The Benighted Among Us

If you read this blog with any regularity, you may know that I hold in absolute, unmitigated contempt those who refuse to wear a mask. When hearing and reading about such people and their myriad of contrived (i.e., absurd) reasons for non-complance, I am almost tempted to believe that the world is experiencing two pandemics: Covid-19 and abject stupidity.

Apparently, I have the wrong attitude.

Charlie Warsel writes that e have to meet such people where they live:

As the Ebola epidemic raged in 2014, some West Africans resisted public health guidance. Some hid their symptoms or continued practicing burial rituals — like washing the bodies of their dead loved ones — despite the risk of infection. Others spread conspiracies claiming the virus was sent by Westerners or suggested it was all a hoax. In Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, an imam was arrested for violating his quarantine, and residents protested by not letting health officials check for fevers.

So the World Health Organization sent Cheikh Niang, a Senegalese medical anthropologist, and his team to figure out what was going on.

For six hours, Dr. Niang visited people in Conakry inside their homes. He wasn’t there to lecture. Residents asked him to write down their stories. When they finished, Dr. Niang finally spoke.

“I said, ‘I hear you,’” he told me recently over the phone from Senegal. “‘I want to and will help. But we still have an epidemic spreading and we need your help, too. We need to take your temperatures and we need to trace this virus.’ And they agreed. They trusted us.”

Trust, at a time when mistrust in science is rampant, becomes central to convincing people to follow health guidelines.

As does empathy. Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote an article in The Atlantic about men who don't wear masks in which

she acknowledged that masks don’t feel cool, can be obtrusive and block important body language signals, while still arguing emphatically for their importance. Dozens of non-mask wearers contacted her to thank her for the piece.

“These men were universally grateful to read something about anti-maskers that didn’t shame or demonize them,” she wrote. “It made them want to hear what else I had to say about why it might be worth wearing a mask.”

None of which I find especially compelling. Perhaps it is just my nature, but I prefer the facts over having to jolly people along. The kind of facts, for example, that are to be found in this very informative post on Northern Currents.

And the facts that are readily apparent in this report by Jeff Semple:



Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you." Regrettably, the same must be said about the benighted who, some days, appear to be legion.