Human beings have been trying for eons to beat back nature and bend it to accommodate and serve their needs. Such efforts have ranged from the use of fire to prevent hypothermia to the development of vaccines to fend off contagious diseases. Other things range from the building of dams to collect water and irrigate fields to the cooling of buildings for comfort.
The cooling of buildings exemplifies the kind of endeavor that copes with nature in a way that enables humans to be more productive (e.g., when a cooled building is a factory or office in which workers become more effective than they would be in the absence of cooling). It’s a small step, conceptually, from coping with nature for the sake of enabling productive endeavors to “exploiting” nature for the same purpose (e.g., extraction of oil and iron ore to build and operate machines and automobiles).
So, human beings have in many, many ways not only coped with nature but also transcended it. Some accomplishments (e.g., airborne flight, space flight, robotic interplanetary exploration, and the use of space-borne telescopes) are literally (physically) transcendental.
All of which has given rise to the illusory human conceit — in “advanced” nations, at least — of independence from nature. Nasty encounters with wildlife, tornados, hurricanes, etc., dispel the conceit — but only temporarily.
The conceit of independence from nature feeds into another illusory conceit, namely, that government, with its ability to command resources, is capable of defeating nature and human nature alike. This conceit is not only illusory but also tragic. It is the Achilles heel of human striving. It leads, and has often led, to impoverishment, famine, genocide, and war.
In a recent incarnation, the all-powerful-government conceit caused the birth and spread of a deadly pestilence, namely, COVID-19. As if that weren’t bad enough, “omniscient and omnipotent” governments made things worse by issuing warnings and edicts (masking, distancing, isolation, lockdowns, “mask-shaming”, “vaccination-shaming”, etc.) that needlessly wrought vast social and economic devastation.
To seem to be effective, and thus to retain power, it is the instinct of most office-holders and senior bureaucrats to do something. And doing something, as noted above, can have worse consequences than doing nothing and letting people strive together voluntarily in the service of their own interests. In the case of COVID-19, that is exactly what should have been done.
You have probably read recent reports about how the draconian approach taken by U.S. officials was extremely counterproductive. Here are some relevant excerpts from a Washington Monthly article:
While most countries imposed draconian restrictions, there was an exception: Sweden. Early in the pandemic, Swedish schools and offices closed briefly but then reopened. Restaurants never closed. Businesses stayed open. Kids under 16 went to school.
That stood in contrast to the U.S. By April 2020, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health recommended far-reaching lockdowns that threw millions of Americans out of work. A kind of groupthink set in. In print and on social media, colleagues attacked experts who advocated a less draconian approach. Some received obscene emails and death threats. Within the scientific community, opposition to the dominant narrative was castigated and censored, cutting off what should have been vigorous debate and analysis.
In this intolerant atmosphere, Sweden’s “light touch,” as it is often referred to by scientists and policy makers, was deemed a disaster. “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale,” carped The New York Times. Reuters reported, “Sweden’s COVID Infections Among Highest in Europe, With ‘No Sign Of Decrease.’” Medical journals published equally damning reports of Sweden’s folly.
But Sweden seems to have been right. Countries that took the severe route to stem the virus might want to look at the evidence found in a little-known 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The researchers found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among individuals under 75. None, zero, zip.
That’s not to say that Sweden had no deaths from COVID. It did. But it appears to have avoided the collateral damage that lockdowns wreaked in other countries. The Kaiser study wisely looked at excess mortality, rather than the more commonly used metric of COVID deaths. This means that researchers examined mortality rates from all causes of death in the 11 countries before the pandemic and compared those rates to mortality from all causes during the pandemic. If a country averaged 1 million deaths per year before the pandemic but had 1.3 million deaths in 2020, excess mortality would be 30 percent….
The Kaiser results might seem surprising, but other data have confirmed them. As of February, Our World in Data, a database maintained by the University of Oxford, shows that Sweden continues to have low excess mortality, now slightly lower than Germany, which had strict lockdowns. Another study found no increased mortality in Sweden in those under 70. Most recently, a Swedish commission evaluating the country’s pandemic response determined that although it was slow to protect the elderly and others at heightened risk from COVID in the initial stages, its laissez-faire approach was broadly correct….
One of the most pernicious effects of lockdowns was the loss of social support, which contributed to a dramatic rise in deaths related to alcohol and drug abuse. According to a recent report in the medical journal JAMA, even before the pandemic such “deaths of despair” were already high and rising rapidly in the U.S., but not in other industrialized countries. Lockdowns sent those numbers soaring.
The U.S. response to COVID was the worst of both worlds. Shutting down businesses and closing everything from gyms to nightclubs shielded younger Americans at low risk of COVID but did little to protect the vulnerable. School closures meant chaos for kids and stymied their learning and social development. These effects are widely considered so devastating that they will linger for years to come. While the U.S. was shutting down schools to protect kids, Swedish children were safe even with school doors wide open. According to a 2021 research letter, there wasn’t a single COVID death among Swedish children, despite schools remaining open for children under 16….
Of the potential years of life lost in the U.S., 30 percent were among Blacks and another 31 percent were among Hispanics; both rates are far higher than the demographics’ share of the population. Lockdowns were especially hard on young workers and their families. According to the Kaiser report, among those who died in 2020, people lost an average of 14 years of life in the U.S. versus eight years lost in peer countries. In other words, the young were more likely to die in the U.S. than in other countries, and many of those deaths were likely due to lockdowns rather than COVID.
And that isn’t all. There’s also this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which concludes:
The first estimates of the effects of COVID-19 on the number of business owners from nationally representative April 2020 CPS data indicate dramatic early-stage reductions in small business activity. The number of active business owners in the United States plunged from 15.0 million to 11.7 million over the crucial two-month window from February to April 2020. No other one-, two- or even 12-month window of time has ever shown such a large change in business activity. For comparison, from the start to end of the Great Recession the number of business owners decreased by 730,000 representing only a 5 percent reduction. In general, business ownership is relatively steady over the business cycle (Fairlie 2013; Parker 2018). The loss of 3.3 million business owners (or 22 percent) was comprised of large drops in important subgroups such as owners working roughly two days per week (28 percent), owners working four days a week (31 percent), and incorporated businesses (20 percent).
And that was two years ago, before the political panic had spawned a destructive tsunami of draconian measures.
Such measures — in addition to being socially and economically destructive — made the pandemic worse by creating the conditions for the evolution of more contagious strains of the coronavirus. If the first stage of the coronavirus had been allowed to run rampant, herd immunity would have been achieved. The most vulnerable among us would have died or suffered at length before recovering (and then, perhaps, only partially). But that would have happened in any case.
Widespread exposure to the disease would have meant the natural immunization of most of the populace through exposure to the coronavirus and the development of antibodies through that exposure — which, for most of the populace, isn’t lethal or debilitating.
In the end, millions of people will have been made poorer, deprived of beneficial human interactions, and suffered and died needlessly because politicians and bureaucrats couldn’t (and can’t) resist the urge to do something — especially when something means trying to conquer nature and suppress human nature.
Related Reading:
“Great Barrington Declaration”
Brendan O’Neill, “The Truth about COVID McCarthyism”, Spiked, December 19, 2022
Scott W. Atlas, “Sins Against Children”, The New Criterion (Dispatch Blog), January 4, 2023
Tom Jefferson et al., “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses”, Cochrane Library, January 30, 2023. From the authors’ conclusions:
There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs [randomized controlled trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI [influenza-like illness] and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.