Ignorance is bliss.
Or so the saying goes.
But for longer than I can remember, I have thought the precise opposite.
Knowledge is power.
The truth shall set you free.
Thanks to the scientific method, we have discovered more and learned more than any humans who came before. From the wheel to the internet, travelling first the highways and by-ways of cleared paths and wooden planks, then of cobblestones and macadam, and ultimately of mere ether, we've been able to produce more and exchange more and communicate more and know more . . . than any before.
Things that would, and in fact did, lay prior generations low have been discarded in the dustbin of history. The microscope gave us germ theory and made soap and water, basic sanitation, our first and often most effective defense against disease. The telescope gave us the laws of gravity and then of relativity, which more or less explains light and electromagnetism and, if that's too abstract for you, allows satellites to take us home.
That's right.
The GPS in your car could not exist without Einstein.
Ignorance, the absence of knowledge, often the intention to never pursue it, is horror, the horror that stokes fear and famine, abuse and neglect, suffering and pain . . .
And death.
Yet it persists.
It has to be, it seems to me, more than an inherent disposition. It's certainly not the case that we humans are omniscient, so arrogance in the wake of the accomplishments made possible by science is not the right attitude. Even the scientific method abhors that. In fact, it demands the precise opposite, a rational skepticism that makes all hypotheses testable and disprovable. The idea, in other words, is not to turn the Newtons and Einsteins . . . and Dr. Faucis . . . into modern day gods. If a claim is tested and rebutted, no PhD can make it true.
And people know this.
Right?
So what is Donald doing?
Every day now, generally between the hours of 5 and 6 pm, the doors to the White House briefing room swing open and the President of the United States enters with a supporting cast and holds forth for upwards of two hours. These press briefings are themselves the product of cornonavirus. Before the pandemic, Trump's go to venue was the "rally", where a swarm of like-minded Trumpists were regaled for hours by a stream of consciousness chest-thumping and litany of insults against all opponents, perceived and real; at his last two, on February 28 and March 2, Trump called coronavirus the new Democratic "hoax" during the first and falsely claimed he had always taken the disease "seriously" at the second. Once the rallies became impossible, Trump took to the briefing room, where he has otherwise been more than scarce for the last three years.
At these briefings, all the usual Trump-tics are on display. Questions he dislikes become vehicles for attacks, often vicious, on the press. Pre-written statements are read, generally in a way (i) that makes it clear he is reading them for the first time and (ii) with odd pauses (and an allergy to punctuation) that allow him to insert random editorial comment.
Sometimes what he says is accurate. On Sunday, for example, he reported that the available models suggested the next two weeks would be the worst. Other times, however, he is in a la-la land located somewhere between denial and displeasure. The former is in evidence as he (falsely but repeatedly) proclaims the test shortage solved (today he even falsely claimed that anyone coming off a plane is being tested), the latter as he waffles from hyping the need to get back to work lest the cure be worse than the disease to admitting that we are in this for the long haul. Easter has been mentioned so often as a target (or aspirational) re-open for business date that comedians now confess surprise he hasn't decided to just move the holiday and take it up with Jesus (or His Dad) later.
There's also a Wizard of Oz element to these events. The strings in this case are members of his supporting cast, there to prop-up the man behind the curtain (or presidential seal). A la Toto, however, the curtain/seal is often pulled back as various interlocutors reveal the reality behind it. Often times, Dr. Fauci comes forward to either deliver hard scientific facts or take the edge off one of Trump's more ludicrous pronouncements (it was Fauci, for example, who turned Trump's Easter rising into a mere "aspiration", quelling the nerves of millions who thought April 12 might end the world as we know it).
Last week, again lifitng the Oz-like curtain, Trump's guy Friday, Jared Kushner, proclaimed that the federal stockpile of medical equipment (ventilators, masks, gowns and drugs) was "our stockpile" and not "the states'" for them to "use". And yesterday, after again suggesting the use of hydroxychloroquine to combat the virus, but no doubt wary of one behind-the-curtain scene too many, Trump himself refused to allow Dr. Fauci to be asked about the drug's efficacy.
Both Kushner's comment and Trump's suppression were astounding.
The former revealed a stunning lack of either knowlege of or appreciation for the purpose of any federal stockpile of medical supplies. Contra Jared, it is to be used precisely in situations like this, where states are confronted with a crisis, the scope and cause of which extends far beyond their borders and for which they lack sufficient capacity.
Neither Trump nor Kushner have retracted the statement, all of which has convinced the commentariat that the President's politcal plan here is to blame the states for the country's overall lack of preparedness.
Good luck with that.
Especially when the virus hits the states that voted for him.
As it now has.
In droves.
As to the silencing of Dr. Fauci, it is a warning light blinking red.
