Harari's list falls short on preparation for next pandemic

London protest against Covid lockdown and masks

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, offers fatally limited advice to readers of Britain's Financial Times on how to prepare for the next pandemic. 

In his February article "Lessons from a year of Covid", Harari rightly praises the scientific effort that has quickly delivered useful vaccines, though he is scathing at the job done by politicians - "All too often the political wisdom has been missing" because of the habitual feuding in the political arena, and the focus on personal and national interests.

However, what counts is that politicians are society's elected leaders and scientists should leave to them the decision-making in the fight against the pandemic. 

The argument Harari presents as he makes his case also highlights from my point of view how essential it is that science and technology be held up to "human" or "social" scrutiny. He explains why science should not be granted the position of ultimate power in matters of life and death:

The Covid year has exposed an even more important limitation of our scientific and technological power. Science cannot replace politics. When we come to decide on policy, we have to take into account many interests and values, and since there is no scientific way to determine which interests and values are more important, there is no scientific way to decide what we should do.

For example, when deciding whether to impose a lockdown, it is not sufficient to ask: “How many people will fall sick with Covid-19 if we don’t impose the lockdown?”. We should also ask: “How many people will experience depression if we do impose a lockdown? How many people will suffer from bad nutrition? How many will miss school or lose their job? How many will be battered or murdered by their spouses?”

Even if all our data is accurate and reliable, we should always ask: “What do we count? Who decides what to count? How do we evaluate the numbers against each other?” This is a political rather than scientific task. It is politicians who should balance the medical, economic and social considerations and come up with a comprehensive policy.

Similarly, engineers are creating new digital platforms that help us function in lockdown, and new surveillance tools that help us break the chains of infection. But digitalisation and surveillance jeopardise our privacy and open the way for the emergence of unprecedented totalitarian regimes. In 2020, mass surveillance has become both more legitimate and more common. Fighting the epidemic is important, but is it worth destroying our freedom in the process? It is the job of politicians rather than engineers to find the right balance between useful surveillance and dystopian nightmares.

He's right in these matters: "there is no scientific way to decide what we should do"; likewise, without safeguards imposed by society, engineers could could end up "destroying our freedom" and delivering the stuff of "dystopian nightmares".  

This analysis is accurate but the advice arising from it as to preventing or combatting a future pandemic  is anemic. Here is the advice in summary:

First, we need to safeguard our digital infrastructure. It has been our salvation during this pandemic, but it could soon be the source of an even worse disaster. Second, each country should invest more in its public health system. This seems self-evident, but politicians and voters sometimes succeed in ignoring the most obvious lesson. Third, we should establish a powerful global system to monitor and prevent pandemics. 

The reason Harari falls short is that he offers no insight on how to lift the standard of human capacity in what citizens and politicians alike are willing to bear with regard solidarity and self-discipline and altruism - each demanding loving generosity and good will to others - and adherence to the common good rather than to the individualistic hedonism now well embedded in most Western nations, and increasingly to be observed elsewhere, such as in Vietnam, from where this blog originates.  

In other words, Harari fails to attend to the need to develop human capacity, which involves the ability of each person to learn across generations and within each society as to how to reason well, how to respect the dignity of others, and how important it is to serve, if that society is to be sucessful in its goal of ensuring human thriving. 

How to make it more likely that humankind will be ready to face the next pandemic or perhaps technological calamity? Buying Sam Harris's Waking Up app will not get to the heart of the human predicament;  nor by reading Enlightenment Now, where Steven Pinker celebrates the achievements of the human family just at the time where his homeland, the most prominent exemplar of enlightenment's child, individualistic materialism, is coming unstuck through the fraying of the bonds of religion, with the consequences of the destruction of discourse by both left and right, and the deluge of cases of early death and of the feeling of meaninglessness in life, which was Pinker's starting point for his book ("Why should I live?" - see his introduction to Part 1). 

Of course, Harari might expect us all to wait around until we reach the state of homo deus, but that book is as baseless as Pinker's on the big picture, on what is most important about human life. Let Harari build on his success in hitting the target on what needs to be done to avoid future catastrophes and focus on ways to solidify the moral foundation of human life, and on ways to generate the unending eruption of mutual love and respect. Enabling the divine spark to engulf each and every person's heart and mind is the certain way to "determine which interests and values are more important, [since] there is no scientific way to decide what we should do".  

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