Excellent article. I am reminded of Susan Sontag and "Illness as Metaphor". Disease used to mean something ("AIDS is punishment from god") and your survival of it was some type of badge of honor (measles, polio). 500 years of science have put all that to rest. I think people didn't like how quickly science was able to deal with COVID. Suddenly disease is just humans coming into contact with viruses and bacteria and not some verdict from above.
I think this is a really acute thought. Kennedy’s anti-vax stance is shot through with a (twisted) moral theory: illness is evidence of flaws and fault. The need to have the right kind of causal mechanism, one that gives meaning to what are in fact the uncaring incidents of mute nature, is really deep in our psyches, and the anti-vax movement plays on that impulse.
Good points. Sadly we seem to have discarded the notion that we should trouble ourselves to do things that might benefit society as a whole. Not all of us, but enough of us that those pathogens can keep on trucking, through host after host.
Excellent article. I am reminded of Susan Sontag and "Illness as Metaphor". Disease used to mean something ("AIDS is punishment from god") and your survival of it was some type of badge of honor (measles, polio). 500 years of science have put all that to rest. I think people didn't like how quickly science was able to deal with COVID. Suddenly disease is just humans coming into contact with viruses and bacteria and not some verdict from above.
I think this is a really acute thought. Kennedy’s anti-vax stance is shot through with a (twisted) moral theory: illness is evidence of flaws and fault. The need to have the right kind of causal mechanism, one that gives meaning to what are in fact the uncaring incidents of mute nature, is really deep in our psyches, and the anti-vax movement plays on that impulse.
Good points. Sadly we seem to have discarded the notion that we should trouble ourselves to do things that might benefit society as a whole. Not all of us, but enough of us that those pathogens can keep on trucking, through host after host.
A lot of the anti-vax argument is a proxy for radical (toxic) individuality vs. a notion of society, or so ISTM.