"The Lord will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish." Deuteronomy 28:20
Glad Tidings of Great Joy.
My phone has twice behaved frighteningly in the past few weeks. First was a national emergency alert. All blaring and buzzing, it told everyone we would be in lockdown for the next four weeks. The second was a text with a video: it was a Muslim cleric from a town I frequent. He bore the good news that COVID-19 was a plague on the West.
What, one might ask, has the West done to Allah that he would plague it?
I’ve asked, and the answers are manifold. I’ve gathered those replies in a report, which you can reach through the link at the bottom of this page. There are some fascinating quotes, including the widely-shared revelation that COVID-19 is a “soldier of Allah.” The quotes come from prominent commentators and men of God who reach millions through social media.
Before you look at that, however, I’d very much like to discuss the virus and our response to it. As we navigate through the crisis, there are many revealing angles to ponder; a multitude of facets reflecting culture, society, governance and more.
Side effects.
At the outset, I will be honest with you: I’m not yet convinced the response to COVID-19 is commensurate with the threat.
Don’t misunderstand me, however; I don’t callously believe that we should just let the most vulnerable die, and most certainly not for that unattainable ideal that I have pilloried elsewhere, namely the endless growth of technological civilization and the economy.
But there are other contingencies to consider too, there are other costs. The bigger concern might be that measures taken now will actually strengthen civilization’s excesses. So what’s worrying isn’t that this crisis will unravel the system, but that it might tighten its grip further.
I am talking about the non-human Leviathans of structured societal power. They are those named, superhuman personages that possess wealth, compelling force and legal status. You know what I am talking about. Corporate entities like states and other massive systems are legally “people,” but they are not human people. Sometimes the beast is simply the irrational spirit of the crowd. Whatever the form, they are creatures that act in their own interest by some mysterious process of innate virtual corporealness. They often act in ways hostile to human welfare.
In sum, whether it is state power or the impulse of a mob, or the stampede effect of viral information, we are continually at risk of falling victim to collective forces that are inimical to the quality of human life and freedom. We must be cautious of anything that facilitates such a process.
Be afraid…
Is that really an issue with COVID-19?
Yes, I believe it is, and I hope that will be clear. But first allow me to spend a few minutes setting the stage. In a crisis like this, we owe it to ourselves to think rigorously.
From the beginning, tension existed between corporate hierarchical power and natural, free human life. This started with the new-born hierarchies and bureaucracies of the first expressions of civilization in Mesopotamia. The tension is a balance, what much later came to be called “the social contract,” but from the beginning, the balance has tended to go the wrong way.
In its essence, the contract provided for the newly ascendent state to justify its existence through a promise of protecting humans from anxiety.
To be sure, real worries existed, but largely it was the imaginary potential of danger that preoccupied humanity as recursive, complex thought developed in the lead up to the agricultural revolution. Humanity became neurotic beginning about 10,000 years ago. The systems of religion and state that emerged served to provide security against largely imagined threats, much as a home security system does today. The religion-state represented a power greater than whatever provoked our anxiety. And the more anxiety was provoked, the more power the state was lent in the bargain. It isn’t far off from mob protection money.
Be very afraid!
As a long history of tyranny and exploitation attests, untold abuse was tolerated in this trade off. The bargain between protector and protected was a bad deal much of the time.
Yet, amazingly, this phenomenon has sustained itself now for 6,000 years! We’ve only now entered an age when the state is in some places held in check. But it takes constant vigilance. So the concern with our COVID-19 response is that because of our fear, we may accept proposed countermeasures without due diligence.
To appreciate how quickly the social bargain can turn into, as Mr. Trump might say, “a bad deal,” we need look no further back than the 2003 Iraq war.
