It was clear to me from the questions that followed that the children had very little notion of what freedom actually was or what it entailed. For example, could it be right to allow climate-deniers to spread their falsehood and lies? The question begs many questions, of course: it assumes that it is beyond reasonable doubt that the globe is warming, that the warming is caused by man’s activities, that the warming is a wholly harmful phenomenon and that there is only one possible solution to it. I am insufficiently knowledgeable to pronounce on these questions and have heard eminent people whom I respect and whose integrity I have no grounds for doubting argue for very different conclusions.
But even if there were answers to these questions that were a good deal more certainly true than any answers that we possess today, it still would not be right to silence doubters and deniers: for error and even malice are the price of freedom. In the realm of intellectual freedom it is not truth that sets you free, but error, or rather the permissibility of error. And the freedom to tell lies is one of the most basic freedoms of all. There can be no freedom without it.
Well, the audience was only young and perhaps this was strong meat for their immature digestions rendered sensitive by a constant diet of modern pieties, as the young these days are said to be more likely to develop allergies because of the sterility and cleanliness of modern homes and ways of life (what they need is more dirt and early contact with potential pathogens). But soon they would be going off to university, where it was likely that they would encounter an even narrower and powerfully self-reinforcing view of the world. The pressure to conform would add to the natural self-righteousness of youth, which is often mistaken for idealism, and their impulse to censor in the name of their own irreproachable virtue would be strengthened and entrenched.
The long-term prospects for freedom of speech, then, are not altogether rosy. Those who value it are less vehement in their defence of it than are the self-righteous in their assault on it.
Anthony Daniels, “Free Speech’s Emboldened Enemies”, Quadrant, 2018-03-10.
June 26, 2020
QotD: “The freedom to tell lies is one of the most basic freedoms of all”
December 15, 2015
Asthma and the “Hygiene Hypothesis”
An older report at the BBC News website discusses recent research into childhood asthma:
Being exposed to “good bacteria” early in life could prevent asthma developing, say Canadian scientists.
The team, reporting in Science Translational Medicine, were analysing the billions of bugs that naturally call the human body home.
Their analysis of 319 children showed they were at higher risk of asthma if four types of bacteria were missing.
Experts said the “right bugs at the right time” could be the best way of preventing allergies and asthma.
In the body, bacteria, fungi and viruses outnumber human cells 10 to one, and this “microbiome” is thought to have a huge impact on health.
The team, at the University of British Columbia and the Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, compared the microbiome at three months and at one year with asthma risk at the age of three.
Children lacking four types of bacteria – Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella, and Rothia (Flvr) – at three months were at high risk of developing asthma at the age of three, based on wheeze and skin allergy tests.
The same effect was not noticed in the microbiome of one-year-olds, suggesting that the first few months of life are crucial.
Further experiments showed that giving the bacterial cocktail to previously germ-free mice reduced inflammation in the airways of their pups.
One of the researchers, Dr Stuart Turvey, said: “Our longer-term vision would be that children in early life could be supplemented with Flvr to look to prevent the ultimate development of asthma
“I want to emphasise that we are not ready for that yet, we know very little about these bacteria, [but] our ultimate vision of the future would be to prevent this disease.”
May 3, 2013
Has society’s immune system fallen victim to a variant of the Hygiene Hypothesis?
An interesting take from Jonah Goldberg:
Is the American body politic suffering from an autoimmune disease?
The “hygiene hypothesis” is the scientific theory that the rise in asthma and other autoimmune maladies stems from the fact that babies are born into environments that are too clean. Our immune systems need to be properly educated by being exposed early to germs, dirt, whatever. When you consider that for most of human evolutionary history, we were born under shady trees or, if we were lucky, in caves or huts, you can understand how unnatural Lysol-soaked hospitals and microbially baby-proofed homes are. The point is that growing up in a sanitary environment might cause our immune systems to freak out about things that under normal circumstances we’d just shrug off.
Hence, goes the theory, the explosion in asthma rates in the industrialized world, the rise in peanut and wheat allergies and, quite possibly, the spike in autism rates. There’s also a puzzling explosion in autoimmune diseases. That’s where the body attacks healthy organs or tissues as if they were deadly invaders.
Which brings me to my point. If you think of bigotry as a germ or some other infectious disease vector, we live in an amazingly sanitized society. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, of course. And we can all debate how prevalent it is later.
My point is that the institutions — the organs of the body politic — that are the most obsessed with eradicating bigotry (as liberals define it) tend to be the places that have to worry about it the least. The Democratic party is consumed with institutionalized angst about prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry in America. But the odds are that relatively few of these people (particularly those under the age of 50) have been exposed to much real racism or intolerance.
