How vaccine researcher Peter Hotez became a ‘soyentist’
… in which I partially decrypt the Victorian militarist culture that we think of as ‘far right.’
Contemplate the tweet below. Does it seem rational?
Some background information. Dr. Peter Hotez is a physician and researcher (M.D., Ph.D.) who is best known in public discussion as the principal developer of an unpatented, low-cost Covid-19 vaccination, called Corbevax, designed to be economical to distribute in low-income countries. Though originally a Connecticut resident, he works as a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology & microbiology, as well as biology, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he is also Director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. He got onto the wrong side of social media accounts like ‘DiscernHeal’ by publicly supporting the value of vaccinations, especially those targeting Covid-19.
‘Soyentist’ is obviously a punny, jokey jab, but does it somehow tie together with the rest of the tweet and make sense? How does Hotez interact with the soybean in his work and views? Is there any obvious connection between the ‘soy’ epithet and DiscernHeal’s assertion that there is “no ‘virus’” anyway? If we decide these two features of the tweet are arbitrary far-right loony themes and dismiss them as such, will that help a few of DiscernHeal’s 946 Twitter followers see that they’re following someone unreliable?
I know the last question will make the internet-savvy reader moan with cynicism, but it does address the question of how we can prevent the internet from gradually funnelling thousands of people each year into equivalents of flat-earth theory. Must we immediately give up and declare each devotee of such ideas lost? Will social leveraging using scorn help to pull some citizens out of the information black hole before their brains are crushed into a conspiracy theory singularity?
My proposition in this article is that it’s more effective to lay out the predispositions that make things like calling Peter a ‘soyentist’ attractive. That way, we can deal with people’s ideas on the often-unspoken level where they actually cause motivation, rather than in the catchy symbolism and meming that’s used to propagandize positions. No internetter who buys into DiscernHeal’s ideas is going to be deterred by scorn and eye-rolling, because there are reasons why he or she got there, and the scorn doesn’t touch those reasons.
Fundamentally, far right positions and discourse are based on a set of ideas about what makes people personally powerful and socially responsive, and scorn may just seem to be a distraction caused by chaos agents acting up. So let’s dig into the rationality of ‘soyentist.’
DiscernHeal’s profile helpfully provides a clue: he proclaims himself a ‘raw carnivore.’ Soy as a plant-based protein source has many non-culinary associations that make it an object of scorn, but the common fibre linking all of them is that soy is weak. Huh? Why?
Firstly, soy implicitly rejects man’s domination (and I do mean ‘man’s’ domination) of the earth, suggesting a reticence to exert power by eating the flesh of killed animals. The raw carnivore has the power of a tiger, who also doesn’t eat soy in the wild, and doesn’t care if getting his bleeding dinner was mean to the deer. Secondly, soy suggests ecological vegetarianism, which carries the suggestion that raising animals to eat may be harming the earth. Believing the earth can be harmed is not exactly being confident that exercising power will be rewarding. That makes the notion, you guessed it, weak. The earth seems very large and it has considerable robustness as well as natural fluctuation. Lean on its strengths and simply deal with the fluctuations, and then you won’t have to live in fear, which is weak. Thirdly, soy suggests trendy coastal cultures where people with considerable disposable income can indulge in whipped drinks and fancy coffees with innovative flavours and eccentric milk substitutes. That suggests a lot of people indulging in independent and froward (not a misspelling: it’s a classical English word meaning ‘going against the common norm’) lifestyles, perhaps thinking themselves above and beyond the heartland — in other words, weak. Being socially weak through frowardness is weak even if the people doing it are strong; their strength can then be portrayed as a cancer-like strength weakening the social body.
The overall philosophy — I think that word is appropriate here — encompassing the attitudes I’m describing here is something I’ve often called ‘Victorian militarism.’ It actually extends further back into history than Queen Vickie and was the organizing principle for much of European colonialism, especially as exercised by English-speaking people. Our everyday language, however, is familiar with the concept of Victorian viewpoints; other cultural referents are less well understood. If you want another viewpoint on the same mindset, an American one, you could think of it as ‘U.S. Marine Sarge’s boot camp values’ rewritten for the broader social perspective.
Now, let’s look at how Dr. Hotez, an organized, innovative, factually punctilious scientist with a great work ethic, offends Victorian militarism, bringing him into cahoots with soy. Here, we actually enter into a fissure in Victorian militarism, since in its heyday, this philosophy was very pro-science & tech, launching the industrial revolution and military developments that incorporated mechanism and mathematics. Not all of its adherents, however, were equally grounded about human health and mental fitness, areas that were not so easy to mechanize. Moreover, it integrated in various ways with religion, giving it a mystic side as well as a mechanistic side.
