Stockmanns

 When, as a teenager, I first heard the plot of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People described, I recall thinking that it was a strange way to illustrate the Norwegian dramatist's thesis about the heroism of the isolated individual. If Dr. Stockmann had been driven from his hometown for being a socialist or the village atheist, say, it would have made more sense to me. But the idea that the townsfolk would resent so keenly a scientific conclusion about their water supply that seemed inarguable, and that it was manifestly in their own interests to heed, struck me as implausibly pessimistic. This is not the sort of thing that gets politicized, I thought. 

Of course, this was a naive attitude for me to hold even in the context of the times: the second George W. Bush administration. In reality, public health has always been controversial, and was so even then. There was no halcyon era in which it was held to be above politics. People with financial interests impacted by the findings of scientists have always resented them for it and sought to discredit their work. In this regard, Dr. Stockmann's fictional experience could be analogized to the controversies over mass tort liability in the twentieth century: legal disputes and fiery public debates over cigarette smoke, lead paint, and other public health menaces. 

Still, it is really the pandemic that has underlined the excessive pollyannaishness of my teenage perspective. Even if the proposition was dubious before, it is now impossible for even a casual observer of the political scene to regard public health science as apolitical. All over the nation, there are thousands if not millions of real-life Dr. Stockmanns—people who issued reasonable and values-neutral public health advice (to wear a mask indoors, to get the COVID vax, etc.) and who were pilloried for it with just as much vehemence as the "compact majority" of Stockmann's community persecute him. Ibsen's play if anything understates the passions that these issues can evoke. 

This truth may be less visible in other parts of the country. In many places, the urgency of debates over public health measures is far in the rear-view mirror, since mask mandates and similar guidance have long since been abandoned on every government level. To really understand the intensity of the rage still broiling over these issues, one needs to go to Florida. 

Here, where I have been visiting my parents this past week, one hears tales profoundly reminiscent of Dr. Stockmann's experience: a principal fired from the local high school for implementing the school board's own mask mandates; a hospital under investigation simply because it refused to engage in medical malpractice by dosing patients with unverified and unscientific treatments involving horse tranquilizers and bleach. The principal, by the way, was fired not because he personally wanted to impose mask mandates, but merely because he complied with his instructions from the school board on the subject. Apparently, the new far-right board expected him to have fallen on his sword to make a bizarre culture war point, on an issue which itself wasn't even clearly entrenched in right-wing ideology at the time these events occurred. 

What astounds the outside observer is the sheer vindictiveness of these measures. It's not enough that they won the underlying policy disputes. Public health orders of any scale have long since been retired around the country. Most everyone, and especially the people of Florida, have not been asked to wear a mask for years at this point. Yet, the entire state of Florida is still being convulsed by a Jacobin-like quest to settle old scores. It is as if the MAGA movement, in order to preserve its own momentum and sense of righteousness, requires an ever-fresh supply of victims. When there are no longer active public health measures to confront, they turn their attention to persecuting everyone who ever defended or enforced some of these policies during the brief time they were in effect. 

Whence the source of this rage? Does Ibsen's play shed any light? 

Reading it as an adult, I realize that the play is a reasonably accurate portrayal of human nature, in no way exaggerated. As much as my teenage self would have expected to see Dr. Stockmann run out of town for being a socialist or a freethinker, Ibsen was probably being more true-to-life in portraying the controversy that leads to his downfall as fundamentally local and economic in origin. The play is full of characters who are self-described liberals and members of the "broad-minded middle class," and who trumpet their "courage" in adopting forward-thinking opinions on matters of national politics. But they say openly that, in matters of local affairs, they are more circumspect. Why? Because local politics hits them where they hurt. 

The fundamental reason that Ibsen's townsfolk join forces to persecute Stockmann and ignore his warnings about the town's water supply, therefore, is a matter of economic self-interest. The doctor's findings jeopardize a new set of baths that the town plans to install, and which they expect to provide a boon to the town in the form of tourist revenue. They therefore prefer to concoct—and no doubt sincerely convince themselves of—a story according to which Stockmann invented his findings in order to buy up depressed shares of the baths. This is to them a more comforting narrative than believing the uncomfortable truth that their darling municipal project is on course to poison and sicken its own future guests. 

Such, no doubt, is a large part as well of the reason why the COVID mitigation measures provoked such fury. They threatened people's pocketbooks, particular in a tourist-dependent state like Florida. This is also, recall, the reason why the Venetian authorities in Thomas Mann's great novella about the city deny knowledge of the epidemic that has just broken out—it would drive away the visitors who are the town's economic lifeblood. At a much earlier stage of the pandemic, I speculated that this might be why a Floridian like Trump, with economic interests in local tourism and major assets tied up in the hospitality industry, would be so resistant to public health lockdowns, even if they were necessary as a temporary measure to limit infection. 

But more fundamentally even than economic self-interest, the reason why the Stockmanns of the world are persecuted for telling the truth about public health is that people see the bearer of bad news as the person who made it true. A problem unseen can be denied; reality can be ignored. What the pandemic showed all of us is that, in the face of uncertainty, and confronted with powerlessness, we are still just as ignorant and unscientific in our response as our pre-modern forebears. We would rather grasp at the illusory sense of control that comes from denying reality, and persuade ourselves that we can banish the ugly and frightening truth by ignoring it, than believe the person who, in good faith, tries to warn us.