For the second week in a row Matthew nails it
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MATTHEW SYED
This is the age of ‘me, me, me’ — until we need a scapegoat, and it’s ‘them, them, them’
Matthew Syed
Sunday April 12 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
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Suppose that in 2015 David Cameron had proposed creating surge capacity to deal with a future epidemic. Suppose he had instructed officials to draw up plans for a new diagnostic infrastructure, buying surplus protective equipment and working with other nations to improve warning systems. Suppose there had even been talk of a warehouse stocked with ventilators to help us cope if a lethal microbe struck.
Do you think Cameron would have been hailed for his far-sightedness? Or do you think that the public would have been up in arms about ventilators gathering dust when money was needed here and now; that pundits would have been bemused about the rush to deal with a mutation that hadn’t yet materialised; that social media would have been awash with condemnation of long-term planning being prioritised over more urgent demands?
It is, of course, a tricky thought experiment to perform, given that we cannot unremember the times we are living through, with their social distancing and lockdowns. But we do know that successive prime ministers didn’t react fully to warnings from scientists that pandemics represented the biggest risk to humanity. Is it not plausible that they failed to do so because they knew it would have been political Kryptonite? Even Dominic Cummings, who wrote extensively about pandemics while outside politics, lost his sense of urgency when he had to write a manifesto that people might actually vote for.
And that is why I fear we may be drawing some wrong lessons from this crisis. It’s easy to blame politicians for misjudgments and logistical difficulties since the virus emerged. But we haven’t yet acknowledged that the broader failure of planning is a reflection of the chronic short-termism of the shameless chancers they rely on to secure power. In other words, us.
We once had a concept of prudence, of saving for a rainy day: the idea that to gain something of value, we needed the patience to delay gratification. Some historians argue that these values were central to the Protestant Reformation and laid the cultural roots for the rise of Europe after a long period of decline between the fall of Rome and the sacking of Constantinople — leading, ultimately, to the Industrial Revolution.
Today we live in an era of “now, now, now”. An era of dwindling attention spans, the sugar-rush detonations of computer games, the dopamine-optimised intensity of online entertainment, the summary recriminations of social media. Gratification isn’t rapid; it’s instant. I doubt any politician could have sold a policy of long-term planning for a pandemic, despite estimates in 2014 that early investment would save hundreds of billions of pounds over the course of the next hundred years.
I mean, who wants to wait a hundred years for a payback? Who wants to wait even 10? Isn’t it easier when a disaster materialises to blame Boris Johnson or some other bogeyman rather than acknowledge our own role in it? Don’t we see the same pattern with the credit crunch, as we continue to collude in the deranged pretence that it was entirely the fault of greedy bankers and nothing at all to do with those of us who took out 120% mortgages and maxed out our credit cards?
And isn’t this part of a broader pattern in which rational long-term planning is sacrificed on the altar of “nowness”? We see it in our lamentable inability to take wise (or cost-effective) decisions on large infrastructure projects, social care and pensions, not to mention antimicrobial resistance and ecological dangers.
The scourge of “now, now, now” is mirrored by that of “me, me, me”. Amid the debate about whether the government acted too late to initiate social distancing rules, I can’t help reflecting upon reports that members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) were sceptical that the public would obey them. They didn’t think a campaign emphasising that people going out were risking not merely their own lives but those of the people round them would be sufficient to engender collective responsibility, at least not at first.
You may disagree with this judgment, but can you not at least glimpse their reasoning? I mean, how often do people go to A&E when they don’t need to, or make GP appointments they don’t keep? We know that such decisions cost lives, but it doesn’t prevent people from placing self-interest above the public good. Indeed, many continued to throw barbecues and parties in those first few weeks, only scaling back when the body count started rising and the police got heavy-handed. And then, of course, we blamed the police.
None of this is intended as an indictment of democracy, for, as Winston Churchill intimated, it is superior to the other systems that have been attempted. I have certainly been more than a little surprised by the dubious acclaim being showered on China, a nation that will emerge from this crisis as a pariah, however much protective equipment it lavishes upon the world. The Communist Party may have been able to enforce a total lockdown, but it also permitted wet markets, demonised whistleblowers when the virus emerged and then serially lied as the epidemic gained pace. Whatever the question, one-party systems are hardly the answer.
Yet if democracy remains our best hope, isn’t it even more imperative that we address its weaknesses? Don’t we need to reconceive of societies not merely as aggregations of individuals and families — to see the threads linking all of us to one another, and all of us to the future?
In 1976 the RAF pilot Douglas Bader spoke at a symposium at Southampton University. I hope you’ll forgive me for mentioning this, given the surfeit of Second World War references over recent weeks. For although he was ostensibly relating his experiences during the Battle of Britain, he used the occasion for a meditation on social solidarity. He made the point that this often strengthens at times of crisis — as we are seeing today with applause for the NHS, our appreciation of low-paid heroes and the upsurge in neighbourliness. The real test, he said, is whether it is sustained when the threat subsides.
“I remember a tobacconist’s shop outside Victoria station which had been bombed the previous afternoon, but in the morning there was a trestle table and a notice that said, ‘Business as usual’, and a grinning Cockney standing beside it. These are the people that we so seldom see, our compatriots who took it. If they had not taken it, if they had not built the aeroplanes and everything else, we could not have fought. We were the glamour boys up there and had something to fight back with — that was the difference.
“This is what mattered,” he concluded. “It was a united effort by everybody.”
@MatthewSyed
