The Christian Chiropractor Commentary

Thinking Critically During a Pandemic

                In 2020 we learned a bunch of new terms.  Corona virus (SARS-Cov2), COVID19, mRNA, mRNA vaccines, herd immunity, viral load, aerosol transmission, fomites, excess deaths, cytokine storm, monoclonal antibodies, PCR testing, antibody testing, serology testing, and many others.  We have been offered advice from all corners on topics related to all of the above as well as mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccination.  We have endured public health officials offering sound and well as unsound advice, all too often conflicting with each other.  So many people have lost their income, their business, as well as losing family and friends to the virus.  And then there is social media!  You know what I mean.  Wow!  The lack of critical thinking skills during the most casual scan of social media is dumbfounding, literally.  We have had to make so many very important decisions this past year and this pandemic isn’t over yet.  So many of these decisions revolve around things that we often don’t fully understand nor are trained in, decisions that have the potential of having wide reaching impact on our futures.  Thinking critically is more critical than ever.  But it’s not easy.  It must be learned.  I must be practiced.  Like throwing a curve ball or riding a bike, it is a skill. 

                Skills, again like throwing a curve ball, or driving a car for example, must be learned and practiced in order to be performed well.  To think critically requires education as to the topics that are being considered.  It requires patience to sift through data and opinions.  It requires the thinker to be willing to admit to being wrong.  It requires belief that the world is not always black and white, but exists in a whole rainbow of colors, colors that require perhaps very nuanced evaluation.  But more than anything else, if there is one point I want you to get from this it’s that critical thinking requires the thinker to step outside of his world view (his paradigm), at least partially, and to be willing to adapt or change his world view, or to abandon it all-together based upon new ideas, new data.  However, stepping outside one’s world view even the least little bit can be very difficult, painful, and impossible for some.  Why?  Simply, our world views are not just part of us, they define us. 

                To understand this let’s start with the fish.  If a fish could think critically, it would not think about the fact that it is in water.  Water is its everything, its first paradigm, its world view.  The fish doesn’t know what air is.  It can’t conceptualize the idea of a cloud, snow, or air.  It cannot step outside of its primary paradigm.  It “thinks” from the perspective of water.  Like the fish in water you were born into some of your paradigms that you think from.  You don’t think about paradigms, you think from them.  We actually have many paradigms.  For example, you were born into the paradigm of race, ethnicity, sex, country of origin, and native language.  Other paradigms were instilled in you early such as your birth religion or your parents’ political affiliations.  Some were constructed over time by your parents, your teachers, your friends and others.  Some are constructive and some destructive.  Perhaps they convinced you that you were good in math, or bad in English, or a poor athlete, or good looking, or ugly, etc.  Maybe your paradigm is that of a devout Catholic, or that of a committed Nazi.  Constructive and destructive.  Finally, along the way you made some of your own paradigms.  It gets complicated, but in reality most of the world views that you organize your life through and around were not of your own creation.  Since they have been with you nearly your entire life, stepping outside of them is not an easy task, and like I said, perhaps impossible.  Perhaps. 

                We each filter the world through our world views.  It’s natural and even critical that we do this.  Our paradigms create a system through which we organize our lives.  Without this organizational system, this structure, mental chaos would reign.  We know people who lack the ability to do this.  They are labeled psychotic.  They cannot see the world as it is because they lack any rational paradigm through which to organize it.  In spite of the necessity of these paradigms, they also limit us.  Perhaps the most easily understood example of a limiting paradigm is that of race.

