In the first week of March 2020, as news of a virus was everywhere, intellectuals associated with the Yale University School of Public Health penned a letter expressing the conventional wisdom of the moment: we should not lock down. That harms the poor and vulnerable populations. Travel restrictions achieve nothing.
Quarantine, if it is deployed at all, said the letter, should only be for the very sick and only in the interest of the health of the community. Government should never abuse its powers but instead find “the least restrictive measure” that still protects community health.
The letter writers gathered signatures. They found 800 others in their profession to sign it. Of course the whole text was discarded by governments at all levels everywhere in the world.
Reading it now, we will find that it makes mostly the same points as the Great Barrington Declaration that came out seven months later. After that document, which was wrongly seen as partisan, many of the people who signed the original Yale letter then signed a new letter, this one called the John Snow Memorandum, calling for a zero-Covid policy and universal lockdowns.
What happened? It’s like the world had turned upside down in a matter of months. The ethos changed. The lockdowns happened and the authorities backed them. Nobody is as talented as intellectuals in discerning the mood of the moment and how to respond to it. And respond they did.
What had been unthinkable was suddenly thinkable and even a mandatory belief. Those who dissented were dismissed as “fringe,” which was crazy since the GBD was merely expressing what had been the conventional wisdom less than a year before.
It’s usually best to take people’s statements on face value and not question the motive behind such shocking turns. But in this case, it really was too much. In the course of barely a few weeks, an entire orthodoxy had changed. And the intellectuals changed with it.
The signers of the original Yale letter were hardly the only ones. Academics, think tankers, authors and major public pundits all over the world changed suddenly. Those who should have opposed lockdowns switched to favour them once every major nation in the world other than Sweden adopted them. This was true even of the scholars and activists who had made names for themselves in favour of human rights and liberties. Even many libertarians, whom you might think of as the last to side with such senseless, destructive governmental policies, were silent, or, even worse, invented rationales for these measures.
It was only the beginning. By the fall of 2020, we heard major figures, who later said the vaccine should be required for everyone, were warning against Trump’s vaccine. The people who urged against taking the Trump shot included Anthony Fauci, Senator Kamala Harris, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Dr. Eric Topol, Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Ashish Jha. They all said that the public should be extremely wary.
Every last one of these sceptics became convinced converts only a few months later. Based on no data, no evidence, no new information other than that Trump had lost and Biden had won, they became enormous proponents of the very thing against which they had previously warned just a few months earlier.
Once again, they turned on a dime. It was an experience lifted straight out of the pages of Orwell, truly stranger than fiction. From opposing the shot, they came around to the idea that it should be mandated, based mostly on who was in power.
Here we are four years later and the deck is still massively shuffled. It is hard to predict these days where any particular public intellectual stands on lockdowns, mandates and the entire calamity of the response to Covid. Very few have apologised. Most have moved on as if nothing has happened. Some have dug into their own apostasy even more deeply.
One reason seems to be that much of the professional intellectual class is currently dependent on some institution. It is not lost on anyone that the people today who are most likely to say what is true about our times – and there are some major and brave exceptions to this – are mostly retired professors and scientists who have less to lose by speaking truth to power.
That cannot be said for many who have undergone a strange metamorphosis over the last several years. For example, I’m personally sad to see Stephen Davies of the Institute for Economic Affairs, formerly one of the most compelling libertarian intellectuals on the planet, come out for travel restrictions, universal disease monitoring and turn-key crisis management by government, not only for disease but also for climate change and any number of other threats. And why? Because of “unusual vulnerability” to global catastrophic events caused by human activity plus artificial intelligence… or something that is hard to follow.
Maybe Davies’s book Apocalypse Next, which is published by a division of the United Nations, deserves a full and thoughtful critique. It shows no evidence of having learned a thing from the experience of the last four years in which governments of the world attempted to wrestle with the microbial kingdom and ruined whole societies.
