Thinking about thinking

Progressive blind spots when it comes to our kids

I know it sounds weird, and will be highly controversial, but I’ve come to realise that understanding what’s happened to us and so many other families looking after children with chronic ill-health and disabilities, requires thinking about thinking.

In our society, all the major institutions, including the thought-leaders (the media, universities and think tanks), charities, churches, service providers and the leaders of large corporations are fully committed to what can be called the progressive view of the world. Society is understood to be on a trajectory where ‘things can only get better.’ Our common goal is to identify problems and find solutions, usually via the application of state planning and new technology.

As a young person, this is particularly appealing: you are trained to see what is wrong and identify solutions to which you can commit with great passion, proving your social worth and virtue in the process. I’ve been there and done it; I was a card-carrying leftist for longer than I care to admit.

However, with age and experience, some of us start to realise that the so-called solutions can be worse than the problems being addressed. Great examples from the manifestos of the contemporary left include:

• Saving the environment by plastering it with windmills, solar panels, electricity pylons and industrialised high-intensity food production.

• Saving the poor by creating a welfare system that incentivises dependency with costs for the poor and the wider society.

• Saving ethnic minorities by promoting racial divisions and antagonising the majority group.

• Saving women by undermining their role and value as mothers and carers.

• Saving illegal immigrants by undermining the social cohesion (and appeal) of the host destination.

• Saving people from disease by making them sick.

It is this last example that has been my road to Damascus. There is even an official name for the issue: iatrogenesis. It means illness or injury caused by medical treatment or practice. It is truly shocking to think about this, but going to the doctor can be very bad for your health.

Seeing your beloved child regress into severe autism as their immune system collapses after one too many vaccines is devastating. You start to lose your faith in everything you used to believe. It’s very hard to come to terms with what has happened to you.

On top of that, the official response makes it much worse than it would otherwise be. Doctors, nurses, educationalists and charity workers will tell you that severe autism is just ‘one of those things.’ No-one knows why it has happened or what can be done.

As a parent, you know that your child’s decline is not just ‘one of those things.’ You also know that living in a society where a third of school-age children have some sort of learning and/or health disorder is not normal and it wasn’t that way when we were at school.

But this raises the question of how and why so many apparently intelligent people accept this as normal. It’s not just about fear of speaking out and losing jobs, friends and family (although that will be a big factor), the professionals really don’t see the same thing as us when it comes to our kids.

This is where the ideology of progress is fully exposed. It allows otherwise sensible people to blank out the inconvenient truths that otherwise detract from the greater good or the utopian goal. Faith in progress allows people to ignore the obvious health crisis that can be caused in the pursuit of ‘public health.’ It allows people to justify concreting over the countryside and erecting more pylons in pursuit of ‘net zero.’ It means people can overlook the damage that illegal migration is doing to origin (often very poor) countries in pursuit of ‘social justice.’ People can ignore the risks of puberty blockers and surgery – not to mention widespread confusion about biology - in support of ‘sex change’, and the list could go on.

It is only recently that the full force of progressive zealotry has been unleashed on our societies. Thinking back to the 1980s when I was a student, we were more likely to be exposed to conservative as well as progressive ideas. In the UK, we would hear from a plurality of thinkers in public life and although I railed against it at the time, there was space for public debate and disagreement between the right and the left. People could call out what they saw as the problems for and from public policy, but this has since become much harder to do. The dominance of progressive ideas and the associated rise of cancel culture has drastically reduced the space for public debate.

In the past, progressive idealism was tempered by Christianity. Growing up in a Methodist household, we were signed up to the liberal left and thought of ourselves as progressive, but I accepted original sin. We recognised the humility of Christ and prayed for the forgiveness of sins; our own as well as those who trespassed against us. Being left wing didn’t mean the kind of progressive absolutism that now stalks the corridors of power in countries like the UK. It meant a politics that embraced the people of the parish and the self-organisation and solidarity that comes with tea and cake. It was a gentler and more parochial kind of liberal leftism that was pluralist and ameliorative, with space for a diversity of perspectives and ideas.

The collapse of Christianity, the growth of the university-educated middle class and the global dominance of progressive ideology that is propagated by all our major institutions (including the church) means that it has become much harder to acknowledge and discuss the negative consequences of socially progressive ideas. Our children have been paying the price for this in relation to the rise of chronic ill health and disability, confusion over sex and gender, climate anxiety and the shame attached to being patriotic and white. The rise of right-wing populism is an obvious corrective to this, but it has little support from the leaders of mainstream institutions in the UK.

Sixty years ago the American James Burnham wrote a book about the dangers of progressive ideology called the Suicide of the West: An essay on the meaning and destiny of liberalism. Well-ahead of its time, he argued that liberal ideology represents “a failure of the will to survive” (p.13). He captured the insidious danger of well-meaning, seemingly benign ideas that prosecute collective self-harm.

There is no clearer example of this than what has happened to the health of our children. Growing rates of chronic ill-health and disability impact family cohesion and fertility rates. Humans are losing the ability to reproduce themselves and secure the health and well-being of the next generation. There is something seriously wrong, and many parents will tell you that it is a vaccine that pushed their child to decline.

Taking a less progressive approach to the threat of infectious disease would mean being much more cautious than is currently the case when it comes to vaccination. Policy and practice would focus on strengthening natural immunity and ensuring people have access to good food, clean water and the time to heal. If vaccines proved necessary, they would be thoroughly tested and applied with care to consider their unintended cumulative effects, especially on the youngest and most vulnerable in society. If people raised concerns, they would be heard and their complaints considered, rather than being silenced and shamed.

Our experience of severe autism has taught me that the road to hell really is paved with good intentions. Well intended action to reduce the incidence and impact of infectious disease by developing vaccines has had unintended consequences for our collective immunity as is evident in the rise of autoimmune and neurological conditions, including the severe autism affecting our son. The refusal to face these side effects represents a collective suicide mission that is more insidious and ubiquitous than James Burnham could ever have imagined. We are living through an iatrogenic as well as a spiritual suicide and our children and children’s children will have to think and act in a more conservative vein if they are to reverse the decline. The Autism Tribune is willing them on.