                I was born of northern European ancestry; white, very white; 100% white according to 23 & Me.  I can’t change that.  It is my racial paradigm.  To let it control how I organize my world is to see others through my white racial filter.  Perhaps as the lyrics go in the stage play Avenue Q, “we are all just a little bit racist,” but when this controls our thinking about others inside or outside of our race this leads us down the destructive pathway of racism.  In order to avoid this trap, in order to see people of other races fairly and accurately, we must will ourselves to step outside of our racial paradigm and attempt to see the world through theirs.  This has proven very hard for humans to do.  The proof of this is the rampant racism that we see throughout the world, each group believing their race is greater or purer or better than the others.  It’s an out of control pandemic dating into antiquity.  For my part, if I can step out of my white paradigm just a little bit maybe I can better understand a black paradigm for example.  Due to my whiteness I’m not trying to step into the black paradigm.  I can’t.  But in trying to step out of mine just a bit I can better understand the black one and think more critically about black-related issues.  Certainly, I’ll understand the black paradigm even better if I have made a study of it.  To aid me in this regard I have read several histories about black issues.  This includes the usuals such as biographies of George Washington and his conflicting views of his own slaves, freeing them upon his death, and several about  Lincoln and the Civil War which ended slavery.  But it also includes biographies about specific historical black figures such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Soloist, Up From Slavery by Booker T Washington, Twelve Years a Slave, In the Shadow of Liberty, and Soaring to Glory – A Tuskegee Airman’s Firsthand Account of WW2.  Finally, The Rise of the GI Army and At War at Sea in part chronical the racism and painfully slow incorporation of black men and women into the American armed forces.  It is not much but it is an effort I have made to be able to think more critically about some of the race related issues we face today. 

                The other overarching paradigm of the human race is religion.  Obviously, this can be a very thorny realm to dive into.  Most are born into a religion.  Some choose it.  Some chose to not have it.  Religion is a spectrum.  Everyone gets to choose a level of involvement, a depth of faith, and a degree of study of its teachings.  I’m obviously a Christian.  I was born into the faith.  At 16 I chose to solidify my faith.  At 60 I continue to make that choice on a daily basis.  But we live in a world of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and a myriad of other faiths, and it doesn’t take must searching to find violence as a result of one faith attacking another in the name of their faith, or even one sect within a religion attacking another sect.  I cannot begin to understand or have a meaningful conversation with my Muslim neighbor if my predominate thought about them is something akin to “you are wrong about God.”  My first question instead might be, “tell me what you think about God” or “tell me about Islam.”  I’m not going to abandon my faith to have a conversation but if I want the conversation to be productive I need to step outside my faith just a little bit in order to better understand my friend’s faith, and thereby all the better to understand him, my fellow human.  And this leads me to my next point, which is this.  In order to think critically one must be willing to abandon his paradigm altogether if it is proven wrong.  This is exceptionally hard to do, but without it you will never fully actualize critical thinking.

                I will later generalize this rule, but for now as an example, could there be any circumstance under which I would abandon my Christian faith?  How would you answer this question?  I would say yes, of course.  The Bible is unequivocal about a few things.  For example, if the universe were to be proven to have no beginning this would invalidate the books of Genesis and Job, and by extension the entire Bible, which clearly states there is a beginning.  I interpret the Biblical creation stories literally which is explained in my article “Genesis and Science – A Parallel.”  Therefore, if there is no beginning to the universe then Genesis 1 is a lie.  In a court of law if a defendant lies about one thing it is assumed you can’t trust anything else out of his mouth.  I would have to, very reluctantly, abandon the Bible.  What if, for example, it were to be proven that Jesus was not crucified or that he was not resurrected?  Sure this may be impossible to do, proving a negative, but this would invalidate his divinity, making Jesus either a lunatic or a liar, neither of which makes for a sound basis of an entire religion.  We can extend this idea to nearly all paradigms.  In order to think critically you must step out of your paradigm at least a little bit, but to fully actualize critical thinking you must be willing to abandon that particular world view if it is proven wrong or dangerous or simply ill conceived. 

