Is It All Worth It?

There is part of me that itches to reject anything that mainstream opinion endorses, but when someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum a link to an interview in which Peter Hitchens denounces hysteria over COVID19 I found my initial weary reaction justified. I knew what was coming: Mr Hitchens is an intelligent man, of course, but thinks that intelligence can replace actual knowledge. ‘You don’t have to be an epidemiologist to come to a conclusion’. No, you don’t, but it might affect how anyone else regards your opinion, and explains why you feel so ignored and marginalised.

That doesn't mean he isn't right. I know no more than anyone else does whether the policies followed by the UK, and so many other countries to different degrees, are the correct ones. At the moment it’s all more-or-less informed guesswork. Even at the end of this, we may be not much the wiser. If the policies work, and we manage to get away with a modest number of deaths, there will always be those who argue that there was never a problem at all. In a way, scorn will be a sign of success.

But that seductive question, ‘Is it worth it?’ sounds challenging but turns slippery when you try to get a conceptual grip on it. What does worth mean in this context? If every human life is unique, you could argue with some point that a single life weighs heavier in the balance than the entire global economy, but most of us would feel uneasy pushing it that far. You might contend, conversely, that putting the economy into a protective coma will cost more lives than the sickness (and Mr Hitchens and Lord Sumption do), but either side of that equation sits a nebulous and indeterminate number. Do nothing, said the Imperial College modellers, and half a million people will die. Shield the vulnerable, and you take that toll down to a quarter of a million (about the number of British people we think died in the flu epidemic of 1918); lockdown and social distancing stand some chance of reducing it to a tenth of that or less. Yet it’s not that simple, because what we’re trying to do is increase the ability of the health service to cope with the extremely ill people who come its way, and the number of people that increased capacity/decreased demand is likely to save – in the sense of deferring their deaths a reasonable time, and to a different cause – is very hard to calculate. On the other hand, working out how many people would be saved by allowing more economic activity to carry on, and not be killed by murders, suicides, unemployment, malnutrition, or lack of resources available to spend on health provision over the next two decades or so, is a completely impossible task for any human agency. And can a life be worth more, or less, than a particular quantifiable amount of distress or suffering short of death? You’re left with a value judgement, nothing more.

‘Life or economy is not a choice’, while ‘economies can be rebuilt, lives can’t’. I can’t say I disagree much with either of these contrasted rhetorical statements. Businesses aren’t just businesses, not just methods of producing money (as some of my left-er friends seem to think). They are the way a community is bound together: they provide context and value to human lives, as well as funnelling creativity, albeit sometimes of a pretty basic character. It’s not a matter of choosing between life or money. But equally we should not forget that despite its power, money is a fiction. It always fascinates me that something we all use every day, something which is fundamental to keeping society functioning, is also a thing whose historical origins are unclear and whose exact nature and workings nobody can convincingly define. Globally, we all agree this stuff exists and that it works in a particular way, because it suits us; we give it its power, by tacit consensus. Money’s laws are not like natural laws, not like gravity or oxidation ratios; we determine them, and we can rewrite the fiction (the chapter on debt, or the chapter on borrowing) if we choose. We need to remember that, provided we all work together, we are in charge and not it: we need not be dazzled by its glamour. But I think that's a harder job than dealing with the pandemic.