Things have changed.
It’s a simple statement that is always true. But the real questions are:
how much?
in what ways?
For almost all of history, the answer to #1 has been, “not much.” But in the last 100 years or so, things have changed insanely fast. More than we, as a species, have evolved to understand.
Which makes COVID-19 interesting, because disease is something we have evolved to deal with. Plagues are a recurrent feature of human history and it’s only been in the last 100 years or -- and then only in the 1st World -- that you could expect not to have to truly suffer the ravages of disease. Both culture and evolution have provided us with deep structures to cope with disease. And I don’t think you can understand what’s going on right now without doing some serious thinking about Mark Shaller’s work on the Behavioral Immune System.
Another outcome of behavioral immune system activity is prejudice and stereotyping of outgroup members. Individuals at higher risk of pathogen infection are more likely to stigmatize other individuals possessing cues of disease, real or perceived.[44][61][62][63][64][28][65]
The disease–avoidant processes that characterize the behavioral immune system have been shown to contribute to prejudices against obese individuals, elderly individuals, and people with physical disfigurements or disabilities.[66][67][27] In addition, the behavioral immune system appears to contribute to xenophobia and ethnocentrism.[64][68] This can be seen among pregnant women, which face higher infection-related vulnerability, that express an increase ethnocentric views.[68] These attitudes might function as a way to avoid people with new pathogens or practices that local practices are unsuited to manage.[26] One implication is that these prejudices tend to be exaggerated under conditions in which people feel especially vulnerable to the potential transmission of infectious diseases.
While it’s not the only conclusion of his work, I think you read it right if you get that prejudice can and almost certainly has conferred an evolutionary advantage at some point in history. And what better way to describe the polarization we see right now than exaggerated prejudices under conditions when people feel especially vulnerable to the potential transmission of infectious diseases.
And it is precisely because of these exaggerated prejudices that I must start my ideas about how stories about COVID are working with this extended disclaimer.
Disclaimer
I am not an expert on infectious diseases. Based on how accurate forecasts and predictions about how COVID have been, I think all of us (epidemiologists included) have overestimated the quality of human knowledge regarding epidemics. But just like you go to war with the army you have, we can only struggle through with the knowledge we have. Pay the epidemiologists more and demand more from them and we will get better science.
So please don’t let any mistake about disease derail you from my points about story. I don’t pretend to know what the best thing to do is. Nor am I trying to change anyone’s mind, I’m just trying to point out some things about this moment that I have noticed.
My bias is to err on the side of as few restrictions on individual liberty as possible because no matter how bad you think a disease might be, tyranny is worse. One of the leading causes of death in the 20th century was governmental action. World War II killed 85 million people (troops and civilians), but genocides and purges in the 20th century killed another 112 million. (And that’s using the low estimate of China’s great leap forward.)
Rudolph Rummel thinks governmental action was the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide I think you can easily make this happen by how you define non-natural death, but it’s a hell of a thing to think about and I think serves to make my point.
But with all that said, do I know where to balance the good of the individual and the collective in a crisis? Nope. I do not. On my best days, I’m just a good writer. And on my worst days, I’m blocked and frustrated and somewhat unbearable to be around.
THE IDEA
I think we’re never getting rid of fearful stories about disease. Whether or not we get rid of COVID, “COVID” the entire complex of stories, punditry and acrimony about the disease itself may never go away.
This is because we are uniquely susceptible to the kind of stories COVID-like emergencies generate. Whatever you think of the disease itself, information networks clearly have made us susceptible to stories that are (or appear to be)
driven by “data”
incite fear
create the feeling that the reader or viewer that they are smarter than people they don’t like.
MORAL SUPERIORITY AS A DRUG
Everybody has a highly partisan friend. (In fact, you dear reader may be one of my highly partisan friends. Do not let what I say next trouble you. I love you anyway, life is short and neither of us can really do anything about any of this.) The Red Team hates the Blue Team, the Blue Team hates the Red Team. I can agree with either sentiment. Those teams are both terrible. But as soon as it becomes, we’re so much better than they are, I have to disagree. (Just once, and not vehemently, I no longer try to convince people of things unless I’m getting paid for it.) Because both teams are pretty horrible.