The key area of wobble in organizing health and robustness is that you have to deal with the power of the placebo effect. This underestimated factor gets you into a field where our society, in general, suffers from low comprehension — self-fulfilling prophecy and similar self-reinforcement systems, like ‘vicious cycles’ and ‘snowballing’ processes. A classic placebo like the sugar pill is conventionally thought of as ineffective, but in reality, it has sufficient effect that it has to be included in measurements of health remedies, rather than using ‘no treatment’ as a control. “This pill will help you” can, to a hard-to-determine and variable extent, be a self-fulfilling prophecy through the placebo effect. Whether a person is hopeful or despondent not only alters their subjective responses to questions about the effects of the therapies they’ve received, but may also have effects on their physiology. An ebullient disposition may have a good effect on hormones, cytokines or other sensitive internal systems linked in various ways to the brain, or it may simply motivate patients to take better care of themselves than they would do otherwise. The more mystic branch of Victorian militarism tended to intuit that believing your confidence and good attitude could cure your diseases was a way of being strong, and objectivity about this was weak. The equivocality of objective science was, in effect, a gateway to despondency, malingering and bodily deterioration. Of course, exhorting people to summon up confidence by itself would seem fragile as a support to health and healing. What was needed in order to bolster that sanguine disposition was a foundation in something naturally robust like — nature! This type of idea then referred personal confidence to a placebo that, instead of being a pill, was something bigger and more abstract. Nature was helping you heal yourself.
I’ve written previously about the Victorian-era “fresh air” natural health cult that developed in response to tuberculosis and that, in the 21st century, was constantly tied in with the far right’s rejection of protective masks.
This set of ideas, as it originally emerged, not only convinced people to sleep with their windows open in the winter in order to toughen themselves, but also directed them to seek recovery from respiratory afflictions in countryside sanatoria where they spent much of their time outdoors. Calls during the Covid era to wear masks indoors caused horror wherever traces of this placebo system lingered. Fresh air culture was especially strongly associated with German culture, as I detailed in my article, and may have percolated through immigration into much of the US, where Germans became the predominant immigrant group that populated Middle America prior to World War 2. Other distinctive cultural tropes introduced by the same immigrants, like Christmas trees, kindergartens, hot dogs and hamburgers, are certainly embedded in American culture today.
Another prominent health placebo effect in the mystic branch of Victorian militarism was sexual self-containment. This doctrine has been passed down to us in various ways, such as in the idea that serious athletes would never have sex before the big game, and in the joke that masturbation would make you go blind. Peter Hotez, in his recent (2023) book “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science” mentions the historic role of Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), a signatory of the U.S. Constitution, in the founding of what he calls “the American health freedom movement;” Rush argued that use of natural herbal remedies by unlicensed practitioners should be considered to be on a legislative par with scientific medicine, and that the government should not interfere with a person’s choice of mode of therapy. What Hotez doesn’t get into is that Rush’s ideas about personal empowerment extended to an extreme view on ‘Onanism,’ i.e., masturbation, which he purported would cause “impotence, tuberculosis, blindness, epilepsy, dementia, and even death.” (I’ve cited this in a previous article on the role of Victorian militarism in far-right evangelical and Catholic Christianity). This type of view was not uncommon among medical people in ensuing decades, along with a range of views about spicy foods and other visceral excitements causing sexuality to get out of control. The integrated, overall picture is that healthful, wild but bland (or bitter-flavoured) nature adds to your vigour, whereas draining yourself, indulging in spicy stimuli, and otherwise going frowardly into personal pleasure saps it. Sexual prudery, probable quack remedies and plenty of fresh air all go together in Victorian militarism as augmentations of your strength.
Real medicine, by contrast, is an outside intervention by a more powerful force — science — and tends to put you in the position of being a weak supplicant, waiting for heterogeneous causes to provide a remedy. Placitory medicine (medicine based on strong placebos, placebos you really believe in) summons up your inner strength to do its own work purifying your health. As long, of course, as you don’t dissipate your power in self-indulgence.
As soon as the idea was put forward that vaccination against Covid-19 should be mandated, I knew, as a philosopher of placebo-related logic, that there was going to be big trouble. Vaccinations had tended to be given to children, who were traditionally recognized as vulnerable due to their high mortality and distressing rates of polio paralysis, and to travellers, who were heading into strange places where they were less in control than usual. Even in those situations, there was militarist ‘health freedom’ opposition. Suddenly, novel vaccines were going to be made necessary for adults living their normal lives, despite the accommodations these adults may have made to managing their health through the placebo effect or through positive endeavours mentally connected with placebo effects — vigorous exercise, positive thinking, outdoor excursions, homeopathy, crystals, heavy vitamin supplements, and so on (We’ll leave aside religion in this discussion, though it’s also a factor). Placitory healing — healing via placebo effects — has a long track record in human history: it is arguably the fundamental healing mechanism used by shamanism. There, the healer typically goes in a trance into ‘the underworld’ and finds a healing spirit to blow into the patient with a puff of breath. There’s more to it than that — see The Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner for more details — but the salient point here is that the views of the Victorian-militarist health placebo cultivator strongly resemble shamanistic beliefs. To supplant the personal-power-believer’s control by putting a substance that is under something else’s control directly into their bloodstream is, in effect, a shamanistic curse spiking them with the message that their own positive health powers are inadequate.
