In response to an article I forwarded to her and other friends on the frustrations at a Houston hospital of the very thing we were going round and round about, she sent me this observation and question in an e-mail this morning:
Just this morning I read in the Tagesspiegel there’s a big problem in certain districts of Berlin convincing migrants, mostly of Arab origin, to get vaccinated. (The same is obviously true for many Palestinians, so I hear, from Israeli sources). They claim the vaccine will make them sterile.In Berlin, they have called for “district mothers,” educated Arab women, to try and convince them otherwise. These women claim it’s literally impossible. Many of the antivaxxers are illiterate and only capable of YouTubing or watching Al Jazeera.Now you’ve been teaching young adults all your life. How would you go about this? It’s not enough telling them “that’s not true!”
I want to share my response with you here. I apologize if it sounds patronizing - I'm not telling her anything she doesn't already know - but that's what this blog is for - a chance to think out loud and say things that, besides being often obvious, may need to be said all the same, and I'm aiming my response at a broader audience.
So, for what it's worth...
It's the kind of question that makes you instinctively want to respond, "How the hell should I know?" A defensive response, rather than admit that one may have to face the reality of powerlessness.
It's now part of our regular daily response to the news to say to each other, always preaching to the choir, "I can't believe people can be this fucking stupid!" The evidence, day after day, of people unwilling or unable to allow reality to enter their consciousness, to recognize how thoroughly they have been indoctrinated by misinformation, how stunted they are in the power of critical thinking.
I think if there is an answer to your question, it's a long drawn-out one. And that means you see the difficulty right away, the fact that most people do not have long attention spans, and listening to a long lecture, filled with ambiguity and complexity, is something many, maybe most people instinctively resist. You're almost defeated before you've even started.
The place I always want to start is with my own experience, Back in 2008, after Gavin Newsom had authorized the right for LGBT people to marry in San Francisco, and the idea caught on, and the state of California extended that right to the entire state, the right wing, people we have come in more recent times to identify as "Christian nationalists," swung into action. Led by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco who had previously served as Archbishop of Salt Lake City and had made lots of close connections with Mormon leaders, a movement arose to overturn that right, with Catholics and Mormons joining forces* to put their religious common ground into a law that would apply even to people not of their faiths. It went on the ballot as Proposition 8.
Taku and I immediately joined the resistance, the "anti-Prop. 8 campaign." and for the first time since Vietnam War days I got politically active again. We would go over regularly to the campaign headquarters on Market St. in San Francisco, a block up from Castro, and volunteer to do whatever was asked of us. The campaign leaders decided on a telephone campaign. They had put together a list of likely democratic voters, voters most likely to vote against Prop. 8 and the push to overturn marriage rights, and our job was to urge them to get out and vote.
It was a huge uphill climb. Most people don't answer their phones anymore because of robo-calls and people who, like us, annoyed you with pitches you didn't want to stop to listen to. For hours on end we'd make call after call, most of the time only to get an answering machine." When we got a real person on the line, we'd get a variety of answers including, "I'm already on your side. I'll vote against Prop. 8," and we'd feel good. But soon we'd start asking the obvious question, "Why are we asking so many volunteers to call people who are likely on our side anyway?" The answer we got was: because Republicans are far more likely to vote, and we need to remind Democrats to get to the ballot box.
It made sense. Frustrating as hell, this drop-in-the-ocean approach, but it was better than sitting home and doing nothing.
Despite what seemed to us volunteers like a herculean effort, we lost. Prop. 8 passed, and the right for LGBT people to marry got taken away.
The good news is this defeat shocked people - not just gay and lesbians - but the average fair-minded Californian - and after a couple of years that defeat was put right and the Obama administration succeeded in getting same-sex marriage rights put into law on a national level. A couple of years after that, Taku and I were able to marry, and the story had, at least for us and many like us, a happy ending.
What came out of this was a pretty deep analysis of what had gone wrong. How could we have failed, when it was so clear that so many Californians, a clear majority of the population, were in favor of same-sex marriage? How could we possibly have lost?"
With the answer that emerged came the awareness that the world is divided into people who respond to reason, logic and sound argument, and people who don't, people who can only be reached, if at all, through their emotions. And here we were up against another serious disadvantage, our own ingrained bias, the belief that smart people think and are persuaded by reason and dumb people don't. To bypass a chance to make a reasonable argument in favor of an appeal to emotions (i.e., in our culture, something less worthy than reason) felt for all the world like reducing oneself to a lower level of being. You were getting down on the ground to play with children, not acting like an adult. It felt beneath your dignity to behave like that.
Politicians and used-car salesmen, we sneered, surrender to that low level of interaction; we don't. It was, and remains, particularly difficult for intellectuals and academics, not to see this through the lens of smart vs. dumb.
After Prop. 8 succeeded, we began to see ads on television and on billboards of gay couples, smiling faces, "people like us" images, often with children, speaking of how happy they were living with each other: "This could be your son, or daughter" messages, all designed to speak to the fact that by now everybody seemed to know gay people personally and had long ago shed the view that, as the religious right was still trying to persuade the population, we were child molesters, or people with "sexual disfunction disorders," unduly focused on sex at the expense of all else. Images, often without words, of two elderly women who revealed that they had shared lives for half a century. The challenge was to reframe the consciousness, persuade people to realize through images and uplifting narratives that homosexually inclined people cared as much about loving, caring relationships as they did about sex, just as heterosexually inclined people did.
