The Indulgence of a Vaccine Metaphor
Good God, get the shot
When it comes to matters of our personal health, we are all Protestants now.
From roughly the time of its accession to the Constantinian status of official imperial religion of Rome until the Reformation and the wide translation and dissemination of the Bible a millennium and a half later, intimate knowledge of the holy scriptures and the complex theologies developed in the centres of religious learning were closely guarded by a well-trained priestly elite. When the word of God came rolling off Europe’s brand new printing presses in all of its sundry vernacular languages, the Protestant reformers boldly declared the redundancy of this ecclesial caste; now everyone could go directly to God for the goods. In the minds of many, the flattening powers of the Google search or WebMD have been similarly democratizing in matters of biomedicine. My doctor has done a degree, med school, and a residency, supplementing that roughly decade-to-dozen-years of training with ongoing professional development throughout his career, and between that and my having read the Wikipedia entry for Rash, he and I should have this thing taken care of in no time.
As with its churchy analogy, this therapeutic reformation has been not entirely either a good or bad thing, and was in part necessary because of Constantinian compromises on the part of the medical clerisy with power and illegitimate authority against the excluded, oppressed, and vulnerable. Well-documented and pervasive androcentric biases in medicine, all the way from research through education to treatment, made the development of a countervailing feminist health movement not only necessary but welcome and life-giving. The use of racialized populations in medical experiments of absolutely unspeakable cruelty and ethical bankruptcy, along with ongoing patient-facing racial bias and structural inequality of services in poorer and largely non-white areas — as well as the gaping asymmetry between global North and South — indicate that biomedicine on the whole has often failed to treat each human being with equal value and dignity. As Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, has said with admirable clarity and simplicity: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong in the world.” At Jacobin, my friend Leigh Phillips, appropriating a Tony Blairism and re-purposing it for human good, calls for us to be “Tough on Anti-Vaxx Nonsense, Tough on the Causes of Anti-Vaxx Nonsense” — recognizing that, especially among the world’s poor and working classes, the scientific skepticism exploited by quacks, conspiracists, and charlatans doesn’t arrive, to put another theological term to work, ex nihilo.
But from Max Weber to the Marxists, there has long been an acknowledgment that Protestantism had something, also, to do with the instrumental moralities and worldviews of the capitalist ruling and middle classes — and here, among the bearded Germans, our metaphor is still germane. In her forensic new monograph, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, Catherine Liu identifies a handful of emblematic spheres of contemporary middle-class living where class distinctions are drawn by affective, class-coded behaviours geared towards competition and telegraphing values. One chapter, “The PMC Has Children,” outlines the endless and anxious ways in which the seemingly primordial, natural act of birthing and rearing children becomes mediated through sets of shifting petit bourgeois exigencies. Anyone who’s had a child in the last 15 years can attest to the way in which, among the university educated, the places where the feminist struggles and reforms of the 60s, 70s, and 80s left off have become just so many bespoke opportunities to differentiate the arrival of one’s own offspring from that of mere regular kids; or, as my pal Erica Sigurdson put it, “Oh yeah, you gotta have a free-range baby.”
As good medical Protestants, we are encouraged to be informed patients, much as we are supposed to be informed consumers in the rest of our lives. We should know our options. We should have opinions on our course of treatment. At parties, we hear stories from friends and acquaintances about their idiotic doctor who didn’t know what they were talking about; we hear confident assertions about the kinds of things ‘Western medicine’ is and isn’t good at doing.
That is, we used to hear stories and assertions like that at parties. We don’t go to parties anymore, because we’re in a global pandemic. And now, whether or not we can yet see a light at the end of the tunnel has come to depend upon a number of factors. To be sure, the earliest and most important bad decisions exacerbating the plague came from above: allowing the profit motive of the free market to determine the shape of North American elder care; the erosion of health working conditions to the point where employees were forced to work multiple sites to make ends meet; the atrophy of domestic Canadian vaccine production in the buffoonish assurance that always-efficient global markets would get us whatever we needed whenever we needed it; signing a vaccine deal with one side of a major international superpower rivalry, then interceding on behalf of the other one in a high-profile legal case; etc. We shouldn't ever lose sight of this.
