From science’s perspective the chance of a person dying from COVID-19 is less than 1 percent for a young adult, or greater than 2 percent for an elderly adult, but from the perspective of any single individual, the chance of dying is either 100 percent or zero percent. Either the person will die or will not die. How a person reacts to this knowledge varies; each person has different feelings and different joys; the view of the world is not the same for everyone.
The difference between the two perspectives is really the difference between the two cultures: science and the humanities. For the science of epidemiology, medical events are spread over an entire population, and no particular person suffers. To use an analogy, 100 tons of snow, divided into flakes, merely scatter over the ground without hurting a single blade of grass. Only when crammed into an avalanche does the snow kill a particular person. The humanities are the story of that avalanche and that person.
Science and the humanities have been divided in the public mind ever since the English chemist C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the subject in 1959. Although the lecture broke with the style of education passed down from the Victorian era, it was mostly a call to give humanities students more exposure to science in their curriculum. Today’s pandemic calls for influence to move in the opposite direction. Right now, the scientists and public health authorities are running the show, as they should. Yet the humanities can reveal to them some traps they might do well to avoid….
The CDC is the nation’s premier scientific institution on infectious disease matters. It should post the latest protocols and therapies, even if their benefit is only conjecture and anecdotal, and not yet confirmed through rigorous trials. For the CDC to restrict itself to discussing proven treatments is to forget the humanities’ wise counsel: The only way for people to stop believing in something is for them to stop living. Give people medical explanations to believe in, or at least to hope in, thereby forestalling other, non-scientific explanations from taking their place. Do not let people’s psyches wither and droop. Sometimes pure science is too cold, too socially blunt, to understand this….
Science’s error in language added fuel to the protests. Public health authorities across the country encouraged Governors to implement “stay-at-home” and “shelter-in-place” orders. But what exactly do these phrases mean during a pandemic? Shelter-in-place, for example, was designed for short-term events such as hurricanes, and not for pandemics. The authorities reached for these phrases because they were there, and because they generally summed up what they were trying to accomplish in terms of preventing human viral transmission. Yet as the humanities know well, since words are their business, an arrangement of words, however perfect, in no way speaks for an arrangement of things….
The humanities have more wise advice for science: Some of what is called “religion” is just the superstition of the past, but some of what is called “science” is no more than the superstition of the present. Prediction models continue to guide coronavirus policy, although some of these models have proved useless because of their faulty assumptions….
These numbers scare officials. Yet in many cases they are merely the products of thought that involve working with the conceptions of the mind alone. In the case of the Imperial College study, a closed loop was created by questionable outputs, which then became inputs, and which then generated more outputs. Believing in the predictive power of these studies borders on superstition, like believing in curses in ancient times….
I recognize the power of numbers, yet we must keep a healthy suspicion of the mindset behind them.The creators of the numbers in these models know that disbelief is difficult when the numbers have the air of science about them. Like fortunetellers, they say, “If you don’t believe in them, then what are you afraid of?” And thus the trap is set. Government officials fear any deviation from what the numbers tell them to do. The humanities provide a valuable service when they remind government officials to think twice about a number’s predictive power, especially when human behavior is a major variable….
Then there are ideologues who demand that only science guide us during the pandemic. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, exemplifies this type, when he says we cannot return to normal for 18 months, until a vaccine for the coronavirus comes along. No dinners in restaurants, no religious services, nothing, he says. The humanities have seen people like this before: people who truly believe in something, and who, for the sake of the sublime idea, will sacrifice everything and everyone. Usually one finds this way of thinking in politics, but while science is not by nature political, this very fact lends itself to ideological fervor, for the compelling spell of science is hard to resist. That is science’s strength: It has the power to sap the will of its adversaries. To question science, to doubt the moral rectitude and incorruptibility of scientists, is to cast suspicion on oneself, and prompts an irate refutation from those who believe science to be the only rational discipline.
It is hard, in our science-obsessed culture, for people to come up with any standards of comparison. But the humanities can. There are the French revolutionaries, and the Russian revolutionaries, and all the other believers in history who refused to compromise in the service of their beloved idea. They, too, had pieties, although theirs did not come in tabular form. There stands fanaticism, drunk with its own proofs.
As someone with a science background, I find it curious that so many scientists speak on COVID-19 with such certitude, especially the modelers. So little is for sure in science.
h/t Robert Townsend (@rbthisted)
For other posts on the science – humanities debate, see here.
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