It was clear the leaders of the movement had learned from their mistaken dependence on reason and were using a new strategy of speaking directly to people's emotions, often bypassing those reasoning faculties. Showing, demonstrating through images and personal narratives, that the impulse to exclude LGBT people from the rights non-LGBT people enjoyed was based on a false assumption that they were, in the words of the Catholic Church, "inherently disordered." And in the end reason did come largely to be replaced by images, emotions, and feelings. Even the best cut-to-the-chase, bottom-line arguments were replaced with smiles and a minimum of words, maybe something like "love is love," or "love is all you need," if that.
That experience, the shock of losing the battle against Prop. 8, left me with the lasting conviction that - to use academic language here for a minute - "narrative" is more powerful, in the end, than reason, narrative meaning story-telling. Just get out there and tell your story, the new strategy went. Make sure you stick to the real, speak sincerely from personal experience, and don't back down. Keep talking, keep telling your story. Look people in the eye. Make them see (as opposed to understand) that you are not all they thought you were. That’s all, ultimately, anyone can do. We need to accept our limitations, recognize that this battle will not be won by individuals, but by collective action. We need to convince each other, those of us who are persuadable by reason, to just keep talking, and not surrender to despair or the view that you are too small to count. You are small. But the collective isn’t. And the collective depends on every individual example. Consciousness raising, that old Marxist strategy of persuasion, was still the way to go. Just not by brute force, but by attractive imaging and appeal to commonality and one's best instincts.
When you bring up the examples of immigrants from Arab countries in Berlin or Palestinians in Israel who are led by their own particular sources of misinformation, it seems to me that you are underlining the importance of a variable approach - different strokes for different folks, not a one-size-fits all solution to problems. And just as the response to argument should be counter-argument, the response to narrative needs to be counter-narrative.
I’m thinking of my friend Pierre, whose story I shared with you, and of all the people who are afraid to get the Covid vaccination because they believe it will hurt them somehow. And the people who say that the breakthrough cases, like Pierre’s, of people who got the two shots but got Covid anyway prove that the vaccine is ineffective. They need to hear Pierre tell his story. He is anxious to tell you he is convinced the vaccination saved his life. Without the two shots, he says, his case of Covid would likely have been far worse. As it was, it caused a couple weeks of intense discomfort, but today he is singing the praises of the beautiful Florida landscape, the birds, and wildlife. If you tell him, “Aha, you got vaccinated, but you got Covid anyway, you fool,” he will respond with a very good answer. His sincerity is palpable. It is, “You’ve looking at this wrong. The vaccination was not to prevent Covid; it was to make sure I got only a mild, survivable case of it, if and when I did.”
I think the answer to your question may lie in organizing some sort of plan that matches doubters with story-tellers. Maybe a registry of people willing to tell their stories - in person, ideally, but on video at least, and a system of matching like the dating apps, where somebody filters through all the information and puts the right people together.
I realize how inadequate I am as a responder to the anti-vaxxers. When I realized that my erstwhile friend in Munich was not responding to my counter-arguments, I decided he was an idiot and shut down the communication. While that makes a lot of sense for me personally, who has better things to do than bang my head against a wall, it was not the right response to give to an anti-vaxxer. I still feel I should have hung in there. The problem is all I had to offer him was facts and statistical information. He insists Dr. Bhakdi was onto something because he's a microbiologist with years of experience and loads of publications. My insistence that all around the world the people filling hospitals these days are anti-vaxxers like himself, was not going to work. He had made his mind up and came back with, "They’re all telling lies because Dr. Fauci is in thrall to the for-profit corporations trying to push the vaccine to make money.”
We were not the right pair to engage in this debate. I should not be the one trying to persuade him to change his mind. What my friend needs is a walk through intensive care wards in a hospital where people are dying from Covid and are willing to tell you they were once like him in denying the effectiveness of the vaccine but had learned through painful personal experience that they were mistaken. If I knew how, I would put anti-vaxxers into direct personal contact with people suffering and dying from Covid.
I know, as that video about the hospital in Little Rock shows so vividly, that even when people are dying from Covid, some people insist to their last dying breath that Covid is a hoax. But we should not be deterred by such stupidity - if that’s what it is - it’s more fear than stupidity, I suspect. We should recognize that these people are a small sliver of the population, that many more people will respond either to reason or to facts staring them in the face, up close and personal.
I’m not the one to do it, but I would hope there are people organizing something we might call “testimony banks.” Face-to-face encounters with people anti-vaxxers can most easily identify with.
And then, when you’ve exhausted the last effort to make that kind of match, and argued your best argument with those who listen to reason, recognize your limitations and look out for yourself. Don’t exhaust yourself, but live to fight another day, in a battle you have a better chance of winning than the present one.
That may not be the best of all possible approaches, but it's the only one that comes to mind at the moment.
In my next life I plan to be king of the world and will have a better one.
Maybe.
*today, it's important to note in passing, I think, that the Roman Catholic Church has divided into retrograde (pre-Vatican II) clericalists on the one hand and largely post-Vatican II "people in the pews" on the other hand, with the latter in the majority who do not fall under the rubric of "Christian nationalists." And the Mormons, while still staunchly conservative, are more likely also to show more diversity of opinion, many following the views of Mitt Romney, a more independent conservative, less hostile to the extension of rights to more and more citizens and also less likely to fit the description of "Christian nationalist." Today, it's the Evangelicals, many of whom have tied their wagon to the Trump camp, that are at the heart of the source of anti-vaxxer enthusiasm in the U.S. But that's another story for another time. I want the focus to stay on solutions, rather than an analysis of the problem.
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