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**Clean Vs. Dirty: A Way To Understand Everything**

Clean Vs. Dirty: A Way To Understand Everything

_Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,_ (https://brownstone.org/articles/clean-vs-dirty-a-way-to-understand-everything/)

The other day, I listened to as much National Public Radio as I could stand and one point stood out to me. **The experience was anodyne. The topics were nothing that mattered. It felt like a gentle ooze of news that always came to the proper conclusion at the end of the well-produced bit.**

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By proper, I hope you know what I mean. It confirmed the listeners’ biases. And everyone knows who they are: wealthy, mostly white professionals in urban centers with high-end salaries to match their educational credentials. **Probably 90 percent Biden voters last time and next time, not because he is a great president but rather because he inherits the anti-deplorable mantle of his predecessor nominee.**

NPR was raising money on that particular day, which they do despite the taxpayer subsidies. If you give money, you can get an NPR umbrella or be given a bit of nature trail to adopt or perhaps acquire a coffee mug for your desk to proclaim your loyalties to your co-workers or just reinforce your opinions while eating your breakfast of Whole Foods granola and soy milk.

The experience happened even as I’m reading, with great joy, _Fear of a Microbial Planet_ (http://anodyne/) by Steve Templeton.

The book is about the ubiquity of germs, trillions of them everywhere. They can be a threat but they are mostly our friends.

**Exposure, his thesis goes, is the path to health.**

Without it we will die. And yet, over the last three years, avoiding exposure has been the main goal of policy and culture throughout the world. “Stop the spread” or “Slow the spread” or “Socially distance” or “Stay home, stay safe” have been entrenched as slogans to govern our lives.

The phrases still have gravitas. **It has been a maniacal fixation on a single pathogen to the exclusion of trillions of others that are truly everywhere in us and around us.** It is like going back before the invention of the microscope when we didn’t know that every surface of everything is covered in creepy crawling things. We further indulge the completely unscientific fantasy that by doing some hopping-around dance to avoid others, plus covering our face and getting a shot, would keep us forever clean, meaning free of the bad pathogen.

**Dr. Templeton’s view is that this is a potential disaster for human health.** And he explains the point with great erudition and examples from all of history. He picks up on the extraordinarily keen insight of Dr. Sunetra Gupta, who has traced longer life expectancy in the 20th century to more exposure to a greater heterogeneity of pathogens as a result of transportation and migration. We don’t just need to learn to live with Covid. We need to live with them all and orient social and political organization around the reality of their ubiquity.

Now, what precisely is the connection between NPR’s sanitized “news” and the thesis of the Templeton book? It suddenly dawned on me. **It is possible to understand nearly everything going on today – the Covid response, the political tribalism, the censorship, the failure of the major media to talk about anything that matters, the cultural and class divides, even migration trends – as a grand effort by those people who perceive themselves to be clean to stay away from people they regard as dirty.**

And not just people but ideas and thoughts too.

This goes way beyond some reemergence of Puritanism, though this is a species. **The desire for purification extends to the whole of the physical and intellectual world.** It’s the reason for the cancellations, the purges, the demographic upheavals, the loss of liberties, and the threat to democratic norms. It covers everything.

Let me see if I can persuade you.

**The attacks on Elon Musk’s curbing of censorship on Twitter have been relentless.** One might suppose that once he revealed that Twitter was operating as a censor for the Deep State, there would be outrage and a renewed celebration of free speech. The opposite has happened. As Musk opened the place up more and more, and non-conventional opinions started gaining traction, we saw panic ensue.

**Sure enough, now we see all the usual suspects quitting the platform in a huff.** More likely, individuals at these organizations are creating fake accounts so they can keep up with the news. Otherwise, they preserve their fan accounts on Zuckerberg and Gates’s platforms.

Why might they be doing this? They do not want their organizations to inhabit (or be seen to inhabit) the same space with dirty o…

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