Life in the Pandemic XIII: Living, doing and knowing……

Here in the England’s northwest, the second wave has well and truly arrived. In Liverpool, our cases and hospitalisations are up and rising, and we have just had new restrictions imposed on us. I have discussed modelling and predictions previously, but we didn’t need a model to predict the predicament we now face. In the Spanish ‘flu pandemic of 1918/19 there are reckoned to have been three waves, with later waves more deadly than the first. Talk of the second wave of COIVD19 has been around since the early summer. In France case numbers began to climb in early August, and deaths (still mercifully low) in September. In Spain it was slightly earlier (and may be receding now). The actual number of cases detected is not the key statistic to focus on because it depends on the testing regime, but the trajectory is clear enough (you can see the relevant plots in the Worldometer Coronavirus site). But, given we’re now into month nine of the pandemic (if we assume it started for real in February), and given the effort that has gone into learning about this new virus, why are we again on the verge of major lockdowns, with all the misery and damage such a state of affairs implies?

It’s not that we haven’t learned anything. The spread of the virus has been followed and probed and information about how transmissible it is has been gleaned. Spread is not just dependant on the properties of the virus, but on the characteristics of the populations exposed to it. But this too is increasingly well understood. How the virus is spread, how long it can survive in the air and on surfaces, have also been the subject of study and debate. And of course who is likely to (and not likely to) get seriously ill, be hospitalised, need ventilation and in some cases die, is now better understood. There are now treatment options available to combat both the virus and its effects, which of course the President of the United States recently availed himself of. All of this hopefully means that in second and subsequent waves, fewer will die than in the first wave, at least proportionately. We are about to find out. And on the horizon there are multiple vaccines, although decent evidence of their efficacy is still not available, and their arrival is not certain.

Perhaps more important than all of this is that we’ve known for months how to combat the virus, and its spread, in inexpensive, simple and effective ways. These are methods that almost all of us are capable of adopting, and in practical terms they don’t interfere too much with all the things we all have to do day to day in our daily lives. Currently in the UK they can be summarised using the Government mantra of “hands, face, space”. Frequent handwashing, wearing facemasks and keeping a reasonable distance between folk from different households, if followed by most of us, would have perhaps saved thousands of lives in the first wave (when effective treatments were still being developed), would have prevented the expected second wave (probably), and could still save thousands of lives now that we are in the midst of the second wave. At least in the UK these measures remain relatively uncontroversial, unlike in the US where they’ve got caught up in politics. So what’s the problem?

The problem is us, all of us. Most of us, as individuals, haven’t experienced the virus (yet). We may have heard of friends or family members who have experienced it first hand, but in many cases their experience was of a mild illness. And although daily cases in the tens of thousands sounds like a lot, it is a small proportion in a population of millions. And even this low level of actual experience is very patchy. The media have worked hard to expose us to the sights and sounds of the trouble the virus can cause. But this is relatively out of kilter with the lived experience of most of us, and comes from a media that various segments of the population distrust. Many appear just not to get it (as an example see this report). None of this is to deny the seriousness of the virus, or to in any way minimise the experience of those who have lost loved ones to it. There are far too many of them (more than there should have been). But it remains the case that this experience, horrible and tragic as it is, is a minority experience. And the problem is that we live in a culture which prioritises experience over knowledge. So while “science” is relatively clear, and the warnings that flow from it are fairly dire, many feel that none of this really applies to them. They will escape and don’t have to heed the warnings. Mask wearing and the rest of the actions they should take, don’t have to be taken too seriously. There isn’t really a need to err on the side of caution.

The problem then becomes one of compliance; we know what we should do, we know what the “scientists” say we should do. Their claim is that if we do these simple things across the population, there is abstract information showing that it will be a good thing and lives will be saved. But we just don’t do it.  Compliance falls. And it is always easier to blame others for the situation that results from this. “Others” may be culpable of course. Government may have been inconsistent, the elite may have got away with flouting rules, some of the modelling may have overstated the impact of the first wave, and all of the modelling comes with a degree of uncertainty. All this may be true, but while it may provide me with excuses for not doing what I should be doing (because it’s mildly inconvenient), none of these are reasons. Meantime, cases, hospitalisations and deaths all climb, although much of this was probably avoidable. My “truth”, what is true for me based on my actual experience, trumps the truth.

