Courage, Anxiety and Despair: Watching the Battle; James Sant, 1850-1916
The Covid-19 crisis is creating a huge penumbra of fear. It’s not just fear of catching the virus. It’s a more prosaic, everyday, intolerable set of worries and gnawing anxieties about about the loss of income or job, or the disastrous effects on the children’s education, or being prevented from hugging your grandchildren, or not being able to go to a restaurant or a concert, or not being able to live your normal life in a myriad different ways for the foreseeable future. And beneath this there’s the deeper fear that absolutely no-one in authority seems to have a handle on this, and so this ghastly state of affairs might go on indefinitely.
So it’s only human nature to seek out those experts who confirm the most consoling conclusion — that if only political leaders or health ministers or the scientists weren’t so incompetent/panicky/venal/duplicitous, everything would be ok. When faced with a massive problem which poses impossible dilemmas with only bad or worse outcomes, blaming someone in authority provides the comforting illusion that all that’s needed is to replace that individual and his wrong-headed policy and then the whole problem will just go away.
So even some otherwise sensible people don’t seem to approach the Covid-19 crisis with an open mind. They appear instead to search out evidence which supports their prior conclusion, a process known as “confirmation bias”.
The internet is thus duly trawled for plausible individuals — and there are many, including folk with stellar academic credentials — whose statistical evidence can be cherry-picked to uphold the view that all this political panic and public pandemonium is unnecessary. Any evidence that challenges this must be not only rejected but banished from the reading list altogether. So minds are closed and rationality shut down.
These otherwise level-headed folk then take up a dogmatic position in opposing any evidence which contradicts their opinion. Rationality is thus conspicuous by its absence.
My own view is that, while there’s a vast amount to criticise in the way governments have dealt with this crisis, I believe the virus poses a very serious threat to life and health which, until a safe and effective vaccine is developed, can only be contained if the public co-operate with some restrictions on their lives.
I fully accept that some people calibrate very differently the competing risks of damage to health and damage to the economy, and have therefore concluded that the restrictions are unwarranted and likely to do more harm than good. These arguments are legitimate and merit careful consideration. This is a highly complex issue, and the benefits and downsides are far from straightforward.
But among the observations which have come my way, in response to my own analysis of the virus crisis, are these repeated examples:
It can’t be true because the consequences for the economy would be too appalling
It can’t be true because the consequences for people’s liberties would be too appalling
It can’t be true because there are distinguished experts who say something different
It can’t be true because someone has put up on YouTube a bar chart or graph which looks impressive and thus proves that Covid-19 presents no real problem at all
It can’t be true because then there’d be no end to this misery
It can’t be true because it would mean the government is not lying to us
What all these claims have in common is that they are not just demonstrably illogical but are examples of backwards-thinking. Because the consequences of a proposition are too appalling to be contemplated, goes this thought-process, the proposition itself must be wrong.
Another common factor is that they all start from a position of apparently dogmatic certainty, which refuses to entertain any challenge and requires instead that any analysis or evidence must confirm that position.
My own approach has always been the opposite: to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and then reach a conclusion. But any assumption even so that this is therefore the last word is very much mistaken.
I am always open to the idea that I may be wrong. So I’m always assessing how reliable the evidence is, looking for internal logic or its absence, checking on accuracy or consistency with other material, and not least using the evidence of my own eyes and ears.
What’s crucial is to gather as much information as possible. The task is obviously made much harder when experts conflict with each other, as they are doing over the virus; but even if you lack their specialised expertise, it’s still possible to subject their analyses to the same rational scrutiny. Does this all add up? is a question we can all ask, and is no less valid for that. And that process never stops. Every fresh challenge to your conclusion requires fresh scrutiny along these lines.
On that basis, I formed a view about the way the Covid-19 pandemic is being handled. This has been made even more difficult because the crisis is unprecedented; there’s still so much we don’t know about this virus, and different benchmarks create misleading statistics and comparisons. So it’s hard for all of us to pick our way through this information maelstrom.
I continue to search out and compare, to listen and learn, and always to ask: have I got this wrong? But until facts come along that reveal authoritatively and undeniably the flaws in the thinking that has convinced me, rather than evidence which exposes the flaws in the contrary arguments, my conclusion stands.
And if we are to hold ourselves together as a society during this awful time, the most important thing we can do is to hang onto our capacity for rational thought and keep an open mind.
Recent posts
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