“The Possibility of Other Logics”

Or, is anyone actually "following the science"?

I’ve been bristling at the way the media divides voters by education. It comes up a lot, it seems, when people are analyzing the 2024 presidential election results: the “college-educated” or sometimes the media will say the “highly educated” went for Harris and the “less educated” or “working class” went for Trump.

In this promisingly-titled (but kind of a letdown, in my opinion) episode of The Ezra Klein Show, “Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won,” a data analyst named David Shor put it thusly:

It’s basically that the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.

I was born and lived in rural Pennsylvania until I was fourteen, among people I assume mostly fit under this umbrella of the “less educated” and “less engaged.” But I myself ended up moving out of that town and going to college and graduate school. And now I live in Los Angeles and find myself tucked firmly within the educated class. Coastal elites, I think we’re called.

But groups are never so simple, are they? One of the reasons I loved Garth Greenwell’s latest book, Small Rain, is that it showcases a… How to describe it? I want to say glitch—okay, let’s try glitch. It showcases a glitch among the educated. A glitch I feel in my bones on an almost daily basis. Let me explain.

The story of Small Rain concerns a forty-something poet and professor; he is our main character and narrator, and he gets very sick out of the blue. Most of the book takes place in a hospital. In terms of education, the narrator is highly so. But, it’s a narrow education. He is a poet. Teaching and writing poetry—that’s his whole career. And so when he enters the hospital, he comes face to face with people with very different but also narrow educations.

He’s aware of this. Here he is, in the ICU, noting his own ignorance:

It was a mystery, everything around me was a mystery—which is always true, I don’t know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets flush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well all be magic; and now my life depended on it, this brute metal the nurse secured to my wrist with three clumsy stitches, rough Xs binding it in place.

How humbling. To have your life depend on something you don’t understand. At the same time, at least at first, the narrator is grateful to hand his life over. He’d been in so much pain and while waiting in the emergency room, he’d been his own problem. By the time he finally gets admitted—which is days after the pain first began—he’s more than ready to turn himself over to the experts. He doesn’t want agency. He wants relief. Help.

And how amazing it must feel as a healthcare professional, at times, to be able to give it. To be able to fix something. To be able to fix someone.

I don’t know if it was because I’d been reading Small Rain and already thinking about this or if it was because I finished revising my manuscript and in a daily way, had lost my purpose, or because my kids are nine and eleven and no longer seem to need me in a keenly elemental way, but recently while watching The Pitt (a medical procedural), I had this acute sense of my own uselessness. This sense of: what am I even doing with my life? Writing stories that very few people will even read let alone be changed by? Shopping for groceries and making dinner that only four people (in a best case scenario) will eat?

Fortunately for my psyche, Greenwell addresses this:

My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilizations, never the necessary core—though they were necessary to me, I thought, no matter how sick I might be they were still necessary to me.

I can feel that line—“they were necessary to me”—in my throat. I don’t have the skills of an ER doctor or nurse. I, too, don’t understand the mechanics of how a toilet flushes.

But I do know how to do some things. I know how to write down my own confusion. I know how to interrogate my feelings. I know how to work with emotional discomfort. I have experience processing the pain of being alive. And I think that if I were laid up in the ICU, that these things would still be necessary to me.

As I was nearing the end of Small Rain, I saw that The Daily, The New York Times’ main news podcast, had just come out with an episode titled: “Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth it?”.

Part of me didn’t want to know the answer and I maybe would’ve pushed it further down my queue if my husband Matt hadn’t listened to it right away. When I asked him about it, he gave me the gist—that it was a conversation with two tenured Princeton University professors, who had written a book called In Covid’s Wake, in which they were making the case that no, the lockdowns had not been worth it. Specifically: that there was no clear evidence that the lockdowns had saved lives.

Simply reading that, is your heart beating faster? I had a very physical reaction to hearing this conversation when I forced myself to do so later in the week. Several times, I pressed pause; my body squirming, trying to flee from the things they were saying. I felt personally implicated and I sensed that the host of The Daily, Michael Barbaro, did too.

He should have, since the conversation begins with one of the professors, Stephen Macedo, describing the main themes of their book. That it’s meant to be a book about how our institutions, e.g. “journalism, science, and the academy more broadly,”—institutions that I, a college-educated person, have always trusted—“did not function as well as they should have during Covid.”

