What Was Elon Musk Thinking?

The twitterverse is abuzz with speculation. It is even more abuzz in China where twitter is banned and where the poem was posted on a site called Weibo. What was Elon Musk thinking when he posted an old poem in Chinese? Since everyone is speculating, we feel empowered to add to the din.

For those who know more Mandarin than I do, here is the original:

Humankind

煮豆燃豆萁

豆在釜中泣

本是同根生

相煎何太急

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2021

As for the English translation, here is one version:

Beanstalks are burned to boil beans,

The beans in the pot scream out.

We are born of the same root,

Why should we incinerate each other with such irritation?”

Dare I say that the translation does not illuminate the issue overly.

So, here is one way to place it in context:

The allegorical poem, which has two main versions, is credited to poet Cao Zhi (曹植) and was reputedly published in 430 CE. The legend behind the poem is well known in China and generally goes something like this: 

Emperor Cao Pi (曹丕) is suspicious that his brother Cao Zhi intends to overthrow his rule and summons the poet to prove his loyalty. The emperor demands that Cao Zhi write a poem before finishing seven steps to convince him of the poet’s innocence. 

It’s about a family dispute, a bit of sibling rivalry. An emperor believed that his brother wanted to overthrow him. He commanded his brother to write a poem that would make manifest his innocence.

Apparently, the metaphor involves two beans that are together boiling in a pot. The one says to the other: we came from the same bean stalk-- that is, we had the same father-- so we should not and cannot destroy each other. That means, the anger we feel boiling up in us does not come from within; it comes from an external source.

In short, sibling rivalry makes no real sense, so it cannot be real.

And then, we will add a comment from Reuters, via Zero Hedge:

The poem describes "the relationship between two brothers from a royal family during China's warring Three Kingdoms period that is taught in all of China's primary schools about the importance of getting along", Reuters wrote.

Obviously, Chinese readers have been pondering this tweet, which was posted on a Chinese site, Weibo. They have been reading it in terms of Musk’s relationship with the Chinese government. Given that he manufactures Teslas in Shanghai, the point is reasonable.

And yet, consider the alternatives. In Chinese primary schools the poem is taught in order to show children the importance of getting along. In American primary schools today, no one teaches the importance of getting along. Children are more likely to learn one or another form of today’s dominant oppression narrative, and to learn to hate themselves, to hate each other, to hate their country, to feel and to stoke antagonism. At times, teachers teach the lesson through critical race theory. At other times, they are imposing leftist ideologies. In all cases children are taught that they should not get along.

To me, this notion has a specific relevance. I cannot guarantee that Musk was thinking about the fact that I am currently finishing a longish manuscript on the importance of getting along. (Not being well versed in Chinese poetry, I took Rodney King as my inspiration.)

I surmise that Elon Musk is not aware of my manuscript or even of this blog, though, after all, you never know? If it is mere serendipity, I am still happy to count him with Rodney King among those who recognize the primary and fundamental importance of getting along. 

The Democratic Party's Tuesday Debacle

Across the country, from sea to shining sea, Democrats took a shellacking on Tuesday. It was not just the gubernatorial election in Virginia. The Republicans swept to power in most of the other Virginia elections. They now control the state house, the executive suite and the Virginia House of Delegates.

In states where school boards were in play, Republicans did very well indeed. See link. A Republican candidate nearly won the election for New Jersey governor, but another Republican, a truck driver, deposed the Democratic leader of the state senate. Strangely enough, in New York State and in Seattle Republicans did very well indeed.

It was so bad, it was such a flagrant repudiation of Joe Biden that our mentally defective president could not grasp what had happened. In truth, that was one of the reasons it happened. The American people had discovered that they had been duped into voting for demented Joe. And now they were striking back.

And, of course, Donald Trump was not on the ticket. Better yet, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, Trump was largely silenced during the campaign. Dare we say that this state of affairs is thoroughly appalling, and that these tech giants will hopefully soon meet their maker. And yet, with Trump’s twitter feed being silenced, the Democratic strategy of being anti Trump failed to resonate.

