Save us from the supposed seers of science
The extent to which our pandemic response has been guided by faulty reasoning, appalling misjudgements and scientific overreach is becoming ever more apparent. A BBC documentary which aired on Thursday night, titled “Lockdown 1.0 – Following the Science?”, explained how highly questionable modelling has fed into the government’s decision-making.
A member of SAGE, Graham Medley, a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reflected on the way government scientists interpreted different models giving different results: “The whole point of SPI-M [pandemic modelling committee] is to generate a consensus view. We don’t rely on one model because a single model can easily be wrong. So what we try and do is to make sure we have at least three different independent groups saying this is our best guess, this is what we think is going to happen.”
Reasoning like this has played a huge role in shaping public appreciation of the crisis. We live in a world mapped out in curves and X and Y axes, representing demand for ICU beds, hospital surge capacity, numbers of infections, numbers of deaths. The past, present and even the future is staked out in these terms. What’s so revealing about Medley’s comments is that much of it is a kind of elegant delusion. How can you recognise simultaneously that a model can only ever produce a “best guess” and yet cleave to the notion that models, when taken together, generate “a consensus view”? In contrast, the historian, when confronted with two sources pointing towards different conclusions, would never simply conclude that the truth lies “somewhere in the middle”.
SAGE and its associated committees are practising a form of bureaucratised augury, based on the interpretation of omens. Although scepticism about the predictive value of prophecies is as old as the practice itself, that is not its primary value. The Roman philosopher Seneca wryly noted that “it makes no difference how many omens there might be [that allow us to make predictions]. Fate is single”. Prophecy is an art of consolation, a tribute to the gods, to their caprices and their shifting wills. The officials who worked in the great temples of the oracles dotted across the ancient world only allowed visitors to pose questions structured in such a way that the answers returned by the oracles could not be easily falsified.
Prophecy is not about telling the future – its proper function is to give us the ability to live productively in an uncertain world. It is the tribute the present pays to the future. That the scientific community has not the wit to articulate those basic truths to itself is testament to dreary, long-term trend in British public life – the valorisation of a narrowly defined technical expertise over practical knowledge.
In recent decades, we have found it easier to cede the public square to the kind of personality that Spanish writer Jose Ortega y Gasset classed as a “learned ignoramus”, master of “his own tiny corner of the universe” than to nurture a culture in which debate is encouraged and credentialism censured. How many “public health experts” have paraded merrily across our screens and across the broadsheets in the last year who patently have no real interest in either the public or its health?
Politics conducted via committees of eggheads never works. It didn’t work for America during the Vietnam War when Robert McNamara, a man whom James Reston adroitly observed in the NYT had “something… missing,” constructed his “monarchy” of the “best and brightest” to run the war effort. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning,” McNamara told the UPI reporter Neil Sheehan in 1962, on a visit to the country after a series of vicious Vietcong bombings which demonstrated beyond doubt the extent of the group’s resolve and its grip on the countryside.
Our current crop of experts indulge in, like McNamara, an incomplete picture of what counts as “winning” and an inability to reckon with phenomena and processes which do not give their truths up easily to “quantitative measurement.” That their view has been allowed to dominate is a political failure of quite extraordinary magnitude, the scope of which Boris Johnson and the Tory high command is nowhere near reckoning with.
In allowing the general course of social life to be governed by ridiculous diktat justified by a tendentious and crude science for an extended period of time, the Tory party has fostered qualities not far removed from those found in the countries scarred by the totalitarian experiments of the 20th century – rampant personal hypocrisy and equivocation, and a sense that the law’s sole purpose is to facilitate the wishes of politicians and serve the claims of power rather than to protect the individual. The stagnation will take decades to reverse.