Covid-policies that fit your values — Part II

Again — an hour of writing, then I stop. I edit or revisit if someone points out a flaw or part that is confusing (there will be many).

There are different domains for understanding the world qua societies: through science, through art & entertainment, through ethics, through religion, …through governing. Cultures that devalue the latter cannot safeguard the former. Just as one values salt in cooking, some things need a lot of salt and other’s just a little, and different people have different preferences for how much salt one needs.

Governing is fundamental to our existence as group animals, born and raised, and as groups persist in environments, anticipating certain classes of events and not others, tapping into our knowledge and experiences, but just as much our values.

For our values are central not just to what we attend — they are also central in how we relate to others of our group; they form part of how we coordinate our thoughts, perceptions and actions together. Anything that we accept as as group that runs counter to our values. Naturally, today’s society contain any different groups with different value-sets, and members of those groups can identify with different groups as well, including their values, bringing in questions of loyalty (as anyone knows who brings their new girlfriend to their parents house for the first time).

In Part one, I argued that there is no point to accepting a policy that is counter to one’s societies’ values, and above I’ve added this is complicated by the fact that societies do not contain just one set of values, so that it becomes very difficult to select policies that make everybody happy. One problem in today’s world that perhaps relates to this inability to please, however, is that many people have adopted a stance that is not a value, but fundamentally negative: governing itself is suspicious. This is a corrosive attitude, for without governing, there is no adjustment of groups to their environments, and ultimately no scaffolding of the capacities that allow an ethical disposition, a scientific practice, or an artistic expression to flourish. So before we return to the question of how a policy fits the values one has settled within one’s institutions as pressing constraints, I’d like to express my concern that the deeper rot lies in not valuing governing at all, and consequently not attending to it, eroding the capacities to anticipate, as a society. It is not surprising perhaps that we see this cynical attitude appear in the online utterances of people that suggest a superficial libertarian or superficial totalitarian ordering of society. It is telling that such people put little expense in their efforts, for both those extremes are similarly naive and lazy, a turning away from the world and the spontaneity of thought and action that must be fostered as groups to retain our societal capacities. I will not deal with the causes of this, for I don’t understand them. What I do wish to express is that one can be sincere in one’s valuation of governing, and within that find very different orderings that result in fine ways of living and working together, so that we do not have to unsettle values unless as a last resort (which is a judgement call for the people who possess those values, and not for outsiders). Similarly, there are many different beautiful, pleasant, functional styles of houses, but one needs a house with skilled attention to architecture and engineering.

Returning to the question of COVID 19-responses, the criticisms reserved for ones’ country or for other countries is primarily one on how serious the culture values governing. For if it does so, it would more easily find ways that congrue with itself to tackle a problem. The sincerity towards governing as a way for society to understand the world implies the primacy of self-knowledge of which I spoke in the previous post. After all, it is only when one is sincere that one starts to attend to one’s self and brings one’s self into integrity with one’s actions and the feedback the surroundings provide. Hence such self-knowledge trumps the qualities of a particular policy path, but such self-knowledge will not arise if one takes a cynical view upon one’s self. That many societies have a cynical view of their own capacity to govern is understandable, but also self-perpetuating. Again, online discourse is telling: instead of sincere thought on how to govern ourselves, the points are scored by in-group signalling via complaints, undeserved virtue, irony, sarcasm, and nihilism (memes are impressive tools for this). Sadly, many people who are intelligent or pursue philosophy as a profession engage in the same behavior, even if their wit is a bit more sophisticated. Nothing about these utterances is constructive, because nothing is neutral, it is destructive. Their utterances tie to the things they complain about, make fun about, or resign towards, and thereby reproduce and amplify them.

But within the class of people who do take governing seriously, who are constructive and problem-solving in spirit, and who are empathic with the turmoil that we find ourselves in, there are also those who cannot grasp that no policy will work if it does not congrue with the governing capacity that is already present. For example, they may reason from abstract concepts or formalism, and their conclusions thus also work only in the abstract. Admittedly, these two features (eroded capacity from cynisim and misfit) can combine and complicate each other and provide for confusion in diagnosis: does the policy fail because the capacity is insufficient? Or does it fail because the people are not so disposed? To take an example from another domain, if the World Bank tries to get policies implemented in a developing country, is it lack of capacity or disposition that complicates the matter? Anyone with experience in such settings knows one has to grasp the disposition first, before capacity may be developed, and only then policies may be found that are beneficial.

Problems that involve natural phenomena are particular treacherous. It invites the thought that what holds in one country must hold in another. And it invites the thought that the sole person to consult, or at least the person whose information must dominate and decide, is the specialist of the natural phenomenon. Thus floods here, are like floods there, the Covid-19 virus in the Netherlands is the same as in New Zealand, and the civil engineer or epidemiologist is only serious go to point. This attitude hides the fact that the attentive patterns of these experts are themselves acculturated, including the acculturation that has resulted from the cosmopolitan practice of academia. But more importantly, it does not point our attention to the right matter: that to understand the world through governing is to bring one’s society into accordance with it, and that this requires a reverse engineering from implementation within one’s social arrangement *in addition* to the understanding of the natural phenomenon. Indeed, some COVID-19 policies need only minimal scientific understanding, if at all, to conceive and implement.

Framing the matter as a decision-problem, we might take a policymaker as an agent who has a subset of optional policies given his constraints in a larger set of possible policies. These optional policies will interact with possible states of the world, of which only a subset is conceivable. The policymaker thus has to deal with irreducible ignorance as well as uncertainty on whether his policy will broadly have desirable effects. For many cultures the full admission of irreducible ignorance is already a problem, which means that policies that are built from the presumption that the future cannot be known are already unpalatable. This is a great shame of course, because such an admission would sometimes be nearer to the facts and result in better policies. It would make us much more careful, for example, in our messing with mother nature. And we might see that nuclear reactors would be built deep under ground. But such is idle talk. For such cultures find irreducible ignorance uncomfortable knowledge (in the late Steve Rayner’s words) that they must deny and plaster over with the acceptable terms risk (as a limited set of possible pathways with judgements on their likelihood) and uncertainty (as a set of limited possible pathways).

There are other things that a culture cannot admit, and since these things are not admitted, policies that depend on their admission cannot succeed. A culture that cannot admit to itself that people have only a degree of agency, for example, will foster policies that favor sovereign individuals, and must disfavor policies that grant people just a very limited degree of agency. If China welds the doors of people infected with COVID-19, such is unacceptable for the US, regardless of it being effective. At the same time, the US (or my country) struggles with the dissonance of ascribing full agency to people and seeing that it is impossible for people as a whole to keep their distance, to wash their hands, to experience the pandemic as urgent. Such denials thus hang together with one’s values, and for this reason every value, held up and applaudable for its laudable effects, has its shadow. Finding policy-fit thus requires self-knowledge as much on what one prides oneself on as on what one is afraid to admit.

Well, this was another hour of writing, but it seems I am not done. So, there will be a part III.