Right?

TFW Kay Ivey has the balls to say what @GovRonDeSantis won’t. https://t.co/MFsqcI5cyT

— Peter Schorsch (@PeterSchorschFL) July 23, 2021

Yeah, that’s not gonna help.

 I'm old enough to remember when the internet divided itself into two spheres (at least the people advocating one side of this dichotomy thought they were tout le internet, which meant to them tout le monde):  those who followed science, and those who followed religion.  The former, of course, walked in the light; the latter were benighted and walked in darkness.  It was a nice, simple reduction of the world into those who were right, and everybody else.

Science, in this "reasoning" (I use the term as loosely as they do) could only lead to "right" thinking.  But if you read the article, or just the quotes I provided, closely, the nurses who decline the covid vaccination are basing their reasoning on science.  Nobody in the article says "God told me not to do it."  So we're back to the basic understanding of "reasoning."  We're also back to the basic understanding of terms like "faith," "trust," and "belief."

The report points out that nurses who don't want to get vaccinated have lost "trust" in the institutions telling them they need the vaccine. You could substitute the word "faith" there, with no change in intent or meaning.  Except we use the word "faith" as a religious word, and usually mean something like "blind acceptance" when we do.  Trust is earned; faith is given.  Except it isn't that simple at all.

Children trust their parents, and it takes an enormous amount of physical and psychological abuse (or just one or the other) to disabuse them of that trust.  Parents don't "earn" trust, so much as they lose trust if they work at it hard enough.  And we generally understand that, but we still hold that trust is earned; except, of course, when it's not.

The military teaches soldiers to trust military orders and military discipline, to trust it so absolutely that you will go to war and kill other people simply because you're told to, and you will face being killed simply beceause you trust you are doing the right thing.  I understand this is a lesson from Vietnam: the military assumed a trust among the soldiers that didn't exist because the soldiers quickly lost trust (faith) that the war was a "good" war.  So the military trained soldiers to kill, to overcome their aversion to killing, to trust solely in orders from military commanders.  I probably oversimplify this situation; but military discipline is definitely built on trust; just as social order is.

I had a neighbor I barely know come into my house and use my computer.  He'd locked himself out of his house, and came to me to use my internet so he could contact a locksmith.  His keys, his phone; everything but his wallet was in the house.  I trusted him.  I left him alone with my computer, where anyone can access my passwords by logging onto any website I use regularly.  It's a convenience of my computer because it's "secure,” because who else uses my computer? I trust he didn't do anything nefarious (and there's no evidence he did).  That kind of trust promotes both hospitality (which at its heart is trust; or faith; we can interchange the terms) and good social order.  We are better neighbors now, even though he's lived in his house for over 50 years, and I've been in mine for 20.  Now we know each other a bit better (we chatted while he waited for the locksmith to show up).

The heart of all our interactions with others is trust; is faith.  I often cite "Othello" because the evil of Iago is that he attacks and abuses that very trust.  He lies to everyone, and manipulates their trust to his advantage.  But it's a mug's game:  Iago can only do it effectively with one person at a time.  When people from Venice arrive in Cyprus at the end of the play, Iago's lies are easily seen and exposed; but by then the damage is done.  Iago never has the power of a POTUS; but part of the play examines the frightening prospects of what would happen if he did (he has the ear of Othello, who is military governor of Cyprus for the time of the play; that's far too much power, as it turns out.).  We trust our fellow society members.  But the more we trust, the worse off we can be.

The alternative, of course, is to trust no one.  How do you function in society then?

The nurses in that story have lost trust.  They have lost faith.  But in what?  In systems meant to keep them and others safe?  In science, which tells them this new vaccine, this "miracle" vaccine (which was actually 20 years in the making. It did not spring full-grown from the brow of Zeus.) is safe?  Whatever it is they don't trust, don't believe in, don't have faith in anymore; the fact is, once trust is gone, it is very hard to recover.

And without trust, what are we?

The scientific adherents (and here I speak only of those on the internet who once insisted science was the one true religion.  They would reject my characterization, but it's exactly what they meant.) insist their trust is based on empirical evidence.  But they accept the empirical evidence as true and trustworthy, even when it produces observations contrary to their experience.  Does ordinary experience explain quantum mechanics?  String theory? A "multiverse"? No.  Movies do.  As the character says in the second Ant-Man movie, "Do you guys just put 'quantum' in front of everything?"  He has a point.  In the movies "quantum" sounds science-y, and it can be used to create time travel and posit impossibilities that suddenly sound possible because "quantum."  Which is all good fun in the movies, but then people begin to trust what they saw on the screen as somehow plausible.  The simple fact is, though:  most of us haven't the first clue what the reasoning is that supports theories of quantum mechanics.  I mean, even Einstein rejected them.