Given all of this, I find it completely understandable, that when I try to explain the existence of a whole other aspect of reality, folk are generally sceptical. I concede that the idea that a person who died a long time ago and a long way away has any relevance to anyone today is, on the face of it, far fetched. And as for the claim that the same person came back to life, and that His death and life have both personal and cosmic significance? Well I can see why this might not all compute. And of course, all of my evidence for this is beyond experience, and comes from an ancient book. All this in a culture that prioritises experience over truth. I see the problem.

Doesn’t mean it’s not all true of course.

Life in the pandemic I: The return of the experts….

It wasn’t that long ago that some were lamenting the death of reason and the revolt against experts. TV studios were filled with serious looking people trying to work out how it was possible for on the one hand Donald Trump to be elected in the United States and on the other the UK voting to leave the EU. Clearly, they intoned, the populus of both countries had taken leave of their senses. Expertise was under attack and ignorance was being encouraged, commended and rewarded. There was perhaps some truth in this.

Both experts and expertise came in for a bit of a kicking, particularly in the US. Experts formed a convenient target of course. This was partly because the terms were rarely clearly defined. Blame was attributed to an amorphous group, without examining too carefully if it was experts who were the problem, or the political decision makers. Many of the latter seemed unwilling to engage properly with a whole range of issues, inform themselves using appropriate expert input, and take and be accountable for the decisions that people elected them to take. In the UK we got into the Brexit mess (remember that?) partly because of this sort of political cowardice. A host of complex issues, requiring a range of expertise to unpack them, was boiled down to a binary choice and forced on a population that consistently claimed that it was generally ill-informed, and in some cases actively deceived. A proportion of the population appeared to be delighted with this general approach. On both sides of the Atlantic the notion gained traction that the experts had done too many of us no good at all. They were therefore of little value and could happily be dispensed with. How things have changed.

As I have pointed out before, there are many situations in life where we are happy and indeed obliged to depend on the expertise of others. I do not have the first notion about how to fly an aeroplane, but (until recently) I needed to use them from time to time. What to do? Well, fortunately for me there are experts in flying aeroplanes; they are called airline pilots. There used to be quite a lot of them flying aeroplanes with skill, and able to fly me safely from point A to point B. I was really glad to avail myself of their expertise. And not just theirs. It turns out that while they were using their expertise for my benefit, they in turn were depending on the expertise of lots of other people, like air traffic controllers, aircraft maintenance engineers, and a whole host of others. Together, all this expertise could safely transport me thousands of miles at a time. I was happy to trust them to do so. Clearly some experts have their uses.

Now we find ourselves in a situation where expertise turns out to be a matter of life and death, potentially for thousands. The centrality accorded to expertise in these pandemic days has been clear for all to see. At least in the UK great stress has been put on policy being informed by scientific and medical experts. Day after day the Prime Minister or other senior ministers have appeared flanked by experts to whom they constantly defer. Of course there could be a deep cynicism at work. It could be, and no doubt some will argue it is, simply the politicians using the claimed expertise of others as cover for them taking very unpopular decisions. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think that in life-critical situations, it turns out we have no problem taking experts and expertise seriously. This is our attitude in aeroplanes, and it appears to be our attitude in the pandemic. At least for the most part.

Perhaps the consistent undermining and downplaying of expertise is recent times explains why governments are finding that advice, sound advice based on science, is frequently being ignored. Just this week, it has been stressed just how important it is that in the current pandemic we socially isolate ourselves and not meet with others unless it is necessary. Other experts have told us that there is no necessity to panic buy and hoard foodstuffs and other thing (like toilet rolls - for reasons no-one seems able to fathom). And yet the flagrant disregarding of “advice” now means the state taking powers to enforce what the science says should be done. All over Europe, and now in the UK, there will be police (and in some places military) enforcement of the advice. Expertise is back, and with teeth.

It is still the case that not all expertise is the same and we need to understand some important distinctions.  For the appropriate expert, flying an aeroplane is a well constrained and defined task. While it is not true to say that there are no unknowables, there are relatively few. Do things in a certain way, in a certain order, and a safe flight will result – usually. “Usually” in this context means almost always; in 2018 there were only 0.36 fatal accidents per million flights. However, the expertise we’re depending on in the pandemic is different, although it is no less expertise. Here there are very many unknowns. We are dealing with a new virus and while information about it is accumulating, no one has anything like the full picture. So the scientific advice that decision-makers are relying upon is a best effort, based on the information to hand. And sometimes, experts looking at the same evidence may well interpret it in different ways. There are different models of how the virus is spreading, leading to different projections of how the pandemic may develop, and potentially different recommendations about the actions that should be taken to improve the situation. Then factor in that any advice issued has to be heard, understood and acted upon by millions of citizens. You can see how the unknowns in this situation rapidly multiply. But the experts and (in this case) their scientific methods are all we’ve got, and a lot better than the alternative - either doing nothing, or doing anything.

