“I think we need to make sure that we’re open to dissent and that we’re open to dissent when it comes from the other side.”
— Stephen Macedo
I recently listened to the book, In COVID’s Wake, How Our Politics Failed Us, by Stephen Macedo, Frances Lee.
Macedo and Frances are two Political Science professors at Princeton University. Princeton is the publisher. They are self described liberals who dug deep into the history and controversies of COVID and found an alarming amount of political deception and science shaming primarily by the elite on the left. The science quickly became politicized and truth and health did not win the day. They document this through transcriptions of many private and public conversations on the record. And through a great deal of data of COVID outcomes. Whether you lean left or right, this book offers an opportunity to be self-reflective and consider the blind tribalism that can overtake our ability to be open to information that is helpful and valuable simply because it comes from sources that have been shouted down, shamed, canceled, or demonized by our tribe. This is not the way of Jesus. This is not the way to truth.
In August our ThinkAgain-FaithAgain discussed Eugene England’s impact on individual lives and the church. Gene spoke out on many important issues in his day and was publically shamed and basically cancelled by some high level leaders of the LDS Church. They used their political and ecclesiastical authority to delegitimize him. Decades later that same church embraces most everything he taught.
In all aspects of life, we would do well to do as Joseph Smith expressed: “The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 49)
Here is a PBS interview to read or listen to with the authors of In COVID’s Wake.
Publisher’s Synopsis:
What our failures during the pandemic cost us, and why we must do better.
The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world’s population-3.9 billion people-were living under quarantine. People were told not to leave their homes; businesses were shuttered, employees laid off, and schools closed for months or even years. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this eye-opening book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative questions: Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?
With In Covid’s Wake, Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive-and candid-political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. Hard choices were obscured by slogans like “follow the science.” Benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.
