BEHIND THE MASK, September 9: You Are Not Stupid, This is Not Normal
BEHIND THE MASK, September 9: You Are Not Stupid, This is Not Normal
Ed Yong is a first class science writer; his pieces for the Atlantic on the virology and epidemiology of covid have become must-reads. But the acuteness of his observations regarding human behavior in the context of institutions, systems, and societies leaves something to be desired.
His recent Atlantic essay purports to catalog various sorts of cognitive biases and misbehaviors perpetrated by individuals and society. People behave badly, is his claim; individual failures sum to group failures.
Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped . They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. This phenomenon is called the death spiral . I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
I am not a sociologist and do not pretend to be one. However, I am a primary care doctor, and through a bit of reading and observations of how patients are blamed in the midst of social and economic strictures conditioned by failed political systems, it’s evident that we search for individual predictors of behavior when the causes are much greater.
Yong talks about “magical thinking” but I have found very few people who engage in this sort of thinking, whatever that might be if ever well characterized. It reminds me of doctors who blame patients for “not understanding” just how bad hypertension can make things. Patients, and people in general, engage in decision making of a sort familiar to all of us. It is sometimes pragmatic, sometimes idealistic, but always linked in some fashion to their own preferences.
People weigh decisions. People have a sense of risks and benefits. People often lack knowledge, but the addition of a tincture of knowledge, titrated in by outside parties, do not realign people’s preferences as much as we might think or hope. We fail to recognize the larger systems that constrain people’s decision making.
Both Yong, and — a strange bedfellow — Ross Douthat managed to find their way to an observation which I think very relevant.
In his recent essay’s final paragraph, Yong wonders whether covid will become “the new normal.”
Somewhere in his Twitter thread of today, in which Douthat ventures that the covid response of the US is actually average if one “steps back from deaths,” he mentioned in passing that we have never been good at large government interventions anyway.
The two observations align. As individuals, we can strive for our desires, we can do what we are able to do.
But normality is a cultural and political judgment, imagining individuals as nothing more than Turing machines with an added error function. There is so much relegated to the normal, the is taken as an ought, that might be differently envisioned if individual choice and flourishing are enabled.
We can try and achieve solidarity. We can organize towards fulfilling and refining a more democratic polity.
When I had small kids, I loved Dr. Spock’s plain spoken adage: “You know more than you think you do.” We all make mistakes, but cognition is not what we should be judged by. We have preferences we can act on if allowed to do so, if not prejudged as stupid and if our societal inequities are not dismissed as normal.
