Voices of Unreason
By: Tim Skellett
Tags: Ethics, Covid 19, Reason, Misinformation, Intellectual Dark Web

The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) started life in May 2018 as a tremendous PR stroke by Bari Weiss on behalf of a coalition of disparate intellectuals bonding together to fight against an oppressive irrationalism on the progressive (or “regressive”) left. For all the criticism directed at the group, it contributed some valuable voices to controversies over freedom of speech and identity politics. But now, far too many of those thinkers have regressed into knee-jerk sloganeering which serves only to promote new oppressive irrationalisms, breaking faith with everything they claimed to stand for— especially on the vital issue of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the recently deceased John Le Carré observed, reason has no natural voice; it constantly struggles against the louder voices of opportunism, populism, and greed. That’s why it’s so important to fight for reason and truth, and push back against those for whom “truth” is whatever they can get away with. What can be said, then, when Maajid Nawaz, the once-admirable critic of radical Islamism and defender of Enlightenment values, not only descends into an unthinking boosterism for Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud but also anti-pharma and anti-‘lockdown’ rhetoric — just as vaccines against COVID-19 start being rolled out, courtesy of big pharma?

Nawaz was clear that he opposed all so-called lockdowns — the vast majority of which didn’t actually require locking down — even with adequate financial support for those in quarantine. Anyone who endorses the claim that these “lockdowns” are “the greatest crime of the 21st century” in the face of, among other things, the horrific crimes committed by ISIS and China’s brutal persecution of its Uyghur minority, has joined the unhinged fringe. Nawaz has promoted an irresponsible populism of anger and amplified the claims of outright denialists and conspiracy theorists (even while admitting that he is not qualified to evaluate those claims because “this is certainly not my field”). He has made the outlandish assertion that pandemic-related restrictions might kill more than the virus itself, including in November when there was little doubt about COVID’s large death toll. He has even promoted the irresponsible fantasies of Prof. Sunetra Gupta, who has continued to insist that the best way to combat COVID-19 is to let the virus spread rapidly through the population while shielding the most vulnerable.

Ironically, all this was happening even as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic made its full devastation evident. The British government fatally dithered in March, causing delays which cost thousands of lives — making Britain among the worst in national deaths per million — then dithered again in September.

Analyzing various countries’ approach to the pandemic provided clear lessons about when to ease quarantine restrictions, and when not to. The government ignored them. Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer since February 2020, invited Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan, and Anders Tegnell, to give an anti-lockdown view — even though all three have been proven wrong time and time again. Tegnell, as official architect of Sweden’s response to the pandemic, made woefully wrong predictions of how much immunity Stockholm would achieve by the end of May. He also predicted that Sweden would not see a big second wave and other countries would suffer more. In reality, the second wave is now hitting Sweden considerably harder than its peers in Scandanavia. Finland is even offering needed ICU space to a short-staffed Sweden. Despite Tegnell’s ruinous strategy, resulting in one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world, he sticks to it with no sense or reason. Johnson, under the influence of Sunak and his choir of fantasists, delayed acting strongly on the second wave, against the advice of his own SAGE team.

While Nawaz was boosting denialists in the U.K., some American IDW members — such as Eric Weinstein, who first coined the term — descended into vague and meaningless complaints about wanting to hug people. Biologist Bret Weinstein, Eric’s brother and fellow IDW-er, has spun false conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was created in a lab and wrongly predicted that this would inhibit the development of vaccines.

Next to Nawaz, the worst COVID-19 offender in IDW ranks is mathematician, author, and “wokeness” critic James Lindsay. For instance, after CNN correspondent Brian Stetler tweeted that the daily death toll of COVID-19 was comparable to 15 passenger jets full of people crashing, Lindsay came back with a response that was both dismissive and misleading:

Let’s look at the data. A study of suicides during the stay-at-home advisory in Massachusetts (through May 2020) showed no rise compared to the 2015–2019 period. Victoria, a state in Australia, which went through lockdowns far more stringent than those in the U.S., also showed no rise in suicides. The same was true for Norway and England. There was even a slight decrease in suicides in Queensland, Australia. Suicides and homicides actually dropped, particularly among women, during lockdown in Peru. As for drug overdoses in the U.S., there’s been a steady rise since 2014, most especially in deaths from fentanyl, and this trend cannot be blamed on 2020 lockdowns. In British Columbia, Canada, drug overdose deaths became so common from 2014 to 2016 as to cause a slight decrease in life-expectancy overall.

Back in March, some predicted large rises in suicides because of lockdowns, but those spikes simply did not happen. In May, the IDW-adjacent Canadian website The Post Millennial ran the alarming headline, “More people will die from suicide than coronavirus,” based on a sloppy application of Australian data and predictions to the rest of the world. In fact, Australia, partly through stringent restrictions, managed to keep its COVID-19 deaths to a minimum, and even to eliminate COVID-19 local transmission, without any corresponding increase in suicides.

Lindsay’s claim that lockdowns will increase suicide may seem intuitively correct. But without evidence, it has no more relevance than the claim that the moon is made of cheese.

Lindsay has also dismissed COVID-19 fatalities as deaths that were just waiting to happen anyway. Yet studies repeatedly show that those who lost their lives to COVID-19 could have expected years more otherwise. For example, a recent study of such deaths in the U.S. published in the Journal of Public Health found an average of 13 years lost for men and 11 years for women.

In a particularly hypocritical twist given his repeated comments dismissing COVID-19 victims as old folks on their last legs, James Lindsay sneered at “woke” bioethicists who think younger “essential workers” should be prioritized for vaccination because more of them are non-white, and at public health expert Ezekiel Emanuel, who has suggested that life after 75 is not worth living. (Emanuel has been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to his COVID-19 Advisory Board.) But while Emanuel’s views on the usefulness of life after 75 are odd and unhelpful, he’s against legalization of euthanasia. On the other hand, Lindsay’s uninformed views on COVID deaths would amount to euthanasia by neglect.

Recently, Lindsay has moved into conspiracy-theory thinking, suggesting that authorities worldwide want to keep life from returning to normal. At the risk of overindulging nonsense, I’ll note that this theory does not square with the same authorities setting up programs for widespread vaccination.

COVID-19 irrationalism and misinformation wield considerable influence, from lobbying to promote the discredited idea of herd immunity in the U.K. to President Trump’s appointment of herd-immunity promoting Scott Atlas to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Yet people like Lindsay, the Weinsteins, and Nawaz, who will cite facts and studies galore to disprove some aberrant social justice claim, fail dismally when it comes to fact-checking misinformation in this area. Nawaz and Lindsay are themselves promoting strident irrationalism; the Weinsteins are at best unhelpful, and at worst adding to the confusion with “just asking questions” contrarianism.

Pandemic denialism and election-fraud trutherism are probably the last nails in the IDW’s coffin. In his November 19 podcast, neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, one of the most prominent thinkers featured in Weiss’s article, metaphorically turned in his membership card. Harris explained that while he had seen the “IDW” concept as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek name for “a group of people who were willing to discuss difficult topics in public,” he no longer wanted to be associated with “this fictional group” since some of its members were “sounding fairly bonkers.”

It is worth noting that many associated with the IDW have not engaged in COVID misinformation or denialism. But the decline and fall of those who have offers a cautionary tale. Challenging groupthink is important, but embracing dissent for the mere sake of “dissent” can spiral down some very dark paths.