Wisdom Guiding Expertise in Time of Crisis
[ This post is already badly dated. It was written weeks ago and a much shorter version appeared in my local newspaper. Like many, I am sick, not of Covid, but of hearing and reading about Covid. So I post this not because it is timely, but because I believe it applies to all kinds of decision making—public and private—on many different issues. And because I need to be a more regular poster. ]
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The question of how we should respond to the current virus crisis, as in other matters, is too important to be left to experts. We need expertise, of course, but what we crucially need from our decision makers is wisdom.
Expertise, by definition, is narrowness of knowledge. To become truly expert in anything, one must focus the great majority of one’s energies on a narrow slice of human knowledge and experience. Even though we often indulge in “expertise creep,” attributing authoritative insight to people speaking outside their expertise (Stephen Hawking on God, for instance), very few people are genuinely expert in multiple fields.
Wise decision making, on the other hand, requires breadth of knowledge and experience. Wisdom is understanding what is true, and the relative importance of often competing truths (and goods), and acting accordingly. Tremper Longman, a scholar of ancient “wisdom literature,” says, “Wisdom is the skill of living” and “an ability to navigate life.” Wisdom is the marriage of discernment and choices.
A wise leader is an embodiment of the virtues rather than a master of specialized knowledge. The traditional seven cardinal virtues are a combination of the classical virtues—courage, prudence, justice, and temperance—and the Judeo-Christian or theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. All of these need to be exercised at this time of profound threat.
Wisdom itself is one of the virtues—prudence—but each of the virtues requires the support of the other virtues. Courage without temperance, for instance, is simply foolhardiness. In a time of pandemic, a decision maker must exercise all the cardinal virtues, not just one or two. Overcoming fearful paralysis requires courage. At the same time courage—including the willingness to take risks to achieve a needed good—must be guided by temperance and prudence. And compassion—an expression of love.
Therefore a decision maker—president, governor, business person, individual—in time of crisis such as ours, cannot afford to turn decisions over to experts or to listen to only one set of experts. Epidemiologists, for instance, are professionally required to answer the question of how to stop the virus in absolutist terms—as though the only issue to be considered is maximally minimized deaths, with worst case scenarios taking priority. Even the more-flexible-than-most Dr. Fauci, to whom the nation owes a debt, urges us to stop shaking hands—forever. Never mind that it follows from that bit of expertise that we never again touch any surface in public—from subway straps to table tops to handrails. Never.
An apt comparison is the weather forecaster with a snowstorm on the way. Predict a lot of snow and get a little and you will hear grumbles. But predict a little snow and get a lot and you will get anger and accusations. Lesson? Aim high. Same with virus. Those who speak most grimly—whether expert, commentator, or political leader—have gotten the most attention and, so far, the most credibility. If you overstate and things turn out better, simply claim your strict measures caused the better outcome. If you understate, kiss your career goodbye.
So it is professionally almost required for an epidemiologist to speak as pessimistically as possible—ten inches of snow! To this point, it has been smart for media commentators and officials to do the same. Maybe even throw in some moral outrage.
The expert says never again shake hands. The wise decider has to ignore it, because a wise decider has to consider many other things (and experts from different fields) in addition to what the professional expert from one field says—including consideration of human nature. How long and to what degree can we expect human beings to live under certain decrees without rebelling and thereby rendering ineffectual those decrees? Absolutist say it doesn’t matter—force them to obey. The wise say that human nature is as pertinent a variable in decision making as the number of new cases of infection. A decision that is technically correct but not workable in the real world of human behavior is not a wise decision.
My wife and I crossed paths with just such an absolutist a few days ago. We had arranged to walk with another couple. My wife and the other couple were standing across the street, me about to join them. The couple stood next to each other, as most do who share the same house—even in time of virus. My wife stood apart from them, but apparently not far enough apart to suit a woman driving by. She was wearing both a mask and gloves while driving alone. When she spotted the trio, she slowed, blasted her horn, and gave the most aggressive finger gesture I’ve seen since high school, then sped away. Hostility as the cure for COVID, who would have guessed?