Quantum mechanics is as much a philosophy (study the original thinkers of that line of science) as it is empirically based.  Indeed, most of modern physics is based on mathematics and theory, not on empirical evidence.  Empiricism has been catching up with Einstein since he wrote his General Theory of Relativity.  Some of what quantum mechanics proposes has been observed; some of it simply can't be.  Almost none of it is explicable to non-specialists; and yet everyone is expected to accept its conclusions, or what we are told are its conclusions, as if they were immutable truths.

The work of Richard Dawkins is a case in point.  Dawkins is not a geneticist, nor even a biologist.  He's a zoologist, but he wrote a book purportedly about the findings of genetics, and the general public took it as gospel.  Geneticists didn't, and still don't; but Dawkins had almost a cult following for decades, and his ideas were taken entirely on faith (trust), because people wanted to believe the "just-so" stories that he peddled.  He marketed himself as a challenger to accepted thinking; but all he was doing was selling acceptable thinking, the kind people wanted to accept.  Science, real science, like philosophy, is hard.  It's carefully reasoned based on the philosophy of science and on information*.  But even then, even with the information and reasoning, the right conclusion is hardly guaranteed.  And that's where faith returns; what you trust, is what you believe.  If you trust what you think is science, then that science is what you believe.  And if you lose faith (trust) in that idea of science (or of anything:  politics, religion, society, Mom and apple pie), then you are likely to reduce what you trust to what you (want to) believe.

And then what?

Faith and trust are the same terms, divide them as you will between one based on un-reason and the other based on reason.  Trust is given, trust is earned; so is faith.  Neither is proof of correctness, or an element of error.  Belief is not far from either.  Belief is acceptance of a set of propositions.  They are adhered to insofar as you accept them.  It's not uncommon for religious believers to lose one set of beliefs, only to take up another.  It's not uncommon for people to accept one set of beliefs, say, their mother country is a noble and virtuous enterprise; only to decide later their mother country is flawed and corrupt, perhaps even evil.  Or perhaps just not what they thought it was when they were younger.  Do you believe in love?  Love at first sight, love eternal, soul-mates?  And when you find out people divorce, grow apart from each other, is your belief in love a falsehood?  Or do you just reconsider the simplicity of love as you thought of it in your adolescence?  Do you believe science answers all questions?  What, then, of the question of love?  Is love just sex misspelled?  Is love a delusion we use to cover the fact we are just walking bags of hormones and chemicals, responding to genes (selfish ones only, to some) and papering over the entire complex of cause and effect which acts upon us with chimerical ideas like "free will"?

And frankly, how simplistic and reductive is that reasoning?

Trust is the central tenet of human society; but we don't all trust the same thing.  We trust authority; but then, we don't.  We trust in our ideals; but as the Congressperson on "Firing Line" the other night illustrated, we generally trust those ideas when they involve other people.  He insisted the protest in Cuba are for something as abstract as "Freedom."  I suspect they involve more homely needs, like food, shelter, and medicine (what the protestors are asking for, per news reports).  I kept listening to him and thinking he probably saw the protests over the death of George Floyd as the product of "antifa" and "BLM" and, in an old term, anarchists.  He probably didn't see that as an exercise and expression of asking for "freedom."  Ox.  Gored,  Whose.  It's ever the way.  Should we call him a damned fool, shout him down, shame him from the public square?  To what end? What you trust can determine what you see. But what you trust can also limit what you understand.

Science is no more trustworthy than religion; and no less.  Science run amok lead to the development of the H-Bomb.  Edward Teller was hardly a religious man, and he was quite sure his bomb design was a good use of science.  The good use of science is that we never exploded one.  I'm not sure science had very much to do with that, however.  Trust in other systems happily prevailed.

Faith, or trust, is inherent to us as a species, as social animals, as spiritual animals. Which of those do you see yourself as?  Or do you not see yourself as an animal? A member of a species? A society? A race? Which frame, which category, do you trust?

Probably you think you are in the group that is wise, and the nurses are in the group that is foolish. Your faith in your group’s standards means their group is to be forcibly overrun, if necessary. You trust your group; you don’t trust theirs.

The “audit” in Arizona, the Arizona sheriff who wants to conduct his own investigation into "voter fraud," the other proposed or attempted audits in other states:  all indicate a lack of faith. Or trust. They don’t accept what they are told. They trust their own study, investigations, results. Of course all they really trust is their own conclusions. Which means they can’t be reached, reasoned with, or made to understand that the rest of us are describing reality. But they don’t trust any group; they only trust themselves.

At some point, in matters of public health just as in matters of public order, the majority overrides even the trust issues of the minority (and frankly, if you "trust" the justice system, it's likely because you've never been crosswise with it) and imposes its will by force.  This can mean required vaccinations  for public school students, required vaccinations for employees, even "vaccine passports."  That problem of trust is never going to go away.  But that's the nature of human society.

*Although some scientists and those trained in scientific reasoning reject the idea that science is a "philosophy" and not simply the "truth" about the world.  In this they are no different than believers who reject the idea most of their Christian beliefs are the product of theology, rather than springing purely and solely from "God's word" (which is itself a theological concept).