I was preparing a sincere response but then stopped, for one simple reason. It’s hard to take seriously a book that also promotes “effective altruism” as any sort of solution to anything. With this slogan, one detects a lack of sincerity. A year ago, this slogan was unearthed as nothing but a cover for a money laundering racket pushed by the company FTX, which was accepting billions in “venture capital” funding to hand out to the pandemic-planning industry, including many of the very same catastrophists with whom our author is now aligned.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s mentor was author William MacCaskill, the founder of the movement who served on the board of FTX’s Future Foundation. His Centre for Effective Altruism plus many affiliated nonprofits were direct beneficiaries of FTX largess, receiving at least $14 million with more promised. In 2022, the Centre bought Wytham Abbey, a massive estate near Oxford University, and currently has a $28 million per year budget.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of this, as much as I’ve looked. Still, it is deeply discouraging to see the framework and lines of thinking in this strange new ideological penchant, which is bound up with a several trillion dollar pandemic planning machinery, show up in the work of a great scholar.
Forgive me, but I suspect there is more going on here.
And in so many ways, I’m deeply sympathetic. The trouble really comes down to the market for intellectual services. It is neither broad nor deep. This reality goes against all intuition. Looking from the outside in, one might suppose that a tenured professor at an Ivy League university or famous think tank would have all the prestige and security necessary to speak truth to power.
The opposite is the case. Taking another job would at the very least require a geographic move, and this would come with a likely downgrade in status. In order to ascend up the ranks in intellectual pursuits, you must be wise and that means not bucking the prevailing ideological trends. In addition, places where intellectuals live tend to be quite vicious and petty, instill in intellectuals an eye toward adapting their writings and thoughts toward their professional well-being.
This is especially true in working for a think tank. The positions are highly coveted as universities without students. A job as a top scholar pays the bills. But it comes with strings attached. There is an implicit message in all these institutions these days that they speak with one voice, especially concerning the big issues of the day. The people there have little choice but to go along. The option is to walk away and to what? The market is extremely limited. The next-best alternative is not always clear.
This kind of non-fungible profession is different from, say, a hair cutter, dry-wall installer, restaurant server or lawn-care professional. There is a huge shortage of such people so the worker is in a position to talk back to the boss, say no to a customer, or simply walk away if the working conditions are not right. Ironically, such people are in a better position to speak their mind than any professional intellectual is today.
This creates a very odd situation. The people we pay to think, influence and guide the public mind – and possess the requisite intelligence and training to do so – also happen to be the least capable of doing so because their professional options are so limited. As a result, the term “independent intellectual” has become nearly an oxymoron. If such a person exists, he is either very poor or otherwise living off family money, and not likely making much of his own.
These are the brutal facts of the case. If this shocks you, it certainly shocks absolutely no one employed in academic or think tank spaces. Here, everyone knows how the game is played. The successful ones play it very well. Those who supposedly fail at the game are the principled people, the very ones you want in these positions.
Observing all of this for many years, I’ve encountered perhaps a dozen or so earnest young minds who were enticed into the world of ideas and the life of the mind out of pure idealism, only to discover the grim reality once entering into university or think tank life. These people found themselves exasperated with the sheer viciousness and factionalism of the endeavor and bailed very quickly to go into finance, or law or something where they could pursue intellectual ideals as an avocation instead.
Was it always this way? I seriously doubt it. Intellectual pursuits before the second half of the 20th century were reserved for the extremely gifted in rarified worlds and certainly not for mediocre or petty minds. The same was true of students. Colleges and universities catered not to people headed to applied fields in finance or industry but rather focused on philosophy, theology, logic, law, rhetoric and so on, leaving other professions to train their own. (One of the first professions in the 20th century to be devoured away from practitioner-based training to academic training was of course medicine.)
Years ago, it was my great privilege once to walk the halls of the amazing University of Salamanca in Spain, which was the home of the greatest mind of the early Renaissance who had been schooled in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. There were the graves of Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Luis de Molina (1535-1600), Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) and so many others besides, along with all their students. Another remarkable thinker writing in Madrid was Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) who wrote ferocious works against power, and even defended regicide.
Perhaps we over-idealize that world but these were incredibly brilliant and creative thinkers. The university was there to protect their ideas from a dangerous world and grant such great minds financial and professional security to come to a great understanding of the world around them. And they did just this, while arguing and debating with each other. They wrote treatises on law, economics, international relations and so much more, that ushered in the modern age.
Being there, you could feel the spirit of learning, listening and discovery in the space.