Naturally, Trump supporters consider the election returns to be an utter and complete vindication of their favorite president. In truth, by all appearances, the suburban housewives who flipped Virginia into Republican territory were casting a vote for a sane, sensible, non-belligerent, not hostile, comforting candidate. To imagine that they would vote for Trump seems fanciful, at the least.

If anything, and here goes a prophecy, the election results will cause Republicans to think twice or thrice about running another election campaign with Donald Trump at the head of the ticket. Of course, no one can say so, because those who sympathize with Trump, who feel empathy for the brutality of the attacks on him, will only give up their hope for a restoration when Trump himself bows out.

Voters across the country were casting ballots for issues. They were not voting for or against an oversized persona. And they were voting for calm and reassurance and competence. After all, governor-elect Youngkin was not merely sensible and on message. He was not filling the airwaves with Twitter static. Like it or not, the American people were exercising their rational faculties; they were not moved by appeals to emotion, one way or the other. 

A considerable number of psycho theorists believe that manipulating emotion, stirring up emotion, is the best way to persuade anyone of anything. Some people even imagine that incivility is the way to go. After all, Democrats are anything but civil-- fight fire with fire, as the saying has it.

In truth, the antidote to incivility is rationality-- clear, concise, precise, articulate, sensible rationality. Funnily enough, the chorus of hurt feelings that infested MSNBC and CNN showed precisely what was wrong with today’s politics. Those who were shedding tears over the election outcome should, as the saying goes, get a life. They are placing far too much importance on elections. They seem to believe that their only chance for success in America involves voting themselves a living. They do not seem to feel confident that they earned their way, but that they have profited from certain government programs and mandates. They seem to want to brainwash the country into believing that America owes them a living, not for what they have earned, but for what America did to their ancestors centuries ago.

Anyway, the media and the blogosphere is awash in explanations of the monumental Democratic election faceplant. Among the better analyses is that of Bret Stephens in the New York Times.

After remarking that politicians and pundits are insulting everyone’s intelligence by saying that Youngkin ran a racist campaign-- when you are a racist, everything appears to be evidence of racism-- and dismissing the fact that McAuliffe ran a lousy campaign, Stephens mentions in passing the Biden, or, should we say, the Brandon factor.

Joe Biden has shown himself to be so monstrously incompetent that even the media cannot cover for him.

Finally, there’s Joe Biden. He is manifestly inept. He cannot get his party to pass a popular infrastructure bill. On inflation, Afghanistan and the southern border, he has offered benign assurances that have been summarily contradicted by events. No president elected after World War II lost more public support in his first few months of office than he has, according to Gallup. Biden’s losses are particularly steep among independents. If he doesn’t recover this is bound to have down-ballot effects.

But then, Stephens gets to what he considers to be the meat of the issue, the hidden problems that consigned Democratic candidates to defeat. In essence, voters have figured out that today’s Democratic party is a fraud, that it has been misrepresenting itself, lying to the people, pretending to be one thing, while being another.

The last three explanations are true as far as they go. But they don’t sufficiently capture the Democrats’ deeper problem, which is the persistent and justified perception of a party too often composed of fake moderates and dissembling radicals. Middle-of-the-road voters — the kind who still decide elections in purplish places like Virginia — sense they’ve been bamboozled.

The Biden presidency pretended to be sane and sensible, moderate and middle-of-the-road, but has proved to be radically leftist.

Who’s a fake moderate? Biden campaigned as the most centrist Democrat in last year’s primary field. He is trying to govern as the most socially transformational president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Attorney General Merrick Garland looks like a fake moderate, too willing to cite the power of the federal government after angry parents at school board meetings were labeled domestic terrorists. Whatever happened to Democrats as civil libertarians?

Today’s Biden-led Democratic Party is a lie.

Consider the question of critical race theory and whether it should be taught in public schools. Stephens explains:

As for dissembling radicals, note the way in which the controversy over critical race theory is treated by much of the left as either much ado about an obscure scholarly discipline or, alternatively, a beneficent and necessary set of teachings about the past and present of systemic racism in America.

