Pandemic and Truth

COVID-19 is here.  There is much, and there will be much more, suffering — physically, emotionally and economically.  This will be the worst global peacetime crisis since, at least, the Great Depression,  It will have a profound impact upon our democratic process.  Whether that impact will be destructive or constructive depends in large part on whether this pandemic helps us re-learn to trust one another and that will depend on our capacity to trust.

Trust — in government, in science, in the media and in Truth itself — is a prerequisite to a functioning democracy.  While the Constitution and subsequent laws are essential, they are not enough.  Rather, a democracy requires norms, unwritten rules broadly accepted by politicians, political parties and ourselves in order to bridge the gaps in legal formalities.  Much of the crisis in our democracy today comes from the crumbling of these norms

In these first weeks of the pandemic, we have become profoundly aware of the danger of this mistrust.  We are on shifting sands, incapable of mobilizing our power. 

• We must be able to trust that the government will do everything in its power to collect and present to us accurate information.  We must be able to trust the government experts to tell us, what we must do in order to confront what we face.  We must trust that the government has our best interests at heart.  This is not to say that government is 100% trustworthy, that our trust will not sometimes be violated; it is to say that government will discover these violations and repair them.  In these times we must start out in a position of trust and move away from it only with reliable evidence to the contrary.
• We must trust science: that it is doing everything possible to find a reliable understanding of the virus and its treatment.  There are facts.  We must understand that the opinions of experts are more reliable than our hunches.  We must trust that our scientists will be allowed to communicate with our leaders without fear of recrimination.
• We must trust the mainstream media§ to pass on to us accurate information.  We must trust that they will not downplay or exaggerate it.  All media know that violence and sex sell; catastrophe sells.  This is a time, however, when we must be not only completely informed but also not coddled or panicked, especially in this day of the 24-hour news cycle.  We must trust that the media can confine themselves not only to the accurate but also to the wise.  And those who work in the media must trust us to be able to deal with the truth.
• We must trust that there is a Truth, that not everything is a matter of opinion.  Facts are not debatable or up for grabs.  “We may have our own opinions but not our own facts.”  And we must trust that we can discover that Truth, even if our inevitable guesses are sometimes inaccurate. 

Ultimately, the most important is trust in one another.  Without it, there is no beginning point.  I’ll examine that in our next post.  But trusting in government, science, media and Truth, we must be able to dispense with our paranoia and recognize that we are all doing the best we can under these unique circumstances.  We need, especially when we find it difficult, to double-down on our trust.  We must begin from the place of Trust.

**These days, one frequently finds quotation marks around "the truth," as if its very existence was questionable.  This is understandable in the light of "alternative facts."

§Until recently, the term "mainstream media" was used primarily by radical institutions to assert a propagandistic nature of the press.  This usage has now become widely accepted, indicating that for many people, nothing in the press can be trusted.  As above, the widespread belief is that truth, in any objective sense, is unavailable.