On Poe & the Paranoia of Anti-Vaxxers

Norman Rockwell, "Before the Shot" (1958)

Norman Rockwell, “Before the Shot” (1958)

What’s with all the craziness on immunizations? Certain public figures (Chris Christie, Ron Paul, Bill Maher, Robert Kennedy, Jr.) are saying that it should be a matter of personal choice whether people get their children immunized. Because enough parents have chosen wrongly, we are witnessing a dangerous outbreak of the measles, a disease that we had all but eradicated. Do you remember the good old days when everyone agreed that vaccinations should be mandated to achieve “herd immunity”?

Some of the current thinking reflects a suspicion of science and some a suspicion of government. Unscrupulous politicians, preying on these fears, are making life unsafe for all of us.

It’s not a bad thing to express skepticism about science and scientists. Literature has been doing so since Mary Shelley in Frankenstein and, even before that, Jonathan Swift in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels. In my American Fantasy course at the moment, we are discussing how positivist science’s one-dimensional view of the world has prompted us to turn to fantasy, which articulates truths about the human condition that such science can’t touch.

But science properly understood and responsibly practiced is a boon to humankind, as witnessed by the fact that measles, mumps, small pox and other diseases are currently exotic outliers rather than the common experience of childhood that I remember them as.

My fantasy course provides some insight into America’s new anti-science bent. I especially have in mind Freud’s famous essay “The Uncanny,” which I taught last week. It may explain why a significant part of our population is falling for paranoid narratives that seem immune to rational discourse.

Freud talks about how we push under or repress fears that we recognize but don’t want to face up to. When we shove these fears into our unconscious, they become toxic. They emerge in uncanny stories that induce feelings of dread.

The major fear Freud writes about is fear of death. He also points to various desires, the incest desire being the most dramatic, that we experience innocently as children but come to regard as abhorrent. It strikes me, however, that science and social science have been so effective at revealing new threats to us that we have a whole new set of fears that we may be tempted to close our eyes to. Among the new threats are:

–human-caused climate change
–technologically doctored food
–an exploding world population that requires increasingly complex management
–the cultural dislocations caused by globalization and the internet

Often fears related to these issues are addressed by dystopian science fiction, with Margaret Atwood making particularly important contributions in recent years with her Oryx and Crake trilogy. Our narratives move from science fiction into gothic horror when we push under the fears triggered by these developments. Sci-fi horror is good at capturing how we feel when we repress the fears generated by modernity.

I’ve been teaching various Edgar Allen Poe short stories where scientific insight fails to provide the confidence and security we expect. At first glance, to be sure, science promises to banish the shadows of the uncanny, just as Freud’s psychological science strove to banish the hysteria caused by (to put it simplistically) shame over having sexual urges. In a story like “Murders of the Rue Morgue,” super detective Auguste Dupin shows that the mysterious murder of two women in a seemingly locked room actually has a logical explanation.

The story is eerie or uncanny because we recognize, but then deny, that humans have it within them to commit such horrific acts as decapitating a woman with a razor. Learning that the perpetrator is an escaped orangutan, not a human, should come as a relief. But one of my students said that she found this development to be the most uncanny thing about the story. That’s because, in the primate, we recognize a double of ourselves that we don’t want to admit to.

Another uncanny masterpiece, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, relies on this disturbing resemblance between humans and apes.

And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted. (emphasis mine)

Stevenson’s novel, of course, is about how the civilized Doctor Jekyll is so horrified by his potential for savagery that he seeks to expel it. By pushing it away, unfortunately, he just renders it toxic and more powerful. He becomes Mr. Hyde.

Evolutionary science, rather than clearing up the uncanny with the light of truth, only further confirmed the unsettling kinship that people felt with apes. This is why many in the 19th century were as horrified by Darwin as they were by Freud—they were repulsed because, deep down, they saw some truth in their theories.

Poe’s insightful observers, like today’s scientists, do not dispel shadows but create new fears. Roderick Usher’s exquisite sensitivities pick up realities missed by the narrator, who tries to apply common sense to the strange sounds emerging from Madeline’s vault. Even Dupin, who seems to represent the triumph of logic over magical thinking, sees himself as a creative genius rather than as someone prosaically making sense out of “just the facts, m’am.” It’s a short jump from Dupin to the narrators of “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-tale Heart,” who use their considerable intellects to wall up their murder victims.

To repeat my general point, scientists and social scientists are opening up powerful insights into all kinds of things, from the climate to human behavior to economics. Then they are bewildered when people resist their conclusions and think they have to become yet more convincing. People don’t reject their theories because they are unconvinced, however, but because they are unsettled. They move into avoidance, and their avoidance leads to paranoid fantasies about scientists, the president, the government, big business, and God knows what else.

And the paranoia leads to a measles outbreak.

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