                Bringing this back to the pandemic, you and I have developed new world views that we never anticipated we would need.  Our decisions have led to varying attitudes and practices with regard to mask wearing, social distancing, hygiene practices, and vaccination acceptance, among others.  These newly minted paradigms have, in some cases, deeply divided us.  This division is highly visible with a casual glance at social media.  One person, in his cynicism, calls this a “plandemic” while another, in abject fear, has refused to leave the house for months.  This person here is the first in line for a vaccine while that one over there thinks the vaccine is contrived by the government or even Bill Gates to inject some sort of location monitor or that it will alter his DNA.  She over there proudly posts a photo of herself without her mask in a store while in the background we see someone wearing two masks, gloves and face shield.  A colleague of mine early on called COVID19 “flu with better press” while over 3 million families grieve for a lost loved one due to the virus.  And over there is the callous post that reads 3 million died with COVID19, not from COVID19…implying that they were weak and old and going to die anyway.  Divided.  Deeply.  Why?

              Short answer…the lack of critical thinking.  There is no more obvious example of this than the observation that political party affiliation tracks with mask wearing and vaccination acceptance.  Before you go there I am apolitical.  I am a registered independent.  I no longer care about “Republican” or “Democratic” issues.  I am a caregiver both personally and professionally.  My politics are the people I take care of.  But I wonder, how did these people come to this decision allowing their party to set their mask/vaccination stance?  Was it through critical thinking?  Did they step outside of their party paradigm, look at the data for themselves, educate themselves, mull over the possibilities, and make a sound decision?  I’m sure a few did exactly that.  Good for them.  But for the most part it looks from my chair like someone very high in one party or the other said yes or no and the rest kind of followed along.  It’s intellectually honest to do or not do something because someone you respect either does or does not do that thing.  It’s not thinking critically.  It may or may not be lazy, but at least it’s honest.  However, it’s dishonest to pretend to think critically by cherry picking the data to come to the conclusion that you want to come to.  Many do exactly this, which is called circular reasoning, but might also be called delusional thinking under certain circumstances.  “I believe in this and this data over here supports what I believe so I must be right.”  But worse yet, it’s fraud to intentionally misinterpret data to convince others of the truth of your paradigm.  I knew someone, a doctor no less, who did just that.  He referenced two studies about masks as his argument against wearing them.  I read the studies.  They were both older studies, prepandemic, that concluded that dental employees wearing a mask at work did little to protect their health.  Do you see the problem?  We are not wearing masks to protect ourselves, but to keep our saliva from distributing viral particles in the air, to protect everyone around us.  This doctor is a smart man.  He knew what the studies said.  He intentionally omitted this information from his FB post.  This is fraud.  We are no longer friends, FB or otherwise.  His actions are worse than cherry picking data.  This is intellectual dishonesty at the highest level and it most certainly convinced people in his circle of influence to take off their masks, probably infecting others, possibly killing others.  I lost my father last July and my wife lost her aunt this year as the virus jumped from one person to the next to the next, viral transmission most certainly being enhanced somewhere along the chain of infection by someone not wearing a mask.   

                This article is not going to go over each pandemic issue and discuss the merits of one idea over another.  I’ve done much of that in my other blogs.  Rather, it is meant to motivate the reader to open his or her awareness of how their particular paradigms or world views influence their decision making.  For example, as a chiropractor my profession is often on the anti-vaccination side of the issue.  There were real reasons for legitimate concerns when organic mercury was within most childhood vaccines.  But that has changed.  In those early days of my practice vaccine skepticism or caution was my paradigm.  Yet today I am very much in favor of the m-RNA vaccines.  Why?  I stepped outside my old paradigm, looked at the data, came to a conclusion based upon critical thinking, and changed my paradigm.  While I argue that critical thinking requires the stepping outside of one’s paradigm, I would also argue that personal growth requires one to be able to change, alter, or abandon altogether that paradigm when new truth requires it. 

                I hope you can take this information and improve your critical thinking skills.  Practice it daily.  Listen to other’s stories while trying to put yourself in their shoes.  Ask questions.  Delve into the data.  Wonder if you are wrong.  Never assume.  In your mind view Earth from the aspect of deep space.  From there you can see that we are all on the same tiny little blue sphere soaring through this great, beautiful, and terribly dangerous universe.  So when you have concluded your critical thinking on an issue and you still ardently disagree with that other person’s world view, give him grace anyway.