How we can use the pandemic to clear up our thoughts and improve our communities.
Personal Spheres of Influence
Faced with death and disease our first priority is to protect ourselves and our families. The primal instinct to survive might be helpful for those of us being chased by a tiger[1], but it cannot sustainably guide society-wide reactions to global threats such as the current pandemic. It also leaves us emotionally vulnerable at a time when we need to be more resilient than ever. For life in general, but in critical situations in particular, it is helpful for each of us to adapt their circle of concern to their circle of influence. In other words, we need to make sure that we worry only about things that we can actually change, and waste as little thought as possible on matters that are simply outside our sphere of influence.
Translated to our current situation, this piece of stoic wisdom might mean that instead of panicking about how painful the experience of falling ill might be, we should focus our energy on maintaining hygiene and following official instructions. If everyone managed to discipline himself in this way, we wouldn’t have to worry about unrelated issues such as whether our local supermarket has adequate supplies of toilet paper. The toilet paper panic serves as an example of what a tennis player might call an “unforced error”. We’ve got the greatest pandemic in a hundred years on our hands- do we really need to make up new problems on our own? Like a tennis player, we need to work on ourselves first. Once we’ve arrived at a healthy mindset, we can more effectively fight the disease. Success starts from within.
Communal Spheres of Influence
The idea of making our spheres of concern and spheres of influence overlap, doesn’t just apply to us personally. We can use the same framework to determine what our communities should prepare for. We might not be able to prepare our communities for every eventuality, but we can do our best to minimize risks. In order to do so we must first identify our communities’ most important interest, then assess the degree to which these interests are threatened and finally determine the actions that lie within our communal sphere of influence. Let’s go through each of these steps one by one.
Identifying our communities’ most important interests is the crucial prerequisite to assessing risks, since the more important the interest, the more worrisome a threat to it becomes. We must ask ourselves who we are as a society, and decide what we are not willing to give up on no matter what. Many people will doubtlessly find that fundamental rights like freedom of speech, systems of governance such as democracy or values like equality before the law are what fundamentally characterises us. Without these, and the infrastructure that ensures their translation to our everyday lives, our societies would not, in the eyes of most of us, be recognisable. For most of us, the list of vital characteristics would include respect for the dignity of the individual and the need to maintain a strong and accessible healthcare-system. We need to have an ongoing and open-ended debate on these vital interests. I am convinced that, even if we never achieve a perfect consensus, the debate will lead to a clearer picture of what we hold to be most important. The fact of a debate like that being led publicly will alert decision-makers to the fact that we as citizens expect risks to these vital interests to be taken seriously. However, the Covid-19 epidemic illustrates that the identification of these threats, the second step, is not always straightforward.
Playing Russian Roulette: Uncertainty vs Prediction
Every country has its own story to tell about how it happened to underestimate the pandemic. There is for example an infinity of reasons why a government might have failed to stockpile masks or ventilators. What unites all of them is that in hindsight they appear absolutely unconvincing. The loss of life and the economic disruption we are currently witnessing are of such a magnitude that we must wonder why the argument for prevention lost out so decisively.
Very few people within government seem to have taken preparation for an airborne pandemic seriously[2]. While many healthcare workers and academics have dedicated their lives to warning us of the dangers of airborne pandemics, it appears that their warnings were not accorded priority. It has been clear for years that a pandemic like the Spanish flu (which in the years after WW1 killed over 25 Million people at a time when the world was far less connected and far less populated than today) could occur and do massive damage. The problem is, that disasters such as a pandemic or a global financial crisis are impossible to predict with pinpoint accuracy. The sheer complexity of the world means that, while it is possible to identify vulnerabilities, even our most advanced models cannot reliably predict such catastrophes. The risks therefore remain dangerously vague, and lend themselves to being ignored.
While we are unable to attach accurate numbers to such probabilities, nothing prevents us from focussing on preparing as best we can to deal with this uncertainty. Wherever we find that our vital interests are vulnerable, we need to invest in resilience, precisely because of the uncertainty involved. People do not wait until the first time they crash through their car’s windshield to put on their seatbelts. Similarly, we should not wait until disaster strikes to invest in preparatory measures. Covid-19 is a perfect example of clear vulnerability linked with vague risk and our failure to invest in resilience now stands thoroughly exposed. Each year we ignored it we were playing Russian roulette. In late 2019, our luck finally ran out.