Had Dr. Fauci been allowed to speak, he undoubtedly would have repeated what he has often said in the past. As an anti-viral treatment for this case, hydroxychloroquine has not been fully tested, has not been proven effective even against other viruses like the flu, is known to have potentially fatal side effects, especially for those with heart problems, and has to remain available to treat diseases against which it is efficacious. The notion, as Trump puts it, that we "have nothing to lose" if the drug is used here is not remotely accurate. There may be a lot to lose, especially if it is given to the wrong patient, and testing protocols are literally the only way that prospect can be avoided.
This does not mean the drug should be side-lined until a years-long approval process is completed. It does mean, however, that the President should shut up and let medical professionals do their job. They can decide if and when to take the extraordinary step of recommending the drug for a coronavirus patient.
What Trump doesn't get, and has never gotten, is that -- whether they should or shouldn’t, even now, and even after three years experience -- his words matter. This isn't a TV show. It's real. A lot of people (still) think they can rely on the President. The couple in Arizona who self-administered an apparent variety of hydroxychloroquine certainly thought so; indeed, one of them said so.
The other is dead.
As are many who heard Trump tell them in January and February that this whole Covid-19 thing was much ado about nothing, a political "hoax".
Back then, he said we'd all "be fine", that the virus could go away "miraculously" in April when the weather warmed a bit.
Now, having failed to do the early testing, identifying and quarantining that could have contained the crisis in ways no longer possible, we are living a latter-day version of Eliot's Waste Land, where hundeds of thousands are expected to die and April truly is "the cruelest month".
The notion that "ignorance is bliss" was actually borne from a poem by Thomas Gray, an 18th century English poet. In his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College", Gray recounts the innocent pleasures of childhood and contrasts them with the inevitable pain of much that lies ahead. In that world, the child's world, where "ignorance is bliss/'Tis folly to be wise".
That is the world of Donald Trump, our man-child president.
And, ironically, it is also the defense he and his seconds mount against attacks on his most outrageous nostrums.
When asked why he persisted in painting a rosy picture of Covid-19 back in January and February, or why he constantly mentions the idea of an earlier return to normal, his recurring Easter-vision as it were, or even why he shut up Dr. Fauci yesterday, some version of Gray's bliss is always embraced.
On the early comments, say his defenders, he was trying to convey optimism in the midst of uncertainty, a sort of Alice-like move where saying so either makes it so or at least takes the edge off. On the Easter re-opening, it "would be a beautiful thing", said Trump, hundreds packed into churches scattered throughout the land living a veritable second resurrection in celebration of the first. And on silencing Fauci yesterday, the President basically argued that -- in answering the hydroxychloroquine question for, as Trump put it, "the fifteenth time"-- the doctor would have turned the bliss of hoped-for cure into the bane of uncertain reality.
The irony here is that Trumpists would flirt with anything suggesting a juvenile disposition. Babies, afterall, do whine and kids often lie. Nevertheless, in Trump's world, "ignorance" really "is bliss" and it really is "folly to be wise". For the rest of us, who actually grew up, it's just folly.
One would have thought that the Founders, those illuminati who gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and who otherwise had such a clear-eyed view of the foibles of human nature, would have created some sort of protection on this front.
And in truth they tried.
They required that anyone be at least thirty-five years old to qualify for the presidency. Back then, when the life expectancy of an average male was forty-seven, this was a reasonably safe age to pick, old enough to be wise but young enough to last. Most of the Founders, moreover, were pretty young themselves. The average age of the signers of the Declararion was forty-four and a dozen were younger than thirty-five. And ten years later, when they wrote the Constitution, they hadn't turned into wizened gray heads (and any whose were had likely been powdered).
In Federalist No. 64, John Jay explained that the Founders wanted as President only those who "have become the most distinguished by their abilitites and virtue, and in whom the people perceive just grounds for confidence." He claimed that "The Constitution manifests very particular attention to this object", and then explained that by "excluding men under the age of thirty-five . . . it confines the electors to men . . . with respect to whom they will not be liable to be deceived by those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism, which, like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle."
Oh well, no one in the 18th century could have known that their era's transient meteor would be our era's television reality show host with an unbridled twitter feed. In fairness, moreover, the Founders, according to Jay, also thought that limiting the presidency to those over thirty-five would insure that "the people have had time to form a judgment" about those running for President, that in having been given enough time to be forewarned, they would necessarily be forearmed. We, of course, had more than twice the time they prescribed to take in the Donald so . . .
Nothing's perfect.
And, by the same token, ignorance sometimes is bliss. Children should be protected. At the expense of maturation or development or, worse yet, parental love, it is always folly to make them wise.
Even for adults, ignorance can be, if not blissful, at least useful. The renowned Harvard philospher John Rawls suggested his famous "veil of ignorance" as a way for us to objectively think about distributional justice. What would you suggest as a fair distribution of the world's goodies, Rawls asks, if you couldn't assume you'd be who you are, born when you were, to whom and with whatever they had and could provide? What kind of society would you create if you did not know, and could not assume, your own place in it?
Maybe Trump should try that on.
Rawls's veil of ignorance.
Something the President could use to think.
Rather than hide behind.
He'd at least have to tell Jared to cut out the "his" stockpile crap.
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