Back then, claims quickly appeared in headlines about the great danger we all faced. As the collective interests of the state and security industries hastily reconstructed society around a new agency, Homeland Security, few questions were asked. Surveillance was amped up. You remember what happened next: President Bush deemed Saddam Hussein an existential threat. The White House “proved” that Saddam possessed incredible weapons of mass destruction and that he was coming to get us. Anxiety over this threat drove the world to war.
Over time, however, the threat proved to be completely untrue. Much of the evidence was false. Unfortunately, the case assembled to convince the American people, such as the evidence presented by Colin Powell to the United Nations, was beyond the scope of verification for ordinary people.
Instead, the public was invited to believe in the panic and to obey the new regimen. By-and-large it did. If we didn’t go along with it, we were told, our safety could not be guaranteed.
Groupthink.
It was a whirlwind. President Bush connected 9/11 with Saddam when no such connection existed, arguing the war was necessary from the unrelated position of September 11. Based on this “clear and present danger,” the powers wielded by the state grew and grew. More and more money went into surveillance and weaponry while less “clear and present” human needs remained unmet.
The public heard repeatedly that extreme measures would prevent Iraq from becoming a breeding ground for extremist terror. We now know that they achieved precisely the opposite. Post-war Iraq became a fertile field for the extremist terror that we feared, incubating and feeding the Islamic State and helping to spread Iranian insurgencies across the Middle East. Millions of lives were ruined.
Remarkably, the intelligence community warned of this very outcome. In a document titled, “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq,” the CIA warned that “a surge of global terrorism against US interests,” was likely to follow the invasion. The president was also advised that “war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists’ objectives…Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East.” President Bush, driven mainly by what analysts describe as “groupthink,” failed to take those warnings into account. The response to the fear of terror had taken on a life of its own.
This may be the biggest lesson of all, that in a panic, crowds stampede.
Another is that groupthink and panicked actions have a way of delivering unforeseen, worse outcomes.
Notably, we see that groupthink ignores information that does not fit. That the CIA’s warnings did not weigh on the decision-making process is striking. Their prudence was far outweighed by a more alarming report—one that later proved to be untrue.
Stampede!
Groupthink has a dark history. The most obvious recent example is Nazi Germany. Although we find it hard to imagine we could repeat such errors, the German people were not special in accepting the promise of protection and welfare in exchange for totalitarianism. Nor were they uniquely subject to the rapid ascent of scapegoating that so quickly manifests in a crowd. Actually, Nazi Germany is an especially apt cautionary tale, for if ever there was a people who declined to think rigorously in the moment of crisis and response, it was that generation of Germans. Let’s take this lesson seriously.
Even now, in my home country for example, a place considered a progressive paradise the world over, I am struck by this: Paradise has rapidly turned into a place where people stare each other down waiting in line to enter the supermarket. Parents warn children to ‘stay in their bubble’ because other people will make them sick. (How will that affect their psychological development?) Almost instantly, Chinese experienced racial profiling and online abuse. To see the whole country roll over and accept extraordinary police powers based on a single untested and uncontested computer model is more than disturbing. Neighbors denounce neighbors. The new police web site built just for that purpose crashed within hours, overwhelmed by the zealousness of our loyal citizens. It is ugly.
AI.
Aside from the surge in state and crowd power, we might also want to consider the Internet. It too is a non-human being of great power.
If Artificial Intelligence would be a rival to humanity (and how, in terms of survival of the fittest will it not be?), its nascent awareness in the Internet can only be delighted by the way computer models and stampeding information dictated our course so rapidly. With a single command it turned us overnight into Matrix-like isolated bodies, each an insulated battery plugged into the networked machine. (Zoom, anyone?)
We are even having church this way, mediated not by the body and blood of Christ, but by this machine. In its profoundest essence, the communion of saints takes place over a sacred sharing of a common cup and loaf, viral in the most somatic and non-virtual sense. We ought not happily have it replaced by the corpus of the Internet and the virtual bloodline of electrons flowing through network hubs. Communion is profoundly of the body, let’s not let the matrix version replace it for too long.
Excess.
