A simple case of believing anything
AUSTRALIA. Cheering on the rise of non-believers like a winning horse at Randwick one day, throwing virgins into the volcano to satisfy the gods the next. Or to put it another way, for a country that prides itself on calm and rational public policy, we do sometimes have a tendency to go off the deep end.
Last week Peter Shergold dropped a bombshell of a report about how we performed during Covid and the verdict, frankly, wasn’t great.
For all our self-congratulation about “saving lives” and “not being the US/UK/Italy/Spain”, we now have a long tale of sick adults, maladjusted and under-educated kids, and a lifetime’s worth of government debt to show for it.
And apparently we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Buried in Professor Shergold’s report was a line that pretty much summed up how and why we went wrong. Wrote the author: “Lockdown overreach in 2020 and 2021 was as much a response to political perceptions of community anxiety as to expert advice.”
Got that?
Our response wasn’t a case of follow the science so much as it was bow down to the mob.
The line came as a bit of vindication to those of us who spent pretty much the entire pandemic railing against a response that was well over the top, from border closures and playground bans to lockdowns that went on weeks or months beyond any sense of their doing any real good.
Here was black and white proof that not only were so many of the rules pointless but that our leaders knew they were pointless yet kept them going to satisfy the crowds.
But before we get too smug about all this it is probably a good idea to understand exactly how pragmatic and sceptical Australians found themselves nodding in agreement when NSW health kommissar Kerry Chant told us not to be friendly in the shops, or when her South Australian counterpart told people to duck Covid-infected Sherrins at the footy.
We should not just look at what went wrong, in other words.
We should also ask we were so damn gullible in the first place.
Well, here’s a suggestion.
What if it was actually Australians’ smug rationalism that got us into this mess? If the theory that those who believe in nothing will believe in anything is correct, then Covid, or rather our response to Covid, became for far too many of us a substitute faith and a source of meaning.
Indeed it was not long before the whole thing began to look like a religion.
When the pandemic hit, suddenly there became a whole set of rules to divide goodies and baddies, angels and devils.
“Doing the right thing” suddenly had an urgent consequence.
A society that in normal times flattens every aspect of life into the service of the economy — both sides of politics agree that the greatest thing new mothers can do is get back to work and be “productive”, for example — suddenly had the high drama of moral contest.
Were you first in the queue to get your jab or were you one of those unclean vaccine deniers who had to be kept from public life?
There were rituals like social distancing, bizarre new etiquette forms like elbow bumps and requirements for the faithful to suspend rational thought and believe that sitting with a beer was fine but standing with a beer was deadly.
The mask, too, became a quasireligious garment and too many of us embraced our inner Puritan to shame those who didn’t wear them correctly or, worse, had a few people around for beers in the backyard on a warm afternoon.
Heretics were labelled deniers, though it is interesting to note that many of the things that were once considered conspiracy theories are now truths as accepted as Galileo’s point that the Earth moves around the Sun. Hell, we even acted like picnics were actually fun and pretended that having random beagles snuffling our hummus in the park was like being at the Met Gala.
And for the most part our leaders were happy to go along for the ride, leaving the hard decisions to the high priests (the CHOs) and taking the credit for keeping us safe from a Biblical case of the sniffles. It is probably not a coincidence that arguably Australia’s most religious premier, the very Roman Catholic Dominic Perrottet, was the one who saw through this and arguably forced the country to open up.
Not because it was a case of faith versus reason as embodied by socalled experts, but because having a wider frame of reference let him see the consequences of one-eyed Covid fundamentalists.
Happily, Australia got out of the trap but, as an extra data point, it is worth noting that really the only place in the world that is still going for “Covid Zero” is the deeply atheistic government of the Peoples’ Republic of China.
If we are going to learn any lesson from all this, it must not simply be to have better reporting lines or more PPE on standby.
Instead, we should also look to build our thoughtfulness and moral resilience in the hope that by having more meaningful lives now we do not simply let the next crisis define us.