Is the MAHA movement building a genuine counter-elite?

Sad to say, the world of The Method is not a projection into the future; it's a portrait of our present. Christopher Lasch named it long ago: the therapeutic state, where the cure of souls has been replaced by mental hygiene, salvation by numbed emotions, the battle against evil by the war against anxiety, where a medical idiom has been substituted for a political one. The World Health Organization gave the new priesthood its global orders, defining health as "complete physical, mental and social well-being," a definition so total it licenses intrusion anywhere.

Thomas Szasz saw the endgame with merciless clarity: once health values are allowed to justify coercion while moral and political values are not, those who wish to coerce will simply enlarge the category of "health" until it swallows everything else. We have watched that enlargement for half a century. The Covid moment was when it accelerated into plain sight.

MAHA's deepest message is a refusal to let that enlargement continue unchallenged. The movement coalesced around Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. not because he was the most charismatic, but because he was willing to say out loud what millions felt in their bones: the body is not the property of the state, and "health" is not a blank check for total control.

That refusal is what makes MAHA feel, for the first time in my life, like something more than another bid for the ring of power.

Even more importantly, my experiences in the MAHA circles have revealed that their counter-elite takes seriously the need for legitimacy in the form of personal behavior. It was on display, a week ago, in Washington, D.C., at the MAHA roundtable, where the NIH's new leadership explained its vision. It was like nothing I had ever heard or seen before from DC officials.

Unusual for a scientist, particularly one at the head of an institution awarding close to $40 billion annually to medical research, the NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, did not speak like a demiurge. He did not preach an escape from nature, into transcendence from the material world led by a vanguard of elites with a special connection to the laws of the universe or access to secret knowledge.

He started with a striking moral admission of sin on the part of the scientific community that attributed powers to themselves that were not theirs when they summoned the whole world into treating their neighbors as biohazards. As a result of that fundamental ethical violation, the population lost trust in its scientists whom they now view as a pack of self-righteous sheep. The Science Emperor is naked and NIH's new vision is to clothe it again, patiently, humbly. Though the goal stated is ambitious (Bhattacharya proposes no less than a second scientific revolution), the tone was never hubristic.

Bhattacharya's argument, in brief, is that science suffers from a "crisis of replication," meaning on the one hand that incentives in medical research reward groundbreaking, novel, big bang discoveries to the detriment of replicable and reproducible results, and on the other hand that medical research community is not honest about admitting failures.

In other words, he's telling us that the NIH has piles of trash worth goldmines, and that instead of starting from scratch every time to find miraculous remedies which take decades to be accessible to the public, we should pick up the low-hanging fruits directly accessible to us with repurposed drugs, better nutrition etc., with a concern for affordability.

This is bold talk, but there's something about Bhattacharya, and for that matter most of the people present with him, that engenders trust. One of the lessons I learned from years of reading anarchist literature and spending time in renegade circles is that if you want to make the world a better place, the best place to start is by making the out group a model of what human relations can be. In this, I think of the great Wendell Berry, who wrote that "[t]he Amish are the only Christians that I know about who actually practise the radical neighbourliness of the Gospels."

They truly honor Jesus Christ's second commandment "Love Thy Neighbor Like Thyself," by not replacing their families and neighbors with technological devices. In other words, an organized elite carrying a new political formula must display some trustworthy personal standards of behavior, a kind of "noblesse Oblige" ethics, if it wants to collect the moral assent of the majority. (Of course, this is precisely what our current crop of elites, and those who aspire to replace them, fail utterly to understand or even acknowledge.)

Will this common decency survive contact with power? That is among the many questions of a moment full of them. We know that history is not kind to such bets. And Orwell himself was not a believer in happy endings (cf, his image of the boot stomping on faces without cease). But while it lasts, MAHA should compel our attention. Not because it promises paradise, not because it has all the answers, but because it tells us that some things are not done. And that's reason enough, I think, to get behind it.Covid shattered trust in our elites. Now MAHA seeks not power for its own sake, but a politics restrained by Orwell’s “common decency.”