The experts have returned. Time to exercise a bit of faith; although let’s be clear – that’s what we’re doing. Putting our faith in experts and their expertise (again). And on a planetary scale.

Anarchy, order, science and (yes) Christianity…

I learned something today I would never have guessed: there's a thing called the “Informal Federation of Anarchists”. Who would have thought? Anarchists need organisation; apparently anarchy has its limits! They might rail against society, hierarchy, order, rules and the rest, but it turns out they’ve formed their own society (of sorts), and probably even have an implicit, if not an explicit, hierarchy. They have an order, and they consider some things to be acceptable, and some things not to be. They set boundaries, and have rules that you contravene at your peril. Indeed, I learned about the Informal Federation of Anarchists in a news story reporting that they had claimed to be behind the vadalisation of a car belonging to a person they accused of being a “snitch”. This is apparently behaviour beyond the pale, warranting action. A line had been crossed that they had drawn. Thus they have at least one rule (“snitching is bad”), and had taken action to enforce it. They don’t want no order, just not the kind of order they object to. Anarchism isn’t necessarily anarchy it would seem.

None of this is really such a great surprise, because the universe in which we find ourselves is ordered. Order is woven into its fabric, and into the fabric of every human being. It’s so much a part of us that we find it difficult to conceive of a different state of affairs. Mind you, the big advantage this brings is that because of this order, and because we are attuned to it, the universe and what it contains can be understood. It is knowable. And once we know enough we can manipulate and control it (at least in part) and make things more pleasant for ourselves. This is formalised in science, but it’s actually something we depend on every day. It allows us to make predictions and plans. It allows us to ignore whole swathes of regularity, and just concentrate on tricky and important decisions and alternatives. If we have to think carefully about everything we do, then we’d probably run out of processing capacity. As it is, we’ve got brain power to spare.

We take all this so much from granted that we rarely, if ever, think about it. Why are things like this, and not like something else? And what proof do we have that it really is like it is, has always been this way, and always will be? For a long time these were all non-questions. But some began to be troubled that we took so much on, well, faith. We just trusted that the sun would rise in the morning, we didn’t look for proof. Such rules as we did come up with to explain many of the regularities (like Newton’s laws) were descriptive. The processes which were used to establish such explanations seemed also to rest of foundations that were still implicitly about trust. Like trusting that things operated the same way everywhere (the principle of the uniformity of nature). They were not themselves provable.

It dawned on cosmologists and others that things have to be really finely tuned to allow life as we know it, including this kind of ordered life in an ordered universe. And it’s worth remembering that before that point it was rather assumed that life as we know it would exist in lots of places. All you needed was a planet rather than a star. Then it was noticed that said planet would have to be a certain distance from a certain kind of star. Then it turned out it would have to have a particular cosmological history and composition. And right down to the finest details of certain physical constants, things need to be tuned just so. It turned out that all of this had occurred; everything had been tuned up in one place, our little corner of the universe. But why?

Well it could all just be an entirely accidental series of coincidences. And that this is all so highly improbable that it has only happened in one place over one period time. So even if you could find some places where some things happed (like a planet with the right kind of orbit around the right kind of star), other things would not be right for life (either any form of life, or the kind of life we’re used to). Try as we might, life is so improbable, that it has only developed in one place (this is the sort of thing the eponymous Professor Dawkins has suggested). There is an alternative. Suppose that there is a God, who is a God of order, who brings into being a universe that reflects His character (this too is not a notion original to me). He continually acts to sustain that order both in the physical realm and beyond (eg in the social and moral realms). Such a God need not necessarily be knowable in and of Himself. But His activity would leave indelible fingerprints on the Universe. It would have that character of order and knowability. But precisely because it is knowable, He would therefore be knowable in at least some ways. At least we would know about Him. But it also strikes me as reasonable to expect that He might actually want to provide additional means such that He might not just be knowable in this passive and distant sense, but to be known. He might reveal something about Himself, so He could be known in the sense of relationship.

