Why do we think masks work? Pt. 4
Wrapping it all up with uncomfortable elastic around your ears.
Let’s close up my conversation on masks. Parts I, II, and III are available here, and deal with the observable epidemiology, the science of aerosols, and viral competition. Now let’s talk about things from a different perspective.
Part IV: Chesterton’s masks
One way that my thinking has evolved in the last few years involves the overlap between the Nutritional Dark Web and the Intellectual Dark Web. People in the nutrition space like Bart Kay, Ken Berry, and Ivor Cummins advocate for a meat-heavy approach as something close to what we would have eaten prior to the first Agricultural Revolution beginning around 12,000 years ago. People in the Intellectual Dark Web like Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying advocate thinking of things in a prehistorical or evolutionary context, in a way that accounts for how human nature was shaped by the preceding millennia.
Both seem to advocate for something close to the traditional understanding of conservatism, in the style of philosophers like Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott. If a thing exists today, it’s likely that it evolved that way over many countless years, for reasons that may not be immediately obvious to us. To undo this thing may have - as noted before - unintended consequences.
As Oakeshott said, “To be conservative… is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried.” It’s in essence to give “votes to the dead”, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton — to presume that many many things have been tried over the millenia before we got here, and we have arrived at modern society only through their trial and error.
It’s very unlikely to me that cloth has been made for tens of thousands of years, and yet no one discovered that they prevented disease when you put them on your face until 2020. Humans 5,000 years ago were no less intelligent than us - they may not have known the mechanics of aerosol circulation as a function of Brownian motion, but they were able to make observations and change their behavior accordingly. It’s quite likely to me that if masks prevented illness, some culture a few thousand years ago would have ritualistic wearing of face coverings to prevent being taken by evil.
Human nature also affects our situation today in a peculiar way - we are TERRIBLE at evaluating the relative risk of rare events. We could see news of a shark attack in Australia, and beach attendance would go way down even though shark attacks are incredibly rare.
Because of this difficulty in assessing risk, people naturally do things to mitigate their observable risk. This is what you’ve seen in countries such as Sweden that did no official governmental shutdowns or mandates — people naturally restricted their own movement to lessen their interactions with others. In the April 2020 season, people went to their workplaces 45% less, and in the winter season 56% less. People can observe what’s happening around them and change their behavior accordingly.
(Note that in Sweden, park attendance increased 300%, while in the US we were putting sand in skate parks, closed neighborhood parks, and telling people not to go to the beach.)
It makes perfect sense to me that a person, in the face of endless bad news of case spread and increased hospitalizations and death, when they’re told that a mask protects them, that they seize on the meme and trust in it, despite every bit of evidence around them that it does nothing. Communities with mask mandates do no better than those without. Countries with high percentages of mask wearers still have their serious outbreaks like any other. And yet, people have to believe in something to ease their anxiety, and masks are a way of “protecting” themselves while not changing anything else in their lives.
Meanwhile, the flip side of the coin is rarely considered. Humankind has evolved to be able to read people's faces, to gauge their expressions and emotions, to communicate in ways beyond words. The Ohio AAP has a series of documents about how babies need face time with adults to learn to read expressions and interact in non-verbal ways.
The nine-month document is particularly interesting, as it discusses how babies will read your face to decide whether someone is a threat or not.
And now the AAP’s informational web site healthychildren.org and Twitter accounts are filled with statements that babies don’t need to read faces.
And the CDC’s official guidance is that children as young as 2 should wear masks when indoors. Is it possible that the science has flipped in the last eighteen months? Or are there other, more political reasons why they’re now putting decades of research down the memory hole?
GK Chesterton had a parable of a fence that a man wanted to take down. He said, “I don’t see any use for this fence here, let’s take it away.” Another man told him, “If you don’t see why it’s here, I certainly won’t let you take it down. Go away for a while, think about why it’s here, and once you know why it exists, then you can take it away.”
This is the core of my stance against masks, particularly in children. Humanity has evolved to need to read faces to regulate relationships, determine threats, and engage in communication. We have no idea how masking interferes with that wiring in the young or the old. So in the thought experiment that “masks can’t hurt and they might help”, if we know via actual experimental science and epidemiological observation that they don’t work, and there’s the chance that they might hurt in ways we can’t foresee… shouldn’t the burden of proof be on those who impose mask mandates, and shouldn’t the default position be to discard them?
One of the main reasons I wanted to start this newsletter was because of the unknown damage that’s being caused by mask mandates for children. Whether through making their breathing difficult or interfering with their newly-forming wiring to interact with other people and communicate, the science for masks either preventing children from becoming ill or increasing community spread must be clear. It is neither of those things. And this is why the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control explicitly recommends against masks for children under 12 in schools, and as far as I can tell the US is alone in using masks on children that young.
As I was writing this piece, I found three articles that I highly recommend anyone read if they want a greater and deeper understanding than what I’ve presented.
The first is by Matt Shapiro, whose work I’ve followed on Twitter for years (since he was writing analyses of DOL employment figures the first Friday of the month). He’s careful, insightful, and an incredibly great read. His piece, The Case Against Masks in Schools, is a clear, concise, and well-researched summary of the state of the science and the necessity for clarity.
Another article, The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain, was just posted this week by David Zweig at the New York Intelligencer, bringing together all of the research and evidence around school mask mandates and finds it severely lacking. I do as well, and I truly hope everyone will read this article and think deeply about what we could be doing to the future generations.
The third article is by someone I just discovered on Twitter at @PezeshkiCharles, where he goes by the name “Connection Doctor, Empathy Guru”. For years he’s written about the need for empathy in our society and the science of relationships. Just yesterday I discovered The Structural Memetics of Masks, a piece he wrote last month about how the memes of masks got ingrained in our society and gets into things in a much more deep and philosophical level than I ever could. It’s an incredible read, and worth sitting alone in a quiet room and reading very closely. I did, and I will probably do so another few times this week as I ponder his ideas.
Well done.
Another brilliant essay! I am sending it to several people, and sharing it on Twitter. I wish the mainstream news would have you on for a thoughtful debate with the mask-pushers. We seem to be on a trajectory of privileged and non-privileged... as shown in the politicians' parties where the guests go unmasked while the servers must wear masks. Thank you for your work!