Round Up: November 8

The Pandemic Amnesty Edition

There were so many fundamental considerations involved in Brown University professor of economics Emily Oster’s reprehensible plea for amnesty, that I had to publish a round-up of the reactions it triggered.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862 (Also known as The Remorse of Orestes). Public domain

Unsurprisingly, my first recommendation is Mary Harrington’s last essay about Emily Oster’s monument of self-righteousness: Mary Harrington, The Tyranny of a Covid Amnesty, A self-righteous cabal has delivered a public that is sicker and poorer (Unherd)

In Emily Oster’s column, Mary Harrington sees a particularly revealing document about class politics, or more precisely the class war described so well by N.S. Lyons, between the Virtual and the Physical classes. Reminding us that Emily Oster’s claim to fame is as a pregnancy guru who was already engaged in the trenches of the “mummy wars”, Harrington analyzes her plea for pandemic amnesty as a hazardous venture in a much larger class war, “a class war writ so large it encompassed minute micromanagement of nearly every facet of everyday life, for years on end, and doled out material consequences for dissenters.”

The Covid crisis fought out this class war on the most decisive battleground, that of science. In retrospect, it makes the virtue signalling signs that appeared on American front lawns after Donald Trump’s election look programmatic. Mary Harrington calls one of them in particular “The Nicene Creed of Virtuals.”

The Nicene Creed of Virtuals

Emily Oster’s plea for amnesty is, to date, one of the best admissions that Covid has driven a wedge in the assertion that “Science is Real”, by laying bare the “grey area between ‘science’ and ‘moral groupthink’” in which Oster and her likes have gleefully been wallowing for a solid two years. Now that the Virtuals’ extreme politicization of science has de-legitimized the very basis of their rule, premised upon their claim to be the oracles of science as a neutral and disinterested arbiter of reality, they now demand an amnesty to magically restore public faith in their authority. Alas, it is not how things work, here, in the real world, as Mary Harrington explains in a thunderous way.

First of all, it will be very difficult to re-establish communications between the Virtuals and the Physicals, given that we don’t have a common understanding of evil anymore. For the former, evil is measured solely by the standard of intention. Alas, for us Physicals, or proud traitors to the Virtual class, evil is consequential and is judged by results, particularly if those results were highly foreseeable… and God knows they were concerning Covid restrictions.

It may be optimistic of Oster, and others of the Virtual class, to try to restore public faith that Science Is Real. But it’s also understandable. First, for reasons of self-interest: those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority. Doubtless the laptop class would prefer that we judge Covid policy by intention, not results, lest too close an evaluation result in their fingers being prised from the baton of public righteousness[…]

And anyway, even measured by the standard of intention, the furthering of class interest was obvious from the beginning.

And these are all downstream of a pandemic-era public discourse that felt like the Brexit/Trump wars on steroids: a battle for class dominance, in which one side used its stranglehold on public institutions to frame censorship as “fact-checking”, and all dissenters as stupid, unscientific, or actively hateful. It’s not that “we” collectively tried to get it right, and “mistakes were made”. It’s that a self-righteous cabal arrogated to themselves a priestly right to determine the proper social order, and to excommunicate those who didn’t conform. Their record in securing the common good speaks for itself[…]

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.

Science, it turns out, is not always “real”. And nor, I suspect, will kindness now be everything.

To give an idea about how insulting Oster’s plea of amnesty is to most of us who live in the real world, the reading of the comments following Mary Harrington’s essay is revelatory. As the first comment below shows, a Rubicon was crossed in March 2020:

Every time I have to talk about lockdowns, I realize I’m still angry. I don’t see myself offering any amnesty to the lockdown proponents anytime soon. I’m still trying to not let myself get upset when I talk about it. I want to move on with my life but it will be with a lot of people classified as a threat to my well-being.

My next recommendation is: Eugyppius, Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty,” suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID” (Substack) and Once More on Renowned Fool Emily Oster, and the Malign Influence of Head Girls More Generally (Substack).

Eugyppius offers, probably, the most devastating response. First, on the central claim in Oster’s article, that “We didn’t know,” here is his limpid response:

The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know. We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves. Joke’s on you, and it’s sad you still haven’t realised.

But the best is on Oster’s attempt to claim a victim status for having been the receiving end of the Covid fanatics’ wrath after she turned around on schools closures:

I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.

Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.

Eugyppius concludes with a thunderous “NO” to Emily Oster’s plea for amnesty:

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

In a calmer, but equally ferocious post, Eugyppius engages in an interesting profile of the kind of anthropological type of the Virtuals, so well personified by Emily Oster, borrowing from Bruce Charlton’s expression “Head Girls”.

Alas, Emily Oster’s proposal that we just forget and forgive the pandemic insanity of the past few years has pleased no one. This is partly because her op-ed is tone deaf and stupid, of course, but it’s probably also down to Emily Oster herself, and a growing cultural exhaustion with the kind of person she represents.

After defining Head Girl as “—the typical ‘all-rounder’ who ‘performs extremely well in all school subjects’ and ‘is excellent at sports,’ while being ‘pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved’,” Eugyppius explains how the concentration of Head Girls in decision-making circles leads not to a more compassionate and kind world as we could expect from a more feminine world, but to a “tyranny of the midwits.”

