Many today would assume that today’s medical science could never become so blind to reality. Yet the reality is that some today are very much subject to such delusions. In considering the cause of this propensity, one could go all the away back to Satan’s temptation of Eve in the garden of Eden. Instead I will start with a more recent phenomenon, the rise and fall of socialism.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a politicization of medical science. Preventative measures such as lockdowns have become associated with one partisan political group, and therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine have become associated with another. This politicization has made the objective evaluation of different medical approaches to the pandemic more difficult. As it turns out, this is not the first time that this has happened in our nation.

During the presidency of George Washington, our nation’s first two political parties developed. They were the Federalist party and the Republican party (not to be confused with the party of Lincoln formed several decades later). The Federalists were those who supported Alexander Hamilton and his policies, and the Republicans of that time were those who supported Thomas Jefferson and his policies.

In this political context, a severe yellow fever infection began spreading in Philadelphia in 1793. The primary physician in the city was Benjamin Rush, a supporter of Thomas Jefferson. Dr. Rush’s treatment is described in the 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow:

  In treating yellow fever, Rush adopted an approach that now sounds barbaric: he bled and purged the victim, a process frightful to behold. He emptied the patient’s bowels four or five times, using a gruesome mixture of potions and enemas, before draining off ten to twelve ounces of blood, to lower the pulse. For good measure, he induced mild vomiting. This regimen was repeated two or three times daily. (page 449)

On September 5, Alexander Hamilton became seriously ill with the disease. Edward Stevens, a boyhood friend from Hamilton’s youth in the Caribbean, had become a medical doctor. He had moved to Philadelphia the year before, and he treated Hamilton and also Hamilton’s wife. Chernow also describes Stevens’ treatment for the disease:

 Having treated yellow-fever victims in the islands, Stevens dissented from the American dogma of bloodletting and bowel purges, which he thought only debilitated patients. … To strengthen patients, Stevens administered stiff doses of quinine called ‘Peruvian bark’ as well as aged Madeira. He also submerged them in cold baths before giving them glasses of brandy topped with burned cinnamon. He sedated patients nightly with a tincture of opium (laudanum). To stop vomiting, patients quaffed an aromatic blend of camomile flowers, oil of peppermint, and lavender spirits. (page 449)

Under this treatment, Hamilton and his wife were cured within five days. Hamilton then wrote an open letter to the College of Physicians informing them of the effectiveness of Dr. Stevens’ radically new methods. Before long, the medical debate caused by Hamilton’s letter degenerated into a political controversy. “An unfortunate medical dispute erupted between the ‘Republican’ method of Rush and the ‘Federalist’ alternative of Stevens” (page 450). Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Rush claimed that Hamilton had never had the yellow fever but only the common cold. Dr. Rush also alleged that Hamilton’s letter had resulted in the unnecessary death of several hundred people. The medical issue clarified somewhat in a second yellow fever infection in 1797 due to the large number of people who died under Dr. Rush’s treatment.

Many today would assume that today’s medical science could never become so blind to reality. Yet the reality is that some today are very much subject to such delusions. In considering the cause of this propensity, one could go all the away back to Satan’s temptation of Eve in the garden of Eden. Instead I will start with a more recent phenomenon, the rise and fall of socialism.

The term “socialism” was coined by the English utopian Robert Owen in the 1820’s. Within 150 years, about sixty percent of humanity was living under some form of socialist administration. According to Joshua Muravchik in his book Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism, the high tide of this ideology was 1985 when some 58 countries were ruled in accordance with some version of communist or socialist ideology. This phenomenal ascendancy was the fastest rise to dominance of any idea, political or religious, in world history. Then suddenly the house of cards collapsed leaving only a few isolated nations still governed by these artificial assumptions. The emblematic event of this collapse was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Socialism was replaced in many places by a legal acknowledgement of private property rights, and the result was a widespread rise out of poverty.

The precipitous fall of Marxism was a tremendous disappointment to many academics in Western ivory towers. Marxist theory was a nihilistic skepticism combined with a religious faith in the inevitable arc of history toward a socialist utopia. Events had destroyed the religious faith element of this ideology, and all that was left was the secular nihilistic skepticism. Marxism stripped of its faith element morphed and merged into post-modernism. This nihilistic skepticism cast destructive doubt upon all areas of human thought and offered no positive alternatives. It could deconstruct any accepted aspect of the social order but could not engage in anything constructive. Such a negative ideology could not gain momentum as a social movement.