Specifically, Macedo says:

… there was a premature policy consensus. There was an unwillingness to re-examine assumptions. And there was an intolerance of criticism and divergent points of view that emerged fairly quickly in the pandemic, and that hurt us…

In terms of evidence, Macedo and his colleague, Frances Lee, begin with these studies that were done just before the pandemic, which specifically looked at how we might effectively respond to a potential respiratory pandemic—which Covid of course turned out to be. One of these documents, published by the World Health Organization in the fall of 2019, couldn’t reach a consensus about “nonpharmaceutical” measures, i.e. lockdowns.

To clarify: there was consensus within this planning document that getting a vaccine (a pharmaceutical measure) would help in saving lives, but there was not consensus among people who study these things for a living regarding actions like social distancing, masking, and school closures.

Here’s Macedo again:

Isolating human beings, who are social creatures, [would] have a whole series of knock-on effects that the pre-pandemic planning documents discuss. And these matters had been studied. And they found that there was a lack of good evidence and absence of certainty around the effectiveness of these measures.

What was certain, however, was that these nonpharmaceutical measures would cause pain. Shutting down some businesses (but not things like grocery stores and gas stations which had to stay open) and keeping kids from school would hurt. Economically and in terms of people’s well-being.

Next, they get into how we as a nation—despite the lack of evidence of effectiveness (i.e. following the science!)—ended up with all of these nonpharmaceutical measures put into place. And then also, how red states lifted them way sooner than blue states like the one I live in, California.

I obviously can’t speak to your personal Covid experience, but living here in the bluest of states, I can tell you that my peers and I thought the red states were either dumb or uncaring or a combination of the two for lifting restrictions and/or protesting them in the first place. For at least the first six months or longer, I know I felt that California had it right. I mean: we were listening to the public health experts. We were prioritizing saving lives.

But what this podcast episode forced me to see was that we were only prioritizing some people’s lives and we were only prioritizing a very specific, very isolated, kind of living.

But wait, it gets worse—if you are reading this from a blue state, that is. Here is Frances Lee:

There were substantial policy differences between red states and blue states over the course of the pandemic. And at the time that the vaccine rollout began, there was no difference between red states and blue states in their cumulative Covid mortality over the course of the crisis.

Michael Barbaro says: “No difference?”

And then, Frances Lee confirms it: “No difference.” Although she does qualify the statement with a bit of an analgesic for the blue-state people. She says:

The difference begins to emerge in the post-vaccine period. And that’s where you begin to see blue states faring better than red states.

Thank, Jesus. At least the fucking vaccines worked! Is what I would have said if I were the host of The Daily (but I guess that’s part of the reason why I’m not the host of The Daily).

But seriously, is any of this as painful to you as it is to me?

Don’t you want to send this episode to all of the people you know who put those signs up outside of their houses, the ones that said, “In this house, we believe science is real…”? Not to shame them. Because we were all (no matter your state’s color) scrambling to understand what was happening and looking for certainty. And the word itself—science—feels so certain, doesn’t it?

But no, I want to send this conversation to every loud lefty I know, so that we can have a conversation about how all of our education failed us. How it led, ironically, to lazy, uncritical thinking. To a lack of healthy skepticism. And if we have time, maybe we could have a conversation around the different ways of being educated; the different ways of acquiring knowledge, of coming to understand what’s right and what’s wrong. But mostly I think I want to send this podcast episode to my peers because I don’t want to be alone with all of this. Because I think it would be healing to look at one another in the eyes and shake our heads and say: Wow. We were so wrong.

Looking back to that first year of the pandemic—two main aspects of myself stick out as ones that kept me from questioning the experts who told me to stay home as much as humanly possible. One, which I’ve mentioned already is the specific culture I find myself within: educated, hipster, Los Angeles. None of us were pushing back on these nonpharmaceutical measures. We were rallying around them. Most discussions regarding Covid were about how to best follow the protocol. It makes me think of a sentence that stuck with me from Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Substack post titled, “How to Change a Mind.” In it, she writes:

Research shows that people stick with what they know because of laziness and social cost.

At one point during the pandemic, I don’t know when, but Matt had read something that compelled him to think that maybe Covid had started in a lab—even though that was something Trump had said and therefore was something we on the left dismissed out of hand. I found what Matt had told me to be compelling, but when I brought it to my own social group, six other educated Angeleno women, the group swatted it down. “Isn’t that a conspiracy theory?” “Isn’t that racist?” they said. I’d been all geared up to have a discussion. I wanted to engage. But no. No one else wanted to. I remember feeling annoyed but also a kind of shame.

