The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Part I

The “horseshoe theory,” attributed to the French writer Jean-Pierre Faye, holds that – contrary to the common view that the far left and the far right sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum – these extremes in fact resemble one another, much like the two ends of a horseshoe that curve back toward each other.

A video in which Matan Hakimi leans on RFK Jr. and Dr. Joe Ladapo – not only to attack the Covid vaccines, but to push a broader message that even in science one must always “hear the other side, as in politics, as in faith” – shows how two apparent extremes—the messianic religious nationalism of televangelism and the Burning-Man style New Age – meet at a junction that is the denial of the most important process of the last millennium: the Scientific Revolution.

For those unfamiliar: Matan Hakimi is Israel’s “guru” of wellness and alternative medicine. He draws hundreds of thousands of followers. Hakimi stirred public outcry after denouncing the use of sunscreen. In his kit is also a recommendation to be stung by bees (“In recent years I have stung myself with hundreds of bees and it changed my life”), and he has even come out against wearing eyeglasses, presenting a PhD (a degree awarded to holders of a doctorate in the humanities) as a “doctor” (that is, a physician). On that occasion he claimed he had learned to train his eye muscles to cope with sunlight.
Hakimi promotes mind–body medicine, yoga, retreats, dance circles, and other fixtures of Californian New-Age culture, and he stands in a long line passing through mystics like Osho, thinkers like Terence McKenna, and even tech elites like Steve Jobs.

The other two figures in the video are, as noted: RFK Jr. and Dr. Joe Ladapo. The first, the American “health minister,” once claimed that “the polio vaccine killed more people than the disease itself” (on the eve of the vaccine’s development in the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of people died of polio worldwide; to this day, no direct causal link has been found between the vaccine and deaths among the vaccinated). He is known as a major conspiracist. It should be noted that as the son of Robert Kennedy – who was assassinated, like his brother, under particularly suspicious and sordid circumstances – and as a man who testified that “a worm ate part of my brain” (yes, you read that correctly; it was likely a parasite rather than a worm) – he has mitigating circumstances.

Mitigating circumstances are not something the second can boast. Ladapo – the authority to whom Hakimi appeals – is Florida’s health commissioner, notorious in the medical establishment as a politician in a lab coat, a headline-seeking populist. He is an opportunist acting on behalf of the ultra-devout Christian governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is known for promoting the censorship of science books, opposing the teaching of evolution, shutting down abortion clinics in the state, and restricting the procedure’s legality to six weeks from the moment sperm meets egg – on religious grounds, of course.

So what on earth do a sun-kissed yogi, a conspiratorial blue blood, and an opportunist from the deep Christian right have in common? In the next three parts I will try to answer:

The Good

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1778).

To understand the Scientific Revolution – and the assault upon it – we must return to three ideas that enabled, shaped, and still shape our world – ideas that run through the Bible, the Christian Reformation, and the Enlightenment.

The first appears in Genesis – the foundational story of Western civilization, the cornerstone from which the ethics, aesthetics, and logic of the world we inhabit developed. As we all learned in first grade – God creates the world, Eden, and – most relevant here – Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, learn to distinguish good from evil, clothe themselves, and are punished by God with expulsion from Eden. This seemingly trivial story encapsulates two basic assumptions about human nature that feel self-evident: because the first thing humans do is sin against the divine, man is evil from his youth; because the first thing humans do after acquiring knowledge is to clothe themselves, man is the very rupture from nature. The fusion of these two is the basis of Western culture’s conception that society must restrain the human being and make him virtuous; that society is what will “redeem” man from being a beast. This conception underlies the institutions that enable our current way of life – law, which orders the structure of society (the state) and notions of property; and science – a tradition of empirical inquiry resting on clear, rigorous protocols designed to prevent man—who, let us recall, is evil from his youth—from corrupting the investigation of physical, biological, and chemical truth, and so forth.

“And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves girdles.” – Genesis 3:7.

The second idea originates in The City of God by Augustine – one of the fathers of Catholic theology – in the fifth century CE. In the book, Augustine writes that man dwells in two “cities”: the City of Man and the City of God. The City of Man is the dimension of matter, where a person exists physically and moves through space – where he eats, sleeps, reproduces, builds, and destroys. The City of God is the dimension of spirit – in which a person exists as a spiritual being maintaining a relationship with the divine. By separating these two worlds, he held that real science can exist without abolishing the world of spirit, and in effect detached the divine from the physical. In doing so Augustine laid the foundations for research autonomy within a highly religious milieu. That autonomy had to wait some 1,100 years for the printing press, the birth of mass literacy, and a man named Martin Luther – a Christian theologian who rose up against the corrupt Catholic Church and began the democratization of religion by disseminating the Scriptures – for the first time in print, and for the first time in German (rather than Latin) – across Europe. From that moment began a 300-year process in which science was freed from spirit and developed into a separate human institution requiring no creed to justify itself. Where science begins – opinion and belief end. The Scientific Revolution brought with it modern medicine, physics and mathematics as we know them, biology, microbiology, and more. It heralded modernity. It quadrupled life expectancy, built our cities, sent water through our taps, lit our homes, deepened our pockets, shrank our world, and put a man on the moon. But it also created the atomic bomb.

“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”  – Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter 11, Verse 32.

World War II was the greatest scientific spectacle in history – a war that killed between 70 and 85 million people, devastated entire continents, supplied the most well-oiled mechanism of extermination in history, and concluded with the most destructive use of human scientific capacity ever. It is hard to overstate the importance of science to the Allies’ victory over the Axis, when to Russian manpower were added the capital and scientific capabilities of the United States to clinch the outcome.

But the devastation was immense – so immense that after the war schools of thought arose that scorned modernity – the (partly) postmodern movements. They sought to go back, to shed culture and return to a “state of nature.”
These ideas found their place both in Sunday Mass and in Westerners’ retreats in Rishikesh and Pune. Building on Rousseau’s thought, the idea of the “noble savage” spread anew: that man is good from his youth and that it is society that has corrupted him. What had been considered “progress” became a corrupting force of terrible destruction.
In our day, and for our purposes, the backward-looking impulse is embodied in two forms that share the same basis: first, the New Age movement’s rejection of science and technological progress, which sees the “natural state” as a necessary good and a constant aspiration; second, the religious longing to return to a kind of “golden age,” evidenced by the right-wing aesthetic flooding the internet with knights, crusades, kings, and Vikings. Of course such a golden age does not exist, and in the days when all these did exist—Europe was a battlefield of unending war among failing kingdoms; and while women then might reach the age of 33 – the life expectancy of the average London male during the Crusades was 24.

So ends the first act – the age of wonder, when knowledge was sacred, curiosity was a form of worship, and reason was still a humble servant of awe. Before the atom split, before faith fractured, before the pursuit of truth became another market segment. The good, it turns out, was never pure – only the fragile balance between our hunger to know and our fear of what we might find.