My Audible book for dog walking this week is "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a statistician/physician, very popular on Ted talks, presented at Davos and to the WHO, etc. But I hadn’t heard of him before. I picked the book up because it was an Audible recommendation and because I feel a kind of responsibility to alternate my escapist fiction/thrillers with non-fiction.
Rosling loved stats and, in my listening so far, has talked about how we tend toward negative thinking—something my mindfulness lecturer has also said—but, really, according to statistics from the United Nations, the world is getting better, not worse. He described how, since the 1990s, he has posed several questions to classes and audiences about issues such as life span across the world, extreme poverty, education, etc. He "proved" through his stats that so many of these issues HAD improved worldwide to a much greater degree than his audience had expected.
I admit that, up to now, I had been listening with a slightly jaundiced ear, saying over and over in my head “Yeah, but….” I know how stats can be manipulated, how they hide injustices within them. My cynicism in a way proved his point about our negative bias. I even thought "Well, Mr. Rosling, you died before 2020, what would you think about THIS year?" As I was thinking that, almost in the very next paragraph, he answered my "yeah but" by admitting that averages are simply averages, that it doesn't mean that there aren't still problems, but that stats are just as often manipulated to show things are getting worse as getting better depending on whose agenda is being presented.
I had been ticked off last night after reading a blog where someone said that governments' imposing controls and sanctions against coronavirus have strayed too far into the realm of the "rights of the people." I was still mulling over my response to that blog when something that Rosling said this morning caught my attention, making me readjust my cynicism and think “What a good point. Isn't this, perhaps, what this so-called "fight for freedom" ignores.”
Rosling said that he became frustrated when people called him an optimist, ignoring the pains and sadness of the world, painting a rosier picture than the world deserved. He was almost insulted because he felt that an optimist tends to brush bad things aside, make light of them, pretend they aren’t as important as the hard facts of life. He didn't agree with that: focusing solely on good news and ignoring any bad news would be like going for too much sugar to counteract too much salt. Neither extreme is good and he fully recognized that. What is needed, he said, is to look at the world as if it were a premature baby.
If a baby is born prematurely, she is placed in an incubator, monitored for issues with her struggle for life, given the treatment that has been proven, through experience and experimentation, to sustain life, to prolong life. The parents certainly know that things are not "good," but the baby is alive and, with good care, is getting stronger. They recognize the need for incubation, for these medical measures and, after a day of the baby's improvement would certainly not take the baby out or say that treatment should be stopped--well maybe a small percent of the population would but let's put that small percentage aside. Parents and doctors, well-meaning friends, would take the baby's condition seriously until she is out of the woods. They would celebrate each positive step and keep vigilant.
As I listened to his analogy, I realized that looking at COVID and responses to COVID in that way, as if we are in an incubator, struggling to survive, focusing on the things that are helping and acknowledging and adjusting the things that are hurting is much more helpful than looking at it as some kind of attack on free agency. Who would say, looking at that premature baby, well, she has the free agency to live or die so we will just give her the freedom from tubes and let God/the Fates decide whether she lives or dies. For most of us, such thinking is anathema. And so it should be in arguments about responses to COVID: as a society, and as a democratic government is our representative, we take measures that are designed to protect its members, especially its most vulnerable ones. We defer to those who have medical knowledge and, confronted with confusing arguments, we take what we deem the best course and adjust along the way as other evidence presents itself.
Our world is better and safer because of all of the positive steps that have been taken in medicine, in education, in civil society. Let's remember that and not think that we would be better off back in the days on the prairies where people were free to live or die--and die they did. As a result, the survivors strove to create a world where that didn't happen anymore. Let's focus on their accomplishments and walk their path.
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