September 11, 2012
More evidence that a bit of dirt can be a healthy thing for kids
Matt Ridley reviews a new book by Moises Velasquez-Manoff:
In a remarkable new book, “An Epidemic of Absence,” Moises Velasquez-Manoff draws together hundreds of such studies to craft a powerful narrative carrying a fascinating argument. Infection with parasites prevents or ameliorates many diseases of inflammation. The author briefly cured his own hay fever and eczema by infecting himself with hookworms-before concluding that the price in terms of diarrhea and headaches was too high.
I’ve touched on the “hygiene hypothesis” in these pages before. In its cartoon form the argument-that in a clean world our immune system gets bored and turns on itself or on harmless pollen-isn’t very convincing. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff makes a far subtler, more persuasive case. Parasites have evolved to damp our immune responses so that they can stay in our bodies. Our immune system evolved to expect parasites to damp it. So in a world with no parasites, it behaves like a person leaning into the wind when it drops: The system falls over.
Moreover, just as brains outsource much of their development to the outside world-the visual system is refined by visual input, the language system can only develop in a language-using society — so the immune system seems to have happily outsourced much of its regulation to friendly microbes. Without them, the immune system becomes unbalanced.
[. . .]
One of Mr. Velasquez-Manoff’s most surprising chapters is on autism, a disorder that almost exactly parallels asthma in its recent rise among affluent, urban, mainly male, disproportionately firstborn people. Better diagnosis explains perhaps half the rise, but the brains of people with autism are often inflamed, and there’s anecdotal evidence that infection with worms or viruses can tame autistic symptoms, at least temporarily.
March 26, 2012
I’ve thought this might be the case for years
So it’s nice to find that the science seems to be pointing in the same direction:
Maybe it’s okay to let your toddler lick the swing set and kiss the dog. A new mouse study suggests early exposure to microbes is essential for normal immune development, supporting the so-called “hygiene hypothesis” which states that lack of such exposure leads to an increased risk of autoimmune diseases. Specifically, the study found that early-life microbe exposure decreases the number of inflammatory immune cells in the lungs and colon, lowering susceptibility to asthma and inflammatory bowel diseases later in life.
The finding, published today (March 21) in Science, may help explain why there has been a rise in autoimmune diseases in sterile, antibiotic-saturated developed countries.
“There have been many clues that environmental factors, particularly microbiota, play a role in disease risk, but there’s very little information about when it’s critical for that exposure to take place,” said Jonathan Braun, chair of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research. “This is one of the most compelling observations to pin down that time frame.”
January 17, 2012
To help kids stay healthier, don’t be a clean fanatic
I’ve suspected for quite a while that the “epidemic” of food allergies and other ailments among today’s children was related to the extremely hygienic conditions of modern homes (that is, kids’ immune systems were insufficiently stressed by exposure to germs, which meant higher risk of immune system over-reaction later in life). I’m not a scientist, so my suspicion was just based on less-than-statistically valid observation of my son and his friends while they were growing up — the kids with the most sterile home environments did seem more likely to have serious allergy issues come up later.
I could have been on the right track, after all:
I do wonder, however, whether we’re all becoming a bit too paranoid about germs. I include my own family in this group. Once we left the doctors’ office, for example, my wife and I encouraged our children to use a hand sanitizer. When our kids were toddlers our house had alcohol wipes and Purell vials all over the place. But is all this washing and disinfecting really necessary? Is it proactive prevention? Or overly paranoid fear?
That, at least, is the thinking behind the “hygiene hypothesis,” a school of thought first proposed by David P. Strachan in 1989, and now experiencing a resurgence that’s probably a response to society’s mania for cleanliness. Strachan’s original study sought to explain why British kids with greater numbers of older siblings had fewer incidences of hay fever, speculating that perhaps it could be the fact kids with lots of older siblings tend to be exposed to greater numbers of germs. While it was greeted with skepticism early on, Strachan’s theory has since been confirmed. In fact, in the decades since, greater exposure to germs early in life has also been associated in epidemiological studies with lower levels of asthma, some allergies and even such autoimmune diseases as type-1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
[. . .]
“These data support the idea that the greater diversity of microbial exposure among children who live on farms is associated with the protection from the development of asthma,” study researchers reported, speculating that microbial exposure may encourage development of immune system cells that in turn suppress the production of the sort of immune-system cells that trigger asthmatic reactions. Researchers’ next hope to determine which microbes are most responsible for preventing asthma — and that, perhaps, may lead to new therapies, such as targeted microbe exposures, for the dreaded respiratory malady.
More broadly, the study is a reminder that humans have been living and fighting off germs for tens of thousands of years. Particularly when we’re young, germs serve an important purpose for the development of the immune system. By depriving our children of exposure to germs, we may be depriving them the benefits of a process the human body has evolved over aeons, a process that helps to create healthy and allergy-free adults.
