Naturally, My Dear Watson

Investigating the Earthy-Crunchy

I’m going to describe to you what we Bostonians would call an ‘Earthy-crunchy’. I think even if you’ve never heard that word, you’ll know who it refers to: those wary of doctors and paracetamol, very interested in the ‘buried wisdom of our ancestors’, and almost always anti-vaxxers or vaccine sceptics. They usually follow this ideological vein to other conservative beliefs that coalesce around the idea of what is, in their minds, ‘natural’ — gender roles, doubts about climate change, and so on. They’re the sceptical counterparts of flower-power hippies. And it turns out they're everywhere. 

I’ve never been naive about the complexities of political affiliation — I know that any belief can coexist in abject contradiction with a person’s identity or circumstances. But, after encounters with multiple Earthy-crunchies in my age group, I’ve only just started to appreciate how such an ideology functions — how the integrity of the scientific method comes to be questioned by people who’ve never known life without it. 

Earthy-crunchies idolise the past. They idolise it to such an extent that their ideology starts to feel more like an aesthetic sensibility than a set of beliefs. They work off of what looks and feels ‘natural’ — and from that they decide what’s acceptable or effective. To the Earthy-crunchy, we always knew better back then. Sometimes, they stumble upon a real historical injustice: for example, male physicians commandeering the process of childbirth and all but erasing the wisdom midwives had been bringing to the practice for centuries. But, from this, they make hasty and fallacious jumps: all evidence-based medicine is founded in a similar lack of humanity, vaccines give you autism, and pasteurised milk tastes better because, despite the risks, it’s untouched. ‘Natural’ becomes a cloak for ‘alternative’ — anything that does not appear institutional is automatically a form of resistance against crushing, clinical modernity. 

Within this way of thinking, there seems to be a tension between simplicity and complexity. The Earthy-crunchy learns to associate the natural with the intuitive and effective. Evidence-based medicine — with all its mysterious pills, Latin names, and complex manufacturing processes — is as convoluted and deceptive as modern bureaucracy. That’s why any sort of systemic concern is forgotten: it’s all an illusion put up by the scheming modern world to distract us from the intuitive wisdom we should be turning to. Those things are what globalists without homesteads worry about. 

Because Earthy-crunchies are often white and relatively privileged, the whole ideology — despite being created by genuine fear — often strikes one as a selfish lack of perspective. Science is amoral, often cruel and misused, but almost never (and certainly not systemically) against white homesteaders in Britain or America. Of course, it’s worth noting that rural communities often lack healthcare infrastructure, but this is an entirely different issue to deliberate conspiracy. It might explain distrust, but it doesn’t redeem it. 

When it does harm a group like the homesteaders — such as in the Thalidomide Scandal (1960-1962) — it’s addressed swiftly and with about as much regret as you can expect from a corporation. When it’s misused against disenfranchised groups — such as in the syphilis study carried out on the Black population of Tuskegee, Alabama — it can take more than half a century to be properly addressed, if it ever is. 

The issue is that Earthy-crunchies get to audit a world of easy-access healthcare while actively undermining trust in it. They can only go unvaccinated because they happen to live in a place where herd immunity keeps them insulated from the diseases they expose themselves to. They can freely abandon their conspiracy theories in emergencies, accessing reproductive care or life-saving treatments, because they know modern medicine will be there for them when push comes to shove. Unlike disenfranchised populations, they have a safety net — one that even the most sincerely held distrust can’t remove. Communities genuinely touched by disease don’t question the necessity of evidence-based healthcare; privileged Earthy-crunchies might benefit from gaining perspective through them. 

I can’t take away anyone's right to scepticism. But I can call attention to the lack of principle. In the same way you can’t just ‘not do’ politics, you can’t just ‘not do’ science. Sadly, Earthy-crunchies, filled with self-satisfaction, will likely continue to try.

Image from Wikimedia Commons