But C.R.T. is neither obscure nor anodyne. It is, according to many of its leading theoreticians, a “politically committed movement” that often explicitly rejects notions of merit, objectivity, colorblindness and neutrality of law, among other classically liberal concepts.

That’s no reason to ban teaching it or any other way of looking at the world. But it is dishonest to argue that it is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing. It is even more dishonest to suggest that it exists only in academic cloisters. We live in an era of ubiquitous race-based “affinity groups,” incessant allegations of white supremacy, and pervasive censorship and self-censorship in everything from words that can be said and documentaries that can be watched, to jokes that can be laughed at.

Teaching radical ideology is not why we have public schools. Dare we mention that parents want their children to learn science and math, not leftist propaganda. And they have grasped that teachers have not been teaching, that their children have not been learning, and that the American school system has produced graduates who lag far behind their peers around the world in the skills needed to function in the modern economy.

How many parents were punishing Democrats for colluding with the teachers' unions in shutting down school systems across the country?

Stephens explains that today’s Democratic party has become illiberal. This should not be news. We have been saying as much for quite some time. And we recall that during the Trump presidency more than a few old-style liberals deplored the Democratic Party’s turn toward the radical left, and its rejection of democratic decorum and respect for the Constitution:

But the Democrats’ political problem is either dishonesty about the kind of country they want, a lack of self-awareness, or some combination of both. An America in which group identity takes precedence over individual merit, racial categories become moral categories, success based on achievement is denigrated as “privilege” based on ancestry, blind justice is attacked as systemically biased, and independent thinking risks being treated as heresy, will eventually cease to be a free, fair and just country.

Stephens remarks that Trumpism was another manifestation of illiberalism, but in truth, the problem seems largely to be coming from the left:

Many liberals who have tasted the progressive moonshine get the point. But too many still feel obligated to take sides against Trumpism when the real enemy is illiberalism writ large, whatever the source.

Toxic Positivity

It’s the latest from the therapy world. Given that our psycho therapists have told us to have a positive outlook, to see the brighter side, to find a silver lining in every storm, you can feel confident that some people have taken it a bit too far.

Finding something good about your pain is not necessarily the best way to deal with it. Beside, some people find relentless positivity to be insulting and offensive. So much so that serious professionals have identified yet another problem-- toxic positivity.

So explains Elizabeth Bernstein in her Wall Street Journal column.

Sometimes the worst thing you can say to a person who’s feeling bad is: “Cheer up!”

Chip Hooley learned this the hard way. At the beginning of the pandemic, his daughter, Hilary, called him in a panic. She and her husband had recently purchased an apartment in Brooklyn. Now, she was worried that real-estate prices in New York were falling and her friends were leaving the city.

Mr. Hooley, 60, a financial-firm executive from Cazenovia, N.Y., interrupted her. “Don’t worry, this will all work out for the best,” he said, launching into a pep talk. “I gave her all these positive thoughts,” he said. “I felt like Batman saving the world.”

Then his wife, who was sitting next to him, piped up. “That was the most annoying conversation I’ve ever heard,” she said. “Your daughter wanted to talk to her dad, and you didn’t even listen.”

Of course, we do not really know what it means to listen, especially when most psycho professionals think that listening has something to do with spraying the room with empathy.

Consider this. Hooley was a financial services professional. He might have known that the best time to buy stocks and real estate is when no one wants them. Did his daughter want her father to commiserate with her? Probably not. Most children do not expect commiseration from their fathers, especially when he has some expertise in an area. 

In truth, no one seems to have recommended this course of action. And besides, the nature of markets is such that while it is likely that it is best to buy when everyone wants to sell, the reality is that there are no guarantees. It might be more likely that things will be better over time, but it is not a sure thing.

In truth, and in retrospect, the best time to buy Brooklyn real estate was the time that Cooley’s daughter and son-in-law bought their apartment. 

Unfortunately, the credentialed professionals that Bernstein consults with all seem to believe that it’s all a matter of regulating your emotional barometer by processing your emotions.

