Like most of you, I’m pretty sick and tired of inspirational commercials at this point. They’re trite, self important, and soooo repetitive. There are, after all, only so may ways to say “Stay put; We’ll get through this together.” One in particular, though, grates on me more than the rest, because, without even meaning to, it encapsulates everything that is wrong with the whole Covid-19 mess.
“At a time when things are most uncertain,” the Pfizer ad begins, “we turn to the most certain thing there is: science.”
Many who hear this won’t even bat an eye. Of course science is certain. Rigid standards of proof and peer review make it a shoe-in for the “most certain” title. Science produces results that are documented, repeatable, and, most important, verifiable. It has revolutionized our world, made feats from humanity’s wildest imaginations routine, and saved countless lives. Who better to turn to in a pandemic than those versed in the science of understanding them, expert epidemiologists?
Society finds itself facing an impossible decision: suffer the loss of millions of lives, or–as these smartest men and women on the planet assure us will mitigate the loss–temporarily sacrifice our livelihoods and freedoms. In essence, we are living in one big trolley problem, the famous thought experiment that posits a choice to either allow a trolley to kill multiple people stuck on the tracks, or switch it to a track with only one victim. But life isn’t a thought experiment, and the governments of the world aren’t Republic serial villains. Do we seriously think they’d explain their pandemic response if there remained the slightest chance of us affecting its outcome?
They did it 35 days ago.
Ozymandias, the antagonist of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons opus, Watchmen, likewise saw an impending crisis. Renowned as the Smartest Man on the Planet, he recognized the inevitability of Nuclear War and decided he couldn’t stand by and let billions of people die, not when he knew how to stop it. And so was born his plan to trick to the world into believing an interdimensional invasion was imminent, with the obvious result of the world’s bitterly divided superpowers banding together to fend off the existential threat. The proverbial eggs broken to make said peace omelet were a mere half of New York City’s population.
The problem with both scenarios is that, the rails ostensibly leading to the certain death of the greater number of people is obstructed from our view. It may appear to our eyes that it leads squarely to their demise, but we have no way of knowing what track we’ve switched to. Maybe we’ve switched to one with fewer people, maybe not. Science, despite the perception, is not certain. Life is not a laboratory, where results can be predictable and controlled. The rigid standards of proof associated with science–any certainty we can derive from it–is diluted with each uncontrolled variable. Logical inferences may be made from physical constants, but it is the greatest conceit to discount the least controllable variable of all: free will.
Whatever pseudo science informed the Doomsday Clock in Watchmen may paint nuclear war as a certainty, but doing so discounts the decisions of individuals. People with their figurative hand on the buttons, people with their literal hands on the button, people with guns and consciences around the people with their hands on either–all had a say in whether or not the missiles would start flying.
Likewise, the epidemiology modeling may have a good degree of certainty what would have happened but for the lockdowns. They may even predict with a good degree of accuracy what will happen when the lockdowns are lifted, but while it’s possible to mathematically extrapolate exposure and transmissions and project the burden, to think that they can account for the innumerable decisions of billions of individuals is textbook hubris.
There is no way of knowing who would disregard recommendations completely and go about business as usual. There is no way of knowing who would voluntarily follow recommendations. There is no way of knowing the overlap in these groups–those who flout the recommendations but already gave people their space and washed hands frequently. There is no way of knowing the unintended consequences of grouping people in isolation. No matter how many times Watchmen hits us with the Doomsday Clock motif or how many times the news unquestioningly parrots the latest Covid-19 fatality projections, neither amount to more than educated guesses.
For much of society, these educated guesses are sufficient. We have flattened the curve and Ozy has averted nuclear winter. It all turned out okay in the end. Even with unreliable statistics, either over or under counting depending on what source you trust, we are on pace to see a death toll beyond a bad flu season but well short of the worst case scenario we feared. As Dr. Manhattan so astutely admonished, however, nothing ever ends.
Tomorrow, and the next day, and for years to come, we will have to grapple with the decisions we’ve made these last few weeks. Already, the continual downward revisions of the death projections have for many called into question the initial reasoning of the lockdowns, while others see in them as sure signs of the policy’s wisdom. Already, we are acclimatizing to the unprecedented response to Covid-19 by returning to our respective trenches and taking potshots at the other side. Vilifying Trump or Fauci, Whitmer or Kemp, Gates or anyone else isn’t going to cut it this time. We need to dig deeper if we are going to come away from this with anything resembling a victory.
Just as in Watchmen, pinpointing a villain isn’t as simple as pointing out the antagonist. While there is something to be said for the questionable morals of actively sacrificing a smaller group to avoid the passive sacrifice of a potentially greater number, vilifying the medical community or politicians is not my aim. The experts are just trying to do what they can to save lives. What we have to remember about any field of expertise, however, is that it has a vested interest in validating itself. You’d be as hard pressed to find an macroeconomist who was skeptical of the merit of GDP as you would to get an admission from Ozy that his plan might not have been necessary, even if it turned out the Doomsday Clock had only been at 30 minutes to midnight. The true villain in both scenarios is human nature.
We are all partly responsible for letting things get to this point. When we defer responsibility for our safety to others; when we defer our opinions to experts, pundits, and parties; when we tolerate the notion that any threat, however certain its impact, would be worth compromising our principles; we share the blame for our current predicament.
Life is always uncertain. To offset that uncertainty and stave off the paralyzing fear it can induce, we put our trust in various philosophies that offer reassurance. We look to reason, to religion, to entertainment, to solidarity, to government, and, yes, to science. Despite frequent inferences to the contrary, these institutions are not mutually exclusive, and contrary to the deep personal preferences of individuals, none have unassailable claims to universal certainty. Each can allay our fears to a point, to provide enough certainty for us to conduct our lives, but none can predict the future.
If any philosophy, any field of study, any group of experts could be trusted to always to steer society in the right direction, we wouldn’t have had to fight a revolution to assert our right to steer it ourselves. If the liberties of grown men and women could rightly be overruled or suspended by the paternalistic measures of elected officials and unelected advisors, hundreds of thousands of service men and women wouldn’t have sacrificed to protect them. If your judgement and instincts count for nothing because someone has studied a given subject more, we might as well just count the American spirit as a Covid-19 death since we’re counting everything else. But if we want to the truth to prevail, for those who have switched the trolley to the obliterate financial stability and Constitutional safeguards track to be held accountable, we need to hold ourselves accountable for letting uncertainty get the better of us for far too long. We need to live our lives, our principles, free from compromise.
