How nuts has the intelligentsia become? This nuts.
The Lancet is the world’s oldest and (once) most respected medical journals. Like most publications of this genre, it has gone totally woke. It is now so out in left field that it has editorialized that the planet deserves equity.
What Does That Mean?
It means that health care should cease being human focused, a concept known as “One Health.” From, “One Health: A Call for Ecological Equity“:
Modern attitudes to human health take a purely anthropocentric view — that the human being is the centre of medical attention and concern. One Health places us in an interconnected and interdependent relationship with non-human animals and the environment. The consequences of this thinking entail a subtle but quite revolutionary shift of perspective: all life is equal, and of equal concern. [Emphasis added.]
I repeat: This isn’t some outlier bioethicist or animal-rights activist being given a few pages of ink. It is the editorial position of the oldest medical journal in the world. And that means, among other consequences, that anti-human exceptionalism will likely determine the articles accepted and rejected for publication. That makes it a science problem.
But what would this mean in a practical sense? As expected, the usual bromides seen in global warming and anti-obesity advocacy:
This understanding is fundamental to addressing pressing health issues at the human–animal–environment interface. For example, providing a growing global population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems is an urgent unmet need. It requires a complete change to our relationship with animals. The EAT-Lancet Commission takes an equitable approach by recommending people move away from an animal-based diet to a plant-based one, which not only benefits human health, but also animal health and wellbeing.
But, but, that attitude constitutes a colonialist mindset! Oh no!
As the second paper in The Series points out, a more egalitarian approach is needed, one that is not paternalistic or colonial in telling low-income and middle-income countries what they should do. For example, demanding that wet markets be closed to halt an emerging zoonosis might be technically correct, but if it does not account for those who make their livelihoods from such markets, One Health will only worsen the lives of those it claims to care about. Decolonisation requires listening to what countries say and what their needs are.
What a Pathetic Joke
Wait. This shift in approach is supposed to prevent future pandemics, which wet markets — whatever actually led to Covid — are said to enable.
The Lancet’s decline epitomizes the serious crisis we face in the West. It isn’t just celebrity radicals such as Peter Singer or Greta Thunberg anymore. Our most important and venerable institutional leaders in medicine, science, bioethics, and political science largely sacrificed serious scholarship and societal leadership in the pursuit of radical theories of equity, anti-humanism, and woke gesturing. It is a major cause of our cultural decline.
Cross-posted at The Corner.