But as we lurch and grope toward herd immunity in a race against rapidly proliferating variants, and as many early supply chain difficulties seem, for the time being at least, to be sorted out, a significant part of the opportunity to save ourselves has been shifted into public hands. Dr. Theresa Tam explained, today, that new federal modelling indicates that something like a return to normalcy could be ours by summer if three-quarters of the adult population gets at least one vaccine shot, and a fifth of the population gets both. Meanwhile, provincial governments across the country are rolling out new restrictions against leisure travel and social gatherings; there will be enforcement mechanisms, of course, but as always the success or failure of these measures will greatly depend upon voluntary compliance.
There is a psychological tendency to treat these sorts of restrictions (which, obviously, it goes without saying, totally suck shit in objective terms) as a sort of opening bargaining position, especially at this point in the pandemic, when our lives from before feel like half-remembered dreams. The natural inclination is to start parsing out which parts of the regulations make sense, and therefore merit our adherence. Similarly, everything we’ve been trained for over the past decades has taught us that, whether the product is a vaccine or a bag of hand-cut small-batch kettle-fried potato chips with all-natural seasonings, we need to be smart consumers. Consequently, it’s understandable that some people find themselves in the position of asking “Which vaccine is right for me?” or even “Am I a ‘vaccine guy,’ really?”
Friar Richard Rohr, a Roman Catholic who acknowledges the historical and spiritual necessity of the Reformation, has long emphasized the anemic quality of a Western Christianity focused exclusively on individual salvation — “You’re going to Heaven, you’re going to Hell” — rather than the collective project of redemption. It is contrary to the responsibilities of Franciscan humility for me to keep congratulating myself on the aptitude of the metaphor that I’ve constructed here, but it’s just really fucking good. We have become so used to thinking about our health as a private good coterminous with our own physical bodies that the simple, evident falsity of that picture of the world, made so evident over the past 15 months, has been exceedingly difficult to take on board. Public health orders cease to be public health orders if everybody decides to tailor them to their own specifications; they become, instead, private health suggestions. But that isn’t right. Similarly, my vaccination isn’t something I’m doing, yours something you’re doing (or not doing); it’s something we’re doing, together. My kid’s long-term emotional health, bound up in the regularity of her routines and relationships, her being able to socialize normally and in a way that’s developmentally appropriate for her age, depends on you getting the very first shot you’re eligible for. Meanwhile, your uncle’s getting that knee surgery that the hospital’s been delaying now for a year and a half, the surgery that will let him walk again and add ten years to the end of his life through moderate exercise and mental well-being, depended on me getting the first shot I was eligible for. The basic premise upon which all non-ultranationalist politics of the past forty years have been based, Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that “there is no such thing as society. There are individuals, and there are families” — and take a moment, here, to consider just how much of the purportedly ‘left-wing’ politics of our age is perfectly and utterly compatible with that basic categorical view — has been shot through the heart by a coronavirus spike. We are communities, and societies, not just culturally but biologically, physically, epidemiologically.
It so happens that in matters of religion, I am an Anglican — the ecclesiastical equivalent of the McDonald’s swirl-cone: half-Catholic, half-Protestant, once found everywhere but now you have to look for it. At the risk of the accusation of home team advantage, in terms of the allegorical device of this essay, an equivalent sort of Anglican via media or Elizabethan compromise isn’t a bad place to land, though I admit that when it comes to medical authority, I would incline towards a very High Church Anglicanism, if not outright Anglo-Catholicism.
Regardless, if we’re inclined ever again in our lives to share a cup with someone outside of our households, for God’s sake it’s time to take the doctor’s orders.
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SAVE THE DATE: ON SATURDAY, MAY 22ND, I’LL BE HOSTING AN ONLINE COMEDY FUNDRAISER FOR PARTNERS IN HEALTH CANADA! DETAILS TO FOLLOW. FOR MORE ON PARTNERS IN HEALTH AND THE VITAL WORK THEY’RE DOING, VISIT https://pihcanada.org/
Another good piece! Been reading Richard Rohr for the past 2-3 years--so much wisdom there.