Step 1: Admit there's no right answer.
Do you think life should resume right now exactly as it was before the pandemic? Or do you think cities should remain completely locked down until there’s a vaccine? |
My guess is that like me you’d probably answer both questions with a “no.” Which puts us, if not in a middle ground, at least somewhere between two poles, wondering what the right balance of risk and security might be. No one — not even the finest epidemiologist — can be sure. |
We keep learning more about the nature of the coronavirus and how it spreads. Writing from Hong Kong, Dillon C. Adam and Benjamin J. Cowling report today that fully 80 percent of transmissions — of the 369 local cases they studied — originated with just 20 percent of cases. And that 70 percent of people who were infected did not pass the virus on. |
That discussion hasn’t always been welcomed. The lack of certainty about the risks has not prevented many arguments for and against reopening from being angry and contemptuous, Pamela Paresky and Bradley Campbell wrote this week: “The crisis has been marked by a rush to label, and demean, the other side. Partisans on both sides lack even a modicum of curiosity about their political opponents’ views regarding how to solve the Covid-19 crisis. Certitude is pervasive.” |
In fact, as they noted, polling shows a strong majority across the political spectrum for precautions, like wearing masks, that are meant to protect ourselves and others. It shows a strong sense of solidarity. |
Yes, people whose politics lean right are slightly more concerned about lockdowns being lifted too slowly, and people on the left are far more concerned about that happening too fast. But these are reasonable differences of degree rather than evidence of irreconcilable world views. |
So why the anger? Maybe precisely because there’s so much uncertainty. Our familiar partisan axis is always standing by to supply a ready frame of reference and, if not answers, at least strong positions. And so the debate became polarized. |
Add to that the way social media, and to an extent the news media, tends to simplify and amplify the loudest and angriest voices. On top of that add Donald Trump and the reflex some on the left have developed to assume anything he’s for must be something they’re against — even when the thing he’s for is, in principle, something sensible, like trying to get everyone back to work as quickly as possible. |
In practice, Trump’s approach to accomplishing this, of course, has been haphazard, and also generally framed as an either/or proposition — either you’re for a lockdown or you’re for America. |
Most leaders, whether of governments or universities or businesses, are dealing not with absolutes but with fraught trade-offs as they try to come up with specific measures to reach a new normal as quickly and safely as possible. David Wippman, the president of Hamilton College, writing with Professor Glenn Altschuler of Cornell, laid out some specific steps to keep campuses safe. |
In such cases each leader — like probably everyone else — is struggling to find the right balance. I was struck by how the Rev. John I Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame, put it last week when he described the risk involved in erring on the side of safety and keeping his campus closed: “Were we to take that course, we would risk failing to provide the next generation of leaders the education they need and to do the research and scholarship so valuable to society. How ought these competing risks be weighed? No science, simply as science, can answer that question. It is a moral question in which principles to which we are committed are in tension.” |
In our private lives everyone performs this kind of hard trade-off all the time, yet the public debate makes so little room for it. |
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