What do Millennial marijuana fans and Covid anti-vaxxers have in common?
Many Americans are somewhat scientifically illiterate, and many more have a postmodernist distrust of science. These facts lead to a range of social effects, irrespective of traditional political clichés about left and right, progressive and conservative. An anti-science ideology mixed with relative illiteracy unites the Millennial marijuana fan with the conservative Covid anti-vaxxer.
Recently I had experience with a common feature of blogs — the opinionated commentator. In this case it was a Millennial supporter of marijuana who was upset by my referral to a study that showed that marijuana use predicted later opiate use. Others commented too. It is a widely held belief among marijuana supporters that the “gateway theory” has been proven false — the view that marijuana use eventually leads to other worse drug abuse. This theory actually hasn’t been disproven; it just wasn’t proven. In fact, the problem is that many claims that marijuana is not a gateway are based on group data — comparing one group of patients with a different group of patients. New research that examines individual-level data — following the same patients over time — does find an association between marijuana use and later opiate abuse.
The pro-marijuana defense against such studies is that they reflect just “correlation, not causation,” as if thereby to dismiss them. Well, the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer is just correlation; the link between covid infection and death is correlation; the link between polio and paralysis is correlation. All observational clinical research is correlation. So what’s causation? Well, that’s a complicated topic, much discussed in the fields of philosophy and clinical epidemiology. I can’t answer that question to anyone’s satisfaction in a short blog post. Those truly interested would do well to read some of the philosophy literature on causation, beginning with the classic work of David Hume and reams of commentary. Hume famously defined causation as the “constant conjunction” of events: sound like correlation? The clinical epidemiology literature addresses the key issue of confounding bias, i.e., other factors that can influence an observed apparent correlation. The classic debate was around whether cigarette smoking and lung cancer was a causal correlation or not. The famous British epidemiologist A. Bradford Hill wrote a classic paper on the topic, again with reams of commentary.
Now such association isn’t “definitive,” another common refrain. But such is the nature of all scientific knowledge; it’s not definitive in an absolute sense because all observation has room for error. This is a large topic, discussed in the philosophy of science literature, beginning with Charles Peirce. Over time, despite lack of absolute knowledge, repeated confirmation of observed associations can lead to extremely probabilistically true knowledge, with a tiny residual of possible error, and, for all practical purposes, Peirce claimed, such knowledge is true.
So, “it’s correlation, not causation” is just not a simple statement with clear meaning. It’s pseudo-knowledge, partial knowledge, which is worse than complete ignorance because one pretends to know.
It reflects relative scientific illiteracy, but such lack of knowledge isn’t the main problem in these cultural discussions.
The main problem isn’t misunderstanding science; it’s rejection of scientific knowledge. And the cause of this rejection is not ignorance or undereducation; it’s our culture itself. This cultural change is reflected in the anti-vaxxer claims related to the Covid vaccine.
One claim was that the Covid-19 virus didn’t cause illness at all. It was the flu, or the underlying conditions, or other causes of illness and death. After all, it’s just correlation. Then the claim was that Covid-19 is real and causes illness, but the vaccine is dangerous. It enters your DNA and changes who you are; it affects the ovaries and causes fertility. If you’re a White conservative, you believe the vaccine is the creation of a socialist radical government seeking to control you. If you’re a Black radical, you believe the vaccine is created by the White man to control you. Here we’re not pretending to have discussions about causation and confounding bias. Instead, we’re getting at the deeper postmodernist bias against science.
In the mid 20th century, beginning in postwar Europe and peaking the in 1960s-70s counterculture, Western societies began to turn their back on 18th century Enlightenment values. In the Enlightenment of Voltaire, and Kant, and Jefferson, and Washington, and Darwin — religion was questioned, but science was raised up to replace it. True knowledge wasn’t to be found in the Bible, but it was to be found in scientific experiment. God didn’t create man, but nature did. By the late 19th century, some thinkers, like Nietzsche, began to doubt these assumptions. Religion had lost much of its power, indeed, but science too came in for criticism. All knowledge was man-made. Everything was a “social construction”, to use modern lingo; it’s all about social power. There is no true knowledge; it’s all about what our society agrees to call true. In short, all knowledge became relative to man, as in the Sophist era of ancient Greece. Even nature is not a final source of truth, then, because all our claims about nature are socially-influenced.
If God is dead, science is buried right next to Him.
An unvaccinated sick Covid patient in a hospital said, when asked why she had not listened to doctors and scientists to take the vaccine: “I didn’t know who to believe.”
That’s the problem: The truths of science have been reduced to the opinions of scientists. And since all human beings, including scientists, will have varying opinions about everything, the postmodernist world concludes that there are no scientific truths.
It’s a short step from there to claim that vaccines are just ways that the White man, or the government — whoever you dislike the most — wants to control you; or to claim that any scientific data that you don’t like, such as studies that don’t show that marijuana is safe and special, are a reflection of social bias against the drug. Or to claim that sex and race are not biological concepts, but social ones.
People will get upset. I’ve just touched on key topics of great social debate. Let me ask readers not to jump to conclusions immediately. The discussion will be closed, as none of us need the negativity. I’m not saying that sex and race are not social concepts, at least in part. I’m not claiming that marijuana is inherently unsafe. I’m not even saying that the White man isn’t trying to harm non-Whites.
What I am saying is that we have lost our cultural agreement on having an external standard to which we would all agree, namely scientific truth. The earth is still round, even if many scientists held that opinion that it was flat. There is no phlogiston, even though many scientists thought there was. Scientific truth is not a matter of the opinions of scientists, nor is it a social consensus.
We are lost in a relativistic morass where no one trusts anyone and everyone is seen as acting from social bias. If all truth is social construction, if it’s all about power, then we all will fight each other over power. We won’t work together to find out the truth.
Millennial marijuana believers and Covid vaccine unbelievers share much more in common than they might think.