Democracy works
Is it too far-fetched to link the absence of any public debate on disaster preparedness ahead of Covid-19 to the absence of preparatory government action? In democracies it is essential that citizens understand and participate in the process of identifying their communities’ vital interests, because public debate tends to shift government action. However, Covid-19 illustrates that democratic states relying on public awareness have not been the only ones guilty of avoiding prudent preparation. In fact, decision-makers in authoritarian systems have displayed their lack of foresight at least as impressively as their democratically accountable counterparts.
It is often pointed out in discussions about the relative merit of democracies and so-called “enlightened” dictatorships, that democratic governments tend to ignore long-term threat mitigation in favour of pandering to the electorate to ensure electoral majorities. Democratically elected governments, so the argument goes, have little incentive to expend resources on fighting inconspicuous but potentially disruptive threats such as Covid-19, because such measures would only translate to electoral success in the unlikely event of such a crisis occurring within that electoral cycle. History has proven this argument wrong time and again, but a brief look at the various responses to the current Coronavirus outbreak suffices to illustrate that prudent governance is not limited to authoritarian systems.
While China has already declared victory over the virus, the credibility of government communications is questionable to say the least: having hushed up the outbreak in late 2019, the official number of fatalities reported by the Chinese authorities is now subject to serious doubts[3]. The authoritarian system’s supposed effectiveness might after all be most evident in its control of the media narrative rather than in the implementation of lifesaving measures. It is only natural that the Chinese Communist Party focused on containing both the spread of the truth and that of the disease, since its legitimacy depends heavily on being seen to deliver positive outcomes. The democratic West however, need not be tempted to copy the response of a system that treats truth itself as a type of viral disease.
In fact, the effectiveness of government policies seems to depend greatly on the degree to which governments are trusted to be truthful. Governments that trusted citizens to deal with sober truths, such as the severity of the disease or the uncertainty involved in dealing with an unprecedented challenge, laid the foundation for relationships of trust between themselves and the population. Playing down dangers, communicating false confidence or even covering up deaths are political tactics that sacrifice human lives for short-term party-political interest. Strong relationships of trust, on the other hand, can be relied on when governments pursuing policies informed by science communicated those clearly and coherently, thereby resulting in minimally invasive but maximally effective action.
While there are real examples of democratically elected governments exhibiting bad leadership, there is no necessary connection between democracy and bad governance. The crisis so far has instead demonstrated that while effectiveness depends on good leadership, healthy democracy and sound leadership go hand in hand.
This finding should move leaders to follow up any exit from the current shutdown with similarly sober assessments of what needs to be done in order to ensure radically improved resilience going forward. Any exit strategy will need to be founded on clear principles and communicated to citizens, if it is to work out. The difficult balancing exercises involved in any such exits should not be hidden away from the public, but rather explained and justified. Citizens trust governments that are honest about uncertainty.
Ticking Bombs
Covid-19 is, like all crises, not merely a challenge, but also an opportunity to reassess. We need to ask ourselves which of our vital interests are, like our health-services, particularly vulnerable to disruption. Are coastal cities for example prepared to deal with the consequences of overshooting 1.5 degrees of global warming? Shouldn’t we, even if we were on course to achieve that target (and we aren’t) nevertheless undertake the necessary precautions, just in case our models fail to accurately reflect reality (as they frequently do)? Shouldn’t we make sure that our militaries are prepared for a variety of threats while simultaneously increasing the resilience of the domestic and international institutions that underpin peaceful cooperation? Considering the scale of the measures needed to cope with the risks posed by environmental degradation and a shifting geopolitical landscape, we cannot afford to wait.
It is on us to hold governments to account for failing to prepare. We need to make it crystal clear that we are not willing to continue being driven through the fog without our seatbelts on. If we learn to value resilience as individuals and societies, there might be a silver lining to this crisis after all.
[1] Yes, there apparently still are people being chased by tigers today. If you haven’t yet watched that Netflix series on the crazy world of exotic animal ownership in the US, you should do so asap.
[2] Despite early warnings by Nassim N. Taleb and Bill Gates:
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/asia/coronavirus-china.html
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