Staring at the shadows
Jesting Pilate, of course, scoffed, “What is truth?” , much to his chagrin. Bertrand Russell described the philosopher’s quest as the asking of questions, the thrill of the search for answers; as for really getting an answer, well, which was less fun. I was friends with a brilliant and well known but departed American philosopher that, once I asked him what doctrine intended for him, responded that doctrine was a series of crossword puzzles. In the event that you were good or lucky enough to solve you, you threw off the paper and went into the next mystery. It was about the vexing, not the solving. I saya little shamefully, that I lost respect for him from then on.
To be sure, as a philosopher I no more want to get fed answers without needing to try than to strive with no answers in sight. I really like both — both the search along with the discovery. But when I had to give one up, it are the hunt.
I never entered philosophy for the sake of the vexing; I wanted answers, and I do. Maybe, in my profession, I’ve even found one or two. I know others that have found loads, and I admire them limitlessly because of that.
Which makes the present nation of Truth, with this infamous capital , fairly disheartening. I’m moved somewhat more by the condition of Truth in the Era of COVID-19. Call me naïve, but I thought we would get a deal fairly quickly on what this particular outbreak intended in terms of risk, severity, international and local outcomes, vaccines, remedies, and the remainder. However here we are, nearly a year , and it feels like we are at Plato’s Cave, staring at the dancing shadows — and no prisoner is close to breaking loose and beholding the Sun. (In Plato’s allegory, clearly, the prisoner who escapes from the cave beholds the Sun of Truth and Goodness, returns into the cave to inform his former fellow prisoners, and is immediately killed. A lesson for us all.)
The dilemma is partly political, no doubt: proof is’spun’, translated and reinterpreted to suit agendas. The sheer proliferation of information at the era of social networking and the world wide web is a famous problem. There are very few people, let alone real experts, who profess positive — and accurate — opinions on the State of the Pandemic. An unusually assured view was voiced by Professor Michael Levitt, who in late July 2020 predicted with certitude that”US COVID-19 will be done in 4 weeks with a complete reported death [sic] under 170,000″. He was proven as wrong as wrong could be, popping up in front of thousands of viewers to state, with no hint of embarrassment, that”the forecast had fared less well than I had expected”. So why was he being interviewed in any way about his fictitious prediction? Since, inter alia,” Levitt is a Nobel Prize recipient — for something that doesn’t have anything to do with epidemiology.
Yes, it is not hard to snipe at one particular case, however for me personally it reflects the issue of Twenty-First Century Science™: to wallow in mixed metaphors for an instant, when the rubber hits the road there seems to be much more sizzle than steak. A half-hour interrogation of Professor Google will inform you, from peer-reviewed publications and varied’authoritative sources’, not least government scientists round the world, that: masks are/are not effective; the stunt will/will not be soon; lockdowns work/don’t operate; SARS-CoV-2 came/did not come out of a lab/wet market/animal/somewhere else; herd immunity kicks in at 20/50/60/70/90 per cent and everything in between; COVID is/is not primarily a respiratory disorder; is/is not propagate by kids; is/ is not bad for kids; has an infection rate/case rate/infection fatality rate/case fatality rate of — well, pick a number between a fraction of one percent and something in single digits… you understand.
Moreover, when it comes to lockdowns and all their consequences for civil rights, in the UK at least, it seems just like Authorities by TED Talk. Among the government’s most senior advisors is enamoured of policy making according to what is on the favorite science shelves in airport bookshops. Nudge here, systems strategy there, appeal to fear, plea for civic duty, bright, clean messaging, and save the NHS, behavioural economics, behavioural psychology, and the dynamics of mass panic, and forth.
I’m not the only one to feel like we’re all no more than individuals in a Big Science Experiment, with a dollop of political experimentation on the side to learn just how far one can restrain people before they get really, really mad. My home city of Melbourne springs to mind at this point.)
So far as Twenty-First Century Science™ goes, I’ll be accused of unfairness. The usual bromides flung in my direction are likely to be:’twas ever so; what can I expect from science — instantaneous, certain answers and immediate remedies? ; science is selfcorrecting — we are witnessing are the pros on a path of discovery, inching forwards, discarding the bad science and keeping the good, admitting their errors and their ignorance, solidifying and encouraging their own successes. Nobody is more defensive than a scientist safeguarding his jurisdiction. Actually, that really is unfair. It is less the scientist who has defensive those that I know are just too excited to waive their ignorance, a humility I always find sterile — than the scientiste, often a pop philosopher, sometimes a true philosopher, commonly a former-scientist-turned-populariser, that considers Science to be the secular substitute for evil ol’ Religion, aka Superstitious Anti-Science. If you think Twenty-First Century Science™ is doing just fine about the pandemic, then to whom are you currently listening? At the present time it needs to feel as if you think in God but do not know which religion is the true one. I submit that you are having issues. The rest of us also have an issue. My reckoning is that even though science is larger, and louder, and wealthier, and more politically influential than it has ever been, the degree to which it is better — gets more truth, solves more problems, achieves increased certainty in both practice and theory — probably doesn’t’match the hype’, as it were. This means — unhappy though it be — that every individual must do their own due diligence when assessing scientific statements about where we stand. You may discover some seriously unbiased, intellectually humble experts out there; if so, stick with them like glue. Otherwise, there is absolutely no substitute for getting as near the main information as possible without frying your brain. Train yourself in some simple data analysis, some statistics, some biology. Most importantly, have a course or two in critical thinking and logical analysis. Unfortunately, in the present condition of things, it is an epistemological’each man for himself’.