The Mask of Authoritarianism

 

Icarus asserts his liberty.

My friend Xerxes, the left-leaning columnist, has recently made the Orwellian assertion that anyone who resists wearing a mask is an authoritarian.

No doubt he is sincere; Project Veritas recently released recordings of internal conversations at CNN, and they too sound absolutely sincere. This is the Devil’s work. The Devil, the Accuser, predisposes us, once we go off the moral rails, to begin to assert the very opposite of the truth. Xerxes, I can deduce, wants a nice authoritarian government, and he wants to blame someone else for it.

His logic is this:

1. people who resist masks do so because the experts keep changing their advice.

3. it is authoritarian to expect truth to be objective and unchanging.

To be clear on how wrong this is, Merriam-Webster gives its first definition of “authoritarianism" as “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority.” Oxford defines "authoritarian" as “A person who favours obedience to authority as opposed to personal liberty; an authoritarian person.”

But that would not matter to Xerxes; in the same column, he objects to dictionary definitions as “authoritarian.”

Xerxes acknowledges that the experts have indeed kept changing their advice. Although it would be more accurate to say that different experts have expressed different opinions all along, and it is government that have been changing their advice.

But, he points out, that is how science operates.

“Initially, masks were considered useless. Immediately, experimenters began testing that hypothesis. They measured aerosol transmission indoors and outdoors. Medical recommendations changed to reflect those findings. That’s the scientific mindset.” For science, “any advice that doesn’t change will be suspect.”

So those who resist current government authority fail to understand science. They want “An absolute, unimpeachable, forever and ever, authority. Which is the opposite of the scientific approach.”

Here he gets the scientific enterprise backwards. Science is and has always been the quest for natural laws: that is, for maxims about nature that are always true: the Law of Gravity, the Law of Inertia, and so forth. It is true, by the nature of things, that any such established law of nature might be overturned tomorrow by a “black swan” event; natural laws do not have the certainty of the laws of reason. But that is not considered by science the goal; rather, it would represent a failure of the science.

It is also true that science progresses by disproving things, never by proving things. However, the likelihood that a given model or theory is true is measured in science by the fact that it has been tested over a long period and not been disproven. That is the scientific method. If you find theories and models being rapidly overturned or changed, this means science has, in this case, clearly been failing to approach truth. To see the change itself as evidence science is getting closer to truth is like seeing pollution as proof that a factory is working efficiently, or fever as evidence of good health.

As this suggests, more broadly, truth is stable and unchanging by its nature. It is not the truth that keeps changing; it is theories that keep changing if they fail to correspond with reality. Were this no so, there would be no grounds but whim on which to change our theories. To say that science now thinks relativity is more accurate, and Newtonian physics inadequate, is not to say that the cosmos changed between Newton and Einstein.

Nor is it some sort of infringement on personal liberty to seek the truth, or to act in conformity with it. It is nonsense to argue that acknowledging gravity is authoritarian because it denies us our freedom to fly at will.

But that is where the political left now is: that is the sort of thing they now assert. That is what we see now, for example, in “gender studies.”