Yet, difficult emotions are a part of life. To suppress them is to deny reality. Research shows that trying to stifle those emotions makes you feel worse because you never coped with them—plus, they will pop back up eventually. The brainpower it takes to push the emotion away keeps you focused on it.

“Think of emotions as a closed circuit,” says Natalie Dattilo, a clinical psychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “They have to go somewhere, so they come back up, like Whac-A-Mole.”

Of course, this can only mean that some therapists are markedly uncomfortable when dealing with reality. The notion that emotions are either repressed or expressed is a bugaboo of the therapy world, one that derives, indirectly, from Freud. 

The question is not processing emotions but rather, in seeing them as an indication pointing to something that needs to be dealt with in real life. The way to deal with an emotion is to look outside and to consider what one might do. Looking to the past, and imagining that the emotion is directing you back into the past, is the wrong approach-- it moves you out of your life and into your mind. 

Consider this, from Bernstein:

Telling someone who is in emotional pain to buck up is invalidating and dismissive. Not only are you diminishing their feelings, you’re telling them that these feelings are part of their problem.

“It’s a form of gaslighting,” says Susan David, a psychologist and consultant at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and the author of “Emotional Agility.” “You basically are saying to someone that my comfort in this situation is more important than your reality.”

At times there is nothing to do but to buck up. But that does not mean that one cannot discuss the reality of the current situation, not to dismiss the problem but to analyze the problem.

True enough, sometimes the thrust toward positivity feels insensitive and inappropriate. Telling someone that there’s a silver lining in a pet’s death makes very little sense. It is also rude.

In reporting this column I heard about people with cancer who were told to stay positive because that will help them beat their illness; someone who was laid off being told that it was all for the best because he’d hated his job; and grieving siblings who were told “at least your mom died in her sleep.”

A recently widowed woman in Philadelphia, whose refrigerator conked out the night before she was hosting family members for a holiday dinner, recalled how a neighbor told her: “In the scheme of things, this is a very minor problem.” (“It wasn’t a minor problem for me,” she said.)

A mother in New Jersey said her teenage daughter complained that her constant attempts to put a positive spin on the challenges of the pandemic only made her feel more stressed. A musician in Florida said a good friend who was feeling down cut her off after she tried too hard to get her to look on the bright side. “I’ll call you back when I snap out of it,” she’d said.

The key to successful communication begins with saying what is appropriate to the situation, to the person, and based on one’s own expertise. You would expect that a plumber’s advice not to worry about a leak will be taken more seriously than a neighbor’s cavalier dismissal of the problem. 

And then, when psycho professionals drone on about feelings they fail to notice that one should not to ask a suffering friend how he really, really feels, but that one should to engage in a conversation about the nature of the problem, and perhaps even to point toward an action plan. 

In the psycho world, action plans-- the question of what we should do about this-- are often derided. It is one reason why so much therapy is largely ineffective.

There is good and bad in the professional advice:

How can we avoid forced positivity, to better help ourselves or someone else who is down?

Start by recognizing that it is different from hope or optimism. Those emotions are rooted in reality, Dr. David says, while toxic positivity is a denial of it.

Of course, this is untrue. Hope and optimism are states of mind. They point toward possible futures; they are not rooted in reality. It is absurd to say so.

Next, Dr. David counsels compassion. Which is fine in some cases, and not fine in others. But then she continues that sometimes emotions are indications that we need to take action, to resolve issues. Rightly so:

Don’t judge yourself, or others, for feeling difficult emotions. Be compassionate. Tell yourself: “I am feeling sad or lonely in the pandemic and that is normal.”

Ask yourself what you can learn from your feelings. “Emotions are data,” says Dr. David. “They are not good or bad. They are signposts to things we care about.” (Loneliness, for example, might signal that you need more connection.) And take action. Do something to address what you decided is missing.

Remember it’s not your job to solve the other person’s problem, nor do they want you to. “You don’t want to listen to respond and give advice,’’ says Mr. Kessler. “You want to listen to understand.”

Of course, listening and understanding is not the same as analyzing the situation and pointing toward an action plan. Heaven only knows what it means to listen to understand. Does it suggest that a friend should say that he feels your pain? Or that it makes sense that you are feeling the pain-- which you can say without mumbling about your empathy.

