A shorter column here, a day late.
In Internet time, that means that this is so late that it is practically irrelevant, because I’m going to discuss Emily Oster’s essay in the Atlantic calling for a “pandemic amnesty”, and like more than a few other respondents, I’m irritated.
I’m not against the idea as such, but Oster’s approach to the suggestion exemplifies a basic problem with public reason in our time. (And maybe other times.) This is not an issue that is native to social media or caused by it.
Oster’s argument, which is op-ed length, makes two common rhetorical moves that dominate mainstream centrist styles of persuasion. The first is a sweeping “both sides-ism” that studiously refuses the work of picking through the tangled architecture of policy-making, politics, and social life to understand how official and institutional decisions get made and to understand how significant social alignments behind or against decisions come into being. The second is the authorial use of both sides-ism to shield a favored argument from critical scrutiny while engaging in pre-emptive, prophylactic ceding of an irrelevant argument in order to make the author appear to be both “one of us” and yet “more reasonable than all of us”.
So one paragraph concedes there were “willful purveyors of actual misinformation” who can be left out of a call for amnesty while steadfastly refusing to discuss exactly what is included under that heading or what it will mean to refuse amnesty to the willful purveyors. Everybody else is covered under the banner of arguing that all of us were wrong about some things and right about others for innocent reasons, e.g., because so little was known that what we got right and wrong was a coinflip.
What is aggravating here is that Oster attempts to include herself by saying “silly me, I and my family overreacted by excessively keeping social distance in outdoor settings, which turned out not to be necessary”. But this is very plainly a move intended to cede something that Oster has little investment in so that she can stubbornly insist that she was right that schools should have remained opened throughout the pandemic.
This is not a great demonstration of how you enact an amnesty. It’s more like the cynical way that combatants in warfare call for a truce so that they can reposition their troops for the next offensive. Oster asserts that there’s a strong consensus now that closing schools was a mistake, which I think is a classic example of seeing what you want to see. What I see—and I was never a particularly strong advocate of school closings—is that the trade-offs that were evident at the beginning of the pandemic remain evident at the end. School closings put tremendous stresses on parents with small children and were deeply costly in terms of the mental well-being and learning for many children in school. On the flip side, the basic problem of children being taught by older people who were more vulnerable to the pandemic was real. How do you balance out the harms here? If Oster or anyone else wants to argue that this is still an unresolved question, that’s fine. If she wants to argue sub rosa that it’s completely resolved and she was right all along, that could be fine, but not wrapped up inside a fake call for an amnesty.
There are basic problems with the logic of trade-offs when we are talking about human lives, an issue that most economists don’t really want to grapple with. But Oster is displaying a particularly unsavory upper middle-class professional version of this problem by trying to argue for a sort of objective equanimity in weighing this strongly felt trade-off while basically saying “the most valuable lives are the ones that I presently value, because I have kids in school.” This is the way that many upper middle-class professionals work utilitarian reason generally: favoring the greatest good for the greatest number but hey! look at that, it turns out that I and my household are in some complicated ennumeration of the greatest number, so the trade-offs are forever in my favor. Sorry not sorry if you’re on the wrong side of that, but it’s a settled issue, one of those logic-and-reason things. Look, I have charts!
In this sense, it’s rather revealing that she conceptualizes what she’s calling for as an amnesty. An amnesty is something offered by the powerful, by prosecutors and governments. Forgiveness between equals is a different sort of thing.
As a personal, emotional act, forgiveness takes an infinite number of pathways. It can be as deep as the ocean or as shallow as a puddle. It can be transformatively felt or calculatedly performed. It can be mutual or unilateral.
As a political act—an act of peace-making—it has some really sharp and unforgiving design specs. As a political act, forgiveness is usually a lie for all the former combatants, even if (especially if) what they fought over turned out to be immaterial or senseless. You grant forgiveness politically if you get something out of it. You grant forgiveness—or amnesty—if you are buying peace and security with it.
How do you show someone that the amnesty you’re offering is transactionally genuine—that you mean to achieve peace and security for all? You make the first move to reboot to tit-for-tat altruism. (Come on, economist: this is game theory 101.)
What is the first move in a transactionally genuine pandemic amnesty? In Oster’s case, it might be something like “I now understand far better why teachers wanted their lives valued more than advocates of school opening like myself seemed to value them.” Don’t hedge it by muttering, “but I was right, you know” or “that was a really unfair thing to say about me, I love teachers”. You model peace and security by not firing a shot while you’re offering it.
The other thing you do is reconvene the “we” who are covered by the imagined amnesty by being specific in honest ways about who exactly is inside that coverage. The reason for that is not some higher morality, it’s so that you’re not offering amnesty to people who have no intention under any circumstances of accepting it. If Oster means to name only a “we” that fought over issues like school closures or closures of public facilities where both sides still believed in the authority of government, in scientific evidence, in basic measures to protect public health, she has some hope of finding a we capable of amnesty. Even there, issues remain. I found myself this past week irritated by a group of people arguing strenuously against vaccine mandates in colleges and universities whose recourse when challenged was to offer programmatic and I think malicious misreadings of official CDC guidance or to cite peer-reviewed studies that didn’t say any of the things they claimed. Could there be an amnesty with folks like that? Maybe? But the intensity of their advocacy and their misuse of evidence makes me skeptical. A lasting peace would take everybody being less certain and less demanding, which Oster absolutely does not model in her call.
But no matter what, there’s a bigger political we that is not going to achieve an amnesty on this issue without reaching a much bigger sort of understanding that at this point seems plainly impossible. The deliberate fuzziness of just who Oster wants to be forgiven makes the whole call dead on arrival. People who offer amnesty and take the first step unprompted are chumps if they’re offering that to people who will continue firing with every weapon they’ve got while laughing all the while at the white flag of truce.
Image credit: Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Wow, this is so good, Tim. I do fear that her argument, easily labeled with a good-feeling name, will be picked up by others who will want to ignore the questions you pose. Her piece was published to influence and this means so much more to clean in a new field of junk argument.