Social Learning Links, 5/22/2025

Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo on the pandemic response; Lorenzo Warby on farmers vs. pastoralists; Stephen Eide on marijuana and mental illness; Martin Gurri on the moral domain

Yascha Mounk interviews Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo about institutional responses to COVID. Macedo says,

One of the things we found is that public health seems to be a very hierarchical discipline. There's a single funding source, the National Institutes of Health, which is hugely important for people working in this area. There seems to be a reluctance, I think as compared with political science, to question and challenge others, even on matters where it seems as though mistakes have been made. So we have found that this is a hierarchical discipline. Actually, the former dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis, Sandro Galea, wrote a book himself along these lines called, Toward a More Liberal Public Health. It’s his memoir, and includes the COVID years, and he suggests, just as you've said, that his own field is subject to an unfortunate degree of groupthink and intolerance of dissent.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Christianity represents the sanctification of a farming synthesis and Islam the sanctification of a pastoralist synthesis. In Eastern Europe, for example, all the farming polities became Christian, all the pastoralist polities became Muslim. The most recent polity established by raiding pastoralists is Saudi Arabia (in the 1920s).

…Kin-groups, particularly patrilineal, pastoralist kin-groups, typically generate loyal and effective warriors. The standard pastoralist response to the polygyny-generated shortage of wives is “those people over there have women, steal theirs”.

Stephen Eide writes,

No mental-health policy plan should be considered complete without some provision about trying to keep schizophrenics and bipolar people off weed. Again, mental-health policymakers have one job: clearing barriers to treatment. Mental-health agencies that are not working to reduce pot use—a treatment barrier faced by half the seriously mentally ill population—aren’t taking their responsibilities seriously.

Martin Gurri writes,

Morality is personal, and it’s all about action, not talk. I live in a small world of family, friends, work and community: That is my moral sphere, where my personal behavior has consequences for good or ill. Every day I add to one or the other. Every person I encounter I leave better or worse. My character becomes the sum of those days, those encounters. I can’t evade responsibility by, say, storming a campus building on behalf of a free Palestine.

Those of us who were in business in the 1990s may remember consultant/guru Stephen Covey. Gurri’s moral sphere is what Covey called one’s Circle of Influence. The big social and political issues are in what Covey called one’s Circle of Concern. Claude explains,

Covey taught that proactive people focus their energy on their Circle of Influence, working on things they can change rather than worrying about things they can't. This focus tends to gradually expand their Circle of Influence over time. In contrast, reactive people focus on their Circle of Concern, which doesn't lead to productive outcomes and may actually shrink their Circle of Influence.

My essays make me one of the reactive people, especially when I write about the Current Thing.

substacks referenced above:

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My Moral Sphere

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Escaping the kin-group trap