OK. But the lockdown is saving lives, isn’t it? No doubt it is. It is extending life for thousands, possibly tens of thousands. The length of this extension is unknown, however. A significant proportion of those who might die from COVID-19 are not well to begin with, and most are of advanced age.
This measurement of what experts call “excess” deaths can only really happen after the facts are in. “Excess,” in this case, determines how many deaths would happen within a particular timeframe even without getting the virus. They discount those deaths in the final tally. We do this routinely in influenza analysis. For example, Italy had 24,981 excess deaths during the 2017-2018 flu season.
This is an unpleasant question, to be sure, but not an unfamiliar one for people in the insurance business. Like it or not, there is a cost/benefit analysis that should be done in terms of non-excess deaths within various time frames. It’s a question of balancing the cost in quality of life against presumed length of life. It’s very much the same calculation made when considering the threat of terror or any class of safety regulations we might consider.
Life and living.
It simply isn’t fair or helpful to stifle conversation by saying that those who favor analysis don’t care about life. This isn’t an antithetical proposition. Again, we are comfortable with calculating freedom and risk in every other context where life might be endangered. There is no difference here.
Certainly, if it is possible to prevent death and preserve the quality of life at the same time, by all means, we must do what we can. However, preserving the quality of life in its uniquely human sense is increasingly difficult to balance against the goal of preserving and lengthening the physical viability of every one of the earth’s 7 billion inhabitants.
Sadly, my home country just had its second COVID-19 death. The government gravely urged us to stay vigilant in the shadow of this alarming news. We already have the most stringent measures taken by any country, what more diligence can be taken, I do not know. As for the victim, she was in her nineties and struggled with “a number of age-related health conditions,” according to the press release.
In the same week, hundreds more, mostly elderly people, died without contracting the virus. A great many died alone because of lockdown restrictions. If nothing else, this illustrates that we are making calculations and tipping the balances at great human cost. There is no sense in pretending otherwise, or in pointing the finger if someone questions the benefit of particular measures. People are dying alone—and for them that surely is a cost worth considering. (FYI, we have 600-700 deaths per week—it is small country—just under 5 million.)
Big Mac attack.
At what point do we decide that stopping some thousands of early deaths is worth enforcing draconian laws? Should we have COVID-19-like measures in force to prevent accidents, or to ban less than optimal health choices? Do we stop driving cars and criminalize refined sugar and Big Macs? America’s health commander said yesterday that shaking hands belonged on a list of permanent no-nos. Is stigmatizing human touch really a reasonable cost?
And will it work? We already know that diminished microbial exposure in children causes numerous health problems later in life. Just as with our example of Iraq, we see in microbe-deficient children how excessive protection from well-publicized dangers can produce deleterious unintended consequences. Helicopter Mom beware!
Who cares?
But of course, we weigh the freedom to live against the imposition of safety measures all the time. This is the calculation we make by allowing guns. Or more happily, the joy and freedom of driving a car comes with the risk of joining the tens of thousands who die in them every year. (In 2019 there were 38,000 car crash deaths.) How about air pollution? The National Academy of Sciences reckons 100,000 people die early every year because of dirty air. We wouldn’t think of banning driving to save those lives, and we hardly think of air pollution as a cause of personal death at all.
Do we shut down life or tax industry to find an immediate cure for heart disease or diabetes? These kill hundreds of thousands each year. Why don’t we spend 3 trillion dollars to quickly find the cure? Or TB, of which I am a survivor: it kills a 1.5 million every year. Who cares?
Neither do we consider such precautions in relation to foreign policy. We trade others’ lives easily against our perceived protection from enemies. Perhaps this unmasks a dark truth: it isn’t about lives at all, it is entirely about anxiety. Since 9/11 the United States and its allies have prosecuted wars that directly killed over 800,000 people. All in the name of preventing terror at home. Few of us even noticed.