That feeling of purity or righteousness has become an addiction in the internet age. And no matter who you are, every threat-assessment story has huge potential to generate that hit of moral superiority. Because no matter what you believe, you can easily say one of two things:
These people are so dumb, they’re just overreacting!
These people aren’t reacting enough. Look at how stupid they are!
FEAR
We’re wired to share threats and outrage, so fear goes viral easier than most things. And if you scratch the surface of most popular things, you’ll find fear or physical harm or social shame right beneath the surface. You’ve watched a fail video and even though people laugh, it’s not because it’s funny exactly. They are fascinating because we are trying to avoid novel and spectacular harm. As I’ve grown older I’ve developed a simple, two-part heuristic that saves me from needing to watch fail videos:
Avoid skateboards
When drinking, enforce a strict speed limit of 3 mph.
Any story about a potential plague triggers fear. And rightly so. How freaked out should we be about a new infectious disease? Nobody knows for sure. Which leads right back to the point about righteousness as a drug. Add in a dash of Dunning-Kruger and viola, the stew is perfect!(ly horrible!)
DRIVEN BY DATA or “DATA”
Statistics and probability are two things that we are extraordinarily bad at understanding. It takes training, because, especially with probability, our instincts are often wrong. We easily underestimate the impact and frequency of very rare extreme events (Black Swans) and have a hard time understanding unusual but perfectly natural distributions. (Fat Tails, for one)
But that’s not even my point here. We get spun up by things we can measure, even if those measurements are irrelevant. And we can measure more now than at any other time in human history. Here’s an example.
The EPA measures contaminants in wastewater from manufacturing operations. The sensors are so fine that if you have a factory and you run perfectly clean water through copper pipes and then out of your facility, it will fail the EPA’s test and you will get fined. Then you will have to take steps to remove the trace amounts of copper from the water before it leaves your facility. But, if you have copper pipes in your home, it’s not only fine to go in a municipal sewer, it’s perfectly safe to drink.
So why the disparity? It’s because where we once could only measure contamination in parts per million, now we can do so in parts per billion or even parts per trillion. We can now see it, so we can, rightly or wrongly, perceive it as a threat.
Just the ability to track a new strain of a virus in more or less real-time as it spreads through a population is driving us nuts. It’s scary, because we haven’t ever seen it before. And I think if we had named and tracked new strains of flu, it also would have freaked us out. DATA!
But how frightened should we be of a new strain of flu? If you say not at all, you’re wrong. The flu kills lots of people. We’re just used to that data and death toll. But it’s hard to see how ‘desensitized’ is the correct response to any threat.
It’s like the recent trend of naming winter storms. A hurricane is a serious threat. A bad snowstorm is not trivial, but it’s not going to rip your house from its very foundations. Can we always use fear + data to generate a clickbaity news story? Lately, the answer is a resounding yes.
CONCLUSION
There’s a lot of money in what Facebook (and other socials) do. So there are huge incentives to generate narratives that use fear and self-righteousness to generate clicks. This insight should be news to nobody. But I think it means we’re living through two simultaneous plagues.
One is a plague of biology and the other is a plague of narrative. And helps me to be calm and sane when I can untangle them from each other.
We may reach herd immunity for COVID, but I’m not seeing any way the majority of people reach herd immunity from the plague of narrative in a short amount of time. Future generations might become immune, just as we’re all largely immune to a three-card monte con, but as a population, we seem to learn slowly.
What I’m not seeing is a vaccine against a plague of narrative. Not clearly articulated and widely distributed. And perhaps that’s what I’m fumbling towards in this post. What do you think?
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I’m still making great progress on the final installment of How To Succeed in Evil — Now with the working title, “The Ascent of Edwin Windsor”. More on that in this post - An End to Evil in Our Time