Knowledge Underload

I’ve just reached a point where I can hit pause and emerge from my creative writing hole. I want to put a marker down, for my own record. I need to express some thoughts before I can press play again. It’s a familiar feeling. I can’t move on without this catharsis.

I would have hoped that by now we’d have a better grasp of the science behind the pandemic. That hasn’t happened. Information overload has resulted in knowledge underload. Number theatre has become a thing. The science remains inexact. The data is still woefully sketchy. An incompetent government is flailing around and continuing to make poor decisions. And some shockingly poor decisions have certainly been made. Hindsight is a miraculous thing, of course, but this has been an embarrassing fiasco of mismanagement. Not that I think things would have panned out so very differently whoever happened to be in power. The lack of preparedness and the inability to act decisively are social and cultural issues as much as political ones.

This crisis has reinforced my belief that humans can’t deal with complexity. Both individually and collectively, we struggle when confronted with complex problems that involve many variables and no clear solution, especially when getting it wrong can have such huge consequences. The driving force in decision-making becomes the fear of making any small mistake, which inevitably means that much bigger mistakes are made by default.

The whole response in this country has been reactive rather than proactive. I’m reminded of a captain on the cricket field, continually adjusting the field, moving fielders to cover the gaps where the ball has just been hit, always behind the game. It’s become endemic to the function of society as a whole. We wait for something to go wrong and only then do we try to fix it. Perhaps that might now begin to change. I’m not counting on it.

I’ve always been extremely good at not worrying about things I have no control over. If there is a source of anxiety, I’m able to bury it. It’s probably not the healthiest strategy in the long term, but it allows me to be very single-minded in the present moment. That’s always been a core part of my personality. It’s my survival mechanism. I create a bubble around myself, one that allows me to focus on my current project. Those projects - from writing books to building major software applications - have always been immensely satisfying and successful from a personal perspective. It’s only when the bubble has been popped and they’ve needed to enter the real world that my projects have been less than successful. I don’t think I’m built for the real world. Perhaps that explains why I’m enjoying what I’m doing right now so much. My fiction has proved to be an all-consuming escape. Ironically, it might yet prove to be the most real thing I’ve ever done. I’m hoping so, at least.

Lockdown hasn’t been much of a problem for me. With the moor literally on my doorstep and a network of quiet roads at my disposal, I’ve barely felt locked down at all. Possibly in common with many introverts, the lack of any obligation to do social stuff has been liberating, albeit in a less than ideal way. I’ve found myself with more energy and a clearer head than at any time since my accident. I’m one of the winners in this whole business. Sadly though, as always, there are far more losers, all around the world, mostly those who can least afford to lose. That’s perhaps the biggest tragedy of all. The collateral cost is going to be terrible.

I can forgive the government's incompetence - they are, after all, only human - but I hold them in contempt for pretending to know what they’re doing when they patently don’t. The line that’s angered me most is the ‘following the science’ one. There is no clear science to follow. There will be a number of scientific opinions and it’s a political decision as to which line is taken. This virus is not at all well understood. Its epidemiology is still quite puzzling. Factors affecting immunity are mysterious too. That lack of understanding has been really quite surprising. Right now, I’m becoming as skeptical of the scientists as I am of the politicians. They have careers and reputations on the line that need to be protected in the same way. It's hard to blame anyone in positions of power and influence for playing it safe right now, but we're approaching the time, I believe, when some brave decisions need to be made to ensure that the collateral damage doesn't surpass the direct toll that the pandemic has taken.

The numbers that are beginning to come out of the testing don’t make any sense to me. It’s a gut feeling that our current assumptions about this coronavirus don’t add up. For example, in London, we’re hearing about very low numbers of new cases at a time when people have become much more relaxed around lockdown, for over two weeks now. The level of immunity in the capital suggested by random antibody tests is too low to explain that. To my mind, that suggests something else is going on. I’m guessing we’ll find out soon enough. If we don’t see a second spike in the next week, then surely we will know that another kind of immunity must be at work, a natural immunity, one perhaps similar to that which seems to protect children. That’s a reason to be optimistic. I have a hunch that we’re going to get back to some kind of normality far quicker than we would have dared imagine a month ago. 

I may well be completely wrong, but even if my optimism is unfounded, it’s a better frame of mind to take with me back into my hole. It might even encourage me out more often. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

Finally, it looks like a very warm, dry, sunny spring following a very wet, mild winter has allowed the bog cotton to flourish. Here’s to flourishing in unusual and difficult times.