The essential practice of qualification in a liberal democracy.
One of the enduring frustrations of living in a politically polarized country is the evaporation of nuance. As the muscles of liberal democracy atrophy, and as cultural tribalism infects everyone’s consciousness, it becomes more and more difficult to say, “Yes, but …”
Everyone hates the but. It complicates; it muddles; it can disable a slogan; and puncture a politically useful myth. We were already headed that way in the discourse, but Trump, and then the Trump Resistance, made everything worse.
The epitome, of course, was the Russia stuff. Between “Trump won the election because of Putin” and “The Russia Hoax,” there was precious little space for qualification. But the truth, it seems obvious now, was somewhere in between: yes, Trump loved Putin, and was happy to welcome campaign assistance from anyone, including Moscow — but no, he wasn’t a Russian agent, there was no “conspiracy,” and Clinton lost the election for far more obvious and provable reasons. The Mueller Report landed somewhere in the middle, because facts — which is why no one liked it. Worse, even to concede a smidgen of a point to the other side became anathema.
Or think of the Covid lab-leak theory. Almost instantly, despite the lack of any solid evidence either way, merely to mention the possibility of an accident was deemed by liberals as proof of racism, xenophobia or Trumpiness. And at a critical juncture, on March 17, 2020, a group of scientists published a report in Nature Medicine that stated, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Tony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH had encouraged the study, and hailed it when it came out. The language seems clear to me: “clearly show … not a laboratory construct.” No hedging there. After editing, a lab-leak explanation went from “not necessary” to “not plausible.”
We now know, from a trove of unearthed private messages, that none of the scientists believed what they wrote with any certainty. “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural,” wrote one of them, while working on the paper. A month after the paper came out, one of the authors was writing: “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved” and “we also can’t fully rule out engineering.”
So why offer certainty when doubt was real? One of them put it in writing:
Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to ascribing it to natural processes.
Another wrote back: “I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to.” The editor of Nature Medicine framed the piece thus: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.”