I’ve never worked directly at a university but I’m told by many who do that collegiality and the free exchange of ideas is the last thing you find in these institutions. There are exceptions to be sure, such as Hillsdale College and other smaller liberal arts colleges, but in major research universities, genuine colleagues are rare. Meetings are not really about big ideas and research but are more often characterised by one-upmanship and plots of various sorts, toxic settings for true creativity.
The truth about these places is being revealed these days, with terrible revelations out of Harvard and other institutions.
How can we recapture the ideal? Brownstone Institute last year began a series of retreats for experts in the many fields in which we take an interest. They take place in a comfortable but not expensive location with meals provided. The meetings are set up not in a classroom environment but a salon. There are no long speeches but rather relatively short segments of presentations that are open to all participants. What follows is unstructured, fundamentally depending on the good will and open mindedness of everyone there.
What emerges over three days is nothing short of magic – or so everyone who has attended has reported. The environment is free of back-stabbing faculty politics and bureaucracy, and also emancipated from the performance that comes from speaking in front of the media or other audiences. That is to say: this is an environment in which serious research and ideas are put on display and highly valued for being what they are. There is no unified message, no action items and no hidden agenda.
Brownstone is holding its third such event in the coming two weeks, and another is planned in Europe this spring. We are looking toward doing something similar in Latin America as we approach the fall.
True, these are not year-round but they are enormously productive and a tremendous respite from the clamour and corruption of the rest of the academic, media and think tank worlds. The hope is that by holding such idealised meetings, we can make a contribution toward rekindling the type of environment that built civilisation as we know it.
Why are such settings so rare? It seems that everyone has some other idea on what to do. In addition, these are difficult to pay for. We seek out benefactors who are willing to back ideas for their own sake rather than pushing some agenda. That is not easy these days. They do exist and we are deeply grateful for them. Perhaps you are one of these people and can help. If so, we very much welcome that.
The number of intellectuals who have let down the cause of freedom over these terrible years is astonishing. Some of them used to be more personal heroes. So, yes, that hurts. Tom Harrington is correct to nail this as the treason of the experts. That said, let’s grant that many are in a tough spot. They are trapped by their institutions and walled in by a limited range of professional options that prevent them from telling the truth as they see it. It should not be this way but it is.
We’ve lived through this and seen too much to have the same level of trust we once had. What can we do? We can rebuild the ideal as it existed in the old world. The kind of genius we know was on display in a place like Salamanca, or in interwar Vienna, or even in the coffee houses of London in the 18th century, can return, even if on a small level. They have to, simply because the shape of the world around us depends fundamentally on the ideas we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Those should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute.
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Well I don’t know if they qualify as what the author would think of as “intellectuals”, but if recent tittle-tattle is to be believed, our PM at the time supposedly didn’t want to do all this horrible stuff but was “forced” to by Whitty and Vallance. Also Fauci, who is mentioned, seems to have been a leader rather than a follower in determining the direction. Accepting that many “intellectuals” went along with the prevailing narrative to keep their jobs or get ahead, why did certain intellectuals make the choices they did – choices which shaped that narrative?
ching,ching cash and here is a kick up the ladder to even more cash. That’s the simple reason. Greed
This “Tribe formation” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_OgSLCra3Y&list=WL&index=3 entry by John Campbell is quite apposite. It is advertising a book by Clare Craig, of course.
Whores of ‘The Science’.
What most people don’t understand is that these ‘intellectuals’ in the main are useless tossers and halfwits and too often openly corrupt and criminal.
They know nothing – except how to extract funds, bribes and ’emoluments’.
‘The lockdowns happened and the authorities backed them. Nobody is as talented as intellectuals in discerning the mood of the moment and how to respond to it. And respond they did.’
Indeed.
‘We didn’t think we could get away with it….and then we realised that we could’
‘What happened?’:
Socialist Fascism happened and it has been creeping up on us, in this country, since 1990.
‘Every last one of these sceptics became convinced converts only a few months later.’
They’re known as ‘Vicars of Bray’, as in the poem
‘When William was our king declared
To ease the nation’s grievance,
With this new wind about I steered,
And swore to him allegiance;
Old principles I did revoke,
Set conscience at a distance;’
They are always with us, in every profession in the land, particularly within the public sector (as was the good vicar….)
Democracy is designed to deal with both Socialist Fascism and Vicars of Bray but it is an imperfect weapon, slow in deployment.
