 |
Moronic Inferno
|
|
The greatest catastrophe in human history was brought about by a flea. The Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis), believed to have been carried to Europe by rats on board trading vessels from Asia in the mid-14th century, were infected with the bubonic plague bacillus. The infection spread rapidly through Europe’s crowded cities, aided by poor sanitation and lack of personal hygiene among the populace. Estimates of the death toll in Europe alone ranged from one third to one half of the total population.
Medical science would remain in the dark about the plague’s true cause or cure for more than five centuries. The College of Physicians in Paris, the most authoritative medical body in the 14th century, investigated the outbreak and declared that a conjunction of planets had caused "a great pestilence in the air.” Helpless to stop its spread, the frightened populace blamed the Jews for poisoning their wells. Jews who survived the plague itself were massacred by the thousands. Meanwhile, bands of flagellants travelled from town to town, declaring that the day of judgment was at hand. In shedding their own blood, they hoped to atone for the sins of humanity as Christ had done.
In notable contrast to their counterparts in the 14th century, medical investigators were quickly able to identify the virus responsible for the COVID outbreak in 2020 and to develop a vaccine to halt its spread. And yet large numbers of people are believed to have died needlessly because they refused to get the vaccine or follow basic public health guidelines. A Boston University demographer estimates there may have been over a million “excess deaths” in the U.S. alone from March 2020 to February 2022, most of them attributable to COVID. The World Health Organization has blamed an “infodemic” on social media of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have spread even faster than the disease itself.
The false and misleading information surrounding the COVID pandemic has proven even more inventive than their antecedents in the 14th century. The virus has been falsely claimed to be a bioweapon that escaped from the lab or the byproduct of 5G cellular network upgrades. There have been false claims the vaccine will alter DNA or cause infertility. Some refuse to take it because they believe it contains microchips or tracking devices. Politicians have deliberately amplified COVID misinformation in order to downplay the seriousness of the disease or to delegitimize medical authorities. Numerous quack remedies have been proposed as alternatives to the vaccine. Some fundamentalist religious groups have refused to take any precautions at all, insisting they are protected by the blood of Jesus. And yes, Jews have been falsely accused of either spreading the disease or exaggerating its effects for their own nefarious purposes.
Welcome to the moronic inferno — a term coined long ago by critic Wyndham Lewis that seems particularly applicable to our own age. Ignorance and stupidity are hardly confined to the present day, of course, as any student of history will attest. But until recent times their dissemination was limited to word of mouth or to printed materials that circulated by hand. Broadcast media, when they arrived, were centralized and usually subject to editorial controls that weeded out extreme content. No such constraints exist now on the Internet. With some 5 billion users worldwide, everyone has unfiltered access to all sorts of information and misinformation — with no constraints on disseminating the same. The result is a radical democratization of content. Everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s, and to hell with facts, expertise or authority. In a weird way we have arrived at the cultural equivalent of a society in which every man is king, as the Depression-era demagogue Huey Long once promised his followers.
The irony, of course, is that the radical democratization of information has made it increasingly difficult for the institutions of democracy to function. In earlier eras, democracy was opposed by totalitarian systems with a chokehold on the free flow of ideas. But we are now also discovering the opposite can be profoundly destabilizing. The so-called “vox populi,” or voice of the people, is easily swayed by the loudest voices in the public arena. Demagogues appeal to the public’s fears and frustrations for the own political gain, often abetted by unfiltered social media platforms whose algorithms are programmed to generate controversy. Huey Long would have loved it!
The Founding Fathers had been rightly wary of mob tyranny, and had built government institutions to guard against the concentration of power in the hands of a few. It remains to be seen, however, whether these institutions can withstand the onslaught of the moronic inferno. Even a threat to public health and safety as dire as the COVID pandemic has failed to bring people together. Appeals to reasoned argument, science, facts, law or tradition go increasingly unheard on every issue amidst the din. How then are we to arrive at any consensus on anything based on an understanding of the common good? And how, finally, are we ever able to arrive at anything resembling the truth?
|
