It’s Sunday afternoon. The sun came out today and maybe that lifted all our moods. It certainly improved mine.
Yesterday on our walk in the Pacific Spirit Park woods we passed fellow walkers and cyclists, most of whom were like us, happy to be outdoors, getting exercise, enjoying the break between rain showers, and deliberately taking steps to keep their distance from us. Not everybody, though. I don’t think I’m temperamentally inclined to think the worst of people; usually when I pass a group of people crowding a sidewalk doing nothing to make room for us, I think, well, they’re just intensely engaged in conversation and so didn’t notice us. Or something like that. Except that the whole point of being a responsible person is that you know you should be keeping a lookout to make sure you aren’t inconveniencing others when you’re walking along a sidewalk or woodland pathway. That should be true all the time; it should be especially true now when, as everyone knows, we’re supposed to be keeping our distance from each other.
So yesterday when we had to go out of our way to avoid people who weren’t doing anything whatsoever to avoid us, I had this little fretful worry about the coronavirus pandemic, which I will try to explain.
There are two reasons we are supposed to keep our distance: one to prevent catching the virus from other people; and two, to prevent spreading it to other people. Okay, there’s actually another, more important reason why we are supposed to keep our distance – because government has told us to.
Is that good enough for you? The direction is pretty clear: stay away from other people as much as you can. That’s good enough for me. It helps that the direction is being given by people who have both power and subject-matter expertise. The fact that BC’s public health officer has a compelling public manner is very reassuring: she’s quiet but firm, rooted in data, but absolutely clear in her conviction of what needs to be done to reduce the risk from unrestrained spread of the disease. But notice how often people express their appreciation for the fact that – at least at the provincial level – the politicians frequently step away from the microphone to let the expert – the scientist – do the talking. The reason for this is pretty obvious – we’ve been so thoroughly trained by experience not to trust politicians that we are no longer able to trust them, even on really important matters. To twist an old metaphor, when our political leaders say ‘jump’, we don’t ask, ‘how high’, we say ‘huh?’
It’s not just that we’ve been trained not to trust what our politicians say, which is bad enough. It’s that when they ask us to jump, we offer up any one or more of a number of responses: ‘you can’t make me’, ‘that rule about jumping applies to my neighbour not to me’, ‘I know how to jump safely, so I don’t put other people at risk when I jump’, and ‘you can’t catch me.’
This is the only explanation I can come up for the fact that as recently as the past couple of days, we’ve been learning about the behaviour of others – our friends – that I have found puzzling. People who were in another country when Canadians were asked to return home, and instead went somewhere else to continue their holiday before deciding to come home. People who left Canada on holiday after we were all told not to. People who regularly visit friends indoors. People who are supposed to self-isolate but instead go to the office.
I don’t confront these people. I want to keep my friends, even though the potential result of their behaviours is that I may lose my life. I don’t confront them because I know ahead of time what they would say. In all cases it would be some variation on the theme of ‘those rules don’t apply to me because I am a responsible (ie, special) person and I was behaving safely.’ None of these people would be the slightest bit apologetic for their behaviour. They’re just like those people who crowd past me on the sidewalk without even bothering to move over. Rules are for other people. I can make my own decisions about how to stay safe. Or…… and this one is a persistent theme: ‘the risk is overblown.’
That notion that the risk is overblown is usually linked to the contention that our government is over-reacting. This idea got a lot of traction from a piece foolishly published about a week ago by the New York Times, written by someone who used to be the head of a health institute at Yale. It later became clear that the person who wrote it was a dietician, not an infectious disease specialist, but by that point the notion that this was all somehow not as bad as we were being told it was had been given all kinds of encouragement by the fact that the piece had appeared in a reputable newspaper.
Today, in a different variation of the theme, there’s a piece in the Edmonton Journal that supposedly makes the case that Canada’s response to the virus has been completely ineffectual. That is, we’ve not reacted strongly or quickly enough. The author of the article compares Canada’s response to that of Taiwan. I’m the first person to congratulate any government that has managed to contain the outbreak of this virus. But I’d be slow to compare Taiwan to Canada about anything. It must surely be easier to control your borders when you don’t have any. We have thousands of miles of land borders. Taiwan is an island. Taiwan is also an unitary republic. Canada, on the other hand, is a federation, in which the provinces are responsible for the delivery of health care. Taiwan has a population density of 649 people per km2. It is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Canada, on the other hand, has a population density of 4 people per km2. Taiwan is actually half of the size of New Brunswick, one of our smallest provinces.
You get the picture? Taiwan is profoundly different from Canada. The only reason someone would go to the trouble of trying to argue that its response to the coronavirus is comparable to Canada is because they are looking for an excuse – any excuse – to criticize our government. Their objective is not to inform but to politicize. That is, their objective is to undermine our confidence in the decisions our governments have been making. Viewed of course, with the all the clarity that hindsight can bring to the table.
We are trained to doubt. And our eagerness to doubt licences irresponsibility. This morning I went out for a bike ride around UBC. Everyone was out. That’s good. We’re supposed to get outside, if we can do it safely. But I saw lots of people in groups of four or six or more standing close together who were plainly not all related to each other. So I’m not very hopeful. I don’t think that curve is going to bend down as quickly as we all would like it to. But I’m absolutely clear about the reason why. It’s not because government hasn’t responded quickly or firmly enough. It’s because we can’t be trusted to police our own behaviour; it’s because we think we know better than the experts and don’t even pay attention to our politicians, and it’s because too many of us are simply, profoundly, and dangerously irresponsible.