It turns out that order may be really significant. The Informal Federation of Anarchists tells us something pretty basic about me, you and the Universe we find ourselves in.

Faith and aeroplanes

Every year the eye and vision science community (or at least a fairly large proportion of it) decamps to the United States for the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. This year I combined this trip with a quick visit to colleagues in Athens, Georgia. So I had to get on an aeroplane in Manchester and fly to Atlanta, then a few days later get on another one and fly to Seattle via Phoenix, Arizona, and about a week after that fly to New York and then back to Manchester. All of this was booked using the interweb or some such. Indeed, before I arrived at any airport, I parted with a large sum of cash (actually I trusted various electronic systems about which I know nothing to move money from my credit card account, to the account of various commercial organisation) trusting that when I turned up at the airport (or the hotel in Athens, or the apartment in Seattle) they would actually know who I was and let me use their services.

Let’s focus in on that first flight from Manchester to Atlanta. I did no investigation of any of the principles of aeronautical engineering, the mastering of which I was relying to keep the aircraft in the air. I exercised implicit trust (or faith) in the aircraft designers and manufacturers, trusting that they had known what they were doing when they designed and built that particular plane. This despite the fact that I know they have occasionally got things wrong in the past. Neither did I investigate the people who were using the presumably airworthy aircraft once it had been built, to transport me to my destination. I trusted them to use it properly and to get me safely to where I was going. This despite the fact that only a few months ago, one particularly disturbed but clearly qualified individual flew an aircraft into a mountain, killing all on board. And I didn’t think too much about all of those charged with stopping bad people causing problems; all those security people I could see, and all of those I couldn’t see. Apparently there are those who want to do me harm by interfering with things like aircraft. I trust lots of people to stop them. But I myself don’t check the competence or commitment of the airport security staff. I trust others to hire them, screen them, train them, motivate, pay and monitor them. This, despite that fact that I know that occasionally, bad people have slipped through the net and have managed to do bad things to aeroplanes, with catastrophic consequences. No, I exercised faith all the way along the line. And the way I behaved was evidence of my faith. I booked my ticket, checked-in on time, made my way to the gate when called, boarded the aircraft, settled into my seat and (I’m glad to report) safely arrived in Atlanta.

The faith I exercised wasn’t blind faith, or particularly naïve, or irrational. This is a flight I’ve made safely before. And in fact, most such flights, many thousands if not millions of them, have been completed safely before. So I had good reason to believe that my faith was not misplaced. While clearly bad things happen to aircraft, and currently one feels for the families grieving for those lost in troubling circumstances in the Mediterranean, such events are mercifully and relatively rare. So in a few weeks’ time I’ll be getting on another aeroplane. My point is that faith was a key part of what I was doing.  And what I will be doing: exercising faith again.

In fact, when you begin to think about it, faith is a part of everyday life and we barely give it a thought. And while faith can be blind, irrational, or misplaced, it rarely is. It seems pretty basic. So here’s the question: is religious faith different in some fundamental way from the kind of thing I’ve been talking about?

When I think about my Christian faith, I don’t think about it in the abstract. I think about what (or who) it’s in. Have I placed my faith in an unknowable mystery? No. I’ve place my faith primary in a person who lived one of the most scrutinised lives in all of history. How do I know about that life? It is recorded (several times over) in one of the most scrutinised books in all of history.  To be honest, just as I (and I would submit, you) have approached other aspects of life, I personally did not do all of the scrutinising myself. As with anything I’m being asked to entrust myself too (like aeroplanes) I’ve looked in detail at some things, left some things to others who have particular expertise, and never had any reason (note the use of the word “reason”) to scrutinise a whole other bunch of stuff. I suppose if I came to suspect that I’d placed my faith in the wrong object, or found I was being asked to simply trust things that seemed internally contradictory, then I’d resort to more scrutiny myself. But so far, this hasn’t been an issue. My exercise of faith in this context seems to be more an act of will, than a process of discovery and persuasion. I didn’t wait till all the “i’s” were dotted and “t’s” crossed. I took a decision and ran with it, just as I do in life in general. So far I have no reason to review the basic decision.

One other thought. Sometimes faith is placed in opposition to science. People talk about science vs faith, or the science/faith debate. Occasionally I do this myself. But in one way I actually find this a bit odd. Science involves buckets of faith on all sorts of levels. But that’s for another day. Trust me.