Maybe We Can Handle the Truth

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 03, 2021

 

It’s okay to talk to us like we’re ignorant — we are ignorant.

 

That’s not the same thing as talking to us like we’re stupid.

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his colleagues did a fair bit of harm early in the COVID-19 epidemic by trying to be clever. Nobody had a lot of information about COVID-19 at that point, the effectiveness of masking was an unknown variable, and there were shortages of protective equipment. (Remember how hard it was to buy household cleaners there for a while?) As Fauci himself tells the story, he and others were worried that there would be a run on masks that would leave medical personnel short.

But that’s not what he said in that now-infamous March 8, 2020, interview. What he said was: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face.”

 

Etc.

 

Everybody, even the smartest person you know, is basically ignorant about basically everything. Most of us have a great deal of specialized local information about one or two things — how to design a rocket engine or manage a 7-Eleven — a little bit of knowledge about a few other things that are of interest to us, and a great sprawling black void of ignorance about pretty much everything else. That kind of ignorance is natural, and there’s no shame in it. The shame is in refusing to deal with it forthrightly.

 

Fauci — and many others — went wrong by talking to us like we are stupid rather than ignorant.

 

Fauci and a few of his colleagues deserve credit in that they have, from time to time, tried to explain that guidance from the CDC and other authorities changes in response to changing conditions and new information. But that has not been nearly as central to the conversation as it should have been — and still needs to be. Every statement to the public regarding epidemic management and policy should begin and end with a disclaimer, something like this: “This is the best we can tell you based on what we know right now and conditions as we understand them. Don’t be surprised if our recommendations or our policies change. In fact, be surprised if they don’t change. This is a new virus and we are, in that respect, starting from scratch. We don’t have it all figured out yet, and we aren’t going to have it all figured out in the foreseeable future, but we think the best chance for our getting through this with the minimum degree of suffering, death, and disruption is for everybody to cooperate, to row in the same direction. And we say that even knowing that we are going to be wrong in certain cases.”

 

Some version of that has been said from time to time. But it has not been said enough.

 

As Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad put it in a useful essay in Slate, what Fauci was engaged in was an attempt at a “noble lie,” an effort to mislead the public for the public’s own good. This is a defective strategy for several reasons, even setting aside the ethical question of whether people in positions of responsibility should mislead the public. On purely pragmatic grounds, the noble lie runs into predictable difficulties: One is that people such as Fauci, though highly expert in one field, are not actually very good at predicting how the public will respond to any given statement or directive. Another is that when the misleading statement is revealed as such — as it will be — trust in experts and institutions declines, and it often declines disproportionately as people irritated by clumsy attempts at manipulation write off entire agencies and enterprises as untrustworthy.

 

One of the problems is that agencies such as the CDC believe — wrongly, I think — that the more they present themselves as Olympians, the more people will listen to them and follow their advice. They believe — wrongly, I think — that if they admit the complexity of a situation, then people will ignore them. But civic-minded and responsible people — and those are the only ones we should really bother even trying to talk to, there’s no point in wasting time on the other kind — can handle being told that things are complex and subject to regular revision. They often sense when they are being condescended to and when they are not getting the whole story.

 

The authorities involved in the COVID-19 response have come up short by that metric from time to time, though they are far from the only offenders or the worst of them.

 

We have seen environmentalists, to name one prominent example, justify misleading the public (mostly through exaggeration and alarmism) as a necessary measure to get people to support what they believe to be necessary climate policies — and, predictably, the result has been a persistent belief in some quarters that climate change is a hoax cooked up by power-hungry crypto-Marxists. On a less grand scale, the endless string of fake hate crimes, fake rapes, and manufactured monstrosities, often cooked up by people with real power (including celebrities such as Lena Dunham and Jussie Smollett) in order to discredit powerless political rivals (a fictitious campus Republican, a couple of equally fictitious gay-hating yahoos cruising around Chicago in the wee hours in MAGA hats and in possession of both a length of rope and a working knowledge of the cast of Empire, because, obviously) as an exercise in Kulturkampf. And now many people, myself included, think, “Huh, I wonder if that’s true?” every time some dramatic tale of bigotry makes the news.

 

Never mind that lying to advance your cause makes you a pathetic little weasel. As a practical matter, it may also not advance your cause — and may in fact set it back.

 

“We don’t know. Our information is limited. It’s complicated. We’ll have to revisit the issue. Our position is almost certainly going to change. We need more information — and, when we have more information, we’ll need even more information.”

 

Words to live by. And words to govern by, too.