Other therapists suggest that people who are in misery do not want advice. They want, as Bernstein suggests, an ear. It recalls Mark Anthony’s speech, after the murder of Caesar, where he suggests that friends, Romans and countrymen should lend him their ears.

Again, here, the issue is more complicated. If you are in mourning, if you have lost a relative or even a pet, you expect others to commiserate, usually with a formal gesture of respect.

Under the circumstances, trying to solve the problem will appear to be inappropriate and insensitive.

But, despite the absurdities promoted by today’s grief counselors, moving from cities, even losing your job, even buying a brownstone in Brooklyn-- these life events have nothing to do with the death of a loved one. 

The same applies to a situation where you have no expertise or where the person knows full well what to do to deal with the problem.

As always, one size never fits all. 

Xi Jinping Skips Glasgow

The real story about Glasgow is not who is there. It is not what is being said. It is not that Joe Biden fell asleep during a speech. It is not even about what the assembled potentates will decide.

No, the real story is who is not there. Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping are skipping the confab. 

When your opponents are sabotaging themselves, immiserating their populations in order to appease a bunch of rabid children, you do best to stay out of the way.

Naturally, this is all debatable. 

What is not debatable is this information, offered by the Daily Mail, of all publications, as a lead into a story about Glasgow.

Of course, the Daily Mail never pretends to be the newspaper of record, but it performs a valuable service by pointing out that while many of the world’s most guilt-ridden leaders are wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over the climate, China is burning more coal. When China was running short of coal, manufacturing suffered. When manufacturing suffers, we in the West suffer. 

So, the Daily Mail counterpoints the pious invocations of Glasgow with everyday China energy policy.

Here is the opening:

China has increased its daily coal production by over one million tonnes per day, easing its energy shortage as world leaders gather in Britain for climate talks billed as one of the last chances to avert catastrophic global warming.

But in a blow to the Cop26 summit, China's president Xi Jinping will not even give a 'virtual' speech in Glasgow, instead only submitting a written statement. 

The world's biggest coal importer has battled widespread power cuts in recent months - particularly in its industrialised northeast - that have disrupted supply chains, due to strict emissions targets and record prices for the fossil fuel.

But the crisis is now winding down thanks to a boost in domestic coal output, according to a statement from China's top economic planning body late Monday. 

On the one side, a lot of virtue signaling. On the other, industrial production. 

It is a point worth noting.

The Tyranny of Hurt Feelings

In a culture where therapy is the supreme good, hurt feelings are the supreme bad. Overgrown children who have learned, thanks to cultural influencers, to have exceptionally thin skin, now get triggered by the least discouraging word.

It is a sad state indeed. We feel sorry for them. But, we do believe that the best approach is to stop coddling them, even if it causes some pain in the short run. To imagine that these overgrown children, now college students, are going to make their way through life whining and complaining about the least apparent offense is to be living in an alternative reality.

Thanks be, therefore, to a professor, named Steven Earnest, who chose to stand tall against the tyranny of hurt feelings. We are less encouraged by the fact that his university, Coastal Carolina University, now wants to fire him for having taken the right stand.

The Daily Caller has the story (via Maggie’s Farm):

Coastal Carolina University theater professor Steven Earnest says his employer is trying to fire him after he wrote in September that students’ feelings were hurt too easily over a campus incident.

“Sorry but I don’t think it’s a big deal. (I’m) just sad people get their feelings hurt so easily,” reads an email that resulted in Earnest’s de facto suspension sent in response to a school-wide message affirming students’ feelings about an allegedly racist incident that never actually occurred.

“I thought my university, where I had worked for over 15 years, would stand behind its faculty. I was wrong,” Earnest told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The event is symptomatic of a culture that has lost its collective mind. And it shows that a primary source of the current nationwide madness is university administrators, standing up for their thin skinned, and clinically depressed students.

Islamic Misogyny

It must have taken a special effort for the Guardian to report on “honor based abuses” without mentioning the specific religious group that was responsible for all of them.

