Are we vaccinated against conservatism?

Maybe our minds treat Right-wing ideas as a threat

Back in the early 1760s, in the Gloucestershire village of Sodbury, some dairymaids were in conversation about the most dreaded disease then known to humankind, when one remarked ‘I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.’

This was overheard by a boy working as an apprentice to a county surgeon, and for some reason it stuck; why was it that dairymaids, who spent most of their time with cows, seemed to be immune to the dreaded smallpox? It was a common old belief but, as with many of these things, it contained a huge amount of truth.

The boy’s name, of course, was Edward Jenner, and after growing up and moving to London and becoming an expert in, among other things, geology, blood, hot air balloons and the study of cuckoos (he was also a keen violin player and wrote poetry, one of those maddeningly accomplished people), he hit on his famous breakthrough relatively late in life.

Never forgetting his earlier observation, in 1796 the now 47-year-old Jenner found a dairymaid with cowpox and, using matter from her lesions, inoculated a local boy, 8-year-old James Phipps — who developed a mild fever and afterwards a cold with some loss of appetite.

Two months later, he infected the boy with smallpox pustules — and, luckily for him, and for Jenner, young Phipps was fine. Indeed, he went onto to live a long life and as a reward Jenner gave him a free cottage to live in.

Although vaccination would save billions of lives, it was met with credulous scepticism by much of the public, a fear caricatured by James Gillray. The innovation was much helped by George III, who promoted the practice even after one of his children died soon after being vaccinated.

Vaccination works by training the immune system to recognise the bacteria or virus entering it. Once the body identifies something, it is far easier to destroy it; and because cowpox and smallpox are closely enough related, being infected with one allows the immune system to deal with the other.

Being able to recognise something as potentially dangerous, by identifying its chief traits, makes it far easier to fight and resist.

Perhaps a similar thing works with ideas, too. If you can identify and label an idea as potentially harmful, especially on an instant, sub-conscious level, your mind will reject it before it’s able to take hold. Maybe the main problem that conservatives currently face is that most educated people’s minds are essentially vaccinated against conservatism. Even when they might agree with conservative principles or logic, their mind on one level sees the ideas as dangerous.

The reason that we’ve seen such a proliferation of terms denoting politically immoral beliefs is that this sort of shorthand is useful and effective. Racism as a word was popularised in the 1930s — admittedly a pretty important neologism at the time, although ‘racialism’ is older — while sexism was only coined in the 1960s, homophobia came into mainstream use from the 1980s and Islamophobia the following decade. But these terms, as well as describing a social pathology that previously was considered unimportant, morally neutral or even a social norm, also effectively act as a form of mental vaccination. Using them, or the various neologisms coined since the start of the 21st century, allows our mental immune system to reject frightening ideas. Once an idea or policy is labelled racist, it’s effectively dead, which is why the term is overused to the point of tedium.

Ideological vaccination also works with political word bingo, the equivalent of downing a glass of sambuca every time an opponent uses a particular phrase, because it can be dismissed; there they go with these tropes, ‘cultural Marxism’ or ‘cancel culture’ or ‘free speech’ or whatever. (Of course, those using the terms are also using tribal signifiers themselves, for their supporters. Like with stereotyping, it’s a two-way relationship.) Relatively useful and accurate terms can easily become ‘vaccinated’; ‘replacement migration’, for instance, was the matter-of-fact term used by the UN in the 2000s to describe labour movement into countries with below-replacement fertility; barely a decade later the word ‘replacement’ triggers alarm bells in the minds of English speakers.

One way of escaping the vaccine might be to make your arguments vaguer, or to focus on some proxy debate for the real issue; the statue wars, for instance, are really about demography but one side can’t be open about it because their ideas would be incredibly unpopular, while their opponents have no way of articulating their beliefs due to ideological vaccination. More generally, the end consequence of vaccination is that conservative commentators and media outlets move towards more symbolic arguments, which tend to be more lowbrow, often inanely so.

Ideological vaccination makes it hard for conservatives to articulate their beliefs, even when they are popular and could be better argued on logical or empirical grounds; they just sound wrong, even to fairly conservative-minded people who have acquired this social herd immunity against conservatism.

I’m also vaccinated, to some extent. It would be impossible not to be, in the surrounding culture, unless you’re a narcissist or sociopath (and there are plenty of them in the wider media circus). Arguments against large-scale immigration, for example, can make me wince, even when I know what they’re getting at and agree (and wrote a whole book about it); it might be a matter of decorum, or politeness, or concern about people’s feelings, but the mind reacts to the arguments as if they are dangerous pathogens.

But there is also history, and the repeated allusions to Nazi Germany’s crimes in our political culture, which make it impossible not to see every migrant as being part of the Kindertransport, even when the comparison is obviously quite absurd. Nazism is not that closely related to any form of conservatism today, even Right-wing populism; certainly it is no more similar than modern progressivism is to communism. But it was a Right-wing ideology, and does have enough of a distant family relationship for our minds to, on some level, confuse them, seeing dangers signs where it shouldn’t. In a reverse analogy of the original vaccination process, our minds are given a dose of conservative cowpox and what they see is Nazi smallpox.