The debate over whether it should be mandatory to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to essential workers, many on the frontline of the fight against the virus, and our security forces has descended into a zero-sum rhetorical game, where neither truth, reason nor public health wins.
More often than not, we feel compelled to hand out en masse to the verbal combatants, a seminal textbook now 90 years old which could very well be an important tool to navigate our way out of this and many other debacles facing the nation.
We’ve got 99 problems. Senseless, violent crime. A viral pandemic. An economy in tatters. A crisis of national and ethnic identity, and an apparent transition from realm to republic in which its citizens have been relegated largely to the sidelines as spectators to political window dressing. We are also faced with an education system still hide-bound to test taking and summative assessments of our young people that could condemn them to a life of either oblivion or riches and fame should they take a singular track to success.
We teeter back and forth between liberalism and permissiveness, conservatism and condemnation, and inertia and reaction.
Public discourse now moves at the speed of Twitter and WhatsApp and our major export now appears to be instant outrage, rather than solemn consideration of facts.
So back to the book. Straight and Crooked Thinking, written in 1930 by Robert H. Thouless, more of a practical guide than an academic tome, was dedicated to teaching critical thinkers to observe pitfalls in argument. Such tools of discernment are now lying idle in the public square
Our politicians, their sycophants, media commentators and many a man and woman in the street, fuelled by very unsocial social media, now deliver at lightning speed, comment, reaction, bombast and tirade, rants and raves. Most trade daily in serial acts of fallacious reasoning.
Long before Donald Trump lied, blustered and bullied his way into the American White House, political, business and religious leaders here at home have for years said anything to gain power and hold on to it. Not all, but too many.
They set up straw man arguments, delivered personal attacks on their critics (this is known as the ad hominem fallacy), appealed to ignorance, fear, emotion and authority. Like the Stentorians of Ancient Greece, many assumed that he who shouts wins the argument.
The current raging debate – if indeed it can be called that – over whether it may be necessary to require some, if not many citizens to take a vaccine or be tested routinely for a virus that has killed scores of Barbadians and sickened thousands more, has very often been characterized by fatalism and, it must be said, fallacious reasoning.
This virus, like the challenges of climate change, social reform and economic revival, requires our critical thinking skills in which facts, not supposition, must rule. It does not follow, though, that it must be bereft of compassion, understanding, empathy and justice.
We ought to have been a long way from the Middle Ages where only the monks could dispense the contents of the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, to the illiterate masses. After half a century of full, free public education, Barbados has broadened and deepened the franchise of free thinking in a democratic state of thought.
But while we affirm that each of us has a brain and the innate capacity to use it, it does not therefore follow that statements based on scientific fact must be granted the same weight as claims based on emotion, hearsay, belief and downright disinformation. As the Surgeon General of the United States Dr Vivek Murthy has pointed out, disinformation is fast becoming a new killer – a comorbidity that exploits the human host of this virus.
Someone, somewhere, for example, has spread the utterly false statement that it is vaccinated people who are spreading the Delta variant, which is noted for its highly contagious nature and its ability to sicken and potentially kill younger patients.
Even amid an avalanche of news, facts, and knowledge disseminated widely by professionals and institutions, it now takes a few keystrokes on a smartphone to convince smart people to believe lies.
If we are to have a debate on whether it is indeed necessary to mandate vaccines, straight and not crooked thinking will become indispensable. The movement against vaccine mandates cannot hide behind a movement against vaccines. This is dangerously misleading and intellectually dishonest. Those who are opposed to vaccines must declare their hand and be prepared to argue their point of view separately, rather than cloak themselves in the raiments of those who have legitimate concerns about coercion, shaming and discrimination. Conversely, our citizens must apply rigorous thought to the statements and claims made by non-experts. A clock may be right twice a day, but can we rely upon its timekeeping if said clock is stopped?
One particularly dangerous fallacy has emerged as many weigh the effectiveness of the vaccines in saving lives against the possibility of morbidity and mortality from the Coronavirus. Often called the Nirvana Fallacy, this act of crooked thinking suggests that if there is the smallest possible chance of death for the vaccinated, it is therefore pointless to take any vaccine.
It bears noting that no vaccine in human history has ever provided 100 per cent protection. And yet, coursing through the veins of the vast majority of Barbadians are vaccines.
Delivered compulsorily, these jabs have managed to prevent the visitation upon this fair land of a raft of illnesses that once made life nasty, brutish and short for generations of Barbadians. Measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, whooping cough, tuberculosis – all have killed Barbadians before they had a chance to be firm craftsmen and craftswomen of our fate. These diseases have stunted limbs and lives and retarded the march of growth, development and prosperity. Seatbelts cannot prevent accidents but it does not mean that we should not wear them.
It is time for our citizens to exercise critical thinking and it is perhaps at this juncture that our education officials ought to take a long hard look at how to introduce critical thinking skills into our education system. A 90-year-old textbook might not be a bad place to start.
