Survival and Choice

One might be forgiven for thinking that much of the rhetoric around masking and vaccinations has reached the level of incoherence. For instance, people who steadfastly maintain that the state should have the moral authority to compel women to carry children to term deny that the state has the moral authority to require people to wear masks. Surely any reasonable person must acknowledge that if the latter is too intrusive a state intervention than the former is more so; if "My body my choice" applies to a piece of fabric over the face, surely it should apply to what happens inside a woman's womb. Many find that such intellectual incoherence can be maddening, and with good reason. I personally love when people hold intellectually incoherent positions however, because with just a little digging it invariably reveals something deeper about their values. Either it reveals a higher order set of often-unarticulated values in which the apparently contradictory values in fact actually hold together, or it reveals that ongoing transformations of a group's values are creating situations where older values are sitting awkwardly alongside emergent ones.

There is I suspect a little bit of both such dynamics happening here, but I would like to focus upon the latter. Through a monumental work of quantitative analysis, Ronald Inglehart has argued that over the last forty years much of the world has witnessed a shift from what he calls pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms. This shift correlates closely with an increase in personal economic security. High infant mortality rates combined with a lack of social security systems means that people need to produce as many offspring as possible in order to ensure that they have children to care for them in old age; this leads to heteronormative values that are antagonistic towards both abortion and contraception. But as infant mortality rates decrease and stronger social security systems are implemented, reproduction becomes less of a personal economic necessity and people have greater freedom to choose for themselves the paths their lives will take. It's not an accident that the Boomers—the single most economically secure generation in human history—also represented the cutting edge in individual-choice norms.

Inglehart found that even though the United States has the world's largest economy, it was one of the last of the higher income nations to pass from a majority holding to pro-fertility norms to a majority holding individual-choice norms. In fact, his data indicates that this only happened in the last decade or so. This probably has to do with the relative strength of social security systems in other higher income nations. But it also has real implications here. It means that right now the US is very much in the midst of the transition from pro-fertility to individual-choice norms. In a transitional situation, we shouldn't be surprised to see that certain sectors of the population will adopt emergent norms in some areas more strongly than in others. And here's where we can come back to masking and vaccinations. Pro-fertility norms are really part of a broader orientation towards values that emphasize survival. Individual-choice norms increase in dominance in situations where most of the population can take personal survival more or less for granted: food is readily available, healthcare is generally accessible, debilitating or deadly infectious diseases have been largely eradicated, etc. Many of us have no experience living under the threat of debilitating or deadly highly infectious diseases. As such, when confronted with what is for us a novel threat, many of us respond not with older survival-focused norms, but with emergent individual-choice ones—even while they maintain the older survival-focused, pro-fertility norms in other areas. This is entirely understandable: people are already accustomed to thinking in survival, pro-fertility terms with regard to long-standing questions, but with individual-choice norms increasingly normative they spontaneously apply these to novel situations.

The above also accounts for the relative naïveté with which these individual-choice norms are applied to debilitating or deadly highly infectious disease: precisely because the persons doing so are otherwise accustomed to thinking in terms of survival-focused norms, they lack the experience necessary to bring survival and choice norms into a mutually-enriching dialogue. Because ultimately no society can fail to consider survival and, well, survive. Eventually, a new equilibrium must be achieved, where survival is recognized as essential and, yes, sometimes more pressing than individual choice; while individual choice is recognized as excellent and something that should be maximized as much as possible.