But, it was up to the task. The word Islam does not appear in its article about the alarming increase in honor-based offenses in Great Britain.

On the other side, we credit the Guardian for reporting the story. How many other news organizations are running the story of honor killings and female genital mutilation. By my count, the answer is none.

And, of course, given the flagrantly misogynistic attitude made manifest by the culture that encourages and supports honor killings and female genital mutilation, you are not surprised to know that feminist leaders are as silent as lambs. 

I trust you are not surprised. You recall that when one Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a group that did not merely support female genital mutilation, but that happily paid for it, was elected president of Egypt, the first foreign leader to drop in on him to legitimate his election was none other than Hillary Clinton.

Over the past five years, in Great Britain, the number of such offenses has soared. And they include rapes and assaults:

The number of “honour-based” abuse (HBA) offences recorded by English police forces has soared over the past five years, figures suggest.

According to data from 28 out of 39 constabularies – those that responded to freedom of information (FoI) requests – the number of HBA cases, including offences such as rape, death threats and assault, rose from 884 in 2016, to 1,599 last year – a rise of 81%.

And also,

Forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) are other instances of HBA offences, committed according to the Crown Prosecution Service, “to protect or defend the honour of an individual, family and/or community for alleged or perceived breaches of the family and/or community’s code of behaviour”.

There are estimated to be 12 to 15 “honour killings” in Britain every year. Notorious cases include Banaz Mahmod, whose father, uncle and other relatives plotted to murder her after she left an allegedly abusive marriage and fell in love with another man, and Samia Shahid, from Bradford, who was killed on a trip to Pakistan. Shahid’s ex-husband and father were arrested in connection with her death but her father died while on bail and nobody has stood trial.

The Home Office has collected data from police forces on HBA offences on a mandatory basis since April 2019. Its first figures, described as “experimental”, showed 2,024 offences recorded in 2019-20, although as it is often a “hidden” crime, it acknowledged this was likely to be a “small proportion” of offences actually committed. Greater Manchester police (GMP) was excluded from the Home Office figures because it could not supply data due to installation of a new IT system and was unable to respond to the FoI request either.

Why are these crimes so often overlooked? Why are they so rarely prosecuted? Could it be that the British justice system, and especially the British legal profession is afraid? Is it filled with weak cowardly people who are afraid to accuse any Muslim of a crime, for fear of being called a racist. One has noted that the police in Rotherham allowed high school girls to be gang raped and sex trafficked by Muslim men, for fear of being called Islamophobic.

This is a failure of policing, but it is also a product of a culture that considers Islamaphobia to be a bigger problem than Islamic misogyny:

Natasha Rattu, the director of Karma Nirvana, acknowledged police identification of such crimes was better – albeit still with room for improvement – but said: “The fact that there are increases suggests that people are and have been feeling more desperate or more at risk.”

The charity wants a fresh review of policing of honour-based abuse by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary as it says many of the recommendations of the last report, in 2015, which found police were not doing enough to protect victims, have not been implemented.

A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said: “We acknowledge that these abuses are hugely under-reported and we remain focused on giving victims the confidence and come forward.

A Tale of Two Sciences

Certain politicians have been intoning the mantra-- Trust the science-- for a couple of years now. They are assuming that the science is settled, and that it is incontrovertible. Since they know nothing about science, they assume that scientific truth is dogma, not to be questioned, not to be challenged, but to be followed, like a dog following a master.

Besides, have you ever asked yourself what the science says about the cognitive decline of a certain president?

As it happens, and as we have often noted, there is no such thing as settled science. Any science that is worth its name is based on skepticism. 

 Better yet, when you enter the world of medical science, as a patient, things are not always as clear and settled as they seem. Such was the experience of New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, a man who contracted what seemed to be a barely treatable version of Lyme disease.

Douthat opens his column thusly:

Trust the science. That was the mantra that many people repeated in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic — an entire worldview condensed into three words, with many implications. Trust Anthony Fauci, not Donald Trump. Trust authoritative medical bodies, not random doctors on the internet. Trust official knowledge, not conspiracy theories.