Baby Jessica
Part of the answer is Baby Jessica. George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University talks about the “Identifiable Victim Effect.” It means that the greater harm goes unobserved or unconsidered when there is a more visible or sympathy-evoking victim.
Quoted recent in Market Watch, Loewenstein refers to the “Baby Jessica” case. She was the 18-month-old girl who got stuck in a well back in 1987. “The world was fixated on this girl who fell in the well,” Loewenstein reminds us, adding that the incident generated $800,000 in donations. She was rescued within three days, and all was well.
“It’s a sign of our humanity, if we ignored such events, we would have a hard time looking at ourselves in the mirror,” Loewenstein said. But here is the caveat: “At the same time,” says Prof. Loewenstein, “it creates an immense distortion in policy making.”
This is certainly the case now, when the lives of those suffering from the countermeasures are eclipsed by the more obviously imperiled victims of the virus. They are the ones losing their jobs, suffering from depression, turning to alcohol or drugs, taking their own lives in despair, or losing their only human connections in their time of greatest need. And to be sure, for the vast majority of people, their greatest need this day is not that they are terminally infected with the virus.
“We already have unprecedented levels of deaths of despair,” observed Loewenstein. If COVID-19 increases that toll, he says, “They’re just going to be more difficult to discern from the statistical victims. If you ignore the impact on quality of life — which is potentially an immense thing that should be taken into account — we don’t really understand what the impact of the economy on mortality.”
Super models.
Headline-grabbing media abets Baby Jessica syndrome, and their attention these days fixates lasciviously upon super models. I’ll not try to argue the complexities here. I’m sure you’ve read them for yourself. At least I hope you know that there is considerable debate.
We understand, I think, that models are not facts. Neither are these epidemiological models the kind of models that accurately predict the trajectory of a probe to Mars or Saturn. Space probe models rely on the certainties and stability of mechanical physics. Not so epidemiology, where nothing is certain and data eludes us until after the fact.
Consider for comparison the models used for hurricane prediction. As you know, when the data is incomplete or assessed very early, hurricane tracking maps are all over the place. The ‘track’ looks like spaghetti spilled on a map. They are not accurate enough to call for evacuations and precautions until about three days out from landfall. Even then, the storms often do the unexpected. How much more sound is epidemic modeling where the data is thin and the measurements unreliable?
What do we really know to accurately construct a COVID-19 model?
Not much. And that’s hard for us. We like to Google for facts and we want instant, simple answers. But lab experiments studying the difficulties people have navigating without a GPS illustrate a problem. Expecting machines to guide us ruins our ability to navigate naturally through an unknown environment by means of an analytical process. There is evidence that over-reliance on GPS actually reduces brain matter.
This is very much at issue in our current crisis. Our reliance on quick pre-processed information makes us susceptible to misguidance and vulnerable to misunderstood cues and signposts. (Read more: GPS use shrinks brain.)
Numbers.
Here’s a fact to chew on: COVID-19 developed too quickly for anyone to know with certainty what is going on. In spite of that, media presents critical news in the simplest terms. You know very well that the criteria for news nowadays is basically how loud the headline can scream. It’s a giant shouting match, drunks at a bar vying for the attention of the bartender. Complexity is anathema to today’s editors.
For example, headlines screamed about the specter of Italy, but did not consider Italy’s high death rate from seasonal flu. Remember that excess death rate? In Italy, it was 24,981 back in the 2017-2018 flu season. As it stands today, COVID-19 has taken 17,127 Italian lives. More complex: how many of these COVID-19 fatalities are not excess? This remains unknown, but given the ages reported, at least some of these deaths were inevitable.
Assumptions.
Lacking data, models simply assume things. They do not even presume to offer the precision of a GPS in guiding us. Until now, modeling the outbreak is like modeling a hurricane’s path and intensity without reconnaissance flights. We don’t know the barometric pressure or the prevailing steering currents. So it is a foundation of thin ice for policymakers.modeling a hurricane’s path and intensity without reconnaissance flights. We don’t know the barometric pressure or the prevailing steering currents.