This ideological derailment was short-lived. Leftists began again to believe in the possibility of radical economic and political revolution if it were preceded by an appropriate social revolution. This new ideological faith resulted in the development of the social justice movement (popularly known as wokeism) together with various forms of critical theory. All that was necessary was to add to the nihilist skepticism a strategic “known known” to function as the Archimedean standing point for the lever of social activism. Retained was the radical doubt about empirical science, mathematics, biology, reason and even the concepts of time and space. These were all considered to be linguistic social constructs that privileged members of society used to maintain a virtual reality that preserved their place of privilege. What was accepted on faith as objective realities within this world of socially constructed illusion were the existence and oppression of social identity groups. Upon this simplistic systemic foundation was built a morality in which evil is social oppression and good is social deliverance. This concept of social justice has been applied to various group identities, especially those related to race and gender.

Here is where we come to the more current ideological distortion of medical science. Among the social justice theories that have developed in recent years are critical disability studies and critical fat studies. According to critical disability studies, disabled people such as the deaf and the blind are oppressed by the privileged who regard being able-bodied as a norm that is more to be desired than being disabled. Some even criticize any who do not accept their disability as a positive group distinctive and instead desire a medical cure or alleviation. Similarly, according to some versions of critical fat studies, medical evidence that obesity has adverse health consequences is unreliable and a person can be healthy at any weight.

Also significant is the social justice movement’s approach to research justice. According to this approach, what is important in scientific research is hearing the perspectives of people from marginalized identity groups that have a history of suffering oppression. Rigorous empirical methodology and closely reasoned argumentation are not valued because these are associated with white males, a group of oppressors with a history of privilege. Since objective truth is unobtainable, what is important is giving previously marginalized groups a seat at the research table and utilizing their traditional beliefs and research methods, whatever these may be and wherever they may lead.

For a more detailed explanation of critical disability studies, critical fat studies and social research justice, I recommend the book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. I found this to be a very helpful examination of the history and essence of the modern social justice movement. I do, however, have some caveats. The book is negative toward religion and positive toward homosexuality and transgenderism. In addition, the last chapter affirms modernism, the secular scion of the Enlightenment, as the answer to all the challenges presented by the current social justice movement. One of the authors, Mr. Lindsay, has written multiple defenses of atheism. I recommend this book with these reservations.

Perhaps today’s most tragic ideological distortion of medical science is the medical treatment of some young children who profess to have a gender identity that contradicts their biological sexual identity. Such confusion is usually temporary in children. Yet some today use it as an excuse to begin strong hormonal treatments whose long term consequences are unknown and to perform radical surgeries that are not easily reversed. In reality, a person’s sexual identity is biologically embedded in the chromosomes found in every cell of that person’s body. Neither a lifetime of alien hormones nor a string of radical surgeries can change this biological reality.

The answer to these current trends is not a return to the Enlightenment presumption that we can function as detached, disinterested observers of the created reality in which we are so thoroughly enmeshed. As immanent finite creatures, we cannot obtain an autonomous objectivity. The only being capable of truly objective knowledge is God Himself. To know anything about this world with absolute certainty, one must know everything about this world from a transcendent perspective with a sovereign independence. Only God as revealed in Scripture is capable of this. God through Scripture has revealed to us glimpses of truth that correspond objectively to reality. This revelation provides us with the pre-understandings and foundational truths necessary to pursue further knowledge about ourselves and this world in which we live. This is the paradigm which frees us from distorting fantasies and enables us to pursue truth, including medical knowledge, using deductive and empirical methods.

Apart from divine revelation, the only consistent conclusion is a nihilism in which consistency is baseless and irrelevant. We are then in a world where the closest we can come to truth is the arbitrary assertion of whatever group has the power to impose its will on all others. In such a world, all truth is politicized. We are then in that world that George Orwell described in his novel 1984, a world in which two plus two equals five as long as that is what the party in power says.

Dr. Grover Gunn is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is pastor of MacDonald PCA in Collins, MS.