pandemic and curiosity

 

 

PANDEMIC AND CURIOSITY

 

Pandemic has multiplied our fears and uncertainties.  It has deepened curiosity about all the bio-cultural factors which have changed either slowly or swiftly in the millions of years of human evolving.  Curiosity demands satisfaction.

 

  The New York Review of Books is one  American  magazine that tries to dignify the pursuit of curiosity without pandering to the soi-disant elitism of The New Yorker or the flippancy that too often mars the offerings of The Atlantic. All three magazines target readers who possess  more than merely functional literacy.  It is probable that radical, anti-intellectual conservatives have severe disdain for all three.  It is probable  that radical, intellectual liberals overrate their virtues. Those who prefer to  read in a centrist twilight zone might more readily turn to Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.  Ideology and taste govern  the journey into curiosity.  The lack of consensus in our fragmenting nation makes curiosity  a peculiar necessity .

 

A  sense of crisis may be the strongest driver of curiosity, especially the sense of  crises innate in thinking about capital and capitalism. I offer two examples.

 

Reading the April 29 issue of The New York Review of Books increased my curiosity about global changes which are not Acts of Nature.  Natalie de Souza's expert opinions in her review of four books about human genome editing activated my thinking about the "magic" of scientific research and experimentation.  It dawned upon me that scientists who have an excess of hubris might dismiss the ethical implications of their work.  We have precedents both  in the Tuskegee "Bad Blood" project which may have assumed a new guise in secret  experiments on incarcerated people and in the reprehensible extremes of Nazi doctors and scientists.  Both instances introduced dreadful wrinkles in human evolution.  It is noteworthy that Natalie de Souza  addresses the matter of capital with panache.  She writes of Françoise Baylis's Altered inheritance the "Genetic editing is almost guaranteed to increase social inequity"(22).

Only the super-rich can afford to pay $850,000 for gene therapy "to correct a hereditary form of blindness" (22).

 

Two days ago I received a special issue of The Moskowitz Report  (Spring 2021) on how "A Massive Market Trend Is Forming in Psychoactive Drug Therapies."  I don't know how my name got on the mailing list.  It is godsend that it did. I have a sharper sense of perverse irony in our current world order, although I am skeptical about the report's veracity.   People who traffic  in drugs on the street are criminals.  People who take advantage of mental health crises in America  and use the stock market to traffic in drugs are champions of capitalism.  Were I a rich man, I would most likely have no qualms about becoming wealthier through heavy investment in the psychoactive drug trade. I would probably not think twice about the harm of narcotizing millions of people.  To echo famous words from The Godfather, "they are animals anyway." Fortunately, I am a poor man who can't afford to play the market, a man with a very fixed income who is curious about Turkey Tail and Lion's Mane mushrooms..

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            April 23, 2021