If you can follow that somewhat unusual descent into the underworld of human power motivations, then you can clearly see why Peter Hotez has been cast as a ‘soyentist.’ He touts for science, an amoral externality, and, in the militarist mystic view, he tries to lure you into weakness by suggesting that your chest-thumping health placebos aren’t adequate to defeat a condition that seems to be a bad influenza. Science is to disease as soy is to protein input — a strategy for people who lack fortitude. Surgery, which usually involves cutting much like butchering a meat animal, is understandable, and thus exempt from placebo-related dread, unlike potions for the blood. In any case, suppose Hotez is right. The people who will die for lack of a vaccination will already have committed the moral sin of allowing themselves to be weak enough to succumb. Or, in the case of the very old or very sick, it may simply be their time, and they are better off going than living in powerless debilitation. For some militarists, even children have to survive the test of strength — as I have stated previously, anti-vaccination campaigns directed at childhood vaccinations are in effect eugenics experiments.
As you can soon see if you watch US Marine boot camp movies, there are two cardinal sins in militarism, being weak (scared, tired, sick, lazy, fat or disabled with relatively minor afflictions) and being froward (self-centred, unloyal, indulgent, pleasure-seeking, deliberately different). Victorian militarism in English speaking countries today is actively in the process of trying to arm-twist society to return to its old values: suppressing LGBT people because their difference is deemed frowardness, banning abortion because it repairs problems caused by weak will and frowardness in sexual indulgence (and detracts from the augmentation of soldierly numbers), and clamping down on the non-militarizable branches of academia because they generate unmanageable amounts of froward ideas. Racial origin is again being pointed out in more extreme circles as a ‘natural’ source of schism, since the perceptible differences involved supposedly cut down on interpersonal identification (which is a pure matter of self-fulfilling prophecy, but never seen as such by militarists) and make different people froward toward each other. It’s not hard to see where renascent anti-Semitism aroused against the heterodox (i.e., refusing total social conformity) Jews might fit into that picture when you arrive at the most nervously mutuality-superstitious folk at the far end of the militarist boot camp.
Militaries need uniformity.
My conjecture is that the resurgence of Victorian militarism in the English speaking world today has to do with the shock wave generated by the 9–11 incident. The initial insult to power and inviolability was amplified by then seeing ethnic and religious groups similar to those involved in 9–11 entering the Europeanized parts of the world in large numbers. Militarists looked around, asked where they were going to pull strength together to repel these hostile and heterodox forces, and saw a society that was fibrillating in oblivious weakness. People were avoiding having the maximal number of (non-Muslim) kids AND being shirty about it, demanding cakes. They were letting their health depend on magic fix-ups that competed with natural vigour and moral empowerment and that coddled survival of the weak. (A Texas House of Representatives member, Republican Jonathan Stickland, greatly shocked Peter Hotez in 2019 by condemning his vaccine work as “sorcery” — The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, p. 90). They were quailing about the planet itself succumbing to their puny influence while they let their teeth chatter at climate graphs, an abandonment of the confident colonial spirit that had made their forbears masters of the earth in every way.
Victorian militarism is permacolonialist, advocating treating the world as an undamageable resource while recognizing that some harm must be done, so get used to it. It is equally sanguine about repelling inferior peoples from, as the Trump deity put it, shit-hole countries. Its apostles today include Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Alex Jones, Conrad Black, Jordan Peterson, and a legion of conservative Catholic and Evangelical leaders.
Moreover, what we think of as militant Islam is an equal-but-opposite Victorian militarism that was pulled together from historical antecedents by people like Mohammed Qutb (a source of inspiration to Osama bin Laden) in reaction to the dissemination of egalitarian ideas in the modern world, such as the education of women. Now, supporters of democratic and egalitarian values, including scientific objectivity, are caught in a pincer movement between these two uniformitarian militarist movements that sometimes fight each other and sometimes cooperate in our current political milieu.
People who espoused political freedoms and human rights, after the centuries of royalist and religious regimentation, knew they had embarked on a risky venture. Democracy involved a considerable amount of social trust in people who were allowed to pursue happiness in their own ways as long as they didn’t obstruct the harmonious happiness pursuits of others. Paradoxically, then, this article is not encouraging you to become still less trusting of the potential good will of people who are on the far right, whether they be Christian, Muslim or secular-cynical (such as Ayn Rand true-believers). I think there is hope that a wider discussion of the issues involved, going beyond sloganizing and taking on the reality of political placebo manipulation, may re-engage some people in honest rationality. As we saw when homophobia took a deep nosedive in the 1990s, there’s nothing like seeing a bunch of your friends taking on a reasonable attitude to convince you that your own fear-hardened urgencies may be over-the-top.
In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with having the occasional soy latte or getting a booster shot. And thank you for your dedicated work, Dr. Hotez.
