It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I am predisposed to not agree with Matt Novak’s argument that The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed Because Shame Works. I’m a big fan of Novak’s work in general, but I don’t find his argument remotely convincing, and the KKK analogy strikes me as a positively addled. But in recent weeks, our machine has done what it does, and forced the vaccination debate into the mold of gleeful, I-can’t-believe-they-don’t-already-believe-this culture war. That leads me to wonder whether shame “working” is even the point.
You should vaccinate your kids, and I think that if you don’t, they shouldn’t be allowed in public spaces. That strikes me as a public health issue and an education issue. But in 21st century America, we only have one type of issue, and that is culture war. The political demographics of the anti-vaccination movement are complex and contested; I imagine that, if you are Facebook friends with a lot of politicos like me, you have seen several “Who are the anti-vaxxers?” pieces float across your feed. Here’s a recent poll on the question, although I imagine that the way the question is posed makes a big impact on the results. Regardless of the reality, the impressions are hardening with alacrity. Even for a cynic like me, the speed and efficiency with which the flag of culture war has been planted on this issue is stunning, and depressing. From my limited perspective, it appears to have very quickly become yet another issue which we hardy-har-har at each other about, even as we are careful to express our outrage about dead kids.
I don’t mean to just assert away Novak’s argument. Maybe shame does work and will work here. I doubt it. I am always skeptical of arguments that claim that the solution is to do what we would enjoy more anyway. But the broader issue is this tendency to make the arguments for which we have the strongest evidentiary basis the weakest, out of the presumption that the evidence is so strong, we don’t need to share it, only express outrage that it is not self-evident to everyone. It’s a really amazing process, in a sense; the very weight of the evidence itself becomes the justification for a rhetorical stance that precludes the expression of that evidence.
We’re living in a country now where one side’s disbelief at the practices and positions of the other side becomes the emotional justification for grasping those practices and positions even harder. In such an environment, the tactical value in refusing to associate your disagreement with your broad cultural grouping is clear. And yet that association seems to have become an absolute prerequisite for meaningful public engagement. Treating vaccination as an issue which helps define the good and right people in liberal America has risen in exact proportion with the growing public debate about this issue. Seeing as people are more likely to harden their opposition when they see specific issues as indicative of broad cultural and social differences, this is a bad mistake.
I don’t pretend both sides are equally guilty of this form of thinking. Some conservatives seem motivated to embrace liberal stereotypes of them in a way that simply isn’t matched by liberals. Conservatives hate trains, most of the time, because liberals love them; you may find the Prius annoying but it doesn’t exist to annoy you the way rolling coal does. But we know that this keeps happening, that the more individual issues get cast as battles in a larger cultural war, the more likely conservatives are to embrace their opposition ever more intensely. So we should probably work very hard to create space between these issues and the social signals we develop around them. That has nothing to do with being nice, or with failing to engage angrily where appropriate. It has to do with trying hard to maintain a divide between what you think and who you are. Eliminating that divide is precisely how shaming works, and I think it’s a terrible strategic mistake.