This woman undoubtedly would say, “Listen to the experts!” But of course that begs the questions everyone is now asking: which experts and at which times and to the exclusion of what other experts? Experts, in this case and many others, not only disagree with each other, they often disagree with themselves. What expert Fauci was saying in January and February was not what expert Fauci was saying in March and April and today. That’s not a criticism of Fauci, because the so-called “facts” change and even experts must change with them.
The scientific methods works best when one knows and can control the variables. In this situation, there are too many unknowns and too many variables (and the timeline for answers too compressed) for science to be definitive. The lacunas in expertise must be compensated for with wisdom.
That’s one problem with claiming to operate only by facts and reason and science. Each of these leaks. Some facts are more or less naked—pure water at sea level boils at a specific temperature, more or less. But most human facts are contextual. They are “true if,” with the “if” including “under these exact conditions with these exact circumstances.” We’ve had conflicting “facts” asserted about every aspect of this event, including about various remedies for the virus—many of them from accredited experts. If a fact isn’t generalizable, it isn’t a naked fact.
And reason is notoriously leaky. Equally intelligent, educated, and well-meaning folks—equally dedicated to thinking reasonably—come to starkly different, often conflicting, conclusions about many important things. That’s a naked fact. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t employ reason the best we can, but does mean we should have a dose of skepticism and humility about our own reasoning. Experts included, as most would readily admit.
We also face the problem of what one writer years ago called “hindsight bias”—the application backwards of things we know today onto actions taken in the past. This bias—currently rampant—suggests not only that the person or persons acting in the past should have done better, and that any competent person would have done better, but that I, myself, given my giftedness, would have done better. How many commentators imply that “there would have been plenty of ventilators and masks in December if people as smart as me had been in charge.”
A version of this bias—call it “moralistic bias”—is that I am more compassionate than anyone who disagrees with my response to this virus. The “you are willing to kill people and I’m not” declaration is spreading like its own kind of virus. The equally moralistic pushback is “you are willing to destroy lives economically and I’m not.” In the search for a middle ground, wisdom indicates that we also consider the experts who identify the link between unemployment and suicide, the deaths that will be attributable to the rise in undiagnosed or suspended treatment of disease, and other causes of death increased by, rather than prevented by, strict shut downs and quarantine itself. Wise decision makers recognize that COVID is not the only thing that kills people.
There is also the issue of where the common person gets his or her facts. The source for the great majority is the media. It’s not media bashing—nor trading in charges of “fake news”—to ask to what extent we can count on the media to report to us accurately and without bias the range of expert opinion and official action on this or any issue. My judgment is that various media outlets, while composed of people with good intentions, have favorite narratives for this pandemic and that they shape their reporting to fit that narrative. This does not serve the cause of wise decision making.
All of this makes problematic the relationship between description, prediction, and proscription. Description is reporting, prediction is speculating (sometimes informed), and proscription—restrictive rule making—is exercising power in service to the first two. Experts are best at description—this is what is happening and, physically speaking, why.
Experts haven’t been so good at prediction. They haven’t just revised past predictions, they’ve junked them and given radically different ones. Prompting the response, “If you were so wrong the first time and second time, why should we believe you this time? Wouldn’t it be better just to wait and see?”
And proscription—the banning of normal activities and aggressive rule making—should not be the purview of experts at all. Their expertise is simply too narrow to qualify them as broad social policy makers. Which means, like it or not, that public policy has to be made by non-experts, though they must, of course, consider the experts.
No decision maker is an expert in what to do in our current situation, because every crisis like this is unique. This is not the same as after Pearl Harbor or Hurricane Katrina or 9/11. So we have to settle for wisdom instead. Wisdom is not exclusive to the intelligent or the highly educated. It requires experience, discernment, judgment, practicality, compassion, and, sometimes, the courage to take risks. In other words, the virtues. And of course, all wisdom is contestable.
None of what I’m saying is an argument for or against any particular strategy for responding to this virus and returning us to health (of all sorts). Nor should it be taken as an attack on experts, whom we need more than ever. It is, however, an argument for thinking holistically—considering much competing information and multiple competing goods—while making our decisions. The expert will speak, our leaders will make rules and guidelines, but ultimately each of us will decide. May we decide wisely.