To lock down or not to lock down?

Since the start of the pandemic, I have been a supporter of lockdowns. It's a certain sign of the intellectual bubble I live in that for long I had thought it's just common wisdom. The bubble consists of mostly liberal news sources, but due to the lockdown itself, not many human contacts. Later when I had real conversations, I realized that whenever the topic came up, almost no one I was talking to shared my view completely. So I decided to sit down and try and articulate why I think lockdowns was a good idea and why the counter-arguments are wrong or unpersuasive.

My stance rests on three legs. Common sense, referring to experts, and caution. 

Let's start with common sense. Viruses spread from person to person. The less people mingle, the slower the spread is. Even if eventually everyone gets infected at some point, by slowing down the spread we can flatten the curve and prevent unbearable pressure on the health-care system. 

Referring to experts is a nice name for appealing to authority. This is admittedly the worst way to support an opinion, but it's also one we have to do every day. No one can be informed about everything, so you have to outsource your belief verifications to experts in almost every field of life. If epidemiologists and economists say lockdowns are a necessary evil, then I, being none of them, accept their word at face value.

Call me naive, but I also believe that politicians listen to experts. Call me cynical, but I also believe that they always keep their own interest in mind. Almost all Western governments have implemented some form of lockdown, and I don't think it can be fully ascribed to groupthink. Lockdowns cause severe economic damage which always hurts political leaders. If they chose to shut down their economies, they did it because they thought the alternative for them would be even worse. Groupthink is not a satisfying explanation for that, especially considering that no country followed the same pattern. Sweden has chosen not to implement lockdowns at all. Russia made a panicky U-turn after the short and typical strong-man stunt of disparaging the Western panic. Israel, whose people are not prone to public anxiety of imaginary dangers, locked down, too.

To address the caution part, every public measure either under- or overaddresses the problem it aims to solve. Shutting down the economy might be an overreaction, but with an unknown and deadly virus, that's exactly what I'd want the government to choose over the opposite. I prefer unnecessary economic damage to an unnecessary death toll. When the world-wide lockdowns were introduced, the mortality rate was estimated in the range of 0.5 and 6%. Italy had around 10%. It wasn't known which age groups are in danger, whether kids can contract the virus or spread it, what's the reproduction number, and many other factors. Today, as far as I know, the mortality rate is generally thought to be around 0.6% - which is still 6 times deadlier than the common flu -, and kids are not really at risk. These are good news, but they could have turned out very differently. If the mortality rate were around 10% among children and not among octogenarians, every family would live in their basement behind boarded-up windows. I would certainly do.

These are my arguments. Let's see the opposite side.

"This is an unacceptable invasion into our personal liberty"

Let's start with the libertarian argument which is the easiest to brush aside. Some oppose lockdowns on the ground of the perceived violation of personal liberty. This is nonsense. No one has the freedom to harm others, and that is exactly what a person infecting others does - even if unwittingly. If you subscribe to this reasoning, how would you make the case against anti-vaxxers?

The most common argument is that "the whole thing is blown waaay over, maaan". There are many sub-strains of this.

"This is just like a severe version of the flu"

Tens of thousands a year die in flu in America and no one thinks we should kill the economy because of it. That argument might have been worth considering months ago, but not anymore. The average yearly death toll of the seasonal flu is 10-60,000. COVID-19 has killed 180,000 so far and still counting. All of this while mandatory social distancing was put in place. The number would be much higher without it. The second wave has just started, and no one knows how long it will last or will there be another one.

"The numbers are unreliable, they count everything as COVID-death"

To invalidate the previous point, one has to put the numbers in question. So the next most popular argument is that the data are not reliable. Deaths are habitually ascribed to COVID even when the person would have died anyway from other causes (probably to serve the nefarious plans of...who actually?). That is surely true in many cases, but we have other statistics to look at that neatly eliminate the problem above. This is the number of excess deaths, that is, the increase in the number of deaths compared with the statistical average of the previous years. In America, it is over 200,000, which is even higher than the official number of COVID-related deaths. In the UK it's 65,000 against the official COVID fatalities of 40,000.

