The risks of a risk-free society

“Schools to weigh pupils over fears of obesity spike.” The Independent’s headline story on Monday heralded our obesity as new epidemic – for “spike” you could substitute any number of Covid-related phrases: peak, flare-up, outbreak…

We talk about an “obesity epidemic” and yet we cannot usefully test for its presence like chlamydia or hepatitis, nor is it possible to “infect” others with it. If one of the famous fat men of yore, Jack Falstaff, had written “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!” in a Saturday column, he would have been met with stern looks and po-faced letters to the editor: “Don’t you know how much lifestyle-related conditions cost the NHS?”

In modern parlance, every societal ill can be translated into the cod-philosophy of disease prevention. If we are not fighting the “mental health epidemic” we are crusading against the “loneliness epidemic”. “Loneliness” is presented as a silent contagion. A depressed state of mind is never just “the blues”, or an occasional fact of life, but an insidious malady – a condition in need of a cure, just in case it becomes infectious.

“Today’s epidemics,” the writer Philip Alcabes observed in his 2009 book Dread: How fear and fantasy have fueled epidemics from the black death to the avian flu, depend on “a sense of fatal fault, a conviction that there is something wrong with our society, a suspicion that the flaw is spreading some kind of malaise.”

The government is championing this anti-epidemic sensibility. If obesity is spreading in schools, why not test for it? After all, obesity is now portrayed as a one-way ticket to a ventilator and an early death via Covid. What if parents could be alerted early enough? The child’s behaviour might be modified and improved. Risk avoided and problem solved, you might think. But this reasoning leaves little room for nuance – obesity is not so straightforward as a bacterial infection or a virus. The BMI standard is a near useless measure for health in general. Weight can wax and wane over time. Being below a normal weight in children can be dangerous too.

The overheated rhetoric of personal risk brings its own damaging effects. In our rush to plan to prevent future dangers, we tend to plan for the wrong disasters. For the last two decades, Western governments proudly exhibited their pandemic preparedness plans. Global organisations rated them tip-top. The WHO lists Disease X in its rubric of infectious diseases to describe “a serious international epidemic” which “could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”

Albert Camus’ oft-quoted nostrum – “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise” – is inappropriate to describe a world so obsessed with the risks of disease. We have been talking about the risk of a new Spanish Flu-style pandemic, combining high transmissibility with high virulence, for decades. It’s just that the disease which did turn up, combining high transmissibility and low virulence, wasn’t the threat we had quite prepared for.

If we over-prepare for more extreme iterations of contemporary risks, we will inevitably screw up our response to genuine emerging threats. Disease X may have none of the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2. In this sense, the Asian Covid “success story” is a chimera – South-East Asian regimes have implemented a near-perfect response to a SARS-like disease, as seen in the early 2000s, which dwindles and disappears. Afterwards, in theory, you can lift the border restrictions and return to normal. But this disease is not going to disappear – it is now endemic across the West and in the developing world.

Tough border measures and understandably sluggish vaccine roll-outs mean the “suppression” group of nations face years of international isolation. Every society needs risk-takers to thrive. But doing the opposite, by skewing all aspects of life – for years on end – towards the avoidance and elimination of the all-too-normal threats of disease and untimely death, holds its own dangers.

The anti-epidemic story encourages us to believe that, if only we prepare enough, we can eliminate future risk. It is ironic that the likely origin story of the Covid-19 pandemic itself is rooted in our propensity to over-egg risk. If “gain of function” testing on coronaviruses found in bat populations created the conditions for the spread of a more transmissible version of SARS, then the pandemic preparedness cottage industry, designed around the amorphous threat of Disease X, is directly responsible for the present harms of Covid-19.

Perhaps, like Burns, we should direct our fear towards “the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” that leave us “nought by grief an’pain”, rather than our supposedly preternatural inability to prepare for the future.

The anti-epidemic rhetoric continues to infuse our domestic response to the still-unfolding pandemic. In the talk of new variants (“every time a new infection takes place we give the virus another chance to mutate”), we are encouraged to imagine that the whole future direction of social life hangs by the finest of threads. New variants are always portrayed as going in one direction – towards disaster and consequently more robust societal measures and protections. This new virus must be n times more transmissible, or n times deadlier. That should cause us to ramp up our sense of vigilance by the nth degree.

We are encouraged to think of life as a continuous über-rational process of weighing one risk against the other – the Delta variant is about, so best be on good behaviour. But the vast majority do not think like that. Teenagers want to go to parties, and this has driven some of the recent Delta spread. But they don’t base their decisions on whether or not they bracket socialising with other youngsters as a low-risk activity. Perhaps – after 18 months of isolation and Zoom calls – they are increasingly aware, as Philip Larkin once put it, of “the strength and pain of being young; that it can’t come again.”

For years, we have been fighting parallel “epidemics” – obesity, isolation and mental health. But in turning every sphere of human life into a social ill to be cured, we get no closer to working out a fruitful way to live in an uncertain world. Disease, depression and social anomie are not problems to be solved – they are a fact of life. They are the burdens we share and the trials that shape who we are. It follows that learning to live with this virus should not imply living in constant fear of the next one.