In one sense, when it comes to covid, the science has done its job. It has produced a vaccine. On the other hand, even if we accept that the lockdown, social distancing strategy has worked, we are also learning that it has produced many mental and physical problems, by itself. What is the value of avoiding covid if the treatment produces other problems. Link here to Psypost article.

By now, however, the sainted Dr. Fauci has been exposed as the leader of an experiment that allowed sand flies to eat helpless beagles alive-- in the name of science. Torturing beagles in the name of science-- it will mark the end of America’s Fauci love.

Now, as we speak, vaccine mandates have caused firefighters and police officers to walk off the job in New York City. For our part we favor vaccination, but, in how much will New York City suffer for trying to force a vaccine on people who are at very little risk of Covid. 

Douthat continues:

In some ways this worldview has been vindicated — the work of science brought forth vaccines with startling rapidity, while vaccine resistance has led to many unnecessary deaths. In other ways, the Covid era has offered case studies in why so many people mistrust official science — like the drip-drip-drip of information that has taken the so-called lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins from censored conspiracy theory to plausible and mainstream hypothesis.

Obviously, the pandemic came as a godsend to Democratic politicians. The science was limited but the rage against Donald Trump was overwhelming. This meant that Democrats blamed the national response on Trump and that Republicans thought that it had all become totally politicized. 

But in the early days of the pandemic, the problem was that there was so little official science yet in which to put our trust. Instead, because Covid was a novel pathogen, we lived in a twilight zone for months, dealing with urgent questions to which there was no clear answer: how the disease spread and who was most at risk, whether masking or handwashing mattered most, whether to put patients on ventilators or try to keep them alive without them, what kind and variety of symptoms were associated with the sickness, what kind of therapeutic drugs should be thrown into the fight. We had to act in that twilight — as citizens, as doctors, as patients — without certainty, following supposition, speculation and hypothesis. And to the extent that confident medical pronouncements were issued in those days, they often had to be amended or reversed.

In short, Douthat’s point is well made. In the beginning the scientists were in some serious doubt. They simply did not know for sure. And yet, they presented themselves as all-knowing-- for political, not scientific reasons.

Douthat’s personal experience with medicine stemmed from his having contracted a chronic disease. As it happens, medical science is not of one mind on this subject. Different physicians, eminently qualified, offer different prognoses and different treatments.

The experience of those chaotic months offers one way for outsiders to understand the world of chronic illness. Because to fall into that strange realm, as I did more than six years ago, is to live in the twilight all the time.

If you haven’t passed into this country, it can seem like a world where science is fundamentally mistrusted or rejected, because the chronically ill end up seeking out so many fringe ideas and treatments, trying out so many strange theories, bending an ear to so many oddballs and cranks.

But the reality is more complex. For chronically ill people trying desperately to get better, actual science — the world of hypothesis, experiment, result — matters in the most urgent way. It’s just that they have entered a territory where there aren’t any clear authorities, any definite consensus. And so a lot of the strange things they end up doing are just a kind of home-brew versions of the scientific method — what it looks like when ordinary people have to effectively become their own doctors and do science on themselves.

Science has promised miracle cures. And yet, for some people with chronic illness, the science cannot offer much of anything. As it happens, some conditions are chronic and cannot be treated. And yet, some scientists offer something like treatments, because they feel that they must do something. One understands that no physician wants to say that nothing can be done-- it's bad for business and its bad for human psychology. And yet, some treatments cause harm....

As for Lyme disease, the condition that Douthat was apparently suffering from, the world of medical science has been in something like what he calls a “civil war.” Different physicians hold radically different opinions about what does and does not work. 

You would think that the matter would be settled. Apparently it is not.

And the treatments these doctors deliver are incredibly complex: Because every patient is different, and every infection might include not just the Lyme bacteria but other so-called coinfections as well, they devise bespoke combinations of antibiotics, “cocktails” of drugs with different modes of action, while sometimes urging dietary changes and herbal regimens and Epsom salt baths and all kinds of supplements as well.