Roads blocked by tractors, politicians houses ’emerded’ ensue, and, ultimately, revolution, often precipitated by war.
What to do?
We know all the right notes: smaller public sector, less government, lower taxes, deregulation…..
We just need to get them in the right order……..
Yes, the rot goes back even before the Vicar of Bray, the churchmen of Reformation times (most of the university educated) tending to vacillate according to who was in power. Understandable when the stake, rather than just tenure, was the risk.
But the same back-stabbing university culture is seen in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, from the immediate post-war period, and was clearly observed from life at Oxford, so it’s not that recent.
The difference now is that the conditions have been made universal and perfect. It’s no longer the job of Master of some college that encourages it, but the whole educational and employment system. Only now is the public slowly starting to understand that experts aren’t independent.
And slowly coming to the realisation that it doesn’t matter what colour rosette is hanging at N0 10 the government works for corporations and billionaires. I hear Rishi rich is on GBN tonight….I’m with James Dellingpole on this one. What is the fuc+ing point!
At least one member of the GB audience got his point across. https://x.com/DrBuckland/status/1757162136420180088?t=j9NZxPvFEoIUy4gwuKWMgw&s=08
If you would like a flavour of what may be the mindset of these ‘vicars’, here is something which seems to have been written by someone called Farrar for the covid ‘inquiry’:
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/21180503/INQ000208834.pdf
It reads a bit like a cheap thriller.
If someone has written it as a satire, it is brilliant………
If they haven’t, God help us all………..
That would be Sir Jeremy, I presume – deeply implicated personally from being in on Fauci’s conference call suppressing the lab leak, and through the Wellcome Trust in the whole gain of function debacle.
You can tell where he’s coming from from his being promoted to a key WHO position.
Less yer average vicar than Fisher, the Bishop of London.
Not really intellectuals, just Parrots who repeat what they have been told.
…and are blown by the wind.
Long winded piece about what virtually all on here knew already from day one.
Meanwhile in a far away land called Palestine, the IDF is bombing Rafah a city which is packed with Palestinians who fled South to escape the bombs in the North.
The Gaza strip, the biggest Child Cemetery in the world.
I have no sympathy for these people. They picked a career in Academia knowing full well what’s that really about and by practicing all the required social skills, backstabbing, grandstanding and defaming everyone who seemed more talented than them and thus, a potential future competitor, since they were students. Many of them probably originally wanted to get into politics but just didn’t manage to achieve that. These people are a pest and getting rid of them or at least getting them out of their publically financed pulpits would improve things a lot.
Says it all
Same goes for Peter Tatchell. He has a history of banging the drum for human rights but was silent during the covid psyop. I did question him on his FB page only to be attacked by his leftist fans. Human Rights only matter if it is the ‘right’ sort that align with the dominant narrative.
Left-wing politicians obviously cannot support human rights, only human lefts. Like the left to pre-natal covaccination or the left to avoid being exposed to other people’s bare faces in public.
Similarly, most if not all European countries signed the Council of Europe Resolution 2361, which clearly stated any vaccination should be voluntary and there should be no coercion whatsoever.
5 minutes later mandates were springing up all over, and many countries made such basic rights as travel and participation in society conditional on vaccination.
Why did they all sign only to immediately embark on the road to coercive fascism?
Excellent article. It’s not just among academics that we need to keep the ideas, the discussion and the arguments alive but among the ordinary members of the public. We are the many, they are the few! Well done to all those who are bringing these ideas into the public square.
“Nobody is as talented as intellectuals in discerning the mood of the moment and how to respond to it.”. Some ‘leaders’ huh!
In the late 1970s, I was invited, as a dairy farm manager, to a 2 day ‘get-together at Reading Iniversity with about 8 other farmers from all over England. The idea was for us to sit around a circular table for 2 days and discuss chosen relevant agricultural subjects while around us were about 20 to 30 observers from academia, industry and Ministry of Food & Fisheries.
They did not participate in discussion but occasionally asked questions for understanding and just listened and took notes of the discussions. It was a brilliant concept for bothme as a participant and for the observers to hear ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ about the future of British agriculture and how to progress.
I saw many of those discussion points used and referred to over the years. Similar groups throughout industry should be doing this now and learning from the people ‘on the ground’ about the future of their industries.
Unfortunately we are entering a dark age for freedom of expression.