One worrying trend of our epoch is a celebration of irrationality by those who believe that their wishful thinking produces ideas that are necessarily true—from the Donald Trump crowd to the woke galaxy. Are we entering an obscurantist age? A story in the current issue of the Economist may vie for the place of Exhibit No. 1 (“Trans Ideology Is Distorting the Training of America’s Doctors,” January 8, 2022), although new candidates appear by the day.
The Public Health movement, more a political movement than a field of scientific inquiry, has been working for a century or so (depending on the country) to translate its vision of a sanitary utopia into socialist proposals and policies. Core medicine itself has been hit by the anti-scientific agenda.
In another Econlog post, I wrote: “If an adult wants to modify his body at his own expense, he should of course be free to do so, and we should respect his decision.” It’s called individual liberty. But the trans ideology, which we can view as part of the woke galaxy, goes much further by negating that there is such a thing as two biological sexes if you redefine them as genders. A large part of the intellectual and educational establishment seems to accept such claims.
“Fear and Ignorance” is the subtitle of the Economist article. It reports on what is apparently taught in American medical schools:
An endocrinologist told a class that females on testosterone had a similar risk of heart attack to males (they have a much higher risk). Debate about all this was apparently off-limits. …
Professional bodies, including the American Academy of Paediatrics, have endorsed “gender-affirmative” care, which accepts patients’ self-diagnosis that they are trans. This can mean the prescription of puberty blockers for children as young as nine. …
Affirmative care has done irreversible harm to some young people’s bodies. This has become especially clear from the experience of “detransitioners” who regret taking hormones or having their breasts or genitals removed. Puberty blockers also prevent bones from developing properly; when combined with cross-sex hormones they can lead to infertility and inability to have an orgasm. A 26-year-old student at a medical school in Florida who plans to become a paediatrician is shocked by what she has not been taught about these treatments. “With other diseases and treatments we are taught in such depth about every possible side-effect,” she says.
Confused corporate executives, whom I criticized in my post of yesterday, look like small fry compared to that, even if their own contribution to muddled thinking should not be underestimated.
The new obscurantists, like those in other times or places, are so persuaded that they have intuited the definitive truth, that they try to censor or bully those who don’t agree with them:
An academic paediatrician (who did not want her name, institution or state to appear in this story) says that all medical students understand that they are expected to follow the affirmation model “uncritically and unquestioningly”. …
Some trans-rights activists bully anyone who expresses concerns publicly.
Reason and free debates are necessary conditions for liberty and prosperity.
READER COMMENTS
Jose Pablo
Jan 11 2022 at 9:35am
Just slightly related with your post, but, as part of a broader comment I intended to post on your comments to Huemer’s book, I was thinking about how close Buchanan’s “give a veto to every citizen” part of the “post-constitutional” state would be to the “cage of norms” of primitive stateless societies it tries to supersede.
Can you imagine how it would be holding your veto power in front of the rest of the woke multitude in your progressive urban coastal neighborhood?
I guess that, in practice, the “rule of law” and the rationality underpinning that law gives you less protection against the mob irrationality that you could think.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 11 2022 at 10:09am
Jose: I fear I don’t understand your first paragraph. The veto power that Buchanan advocates for “constitutional” rules is nothing but the individual right not to be coerced. A quick example: If 99% of the tribe favor a rule decreeing, say, that “The tribe will redistribute money if it increases aggregate utility,” and you think that you might be on the wrong side of the redistribution in the future (or you don’t understand what “aggregate utility” means), you just say No. Perhaps this is impractical (which is another argument), but the individual veto, if implemented, is close to the polar opposite of the tribe.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 11 2022 at 10:16am
Another example, more related to my above post: Suppose 99% of the tribe wants the following “constitutional rule”: “Genital mutilations by physicians accredited by the State is allowed provided the subject accepts it, ze is at least nine year old, and anesthesia is used.” The lone individual who thinks the rule may be applied to a child of his sometime in the future may veto it.
Jose Pablo
Jan 11 2022 at 11:55am
My point tried to be (sorry for not being articulate enough) that, in practice, this lone individual that may veto the genital mutilations, would be subject to an irresistible pressure by the rest of the society. This pressure will surely result in ostracism with the individual being left apart in any social activity … very much, from a practical point of view, like in the “cage of norms” of the tribe.
As your post points out, in our quite open society, even pure dissident “opinions” (much less relevant that “veto power”) are not allowed.
David Seltzer
Jan 11 2022 at 6:21pm
Jose, I always enjoy your thoughtful posts. Your comment on the individual being pressured by the cage of tribal norms. I fear not enough is said about aggregate dissident individuals who will NOT be cowed by wokeness. Their day of reckoning is on the horizon. An example; the significant numbers who choose loss of employment rather than endure vaccines in order to keep their jobs.
Monte
Jan 11 2022 at 7:51pm
This phenomenon is really quite extraordinary and seems to fit what psychologists are defining as a “mass sociogenic illness.” I found an article in Psychology Today describing how Lisa Littman, a physician and professor of behavioral science at Brown University, conducted a 2018 survey of 250 families whose children developed symptoms of gender dysphoria during or right after puberty. Many of the youth in the survey had been directly exposed to one or more peers who had recently “come out” as trans, and almost 65% had exhibited a marked increase in Internet and social media consumption. Littman called this Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and suggested it’s a novel condition that emerges from cohort and contagion effects coupled with social pressures.
This sounds like some kind of mass hysteria outbreak, similar in certain respects to the Dance Plague of 1518 in Strasbourg, Alsace, where the town inexplicably fell under the grip of a dancing mania. “Hundreds of people started dancing non-stop for days on end. By the time the dance fever finally broke, many of the good people of Strasbourg had literally danced themselves to death.” Authorities exacerbated the problem by choosing to accommodate the dancers by hiring musicians, building wooden stages, opening up guildhalls, and clearing marketplaces so people could dance to their heart’s content. Could our medical community be making the same mistake?
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