Читать книгу The Case for Democracy in the COVID-19 Pandemic - David Seedhouse Dr. - Страница 11

This book was written quickly and is intended to be read quickly. I began writing in mid-March and submitted the manuscript at the end of May. While the story of the pandemic will be dated by the time you read it, this strange episode in human history has brought fundamental issues in psychology, risk, public health, ethics and democracy into sharp focus. As these are explained in the following pages, their enduring relevance to social organisation, planning and citizen engagement is made clear.

Originally the book was to be called A Viral Imbalance. Like many other observers I was struck – and personally disturbed – by what I saw as a one-eyed approach to a novel infectious disease. Governments around the world were imposing radical lockdowns of their populations, ordering rather than advising the public to stay at home, giving us limited information, and not consulting us in any way. An inevitable and entirely foreseeable consequence of this was severe economic difficulty for millions, the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs; anxiety, depression, domestic violence and a fearful, intimidated public. How could preventing one problem be so much more important than all the other problems the prevention was bound to cause?

Why was this virus such a threat when the evidence from data centres was that while contagious, it could be managed by protecting the most vulnerable of us? Why was so much faith placed on speculative, hypothetical models of the course of the contagion? Why were only a few scientists, doctors, civil servants, and politicians making the decisions? What was driving them? What were their justifications? From where did their moral authority derive?

Many of the questions, directly and indirectly, are about control: controlling the virus, controlling ‘the people', and people controlling each other.

Why were so many decision-makers so readily ignoring centuries of hard-won civil freedoms? Why were the public so accepting of the restrictions? Where was the discussion of ethics and human rights? Why were we so easily controlled and why were our controllers so willing to do it?

Whatever happened to critical thinking?

As an inquisitive human being, knocked off balance like everyone else, I desperately needed to try to understand what was going on. My first instinct was that there was a kind of madness abroad which had infected almost everyone. Not just we citizens, but our rulers too. At a stroke everything normal was turned upside down and distorted. Strangely, many people not only seemed not to mind, but welcomed the radical restrictions we were told were necessary.

Most of us were obviously scared. Understandably, people wanted to feel safe. But the fact that so many of us would accept almost any sacrifice to ‘beat the virus’ astounded me.

As I have researched and thought about what has happened, I have found I both understand more and understand less. I understand that the human reaction was, up to a point, predictable to those knowledgeable about risk, psychology, and social amplification. But I do not fully understand the widespread acceptance of wide and diverse negative consequences, the willingness of people to be so readily manipulated, or the logic of the disproportionate response to the problem. I cannot see past the thought that the effect of the virus itself is far less damaging that the skewed human answer to it.

I am aware of my own biases. I am a natural rebel and would have been astonished had I not had my instinctive reaction. But I have not knowingly tried to prove my beliefs. I have examined the evidence as open-mindedly as I could. I appreciate the awful effect the disease has had on many thousands of people. I have been shocked to the core by the suspicion and terror in so many people's eyes. Yet however I look at it, I find imbalance.

Most but not all my research relates to the UK, where I was locked down, like 70 million others. Here, some human behaviours have been nothing short of bizarre. Each day brings fresh incongruity.

Over these past weird weeks police have arrested people simply for driving around on their own (1), have forced householders to leave their own gardens (2), searched supermarket bags to check for non-essential items, and in Derbyshire have even dyed a blue lagoon black to stop tourism (3). Hotels, hostels, B&Bs and more remain closed (May 28th). Domestic abuse is ‘skyrocketing’ (4,5). And early in the UK, for three weeks or so, toilet roll, pasta, and paracetamol were like gold dust.

In mid-May, an Amsterdam restaurant began sitting customers in rather cheap mini-greenhouses so they could eat their dinner safely, a tragi-comic strategy which their fearful patrons seemed to think made sense (6), while in Worcester, UK, a café owner has invested in 35 shower curtains to protect his customers when – or perhaps more likely if – they return (7). And in London, for weeks park benches have been taped off like mini-crime scenes (8).

Animals continue to be farmed and abused as if no-one understands or cares about them, or the probable zoonotic cause of the pandemic (9), or the next one. ‘Experts’ regularly make contradictory predictions based on guesswork and unproven assumptions. Charts and statistics are presented in the news media as if they require no interpretation, and with little or no context. Basic civil liberties have been pushed aside without parliamentary approval and with no public debate. Churches and other places of worship are closed. Attendance at funerals is strictly limited – to ‘close family members’ in the UK at present (May 30th), and people are forbidden to hug each other, which is unbelievably cruel. Schools and universities, which should be bastions of critical thinking, were closed throughout April and May, despite (disputed) evidence that such closures have little effect. Countless thousands of people are supermarket shopping wearing facemasks and gloves, backing off as fellow human-beings approach.

