Preface

Summary

As long as the World is turning and spinning, we are gonna be dizzy and make mistakes.

Mel Brooks

Strange days. I sit in my home office, using Zoom to lecture and to communicate, while a global pandemic brings about a second lockdown in most European countries (and some of my province in Canada) while I listen to the national radio broadcast a “science” reporter whose expertise a short 10 months ago was provincial governmental affairs. In the period of the pandemic, he went from being an expert on politics to the public radio voice of the science of the pandemic on the national radio broadcast in my heavily populated region. His position on the national broadcaster, its centrality in terms of Ontario population, means that he really is shaping how many educated or interested Ontario residents think about the pandemic. He is, in the parlance I will repeatedly use in this work, “educating us to reality”—in this case not only on the science of COVID-19 but also the human ethics and social aspects of it as well. Our intrepid reporter cites health experts and various studies, interviews talking heads from various universities with impressive expertise and works tirelessly but gets so much of it wrong (at least, for me)—I checked his biography and as far as I can see, he has no training in science. The talking heads struggle to speak “science” into a void that wants easy reduction and whenever they qualify or modulate what can be said, end up being pressed to an absolute kind of statement on numbers, virulence or infection rates as if they have absolute secret knowledge that is fated to come. And importantly, each morning the political reporter qua science expert tells the audience how that understanding should impact or alter human behavior, social interactions and even economics or politics based on his curious interactions with above experts. But, and this is the point, he confuses the two places on what science is saying and what it means. That is an intractable point of confusion, a place of dialogue between the scientists and the general public for whom public agencies are working.