Foucault Predicted Our Covid Response, and It Is Happening Again
American culture appears to be cleaved into two camps. One army utilizes science and argues compassion for others; the other holds up the US Constitution, including its property rights and privacy, as the only way to guarantee that compassion is always and equally applied. On the face of things, science and compassion seem to go together; compassion and individual rights, not so much. On the face of things, there are only two sides: one who voted for the CDC in the last national election, and one who voted against it.
Of course, media soundbites and presidential campaigns do nothing to appeal to those Americans who reside in the wide swath of middle ground between opposing forces. There live Americans who want to protect their families and their neighbors, their schools and their businesses. These Americans are willing to forego vacations and restaurants and air travel until herd immunity is achieved through widespread vaccination, but they also do not want to live through the last thirteen months. Ever. Again.
What if instead of demonizing either camps of the American public, we focused our critical attention on an important reality French philosopher Michel Foucault described over fifty years ago? A reality that predicted the very way in which we have responded to the Covid pandemic? A reality that is not so much right or wrong as it is inevitable: the reality that when human societies look to science to provide meaning, they instead receive language; they find definitions rather than directions.
When Foucault first published The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences in 1966, historians, philosophers, and social scientists were breaking down previous perceptions of knowledge and arguing that they should be rebuilt along postmodern, feminist, and poststructuralist lines. All of those fancy terms were simply ways to say that TRUTH was not what the textbook said it was, unless the authors of those textbooks had walked in the shoes of the marginalized and poor, the female, queer, or person of color. Rich nations should no longer tell poor nations what to do. Neither should poor nations follow rich nations simply because they were rich. I think we all know how influential the academic revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s were upon American education and consciousness.
But thinkers like Foucault never said that SCIENCE should replace religions that were intolerant or ideas that were antiquated. In fact, Foucault said that SCIENCE — the European Enlightenment, Scientific-Method kind of science — was part of the problem.
Wait. What?
In deconstructing nature, space, the human body, or, in fact, anything visible (even an atom or virus), those in search of enlightenment define, catalog, and categorize what they find exists. But, what does that really do?
It creates a new language — a jargon, if you will — that changes every time a cell mutates or a star falls. And this language separates the educated from the non-educated, the scientist from the public.
For example, when you are sitting in the doctor’s office and listening to her describe what is going on in your body, your eyes may begin to glaze over. Why? Because you are hearing words like “bilateral,” “proximal,” “nosis,” and “itis,” rather than “I understand that both of your legs hurt.” This is the language of science. It is precise and new and unfamiliar, and it is designed to cleave meanings into smaller and smaller bits until the smallest (or, conversely, largest) bits can be explained.
What I am trying to say is that “real” science occurs in the observation, not in the definition, and the predictive power of science occurs only after repeatable observation. What you name those observations is immaterial.
When Foucault described this new language, he also tried to warn post-Enlightenment societies about a reality many Eastern societies already knew: the unobservable was not, by correlation, FALSE.
The danger of ordering societies along a peer-reviewed, grant-funded, experimentally-repeatable, progressive model is that societies must WAIT on science. Wait on funding, wait on scientific training, wait on public education that creates priorities for studying red or pink-ribbon diseases, instead of those that are yellow, green, or blue. Wait on the scientist, peer reviewer, grant awarder, editor, or journal. Meanwhile life goes on for real human beings operating in real time. People are born. People die.
Scientists took dramatic, rapid, and unprecedented leaps forward in working together to observe and understand the visible phenomenon of SARS-CoV-2. As a result, we have multiple vaccines that are highly effective. Yet, in the interim of WAITING FOR SCIENCE, we looked to elected and unelected officials to tell us everything we needed to know to stay safe, which, from a scientific perspective, was impossible, because those officials were also waiting on science.
So, we wore masks, not to make sure we were 100% safe, but to create a “culture of safety,” and to remind us that we were in a pandemic, and to stay six feet apart, and to think about others. And, when some localities or states chose not to wear masks, we demonized their officials and those who voted for them. Florida and South Dakota became, for some, four-letter words.
On the other hand, those who held up the Constitution and argued that freedom must be protected at all costs also refused to wait for science, arguing that scientific findings related to social distancing, business closures, or mask wearing were irrelevant to life in the USofA.
We are learning from Covid and will continue to do so as the significant, long-term, global studies are evaluated, but will this keep us safe when the next virus emerges? No. Because this is where SCIENCE has its limitations. It will need a new language for a new virus, and it will need to observe the new virus in order to create the new language. If we continue to precedent public health officials over all other public policy officials, we probably will see the lockdowns of the past year repeat themselves again… and again… and again.
We need to begin having real conversations about the role of science in our public policy choices. Is government’s responsibility to eliminate health risks? What about minimizing them? Are suicide deaths as important as Covid deaths? Were they preventable, as well? What are the economic costs associated with living in a “safe” society? Can we afford them? Should we pay them? What are the unintended consequences if we do or do not? On another level, are Zoom and Google docs the same as classroom learning? What practically happens when a child stays home from school? What happens when an adult stays home from his place of employment?
No one wants to repeat this past year. Yet until we realize that our response to the next pandemic can no more be rooted in science than this one was, we are bound to repeat it, trapped in what Foucault called the dusty, antiquated, and dry relics of human achievement, the archeology of knowledge.