"The cure is worse than the disease"

Maybe the deaths are real. But I've heard from multiple sources that the self-inflicted economic damage leads to more misery in the long term than the virus would have done. This is something that's hard to argue both for or against. In ten years, when all the consequences have played out, we can have a pro- and con list, and even then we will need to resort to counterfactuals as the bases of comparison. As for now, many critics commit the mistake of comparing the grim reality to the normal state of affairs. The damage the shutdowns cause should be measured not against last year's GDP data, but against the alternative reality of COVID without mandatory social distancing. Sweden has shown what could happen without a lockdown. Its quarterly GDP fell by 8%. The EU average is 12%, Germany 10%, and Switzerland also 8%. They haven't avoided much of economic damage but lost 5-10 times as many lives per capita than Finland, Norway, or Denmark. Every country is unique in many relevant ways (population density, age distribution, cultural norms, international connectedness, the time and severity of the first outbreak, etc), but Sweden can't be that different from the average of its direct neighbors.

That was it. As a parting message, I offer my favorite line of reasoning, which is a kind of reversed argumentum ad verecundiam fallacy. Listening to people with a history of good judgment is a good strategy, but there is another useful one. It is listening to idiots and tyrants, and firmly taking the opposite view. Who were the loudest opponents of the mainstream reaction? First the Russians who never cared about their citizens' well-being. Then the Belarus dictator, Lukashenko, who claimed that the best cure for COVID is drinking vodka and driving tractor. The president of Turkmenistan who in his country simply banned even the discussion of the topic. The Brazil right-wing president, Bolsonaro, who said if he got infected, he would just shrug it off due to his athletic youth. Donald Trump - no explanation required. Right-wing media almost everywhere. Fox News treated it for weeks as a Democrat-hoax, then even now as the normal flu - so what's the fuss about? The UK government, which is neither malign nor completely moronic, but has shown that they prioritize their personal interests over their citizens'. 

It wouldn't survive strict scientific scrutiny, but as a rule of thumb, it is pretty reliable. When murderous dictators, crackpots, conspiracy theorists, plain morons, and well-known opportunists all tell you the same thing, it's a good sign to place your bets elsewhere.

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Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy

A couple of years ago I decided to write a quick summary after each good non-fiction book I read. I read a lot, but I forget a lot, too, and my attention to detail leaves much to be desired. This self-imposed exercise was meant to be a remedy of the sort. Of course, I lacked the discipline to stick to it, but time-to-time I muster the energy to carry it through. Some days ago I finished The Twilight of Democracy from Anne Applebaum, and decided this is a good place to get into practice again. So, here we go...

In her new book, the Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum attempts to explain the reasons behind the authoritarian wave that has swept over the Western world in the last decade. From Hungary to the United States, history seemed to take a sudden U-turn. Even in countries where democracy has not suffered serious blows, nationalists (and sometimes their mirror-images on the far left) have gained territory to an extent that was unimaginable ten years ago.

Applebaum is a renowned historian of the Soviet Union, but her new book is not a heavy tome. It's more like an essay of the length of a short book, in which she makes an attempt to explain how and why the zeitgeist has changed so much and so rapidly. She examines in detail how the events unfolded in Poland, Hungary, Spain, the UK, and the USA. 

There is no real common theme that underlies the changes everywhere. There are some commonalities, but every country has had its own way in the race to the bottom. Poland and Hungary went straight down the rabbit hole. Both the Polish Law and Justice Party and Orban's Fidesz have invented imaginary enemies - migrants, Soros, Brussel -, and managed to keep their base in a constant frenzy of them. The USA and Spain have developed the twin forces of Right and Left-wing extremism that mutually fuel each other. Britain hasn't sunk that low (my way to put it, not Applebaum's), and it's an outlier in this story in many ways, but a bunch of nostalgia-driven zealots and opportunists has taken over the country.

The usual explanations for the general decline in support for centrist politics find the blame mostly in globalism and growing inequality. Applebaum barely mentions them and instead makes two observations. One is about democracy and the other is about the role a special cadre of the elite - she calls them 'clerks' - plays in the political turns and the maintenance of the new regimes.

Liberal democracy has two unappealing features, at least unappealing for a large number of the electorate, especially those who reached adulthood in one-party systems. One is complexity. After decades of socialism, the chaos of democracy with its constant debates, changes, and uncertainties were too much for many people. They needed a simpler narrative. And once someone offered the truth, why would we need pluralistic views? Secondly, liberal democracy is a meritocratic system. That is great for talented and lucky people, but it can be a source of resentment for others. For those, a one-party system where loyalty and not talent is rewarded is often much more desirable.

