Why science can't actually tell us what we must do

If you thought the coronavirus presented difficult policy questions, don't worry — we have science.

California Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted the other day, "The West Coast is — and will continue to be — guided by SCIENCE."

Former Vice President Joe Biden has urged President Donald Trump, "Follow the science, listen to the experts, do what they tell you."

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson calls the crisis "a giant experiment in whether the world will listen to scientists, now and going forward."

The invocation of science as the ultimate authority capable of settling questions of how we should govern ourselves is a persistent feature of modern Western life going back several centuries, and has always been a mistake. It is especially so in this crisis, when so much is still unknown about the coronavirus and immensely complicated and consequential public-policy questions are in play.

Modern science is obviously one of the wonders of our age. We owe it an unimaginable debt — for technological advancements in medicine, transportation, industry, communication, computing and more. All honor to Newton, Turing, Curie and Einstein.

One of the horrifying things brought home by The Great Influenza, John Barry's book about the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, is how primitive our knowledge and medicine was then by today's standards. The world was slow to react to the coronavirus, and yet the genetic code of the virus was publicly posted by China in January, and South Korea had deployed a test kit by early February. It's possible we'll have a vaccine by the end of the year.

Of course, our policymakers should be informed by facts and reason, but science has a limited competency. Once you are outside a lab setting and dealing with matters of public policy, questions of values and how to strike a balance between competing priorities are involved and they simply can't be settled by people in white lab coats.

Science can make the atom bomb; it doesn't tell us whether we should drop it. Science can tell us how to get to the moon; it doesn't tell us whether we should go. Science can build nuclear reactors; it doesn't tell us whether we should deploy them.

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The great British essayist G.K. Chesterton wrote compellingly about how to think about the role of science, using the example of a doctor, "Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself. It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place. After that, obviously, it is for us to judge."

Invoking scientists in this crisis is a little like saying, "My economic policy is going to be guided by an ECONOMIST." Well, good for you. But is your economist on the left or on the right? What are his assumptions? Does he care most about inequality or dynamism? Is he Paul Krugman or Art Laffer? Both muster facts and research in support of their positions.

Science can indeed settle debates once and for all — we don't argue about heliocentrism anymore. But an extraordinary feature of the coronavirus is how poorly understood it is. We don't know how many people have it, what the death rate is, what the long-term health consequences of having a severe case are, or how best to treat it, among other things.

The models of how the virus would spread and how many would be hospitalized and die were invested with a certainty that they didn't deserve. They were all over the map, and some have failed to accurately predict the course of the disease even a couple of weeks in the future.

If we are going to unquestioningly accept expert opinion, we'd better prepare for whiplash. At first, the elite consensus was that wearing masks was unnecessary. Now, we are told, it's an essential piece of getting out of this mess.

We worried about running out of ventilators, but in recent weeks some doctors have been wondering whether they have been overused.

Then, there are the big questions. Science can't tell us how we should think about the trade-off between economic misery caused by shutdowns and the public-health risks of reopenings. It can't determine the balance between shutting down a hospital's elective surgeries so it can prepare for a Covid-19 surge, and tanking its business and forcing it to furlough employees. It can't decide what level of infections we deem tolerable while returning to seminormality.

The people in our political debate who most volubly insistent that they are simply following "the science" tend also to be most resistant to nuance and prone to fervency rather than scientific dispassion. They are using "science" as a bludgeon and conversation-stopper.

Obviously, science already has made an enormous contribution to our fight against the coronavirus, and may — through therapies or a vaccine — go a long way to solving this crisis. But life is not an equation, and neither is politics or policy.

We, as a self-governing people, will have to decide the important questions about how to respond to the coronavirus going forward, not the doctors on TV or the researchers in the labs.

(COMMENT, BELOW)