Bonus Sample: My Religious Attitude Toward Science
Okay, maybe the title is overstated. But, as Matthew explores in this bonus episode: what are the contours of social comfort and habitus — supported by faith and ritual — that haunt any layperson's relationship to science? When the pressure is on, be it acute or existential, do we really display "critical thinking" — or are we really skilled at post-hoc rationalizing choices that embody the social status we wish to identify with?What are the psychosocial scents that waft from institutional actors vs. influencers, and what does it say about history and personal experience that one or the other is inviting, or terrifying?Finally: both Steve Hassan and Lee McIntyre have proposed that careful 1:1 conversations can re-establish interpersonal trust with the indoctrinated. But when we're talking about making vulnerable populations less susceptible to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, is this really sufficient? Or must we consider broader forms of social atonement, like reparations? Show NotesSapolsky: Religious Ritual is OCDB.C. health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry on COVID-19333,000 children were abused within France's Catholic Church, a report finds Santa Claus and Dr. Tam have a video chat
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
My religious attitude towards science.
What the scientific attitude is most basically is a commitment about values.
That is author Lee McIntyre speaking with my co-host Julian Walker in episode 75.
Lee's book is called How to Talk to a Science Denier.
It's a commitment about We're not wanting to fool ourselves with whatever we think is true.
And the idea that we're going to test it against nature is a certain amount of humility.
There's a certain amount of cooperative spirit with other scientists.
That's something else that I think is really important about science, is that there's this community ethos of checking one another's work.
And being honest about it and, you know, not claiming that your theory is right just because you're the one who came up with it.
But, you know, being willing, as I said, to change your mind when the evidence shows that you're not right.
That's something that I think is humanity at its best.
Hello, dear listeners.
So, to start, I want to pick out some keywords here and explore them a little bit.
MacIntyre speaks of values, of not wanting to fool ourselves, of humility, of a cooperative spirit and a community ethos and the whole process or value of being honest and not self-centered.
Now, these are all things that are valued in many types of community, including religious ones.
And what I think MacIntyre might say is that at the center of the scientific project lies the data, the material facts of the world.
And that serves as the pole star of honesty, the reality principle against which behaviors are measured and calibrated.
And yet, there are communities built on those same things, values, not wanting to fool themselves, humility, cooperative spirit, community ethos, and the goal of being honest and not self-centered.
And instead of data, they might have a scripture or a series of oral traditions at the center of their effort to stay honest.
In the debrief to Episode 75, I suggested that, at least in my experience, MacIntyre's invocation of humility and these other principles might actually bring scientific and religious attitudes towards stressful moments and complicated problems, and even life itself, closer than we may want to admit.
So, I'm going to take this bonus episode to flesh out those thoughts a little bit.
And thinking about this has had a number of soft and hard starting points for me.
A couple of hard ones.
One would be in episode 61, Annie Kelly made two comments that have haunted me.
And one was to point at the terrible PR choice of UK politicians.
Who chose to mug for selfies beside the new Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines as if they would be trustworthy communicators of public health values.
Now, the way Dr. Kelly described it gave me a picture of lab coats blending with business suits on a parade of vacuous company men.
Are these the people we're really meant to trust?
The way that the new vaccines were being announced at the end of last year, she said, prioritized their medical and technical brilliance.
How fantastic and brilliant they are.
How cutting edge.
She goes on to say, it felt as if it was further alienating.
It just wasn't cutting through.
And in fact, it was making them more suspicious.
Now on episode three of her excellent podcast series called Vaccine, Dr. Kelly describes how Lady Mary Montagu, who is an early 18th century English socialite, drove the first inoculation campaigns in Great Britain.
Here's a quote.
She's got no background in researching this sort of thing.
She just sees this invention.
So Montague was a world traveler.
She had seen ritual inoculations in Turkey and other places.
Quote.
And she thinks it's fantastic and wants to take it to England.
Part of that is wrapped up in seeing herself as a very exotic woman of the world who wants to bring through this new kind of folk medicine, and she knows it will be a little trendy, that it will excite her friends back home." In other words, Lady Mary Montagu was an influencer.
She was a wealthy woman who went to faraway lands, became enchanted with alchemical healing techniques, and then began to evangelize for them at home.
Sound familiar?
Sounds kind of like a well-platformed yoga mom.
Quote, I relate to that because I think actually many of us don't really follow the science, said Kelly.
Quote, or not as much as we think we do.
Unquote.
Secondly, I also started looking closely at my early pandemic choices.
Was I supposed to mask?
What type of mask?
KN95s?
KN94s?
Should I sanitize surfaces?
Should I sanitize groceries when I bring them home?
I did it all.
And I did it all because public health was sending mixed messages, because they were trying to work out fomites versus aerosols versus the supply chains for PPE, and none of it is really transparent, you know, unless you're in those planning meetings, and none of it is ever really resolved.
And yet, the virus seems as omnipotent and as inscrutable as the angel of death.
It's not something that you can see.
It's not something that we know how to be safe from at that point.
And we're relying on leaders for comfort as much as for information.
And so what did I do?
I think like many people I developed a kind of hygiene obsessive compulsive disorder.
I remember things like sanitizing my groceries using spray bottle chemicals on cardboard boxes of cereal and oatmeal and plastic bags and it was stinky and messy and I didn't know how long to let things dry off or should I use extra rags to dry things off or should I let them air dry.
Not knowing if any of that was working, but imagining that it was virtuous nonetheless.
I remember faithfully singing Happy Birthday three times while washing my hands.
That was kind of instructive.
You know, like, what's 20 seconds or 60 seconds?
And it was hard to keep that up.
Almost as hard as it was when I was a Catholic schoolboy to keep up all of the prayers and internal attitudes and correct postures towards God throughout the day.
