hose who live through the COVID-19 pandemic will retain many memories for years to come: new concepts such as “social distancing,” face masks as a fashion accessory, ubiquitous hand sanitizer stations, fewer opportunities for travel, and countless missed celebrations deemed too dangerous for even relatively small groups of people. Regardless of its duration, these snapshots of the experience will remain topics of conversation for the foreseeable future.
The effects on national security will also remain central to the memory of this crisis. Often, the public thinks of national security as a category of war or as problems pursued by those in the military charged with defending the country against threats to our survival. This pandemic, however, is reshaping that perception in an uncomfortable manner.
The Cold War ended 31 years before the current pandemic broke into the news last January. With the end of that forty-year ideological siege, U.S. power appeared so unparalleled as to preclude any other country from threatening the nation’s homeland. U.S. security forces—both civilian and uniformed—served in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Liberia, and Colombia as the United States adopted its role as a stabilizer in troubled states. The 9/11 attacks undermined national confidence that the homeland was a refuge from global problems. Subsequent disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq amplified that uncertainty, as did the 2008 financial crisis, which closed out the discouraging first decade of the 21st century.
These threats, however, were relatively identifiable. Afghanistan was the safe haven for the brutalizer bin Laden who launched 9/11, while Iraq’s long-time dictator Saddam Hussein was (wrongly) thought to harbor nuclear weapons with which to threaten our homeland and those of our allies. The 2008 financial crisis resulted from unsparing greed playing on the willful naivete of a financially illiterate society. Most citizens believed the government could and should prevent or resolve these problems. People often advocate a “Whole of Government response” to use the widest array resources to protect the national interest against obvious dangers.
The dangers of COVID-19, like the parallel threat of climate change, are different challenges to the nation because these dangers result from problems which may not have the human proximate cause, yet human behavior magnifies them dramatically. Understanding these threats relies on explanations from scientists, as those who feel the effects don’t necessarily see the causes with their own eyes. Unfortunately, society no longer considers scientific explanations to be a reliable basis for crafting appropriate responses. Instead, scientific illiteracy, coupled with political polarization, make the Whole of Government approach far less feasible than has been true at any other time in living memory. This is a grave danger not only for current crises, but for those to come.
Government officials should derive their decisions from expertise produced by the scientific method rather than partisan politics because governments have a social contract, at least theoretically, with their citizens. The scientific method requires a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and replicating the tests—and outcomes—by others in a replicable process to verify its validity. Personal desires or beliefs are not part of this replication, though they may infrequently coincide with the outcome of the methodology.
Public distrust of the scientific method is on the rise in the United States and has been for at least a decade. The anti-vaccine movement coincides with a tendency towards partisan polarization on topics relating to science and the scientific method. Accusations that science has not “proven” its case ignore constant and repetitive evidence to the contrary on vaccines, on climate change, and of late on the COVID-19 pandemic.
This distrust and attendant partisan polarization are part of why the U.S. government under-performed dramatically in this crisis. Government agencies proved unable to convince whole swaths of the country that wearing masks or physical distancing from sources of virus are essential to stopping the contagion’s spread. Public hearings over mask ordinances in many locations devolved from discussions of health to furious proclamations not on public health but on citizens’ alleged Constitutional guarantees. The resulting proliferation of COVID-19 cases plagues health care providers and government agencies unable to curb the disease’s proliferation because distrust of the scientific evidence outweighed fear of the spread, even in the face of dramatic increase in fatalities.
Rebuilding faith in the scientific method as a basis for Whole of Government decisions is an essential step for the future, as challenges from non-traditional threats proliferate. Embedded in this issue is the need for politicians across the political spectrum and at all levels of government to recognize the fundamental menace created by political polarization associated with anti-scientific thought.
No political party has a monopoly on good governance or on being able to predict the future. Science does, however, provide rational arguments which offer long-term solutions. In a society of more than 330 million citizens, the reliability, trust, and equality that government must provide under its social contract requires us to respect the non-partisan confidence that all will have equal access to our government and its response to the growing number of threats that only thirty years ago were impossible to envision.
a global affairs media network
Whole of Government, the Scientific Method, and Future Plagues
August 26, 2020
In order to build a successful Whole of Government response to COVID-19 (or any future plagues), we must as a society rebuild trust in the scientific method.