The other crucial element in these political movements is the existence of the clerks. The bureaucrats, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who, for various reasons and rewards, decided to serve the regime. They spread the center's lies, explain away contradictions, stoke nativism, present a measured and civilized face to the outside world - while railing their base against it. In Eastern-Europe they largely came of age in the socialist era and the main reason to turn against liberalism was personal resentment. Many of them felt that in the new system they weren't given the status and recognition they deserved, but realized that they could have them in exchange for loyalty.

In England, the Brexiters subscribed to a special form of nostalgia. Being a middle-sized power in the shadow of the USA, China, and the EU is not a glamourous role for a country that ruled over a quarter of the Earth just a century ago. They long for a world where England could make the rules again, and shameless lying, sycophancy, and economical and political damage are a small price to pay for it.

What happened in the West in general, particularly in the US, is an unexpected break-up among former comrades-in-arms. A generation ago, the Soviet threat herded very different characters into the same camp. Christians opposed the Communists on the basis of their atheism and religious persecution. Nationalists hated the idea of Soviet dominance and the Marxist interpretation of history. People of realpolitik were concerned about Soviet influence and threat. Idealists thought that fighting for freedom and human rights is a duty. Free-market advocates hated collectivism. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the cohesive force disappeared with it and the differences become obvious. In the span of two decades, intellectuals drifted into two opposing camps, with no bridge between. 

On one side are (or stayed) the believers of democracy and freedom. Not every one of them is an unabashed pro-market and free-trade supporter, but the latter all belong to this camp. On the other side are the ones to whom democracy turned out to be only secondary to something else. National greatness, or religion, or tradition. Many such people, even staunch Cold War warriors, have found an unlikely lodestar. - Russia, as the defender of tradition, religion, and conservative values. It looks like it doesn't matter how many journalists and human right lawyers Putin kills, politician opponents poisons, or war crimes he commits, or how much he and his cronies steal from his own people, simple claiming to be a defender of Christianity (and not even trying very hard at that) absolves all the sins. Applebaum is incredulous how people can fall for such an obvious lie, and so am I.

The book also addresses the role social media has played in the surge of populism. It doesn't make any novel observations but summarizes the topic neatly. First of all, social media offered the fringes a platform to coalesce. Conspiracy theorists, anti-semites, nazi-sympathizers, and general nutjobs used to have few venues to vent their anger. In the pub, on football-matches, or at family gatherings. The mainstream media slammed the door firmly in their faces. Now they can find and connect to each other as easily as never before. They can live in a social bubble sealed from alternative voices. Additionally, expressing some extreme opinions or insulting people used to come with the danger of retaliation. Anonymity on the net eliminates that.

Even for sane people, social media changed the perception of the world. The traditional ways of exerting political influence - voting, campaigning, international efforts - seem extremely slow and ineffective ways of bringing about change, and that frustrates people.

The world changed in another way, too, which is only partly related to technology, but like that, it's unlikely to go away soon. Apart from the mandatory anti-semitism, far-right parties across the world used to have little to agree on. Just being neighbors logically led to animosity. It has changed, very recently, probably as a backlash against the radical leftward-shift of the mainstream. From Russia to the United States, the right-wingers share a common fear and hatred for gay-rights, feminism, Muslims, immigrants, globalism, environmentalism, and technology (and still the Jews, which, of course, will never change). But they also share a vague ideal as well. The socially conservative, Christian family.

The book, unfortunately, doesn't offer solutions. Applebaum's farewell message is that these are darker days, and the liberal world order might turn out to be a mere blip in history, not the end of it. Let's hope and work against that.

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Robert Wright: Why Buddhism Is True Book (2017)

Earlier I admitted that, although I'm generally, albeit moderately, interested in Buddhism, I can only really appreciate books on the topic from Western authors. Since then, my snobbism has raised to new heights (or sunk to new lows), as nowadays I can only digest the rare Buddhist books from Western scientists. I think the reason is that with something both so subjective and abstract, even very smart people can get carried away by wishful thinking, confirmation bias, or just insufficient training in critical thinking. A scientist is trained to avoid logical fallacies, to think in probabilities rather than certainties, and to distrust even beautiful theories until they are confirmed by data. They are not infallible, but at least more immune to self-deception...

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