Since 2000 especially, Head Girls have cemented their dominance across a great many bureaucratic institutions and white-collar professions, and they have used their growing influence and seniority, above all, to recruit and promote more Head Girls like themselves. The problem is that traits like conscientiousness correlate not at all with raw intelligence and ability. Thus, our world has come to be steered by fleets of extremely agreeable, deeply concerned, highly productive and overly socialised Emily Osters—midwits who have very few original thoughts, and who make up for that by caring a lot about what other conformist midwits of similar status think about them.

The problem, emphasizes Eugyppius is not that there are, in the vast diversity of human characters, some Head Girls, in our world, but that their anthropological type is so dominant in the class of people who regulate our lives in the most minute details, “from university professors to the minister president of Bavaria to municipal police administrators.”

There’s nothing wrong with Head Girls, when their worst tendencies are counterbalanced by a sufficient number of disagreeable, intelligent, and less conformist colleagues. When they become the predominant personality type in newsrooms, faculties and government offices, though, you start to have serious problems. Then, your schools and your media organisations come to be dominated by committees and meetings, by the avoidance of open conflict, by the constant erection of and sheltering within consensus positions, and by preference cascades kicked off by clamorous organised minorities. All of these characteristic symptoms of government by Head Girl are intolerable to everyone who isn’t a Head Girl, and talented people with any other options at all will ultimately leave their influential positions in Head Girl-dominated institutions, driving the Head Girls to ever greater ascendancy.

The award for the funniest commentary goes to libertarian stand-up comedian Dave Smith, Part of the Problem, November 3, 2022 (podcast). Focusing on this passage by Oster:

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.

Dave Smith goes on to say:

One of the wisest sayings in the history of humanity, that almost everyone universally agrees on is that we need to learn the lessons of our mistakes in history in order to avoid repeating them. But no. Let’s actually not, because we’ve got a new saying here, which is even better than “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” The new saying is “dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop.” […]

She’s wiggling around to say: let’s just ignore the mistakes. Let’s just stop because we wouldn’t want a doom loop. The people who were pushing Covid hysteria are telling me they’re concerned about a doom loop […] We did, through the largest propaganda campaign in human history, drive all of advanced civilization into an absolute state of terror, where people were literally afraid to leave their houses, because they were afraid of a germ. But we’re just worried that acknowledging that could really freak people out.

In her essay, Mary Harrington laid out the requirements for an amnesty to be contemplated, which include, at the minimum, an acknowledgement of “the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.”

In Charles Eisenstein’s, Amnesty, Yes — And Here is the Price (Substack), he lays out a much more detailed list of requirements for forgiveness:

The invisible workings of the Covid machine must be laid bare if we are to prevent something similar from happening again. People and institutions must become cognizant of the role they played in the social catastrophe that was Covid. I will support amnesty when universities admit that they coerced young people to take unnecessary and dangerous vaccines. I will support amnesty when Pfizer describes how it manipulated data to get its shots approved. I will support amnesty when regulators confess that they allowed shoddy vaccine manufacturing processes to proceed without oversight. I will support amnesty when medical boards and hospitals acknowledge that they expelled doctors for using beneficial therapies. I will support amnesty when the FDA admits that it removed helpful drugs from the market. I will support amnesty when social media platforms acknowledge that they censored important, true information. I will support amnesty when fired workers are reinstated with back pay. I will support amnesty when the state of Rhode Island reinstates my wife as a licensed acupuncturist. I will support amnesty when the government acknowledges vaccine damage and compensates the victims. I will support amnesty when regulatory agencies are freed of corporate influence. I will support amnesty when vaccines are subjected to long-term, robust scientific study to determine safety and efficacy. I will support amnesty when mainstream media gives attention to the dissidents and whistleblowers it has ignored and ridiculed. I will support amnesty when brave, conscientious doctors like Peter McCullough and Meryl Nass are reinstated by professional organizations and medical boards. I will support amnesty when a moratorium is declared on genetically engineered bioweapons research, and its full extent made transparent to the public. These are the kinds of things that would have to happen for me to trust that amnesty wouldn’t mean license to repeat the crimes, again with the excuse of “We didn’t know.”

OK, Professor Oster, you didn’t know. Do you know now? Show us. Make the effort to get to the bottom of why you didn’t know. Believe me that I speak for many when I say, truly: We do not want revenge. We don’t want to gloat. We don’t want to keep score. We want this never to happen again.

Clearly, Emily Oster’s arrogant plea for amnesty hit a raw nerve. I wanted to get to the bottom of it with a few thoughts collected from independent minds to try to understand my own raw anger at this text. Spring of 2020 was a moment of revelation, in the etymological sense (unveiling), about who were the Virtuals and on the nature of their yoke over our lives. If I had any doubts at the time that we could live together, the path taken with the lockdowns, mask-wearing and vaccine passports has definitely lifted them. For a while, I mourned that separation, and gradually I saw it as a liberation. I’ll explore in my next post why and how separation, provided it is premised on the acceptance of a proposition, can be liberating.