Let’s trust the experts on this one

“It might be.”

When historians write about this moment and this crisis, those three humble words by the least humble president of the United States might be considered his most significant. Talking last night about the likelihood of the US economy moving into a recession, this president, who has gambled everything on the strength of the economy, momentarily gazed into a personal abyss. Donald Trump’s concession amounted to a recognition that there is a limit to the power of his messaging, branding, demagoguery, litigation, insults, gold paint, and even his red MAGA hats.

Yet it’s not only Donald Trump who has come to understand that the coronavirus will not be defeated through populism. It feels self-evident to say this now as the entire world suddenly rekindles its interest in science and when everybody and their grandmother is an expert in R0, “herd immunity”, and chloroquine (the malaria drug said to be effective in treating the virus), but this moment isn’t just the crisis we see unfolding before our eyes.

It is the moment when deeply contradictory forces in our culture are facing off. This is a moment of recalibration when prevailing bad ideas might finally be forced back into the fringes where they belong; the end, in more than a literal sense, to gormless “influencers” who film themselves licking toilet seats to prove science wrong; and the last we see of taproom blowbroths whose opinions have too long been integral to the news agenda.

The re-emergence of science and, more broadly, expertise should be welcomed like liberating troops into a previously occupied town. A trend in culture, stretching back decades, has been the marginalisation of our professional classes. Back in the dark ages when the Conservative Party was *the* party of doctors, teachers, lecturers, and lawyers, there was no shame in being part of an elite who went to university.

Remnants of that culture still exist. The government’s website still advises that to certify a document, you must find “a professional person or someone well-respected in your community (‘of good standing’)”. The list includes bank officials, charted accountants, ministers, dentists, solicitors, and teachers. These were the people in whom we put our trust before successive governments watered down the professional classes with ever weaker degrees, shorter courses, intermediate positions that were almost professional but not quite, and the whole ethos of leadership-from-the-top that denied professionals their independence.

These trends were not, however, set in isolation. The Long Peace, that period of prosperity and relative calm since the Second World War, saw an industrial revolution that eclipsed all others. Machines from Bletchley Park used to run corporate America of the 1960s and 70s, developed into the Personal Computer and, not long after, into the kind of silicon we’ve carried in our pockets for the last fifteen or so years.

Underpinning this was a growing disconnect. The mobile phone disconnected us from the context of offices and homes. Then it started to disconnect us from the wider world, as news and information started to be filtered to fit the individual. Social media completed the narrowing, creating in a virtual space another version of the self that was smaller but somehow closer to how we perceived ourselves.

Even as professional classes were torn apart, technology helped to invert the old hierarchies. “Individual choice” became the mantra in every walk of life. With it, teachers were suddenly answerable to students, doctors to patients, and, of course, businesses to customers.

This is the world that Trumpism would come to inhabit; that world in which a nation was subverted to the will of viewers in red hats believing in a very alternative reality shaped by reality TV and Fox News. Inside of appreciating the comfort afforded to them by science, engineering, and progress, they nurtured the belief that learning was secondary to common sense; law a mere foot servant to politics; and truth precisely whatever they wanted it to be. Soon they had a president who could say one thing one day, something entirely the opposite the next, and never admit there was a discrepancy between the two.

There was always going to be that moment when the illusions were no longer enough. Politicians would need science and so it proved. Coronavirus could not be dismissed with cheap gimmicks and rhetoric and so it was that leaders turned to the experts and followed the science.

No government did this with as much bravado as the UK under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Our government’s “mitigation” strategy was a bold outlier from the start and based, according to those leading the charge, on the best science available. Yet the discrepancy between the UK’s plan and plans across the rest of the world were difficult to explain.

On social media, familiar battle lines were soon drawn as if this was going to be the old Brexit battle recast with different names. “Do not question the science!” became the cry of many, especially on the hard right who now found themselves fighting on the side of a science that appeared to verify their brand of British exceptionalism. “

Get it. Get immunity. Feel better. The herd triumphs” tweeted Katie Hopkins just a few days ago, adding the hashtag “#60% of U.K”. The only thing she didn’t do was recommend licking door-knobs or worse…

Yet this confidence was to miss the point entirely. Embracing science isn’t the same as making it the newest idol we are meant to kneel before in unthinking reverence. Science isn’t an endpoint but a process. The “scientific method” is precisely that. It’s a process of constant peer review. Results are questioned, checked, and then checked again. When something is proven to be wrong, a new hypothesis is carried forward to undergo the same scrutiny. Follow the science, certainly, but always question the science. Keep the science honest.

That, admittedly, is difficult once a specialist domain becomes central to our collective existence. The normal rhythms of academic research are punctuated by the drumbeat of politics, as well as the inchoate babbling of the increasingly irrelevant populists. Perhaps politics has become so tribal that we can no longer countenance the kind of paradigm reversals that scientific research sometimes demands. The government is operating in a deeply polarised climate, made worse by the kinds of ignorance that breed fear.

Therefore, when scientists at Imperial College released a new study on Monday in which new modelling exposed a flaw in the UK government’s plans, there was a palpable sense that the science had gone terribly wrong. Emotions around this are understandably raw. These are the decisions on which history turns and for which history will ultimately be the judge.

Yet the failure wasn’t entirely a failure of science. To embrace science is to understand that all science is fundamentally imperfect. The initial misstep was, rather, one of messaging, presenting their modelling as a conclusion that should not be questioned. It was this overconfidence that would compound the error when it emerged that their initial modelling was flawed, and their original “mitigation” strategy would have to be abandoned for a plan based around “suppression”.

Time will only tell how costly this political error is. We can be certain, however, that it won’t be the last miscalculation in the science because error is an unavoidable feature of the methodology we’re now employing. That is a brutal truth that can be difficult to accommodate after so many years of easy answers.

However painful it feels at the moment, we are better for our scientists. This isn’t Trumpism that promises so much and then takes no responsibility when it fails to deliver. Defeating the coronavirus will not take days, weeks, or perhaps even months, but better treatments of the disease will emerge sooner rather than later.

For all the fear of the past days and, no doubt, the extreme difficulty of the coming months, we should acknowledge the good that should and will come from our re-embracing science. Our darkest moments often give way to the most vigorous renewal. The science of the last war gave us technology that took us to moons both real and virtual. There’s no reason to believe this new war shouldn’t result in something equally profound.