I saw my cardiologist last week…

It was a routine checkup six months after my surgery to remove blockage from the carotid artery in my neck after my stroke.

“I know how annoying it must be when patients come to you with Google-based diagnoses of health problems they are experiencing,” I told Dr. A, my very conservative and otherwise very mainstream cardiologist. “But I’ve been reading lots of reports online that myocarditis is being reported as a common side effect of not just COVID, but also taking several jabs of the COVID vaccine. And since a few weeks after my last – and third – jab, I’ve been experiencing pretty much all the symptoms.”

He smiled. “Such as?”

“Well, persistent fatigue, balance issues, occasional acute chest pain and heartburn, times when I feel that my heart is beating too quickly, and swollen ankles. Am I crazy?”

I smiled widely, assuming he was going to say some version of “yes.” But he surprised me.

“No,” he said. “Myocarditis is one of several documented side effects of the COVID vaccines. It’s not a crazy, unfounded conspiracy theory. It may have begun that way, but there is a wealth of information that has been examined in the past 12 to 18 months. And myocarditis is not the only danger. There are others. In fact, I no longer recommend the vaccines to my patients.”

I raised my eyebrows.“Mark,” he said, “I don’t think you have myocarditis. I think you have the problem of having been in 30-year-old shape since you were 30. And in the last several months, your body has decided to settle down and become a septuagenarian. Nevertheless, I’m ordering a few tests so we can rule out myocarditis. And I’m prescribing a diuretic to get that fluid out of your lower legs.”

But I was barely listening. “Yes!” I was thinking. “It’s not a bogus theory! And I’m not crazy! I can’t wait to tell all my Doubting Thomas friends and colleagues!”

And that’s why I’m telling you!

A World Divided: Is a New Dark Age Coming?

During my high school and college years, debates between liberals and conservatives were energetic and passionate. I was a card-carrying Socialist then, yet I never had the nerve to think I was smarter than Bill Buckley. Nor do I remember feeling any antipathy towards my conservative friends and family members, and I didn’t feel any from them.

Today, in the US (and, from what I’ve experienced, in Canada and in Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean), disagreements about so many ordinary things have become political – from what someone thinks of the Joe Rogan podcast, to the car he drives, to his thoughts on business issues like trade barriers and wages.

What’s remarkable about these arguments is that you can tell within the first sentence or two what the person you’re talking to believes about the topic at hand – virtually any topic, including, say, offshore windmills, or whether men can have babies, or whether African Americans deserve reparations.

You not only know in advance his positions on all these topics, but also the arguments he will make and the particular facts he will use to support those arguments. You may also know your own positions on those topics and the facts you would use to support your arguments.

What has happened? Why are our disagreements so similar these days? And why are our opinions so categorical across such a wide range of topics?

My answer is this…

A set of arguments about human dignity, social equality, and political freedom began during the Age of Enlightenment in the latter half of the 18th century. It led to great advances in the sciences, and, coupled with the great experiment of free market capitalism, to the greatest period of wealth advancement in the history of the world. (It also led to the greatest political revolutions in modern history, including the French and American Revolutions.)

In European universities in the middle of the 19th century, it was cross-bred with the Socialist theories of Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels and – perhaps more oddly – with the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud. And it emerged, towards the end of the century, as a set of ideas that were seemingly unrelated but very much connected with those of the Enlightenment (principally, Humanism, individual agency, and individual liberty.) And although no one I’ve ever read wrote about this, it seems pretty clear to me that those two philosophies – Socialism and Freudian psychology – infested the best ideas of Enlightenment thinking and gradually corrupted them, without anyone seeming to notice.

By the second half of the 20th century, the foundational beliefs of Freudianism and Socialism (which included, among other bad ideas, the inevitability of psychological, social, and political oppression and victimization), had morphed again into the advent of Structuralism, Post-structuralism, intersectionality, critical race theory, gender fluidity, and equity theories – which all felt like Humanism, but were, in fact, polar opposites of every good and useful idea that came out of the Enlightenment.

Most importantly, these were not, and are not, alternatives to Enlightenment thinking. They are religious doctrines that are anti-humane, anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-individual liberty that, if not opposed, will lead us towards a new age that may be more destructive to humanity than the nearly 1,000 years of tribal warfare, barbarity, acute poverty, and intellectual and moral regression that we used to call the Dark Ages.

And that is why, in my opinion, disagreements today are so mean-spirited and even hateful.

In turning towards these new “progressive” social ideas and movements, we are turning away from all of the great ideas of the Enlightenment – e.g., that all men deserve equal respect and dignity and an equal chance to participate and succeed in society – and replacing them with deeply irrational and largely unscientific ideas that are much closer to religious than rational thinking.

The powerful among us are no longer committed to researching, discovering, and publicizing the universal truths that bind us together as a single species. Instead, we have returned to believing in “revealed truths” that cannot be questioned and must be accepted with the full commitment that medieval kings and priests assigned to their religious doctrines.

And so, despite our fetish for fact-checking the statements of our opponents, we no longer care about facts at all. Nor logic. Nor science. We believe only in proselytizing the ignorant and extinguishing the infidels.