Jonathan Iwry | A dose of reason

The Faithless Quaker | Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit

By Jonathan Iwry 10/19/14 10:57pm

A ma n stuck in a flo od is tossed a ladder. He refuses the aid, choosing instead to stand in place and pray. He’s later offered a lifeboat and, eventually, a helicopter. He refuses both, praying all the while and insisting that God will save him.

Upon drowning and reaching heaven, the unfortunate believer asks God why he wasn’t saved. “What are you talking about?” God says . “I sent you a ladder, a lifeboat and even a helicopter!”

This bitter joke is more relevant than it might seem. With Ebola outbreaks in Uganda and the Congo, thousands of deaths across West Africa and a fierce debate raging over border control, disaster is on the American mind. So is the desperate scramble for a vaccine.

As favorable as the mainstream might be toward medical science, you would expect a technologically advanced society to have an even stronger consensus in favor of vaccination. Sadly, staunch opposition remains. We all know the stereotype of the fanatically faithful, who consider science and its heathen orchestrators diametrically opposed to religious faith. Annoying as the Bible Belters are, the joke about the guy in the flood ought to address what the CDC calls their “philosophical objections.”

What’s really troubling is that the ultra religious aren’t the only ones who oppose vaccines. A surprising number of protestors hail from the wealthy, educated suburbs of California, which have been lulled into a false sense of security by low disease rates. Of course, vaccines are the very reason those diseases have been so infrequent, and the drop in vaccination rates over the last few years enabled a resurgence of whooping cough in California — the worst in almost a century.

Gossip and a misplaced fear of autism go a long way in explaining how the anti-vaccine movement became so contagious. But the movement can’t be explained without addressing a dangerous underlying attitude.

In areas such as these, emphasis on an eco-friendly and generally green lifestyle has spawned a homeopathic religion of its own. According to Californian suburbanites and fraudulent doctors, letting the body ward off disease by itself is more natural, so to speak, and Mother Nature has graced her children with all they need to live long and fruitful lives (including an invulnerable immune system).

This is a quintessential example of what philosophers call the appeal to nature — the fallacious assumption that whatever is natural is good and morally advisable.

Unfortunately, the cult of the natural has overstepped its bounds. These people are no different from the fanatically religious; they cling mindlessly to dogma, guided by simplistic maxims like “nature good, technology bad.” And their lack of insight is putting everyone at risk.

The whole idea of nature is a bit contrived, and not everything natural is necessarily your friend. Poisonous mushrooms, for instance, are so-called products of nature, yet they’re also about as lethal as it gets. Similarly, open-heart surgery, an artifice of human design, often means the difference between life and death. If Mother Nature were so concerned for her offspring, then the natural world, evolution included, would be far more pleasant than it actually is — and there would be no need for medical practice of any kind.

In fact, surgery, vaccines and other medical technology are no less natural than the homeopathic “remedies” offered in their place. Biology is the systematic study of the living material world — which is included in nature — and medicine is the application of biology to human health. Vaccines give us mild doses of harmful pathogens, exploiting the workings of biology and chemistry to achieve favorable results. In what way is that not natural?

We can’t rely on nature as a guiding concept for public decision-making. The intuitions behind the idea of naturalness are sometimes valuable to examine, but they should be discussed openly to prevent confusion. The homeopaths, like the religious, are making a fetish out of something unreliably vague; were they paying closer attention, they might realize that the things they’ve been rejecting are actually consistent with their general values.

More broadly, this all goes to show how mindlessness and cloudy thought can be a plague of their own and how they represent a potent threat not just to their carriers, but to others around them.

Israeli and Canadian scientists have recently announced that an Ebola vaccine might be on its way. Let’s hope the naturalists recognize a lifeboat when they see it.

Jonathan Iwry is a 2014 College graduate from Potomac, Md. His last name is pronounced “eev-ree.” His email address is jon.iwry@gmail.com. “The Faithless Quaker” appears every Monday.

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