Kevin Drum got seriously dragged on Twitter for an insufficiently sensitive response to a tweet by Chris Hayes, and to some extent, that was deserved. His initial response was really poorly phrased, and even his more detailed partial walk-back is pretty cold. I’m a fairly big stats-over-anecdotes guy, but I would’ve hesitated to deploy that argument in that manner.
At the same time, though, Hayes’s tweet is an example of a genre that I find kind of annoying, the “How can people tolerate this thing I find intolerable?” gambit:
The last couple of years have seen a lot of this relating to Covid-19, but it’s a pretty common rhetorical trope with regard to lots of other political and environmental issues. People regularly express amazement at the levels of deaths we’re collectively willing to tolerate from guns, and car accidents, and pollution, and climate, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few.
And on the one hand, there’s some real force to this argument— some of these things really are appallingly bad when you lay out the numbers, and many times people genuinely aren’t aware of how bad until they see the numbers. At the same time, though, there’s a sense in which tolerating appallingly bad things really shouldn’t be surprising, given, you know, the entirety of human history. In a very real sense, pushing forward in the face of intolerable circumstances is what we do.
Another fact that’s been noted a lot over the course of the pandemic is that, as world-historical diseases go, Covid-19 is not that big a deal. The Black Death wiped out something like a third of the population of Europe in the late medieval period, and smallpox and other diseases cut an even greater swathe through the population of the Americas after 1492. People in both places carried on through those vastly worse plagues. In more modern times, the 1918 flu took a greater toll, particularly on the young, and people carried on.
Throughout history, people have carried on in the face of not just diseases, but innumerable famines, and wars and natural disasters. It’s what we do, even today. Every time a fire or a flood devastates some community, there are news stories about how residents are rolling up their sleeves to rebuild in the exact same place in the face of the exact same risks. Given that behavior, is it really that surprising that large numbers of people are willing to roll the dice on Covid-19, and get on with their lives in a “new normal”?
Please note that I’m not saying that the hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid don’t matter, or aren’t tragic. They are— every one of those statistics is a source of pain for a family member, or a friend or neighbor, or a medical worker, and those are terrible things. Recent deaths are even worse, given how readily preventable they are thanks to vaccines that are just incredibly good and freely available in the US and Europe. It’s just mind-blowing that people are refusing the life-saving tools available to us, and paying a terrible price for it.
What I am saying is that the widespread drive to carry on with something as close to business-as-usual as can be managed is not surprising. It’s human. Stubborn perseverance is one of the signature human behaviors, right up there with the drive to do science and the urge make art. In its dumber manifestations, it’s one of our very worst traits.
At the same time, it’s one of our best traits. We carry on in the face of vast forces trying to wipe us out, and thanks to that perseverance have achieved incredible things. In a very real sense, we’re all descended from people who were stupidly persistent in the face of devastation. One of my favorite weird things I’ve learned via Substack was Razib Khan noting that genetic studies suggest that every human outside of Africa is descended from a group of 1,000-10,000 people who survived some kind of catastrophe on their way out into the wider world. That’s amazing, in a way that borders on inspiring.
And, you know, I recognize that people saying “I can’t believe we’re tolerating XXX” aren’t expressing genuine surprise, but employing a rhetorical device intended to spur people to action. It’s a device that rankles a bit, though, at least for me— a lot of times, it comes off as contemptuous of those whose priorities differ from those of the speaker. I basically agree with most of the policies favored by people using this trope, and even I have a bit of an immediate “Put a sock in it, you sanctimonious dick” reaction when it comes across my timeline again.
I also think this undersells the very real sacrifices that people have made over the last couple of years in a way that makes it unlikely to motivate any of the people whose behavior ought to change. Outside of a small number of utter sociopaths, basically everybody has sacrificed things to the greater good over the last couple of years (as reflected in that poll that Nate Silver cited in the tweet Hayes was responding to)— lost income, lost education, lost time with family and friends. The difference between the new-normal crowd and the “I can’t believe…” crowd is just a difference in what value they put on the things they had to give up, or would have to continue giving up. And as a matter or rhetoric, telling people they’re awful for valuing the things they do is not that great a way to win hearts and minds.
I wish we could put more of an encouraging spin on arguments in favor of sensible public health measures, but you know, that rhetorical ship was set aflame and adrift a long time ago, and there’s not much that can be done at this point. I’m fairly confident that we’ll find a way to muddle through in the end, though. After all, it’s what we do.
I’ve come close to writing something along these lines a bunch of times; curse you Kevin Drum for pushing me over the line. I may yet come to regret posting this; if you’d like to find out, here are some buttons:
and if you’d like to speed the process of making me regret writing this, I’ll leave the comments open.
The problem with Drum's posts (both of them) is two-fold, and you're getting at both of the problems in your response, I think.
One is a very widely shared problem, which is that people who fancy themselves as understanding statistics, probability and risk frequently complain that public feelings are misaligned with reality without ever troubling to investigate what makes us feel as we do, what the actual sociological distribution of said feeling is, whether there are other modes or forms of reason that make those feelings completely sensible or cogent; e.g., they have a strong opinion about society and psychology without troubling themselves to think about society or psychology. Not only does that mean that they don't really understand the problem they're complaining about, they're also not thinking very clearly about the alternative they're calling for. What would human life be like if our governing systems and general mass psychology were tightly and consistently aligned with the actual distribution of problems afflicting human beings and the actual probability of catastrophic or negative events in human life? It would be deeply and dramatically different if we did that without exceptions or special pleading. Moreover, it wouldn't ever be a fixed or final outcome. If you stomp on the top cause of premature or preventable mortality with the top allocation of resources, then the next mole in the whack-a-mole game is going to pop up. Go after that one and the thing you stuffed down the list last time is going to pop up again if keeping it down requires continuous outlay of resources. The intolerable is not necessarily quite that zero-sum, but even if we were reallocating, we'd need a holistic vision of how to do that rather than the problem-by-problem approach that's built into these kinds of "why do you care about X when Y is so much worse?"
That's connected to the second problem, which Drum has a persistently bad case of: these kinds of complaints generally amount to a tendentious bit of specific policy-wonkery, e.g, "on this one issue, I believe we care too much/too little" (which is fine) via a global, universal claim of misallocation of caring in order to make the writer seem disinterested and objective. Look at my numbers! Look at my bell curves! I have charts! Specific claims of misallocated attention and resources should be made specifically, and when they're actually qualitative, observational, personal, felt (at least Hayes is being pretty honest about that), just go there.