Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth-century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard. Science enables the holders of power to realize their purposes more fully than they could otherwise do. If their purposes are good, this is a gain; if they are evil, it is a loss. In the present age, it seems that the purposes of the holders of power are in the main evil, in the sense that they involve a diminution, in the world at large, of the things men are agreed in thinking good. Therefore, at present, science does harm by increasing the power of rulers. Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head.
Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action. It has given communities more power to indulge their collective passions, but, by making society more organic, it has diminished the part played by private passions. Men's collective passions are mainly evil; far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry directed towards other groups. Therefore at present all that gives men power to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization.- The quotes - you'll recognize them* - are from Bertrand Russell's 1924 book, Icarus Or The Future Of Science.
- And why this time do you bring them in?
- As the country in lockdown debates how we are to balance the benefits of fewer deaths with the economic and social costs of closed businesses and confinement within one's house, we are leaving out the cost of putting the power of using social technology in the hands of our leaders.
- By social technology you mean things like the lockdown, social distancing, compulsory wearing of masks.
- Yes.
- If the economic costs of the lockdown are closed and bankrupted small businesses, and tens of millions newly unemployed, and the social costs include domestic violence, stressful isolation and fear of the future, what are the costs you expect from use of social technology?
- Russell said it: increase in the use of power by our leaders to do evil.
- How?
- Giving individuals and small business little or nothing, while bailing out large corporations that much better, considering their incompetence, would have been allowed to go through reorganization in the bankruptcy process, many of which had their hand out more desperately because had borrowed large amounts of money they used to drive up their stock price by buying back their own stock, - these corporations bailed out with an amount equal to one entire year's budget of the United States government, or if you prefer, one quarter of the entire economy for a year, one quarter of the gross national product. And that is just the beginning.
- Go on.
- We can divide the countries of the world we are in closest contact with into two classes: those that acted quickly and were able to contain their outbreaks pretty much completely, with relatively few deaths, and those countries that waited to act until the virus had already widely spread through their population. Total deaths in the late to respond world are in the low to mid tenths of one tenth percent, varying between countries, but including Sweden, whose social distancing rules are mostly voluntary. The United States is up to about 3 tenths of one tenth percent so far (that is, three one-hundredths of one percent, about one out of 3,000). Out of this group of countries, the subset of those countries where the epidemic developed first, deaths are now declining, an indication the epidemic (at least in these countries) is winding down.** For the 12 weeks the epidemic was strongest in the U.S. the number of deaths per week increased on the average from 60,000 to 72,000, an increase of about 20%.**
- Are you suggesting that the social distancing was unnecessary?***
- No, I'm suggesting that making the rules law was unnecessary and extremely dangerous.
- Dangerous because they are social technology that puts power in the hands of a sort of people, our leaders, who are sure to use it to no good.
- Yes.
- The bailout of big business and abandonment of individuals to unemployment and small business to bankruptcy will insure the increase of monopoly.
- And monopoly, with mass unemployment, will result in lower wages, lesser or no benefits, poorer workplace safety. The administration has already halted all enforcement of environmental regulations, after having undermined the functioning of regulatory offices, leaving many posts unfilled, including infamously those agencies and offices with the job of managing epidemics. Even if the government's response to the epidemic had not been so pitiful, the existing poor health of the people would likely have resulted in more deaths than in other countries. Much of that poor health can be attributed to stress from economic insecurity leading to drug addictions and obesity, to adulterated foods, to environmental pollution, all certain now to increase with monopolization and deregulation. Death of what percentage of the population do you think these consequences will account for?
- Life expectancy in the US is going down, presently 78 and a half years, with the US number 46 in the world, and Hong Kong number one with an average life span of 86 years. What do you think? How much of that difference is due to our greater economic stress and environmental pollution you say are certain now to increase?
- I don't know. But we are talking about not tenths of a tenth of one percent of the population dying prematurely, but whole percentage points. Do you agree?
- I do.
- Putting the power to exercise social technology in the hands of our dangerous leaders has perhaps saved a few tenths of one tenth percent of the population - and perhaps not - at the cost of, without significant reversal of direction, many times as many deaths to be expected in the future.
Further Reading:
Totalitarianism & The Lesser Evil
Watch:
The Corporate Bailout
_______________________
* The Future Of Science
** Excess Deaths
*** See: Professor Sunetra Gupta: The Epidemic Is On Its Way Out ( Freddie Sayers):
'It’s the biggest question in the world right now: is Covid-19 a deadly disease that only a small fraction of our populations have so far been exposed to? Or is it a much milder pandemic that a large percentage of people have already encountered and is already on its way out? If Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College is the figurehead for the first opinion, then Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, is the representative of the second. Her group at Oxford produced a rival model to Ferguson’s back in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate may be as low as 0.01%. Since then, we have seen various antibody studies around the world indicating a disappointingly small percentage of seroprevalence — the percentage of the population has the anti-Covid-19 antibody. It was starting to seem like Ferguson’s view was the one closer to the truth. But, in her first major interview since the Oxford study was published in March, Professor Gupta is only more convinced that her original opinion was correct. As she sees it, the antibody studies, although useful, do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity. First, many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable” and rely on hard-to-achieve representative groups. But more important, many people who have been exposed to the virus will have other kinds of immunity that don’t show up on antibody tests — either for genetic reasons or the result of pre-existing immunities to related coronaviruses such as the common cold. The implications of this are profound – it means that when we hear results from antibody tests (such as a forthcoming official UK Government study) the percentage who test positive for antibodies is not necessarily equal to the percentage who have immunity or resistance to the virus. The true number could be much higher. Observing the very similar patterns of the epidemic across countries around the world has convinced Professor Gupta that it is this hidden immunity, more than lockdowns or government interventions, that offers the best explanation of the Covid-19 progression:
“In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.”Asked what her updated estimate for the Infection Fatality Rate is, Professor Gupta says, “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so I think it would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.” That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%. Professor Gupta also remains openly critical of the Government lockdown policy:
“The Government’s defense is that this [the Imperial College model] was a plausible worst case scenario. I agree it was a plausible — or at least a possible — worst case scenario. The question is, should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting, that case is becoming more and more fragile.”She recommends “a more rapid exit from lockdown based more on certain heuristics, like who is dying and what is happening to the death rates”. She does not believe that the R rate is a useful tool in making decisions about government policies, as an R rate is “principally dependent on how many people are immune” and we don’t have that information. She believes that deaths are the only reliable measure, and that the number of cases should not even be presented as it is so reliant on the amount of testing being done. She explains the flare-ups in places like New York, where the IFR seems to have been higher than 0.1%, through a combination of circumstances leading to unusually bad outbreaks, including the infection load and the layout of the population:
“When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn’t if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population.”She believes that longer-term lockdown-style social distancing makes us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to infectious diseases, because it keeps people unprotected from pathogens:
“Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”
Commenting on the Government response to the virus, she suggests it erred on the side of over-reaction not under-reaction:
“I think there’s a chance we might have done better by doing nothing at all, or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable, to have thought about protecting the vulnerable 30 or 40 years ago when we started cutting hospital beds. The roots of this go a long, long way back.”And she believes it is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine, but accepts that is hard to prove with the current evidence:
“So what do we do? I think we weigh that strong possibility against the costs of lockdown. I think it is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population.”
On the politics of the question, Professor Gupta is clear that she believes that lockdowns are an affront to progressive values:
“So I know there is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown have had our voices added to that libertarian harangue. But the truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries. It’s a very serious crisis.”'
