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| The right brain is where all the left things are happening. |
I've been reading this long and very well-made piece by David Wallace-Wells
for New York Magazine ("How the West Lost Covid"), which begins with some pretty uncomfortable truth: that pretty much every
government in Europe and North America, left or right, democratic or
authoritarian, globalist or isolationist, pro-science or anti-science, screwed
up in the pandemic fatally, in pretty much the same way; while the governments
that handled it especially well come from an equally mixed bag, in East Asia
and Australasia with just a tiny number of European outliers, Norway, Finland,
and Iceland.
I remember starting to get an unpleasant sense of this in the fall and winter,
when I was spending a lot of time looking at the statistics of the second wave
of infections. You could predict certain outcomes from this or that lockdown
or loosening, but you couldn't get a sense that one of your favorite countries
in the first group, Canada or Germany, was doing an adequate job. The Trump
and Johnson governments were as ignorant and vicious as you thought, but smart
politicians in Italy, France, and Sweden—Sweden!—were doing just as badly as
the US, or even considerably worse. And the same pattern was going on inside
the US, with the better-equipped states, New Jersey and New York and
California, doing just as badly as the incompetent and irresponsible
leaderships of Florida and Texas. What was that about?
Wallace-Wells has a non-ideological kind of hypothesis for starters, about
national cultures rather than politics, which is that the governments that
dealt successfully with Covid were the ones that decided to kill the virus—to
eradicate it—rather than learn to live with it, or mitigate it until the
pharmacologists came up with something. "Basically," he quotes the Edinburgh
public health professor Devi Sridhar,
