Look back to create forward-looking policies

Knowledge of social history is essential to understand countries’ attitudes and actions to crises. Even before the Vietnam War Americans’ reactions to “socialist”, and “communist”, is incomprehensible without knowledge of treatment of US prisoners during the Korean war.

Similarly North Koreans’ anti-US attitudes make no sense without knowledge of the extensive US carpet bombing of North Korea 70 years ago. The same is true for colonised nations, ours included.

If policies emerge from the context of historical decisions, it follows that a broad knowledge of social history is needed to construct forward-looking policies — and widespread buy-in of them.

For example, pandemic management today is a lesson in science trumping superstition. With the capacity to crunch mega-data quickly, modern science is able to offer leaders the numbers and modelled scenarios to guide decisions.

However, it is knowledge of social history that also influences our ability to assess, prioritise and act. Governments need, in democracies at least, to have the buy-in of a variously educated public.

In liberal democracies, public health policies cannot be simplified to trade-offs between citizens’ wellbeing and economic wellbeing. Such policies need to appeal to a nation’s core values, and social history can remind how these were established.

Those most at risk in this pandemic, besides the elderly and their caregivers, are refugees and the indigenous. Mass graves from the 1918 influenza pandemic attest to this.

Following a devastating second wave that killed 37,000 Swedes, Sweden’s writers and politicians launched a successful liberal movement to ensure everyone had access to the best care.

This led to the world’s first comprehensive social welfare system. And in the 1930s, by other liberal democracies , including New Zealand.

Knowledge of social history is important to motivate and identify values.

While strong leadership is primitively attractive, the tendency to confuse decisiveness with consultative wisdom can only be inoculated against by education. And at times, public protest.

In 2003-4 I was in Rome for the march for peace and against the second Iraq war. Popular opposition to this illegal war was ignored, signalling the beginnings of a deep cynicism we are still trying to undo.

In this latest crisis how can we ensure that leaders respect the three pillars of peer-reviewed, published and consensus science? More importantly, how can ideological filtering that sees science as part of the problem be excluded?

Filters such as the “Christian fascism” bedevilling US conservative administrations have been articulated by war correspondent, political commentator and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges. His book American fascists

— the Christian right and the war on

America, outlines dangers of merging politics with fundamentalist faiths.

While various forms of monarchy, theocracy, authoritarianism and communism have come and gone, liberal democracy has endured. Its principles of liberty, individual rights, and equality of opportunity have become widely accepted in debates and policymaking.

Although in Europe “liberal” is more likely to refer to a defender of the free market, and in the US to a defender of the welfare state, what has undermined liberal democracy in both is polarisation, disengagement and narrowly defined selfinterest.

In an interdependent world, inclusive policies require discussions that begin with rejecting liberal and conservative as smearwords.

Let’s commit to educating all citizens in liberal democracy’s basics — in the context of the social history that gave them birth.