But the other side says this:

Meanwhile, the orthodox view is that this supposed “war” is a high-risk intervention against a disease that may not actually exist, and the dissenting doctors are basically war profiteers, exploiting patients desperate for a cure. And both sides marshal scientific evidence in their favor: The dissidents invoke research showing that Lyme bacteria can, in fact, persist in animal subjects even after they’re dosed with a course of antibiotics; the establishment points to studies showing that treating chronic patients with intravenous antibiotics doesn’t seem to yield much benefit.

As a suffering person, then, you have to choose which form of science to believe.

So, when it comes to Lyme disease, there are two sciences-- choose one. Or better, as Douthat did, you try both.

The first physician worked in New York City. He was, Douthat explains, avuncular and reassuring.  He prescribed antibiotics and declared that the symptoms would go away within a year.

So, Douthat tried his treatment and discovered that it did not work as advertised. Science requires empirical results to confirm its theorizing. In the case of the first doctor, the results were not very good:

But the body’s experiences are their own form of empirical reality, and as a patient you can’t follow a scientific theory that doesn’t succeed in practice. And in the end the reassuring doctor’s theories didn’t work — I didn’t get better on his steady dose of antibiotics, the constant pain didn’t go away — while the advice to go off antibiotics entirely led to disasters, where I stopped the drugs and disintegrated quickly.

And then he found another physician in Connecticut, a man whose appearance inspired a lot less confidence. Not only did he not reassure; he offered a frightening prognosis:

The second doctor had a wood-paneled office one town over from our new Connecticut house, more like a den than a clinic, and books and pamphlets littering the waiting room, each seeming to offer a different theory on how one might treat an entrenched case of Lyme. He talked to me for 90 minutes, took copious notes, asked a thousand questions, and informed me that chronic Lyme was an epidemic, wildly underdiagnosed and totally mistreated. Could he get me better? Probably, but I was obviously very sick, and it would take a while. Most of his patients took high doses of antibiotics for around a year; I might need more; some needed years and years of treatment.

And yet, over time, the treatments offered by this physician worked:

There were many false starts and blind alleys, including a brutal summer when I took intravenous antibiotics for three months without improvement, and a long winter of rural imprisonment for my family with a father whose health was gone and whose sanity seemed doubtful.

But after about a year of trying different combinations of antibiotics and extremely high doses, I finally found a cocktail that first made my symptoms more predictable, and then enabled me to begin slowly gaining ground, month upon month and year upon year — in a process that has taken me from almost-constant pain to something approaching normal life and health.

So that dissenting doctor — and others like him, and many researchers doing work on Lyme disease treatments outside the official line — saved my life. But I also saved my own life, because I was the only one who could actually tell what treatments made a difference. So I had to act like a doctor or researcher myself, reading online for ideas and theories about drugs and supplements, mixing and matching to gauge my body’s reaction to different combinations — like a scientist working on a study with a sample size, an “n,” of only one.

Obviously, one patient’s experience with the medical treatment offered for a single illness, one that seems to be not very well understood, does not necessarily apply to all forms of scientific treatment. 

And yet, Douthat’s experience showed him why many patients are highly skeptical about physicians who pretend to know everything and whose treatments are only marginally effective. 

Because modern medicine demands replicability and prefers simplicity in treatment, plus a strong dose of “first, do no harm” caution in dosages and duration — and what I ended up doing was way outside those bounds. And it was hard to imagine how my experience, the years of personalized and sometimes reckless experiments borne of urgency and desperation, could be translated into a chronic-Lyme prescription that was testable and replicable along the lines that official medicine requires.

Settled science, even settled medical science, is often unsettled. Scientific knowledge evolves; it changes; it is subject to the interpretations offered by different physicians in different places.

By now, physicians are more likely to diagnose with tests than with intuition. Surely, this is a good thing. And yet, physicians exude confidence even when they are not confident of the effectiveness of their treatment. Evidently, this elicits more optimism and hope in their patients. However good such hope is, once a patient starts feeling that he has been gulled by false hope, he will cease believe in the omniscience of an everyday man of science.