T
hose who live through the COVID-19 pandemic will retain many memories for years to come: new concepts such as “social distancing,” face masks as a fashion accessory, ubiquitous hand sanitizer stations, fewer opportunities for travel, and countless missed celebrations deemed too dangerous for even relatively small groups of people. Regardless of its duration, these snapshots of the experience will remain topics of conversation for the foreseeable future.
The effects on national security will also remain central to the memory of this crisis. Often, the public thinks of national security as a category of war or as problems pursued by those in the military charged with defending the country against threats to our survival. This pandemic, however, is reshaping that perception in an uncomfortable manner.
The Cold War ended 31 years before the current pandemic broke into the news last January. With the end of that forty-year ideological siege, U.S. power appeared so unparalleled as to preclude any other country from threatening the nation’s homeland. U.S. security forces—both civilian and uniformed—served in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Liberia, and Colombia as the United States adopted its role as a stabilizer in troubled states. The 9/11 attacks undermined national confidence that the homeland was a refuge from global problems. Subsequent disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq amplified that uncertainty, as did the 2008 financial crisis, which closed out the discouraging first decade of the 21st century.
These threats, however, were relatively identifiable. Afghanistan was the safe haven for the brutalizer bin Laden who launched 9/11, while Iraq’s long-time dictator Saddam Hussein was (wrongly) thought to harbor nuclear weapons with which to threaten our homeland and those of our allies. The 2008 financial crisis resulted from unsparing greed playing on the willful naivete of a financially illiterate society. Most citizens believed the government could and should prevent or resolve these problems. People often advocate a “Whole of Government response” to use the widest array resources to protect the national interest against obvious dangers.
The dangers of COVID-19, like the parallel threat of climate change, are different challenges to the nation because these dangers result from problems which may not have the human proximate cause, yet human behavior magnifies them dramatically. Understanding these threats relies on explanations from scientists, as those who feel the effects don’t necessarily see the causes with their own eyes. Unfortunately, society no longer considers scientific explanations to be a reliable basis for crafting appropriate responses. Instead, scientific illiteracy, coupled with political polarization, make the Whole of Government approach far less feasible than has been true at any other time in living memory. This is a grave danger not only for current crises, but for those to come.
Government officials should derive their decisions from expertise produced by the scientific method rather than partisan politics because governments have a social contract, at least theoretically, with their citizens. The scientific method requires a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and replicating the tests—and outcomes—by others in a replicable process to verify its validity. Personal desires or beliefs are not part of this replication, though they may infrequently coincide with the outcome of the methodology.
Public distrust of the scientific method is on the rise in the United States and has been for at least a decade. The anti-vaccine movement coincides with a tendency towards partisan polarization on topics relating to science and the scientific method. Accusations that science has not “proven” its case ignore constant and repetitive evidence to the contrary on vaccines, on climate change, and of late on the COVID-19 pandemic.
This distrust and attendant partisan polarization are part of why the U.S. government under-performed dramatically in this crisis. Government agencies proved unable to convince whole swaths of the country that wearing masks or physical distancing from sources of virus are essential to stopping the contagion’s spread. Public hearings over mask ordinances in many locations devolved from discussions of health to furious proclamations not on public health but on citizens’ alleged Constitutional guarantees. The resulting proliferation of COVID-19 cases plagues health care providers and government agencies unable to curb the disease’s proliferation because distrust of the scientific evidence outweighed fear of the spread, even in the face of dramatic increase in fatalities.
Rebuilding faith in the scientific method as a basis for Whole of Government decisions is an essential step for the future, as challenges from non-traditional threats proliferate. Embedded in this issue is the need for politicians across the political spectrum and at all levels of government to recognize the fundamental menace created by political polarization associated with anti-scientific thought.
No political party has a monopoly on good governance or on being able to predict the future. Science does, however, provide rational arguments which offer long-term solutions. In a society of more than 330 million citizens, the reliability, trust, and equality that government must provide under its social contract requires us to respect the non-partisan confidence that all will have equal access to our government and its response to the growing number of threats that only thirty years ago were impossible to envision.