Secondly: both of my parents were/are doctors. I’ve never really struggled to trust in the institution of western medicine, especially in times of crisis. When my youngest son fell off a children’s table he shouldn’t have been standing on and hit his head off the edge of the baseboard and blood was gushing down from the wound onto the back of his shirt, my first instinct was to call my pediatrician mother. Over the phone and over his screams, she asked me: “What does the wound look like?”

He had a lot of hair and I’d only focused on the blood. “I have to look at it?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she told me. Thinking about that moment now still gives me the creeps. I really didn’t want to look at it.

But as soon as I did and realized I could see that white, fatty layer well underneath the skin, I understood quite plainly that we were going to the emergency room.

And we did. Once we got in a room, I was so grateful to be there. To hand my son over to the experts.

Back to Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain. One of my favorite parts of the whole book is when the poet-narrator spends many pages breaking down a specific poem he loves. It’s a poem that gives his life meaning while he’s faced with death—while he’s incredibly sick and so physically vulnerable. From this in-depth analysis, he pivots to discussing poetry in general and the poems he has taught to his high school students.

Read it again, read it more slowly, that was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence. But it was difficult to defend the alternative, to justify it in terms of outcomes and deliverables, costs and benefits; it was indefensible by that logic, its value lay in demonstrating the possibility of other logics, other relationships to value, I mean other ways to live. The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them, to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence. But that knowledge is experiential, you can’t explain it or demonstrate it or guarantee it, you can only try to tempt students toward it, entice them…

This passage means so much to me. It summarizes what I’ve been trying to do with the bulk of my online writing: to show the value in an alternative way of being. Even though it’s so difficult to “justify in terms of outcomes and deliverables, costs and benefits.”

Right now, my manuscript, a book I’ve written and rewritten, is out of my hands. My agent has sent it out to editors, i.e., potential buyers. And I have this sort of aching dialogue in my head. That if someone buys it, then I will be able to “justify in terms of outcomes” my way of life. But if it doesn’t sell, then I’ll just have to rely on my own experiential knowledge. I’ll have to keep reminding myself that it was worth it. Worth it to try. That I enjoyed so many of those hours writing. That it filled my days with a kind of purpose I struggle to find elsewhere.

Perhaps the most compelling moment from that episode of The Daily comes toward the end. Michael Barbaro asks something that maybe you’re thinking while reading this very essay. In forcing this conversation and making us look at the mistakes we made, Barbaro says to the professors: “Do you worry that conspiracy theories will be fueled by what you’re asking people to do here?”

Here’s Frances Lee’s response:

I think conspiracy theories are fueled by not asking these questions… If government acknowledged these questions and tried to hash them out, yes, some faith might be lost, but also some faith would be gained.

Exactly. And for example: because The New York Times was willing to have this conversation and then publish it, some of my own faith has been restored in this institution.

But secondly, some people need to have these conversations. When my friends wouldn’t debate me re: Covid’s origins (or other hot-button issues), I didn’t magically stop thinking about it. I just took my conversation elsewhere, to people who would have it with me. And if you can’t find someone who will talk to you about something, where else do you go but… the Internet?

I wonder how you might feel if you discovered that your child or niece or neighbor’s kid was being taught at school that it was not okay to make mistakes. Or that certain questions were unaskable. What if you found out that if a kid did make a mistake, that they were being taught to ignore it? To move on and never look back?

But doesn’t that feel like the system we’ve got in place as adults? Especially politically-speaking?

To close out the episode, The Daily plays an archived recording of a public health official named Francis Collins. It’s from July of 2023. Here’s the transcript:

As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling the sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city. If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life.

It doesn’t matter what else happens. You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.

To what do you attach infinite value?

I think about Garth Greenwell’s narrator. Face to face with death, his answer was poetry.

I don’t think I value poetry as much as Greenwell’s narrator does. But I do value words. I value dialoguing.

On my desk, as always, sits my Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. Right now, I look up pandemic: “(of a disease) prevalent over the whole of an area.” My eye is quickly pulled to the word just underneath it, pandemonium: “abode of all devils.”

All devils? But I thought there was just the one?

I go back to that moment when my youngest son was screaming and blood was pouring out of his head, and I called my doctor mother. My Republican, doctor mother. I needed help. Her expertise. But she needed my expertise, too. She needed my experiential knowledge. She needed me to look at what she herself couldn’t see. At the source of the pain.

And of course I did. I had to. To have looked away would have been so dumb.

Audio version (read by yours truly) for paid people is below!