On the other had, one of the things we really know is historical epidemic data. At the risk of comparisons with Donald Trump, there is good reason to consider historical flu death in America. By comparing with flu data at least we can honestly look at the numbers and better evaluate our risk tolerance.
Why should that line of questioning be taboo? Even at this late date, COVID-19 must make a big surge to compete with the 2017-2018 flu season in America. The CDC states there were 959,000 hospitalizations and 61,099 deaths. Even assuming COVID-19 doubles that, the question remains why the flu doesn’t summon half the response triggered by the present epidemic. There may be good reasons, but they need to reasoned through.
Oracles.
As a student of history, the lurch into draconian action reminds me of the start of World War One, all headline and reflex at a terrible cost.
I can’t help but marvel at the power of medical bureaucrats to shut down entire countries on the strength of computer models. I appreciate their expertise, but they’ve trained their whole lives for this moment. Of course they will want to pull out all the stops! It’s what they do! It is not their job to do the checks and balances in relation to the rest of life.
Marvelous too are headlines that cite models with the force of a divine oracle. That is, they cite the most frightening models, while competing studies from equally august bodies get no mention. Some of those other studies criticize the policy-driving ones. Why is there so little debate? Why is there so little scrutiny? We say we err on the side of caution, but do we? Are we cautious at all concerning anyone but Baby Jessica?
The most influential study by far came out of the Imperial College team led by Prof. Neil Ferguson. He also predicted in 2009 that swine flu was set to infect a third of the world’s population. His recommendation as an adviser to WHO and the British government was to close all schools and begin social distancing. Government at the time declined. As for his more recent prediction, which so influenced world governments, Prof. Sunetra Gupta of the rival Oxford team remarked, “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model.” Indeed.
Qualification.
I could be wrong, of course.
It may turn out to be even worse than the models predict! But this still leaves open the two questions: how to get the balance right and how to avoid the perils of groupthink. What I am not wrong about is the need to think rigorously.
Actually, I’d not be surprised at all if some virus turns out to meet the direst predictions and worse.
It may not be this one, but I’ve long considered that nature’s response to the modern world was overdue. And I’ve expected it to be harsh. If you’ve read my thoughts on civilization, you know that a devastating virus has been on my radar for years. There is, unfortunately, also the horrifying prospect that with the democratization of genetic technology, the next big thing will come out of a terrorist lab.
Prudence redux.
Again I must defer to Edmund Burke: prudence is in order. Prudence means to be mindful that large-scale action requires utmost caution. When power swoops in to protect us, the delicate balances of human relationships suffer tremendous stress. We need to be alert and analytical; always questioning and not gullible.
Society needs people who will question groupthink, and that questioning stance should be valued lest we slide into fascism by any other name.
It is imperative that we question what we are told.
Interrogate everything.
This may well be the worst pandemic of the last 100 years. It may well not be. But please, don’t just take it based on headlines, group-think or crowd-driven behavior.
Also, don’t ask Dr. Strangelove if it’s time to light up the doomsday machine! Going along with everything a life-long functionary of the state tells you, even if he is a doctor, is a truly risky tactic. It’s like asking a weapons manufacturer if we should go to war. This is their business. God bless them—but somebody else has to weigh the balances. In theory, that person is you, dear citizen. I implore you to think about it, and when reading the headlines, above all else remember: buyer beware!
Fascinating reading: How millions of Muslims hail COVID-19 as a “soldier of Allah.”
IMAGE HEADER: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) – Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Image in the Public Domain. Peter Sellars as the titular Ph.D in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove. In the film, the world faces a breakdown in the balance between the USA and Soviet Union. Only drastic action can snatch the world from the pending disaster. Enter Dr. Strangelove to serve in the capacity for which he has prepared his whole life: managing doomsday.