Every day we get a head count of ‘new cases’ and graphs of ‘cumulative deaths', almost always with dramatic, scary imagery of police, doctors and nurses in hazmat suits, ambulances, emergency vehicles and sick people on stretchers. As public health Professor Allyson Pollock observed, ‘…it is a great pity that the government uses the death counts and the testing counts as a propaganda tool. … These data are unreliable when they are reported daily, and inaccurate…’ (10).

Wartime metaphors are everywhere in the UK: ‘frontline staff', ‘save our NHS', ‘your NHS needs you', ‘the NHS is rallying the troops for the war on coronavirus', ‘the invisible enemy'. NHS staff are forbidden to speak out: careless talk costs lives, your country needs you, stay at home for victory (11).

There is still (May 28th) hardly a focus on anything else. There is so much that could and should be reported on the front pages that is being ignored, or at least receives much less attention than the course of the virus: comparative death rates with the ‘flu; comparative death rates from other diseases where mortality is much higher, and is always much higher, year on year; chronic underfunding of health services; the effect on people's mental health; the effects of incarcerating and terrifying children; the funding of the news-media itself; the behaviour of large corporates which have brazenly jumped on the propaganda bandwagon to push their products. There's an endless list of topics at least as important as the pandemic, yet for weeks we have heard of little else.

Every major decision and every policy have been based on hypothetical models, not scientific truths. Different models present different scenarios. Most governments have assumed the worst, when the evidence from every country is that ‘the worst’ is not happening. No-one really knows what's going on, but it is at least clear that dire predictions of spiralling ‘exponential’ contagion have not happened. And they have not happened whether the country is Spain or Sweden, where quite different strategies have been used: complete lockdown in the former and personal choice to try to avoid infection in the other.

Were journalists to be calm, were they to report figures soberly, accurately and comparatively, were they to cast doubt on the claims of policy-makers and decision-makers, they would be providing a public service, offering balance and allowing people to think: if 800,000 suicides are not an emergency why are 370,000 deaths associated with, but not provably caused by, COVID-19 an ‘unprecedented crisis'?

As my research has progressed, I have increasingly focused on the psychology of the episode. It has seemed the only way to get a foothold. It does not provide all the answers, but it does explain some of the uneven human reaction. When this is placed alongside careful consideration of the narrow-minded behaviour of some scientists and public health officials, the striking lack of ethical reflection all round, and the continuing lack of access to proper democratic channels for ordinary citizens, this series of unfortunate events becomes just a little more explicable, though the reasons why so much has become so unbalanced so quickly remains a mystery to me.

The emergence of a novel coronavirus is not the fault of government and its advisers. It is popularly assumed that the virus originated in bats, but like almost everything else in the pandemic no-one knows for sure (12). But however it came to infect humans – even if as seems likely it was from our relentless abuse of animals – no scientist, politician or policy-maker can be blamed for it directly. Nevertheless, there are profoundly serious questions our leaders do need to answer.

What started out as a need to understand extraordinary events has slowly become something else. The more I have begun to understand, the more I have found myself asking personal questions. The most important of which was, and is: do I want to live like this?

My answer, increasingly, day by day, has been: no. I don't want to live in a society where I have no meaningful say in what happens to me. I don't want to be locked down and prevented from seeing my daughters in New Zealand indefinitely. I don't want to be governed by a political elite with values I don't share. I don't want to live in a society where the only view of health is that it is the opposite of disease, as a presumed fact. I don't want to live in a society where people's view of risk can be so easily distorted by propaganda that they are scared to death of something that is unlikely to hurt them. I don't want to live in a society where the politician I helped elect to represent my views can vote for exactly the opposite in parliament. Nor do I want to live in a society obsessed with living at any cost.

I want to live in a society where people are encouraged and supported to think for themselves. Where journalists see their work as not merely to report, or comment, but to educate and encourage reflection, rather than an instant emotional reaction. I want to live in a society where I can encourage others to grow. I want to live in a society where I can contribute and where there are ways where my views can count and can have an impact. I want to live in a society where quality of life is more important than clinging to the perch whatever the price. And I want to live in a society where there is real democracy, rather than the sham we are continually persuaded is the least-worst option (13).

What started out as a need to make sense of other people's decisions has slowly turned into a protest.

There you have it. This book is a protest. It is a reasoned, researched, calm and measured protest, but a protest it most certainly is. It's a call to action too. If you agree with only a fraction of my case for democracy, please join me and others, help us to massively expand our decision-making processes and involvement, and create a world where everyone, no matter what their circumstances or social standing, can have a meaningful say in what we do to it and to each other.