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Liberty

The United States is hamstrung over liberty. It’s hard to sort out. New covid-19 regulations every week: masking, quarantines, contact tracing, banned gatherings, bars and restaurants closed. The legitimacy of the presidential election is in question.

Tethered border collie in flood
Albert, the border collie, contemplating troubled times for liberty

Joseph Biden is set to win the popular vote by a 4% margin and the electoral vote by 306 to 232. Historically, this is not an especially close election. Not a landslide, but not exceptionally close either.

In the 2016 election the electoral vote went one way, the popular vote the other. The famed supreme court decision in 2000 was pronounced over a 547-vote margin. The closest margin this year is over 10,000. Associated Press has set the standard for calling election since the 1960s. Their summary is here.

Yet people are upset, arguing, misunderstanding, and talking past each other. I sense, for the first time in my life, that some people seriously question the legitimacy of majority rule. And I sense that feelings would be the same no matter which way the election went. This has sent me on a mission to examine my own feelings.

Two Years Before the Mast

With that mental backdrop, last week I read Two Years Before the Mast by a Richard Henry Dana Jr., a book I’ve known of since I was a teenager captured by the idea of going to sea, but never got around to reading. You can get it from the library.

In 1834, Dana was a student at Harvard College. He contracted measles, which damaged his eyes. He couldn’t study. He was told that a long ocean voyage might restore his sight.

His family could have sent him on a grand tour, but instead, in 1836, he signed articles as a common seaman on a merchant voyage to California on the sailing brig Pilgrim.

Two Years Before the Mast is a non-fiction account of the voyage and Dana’s experiences loading cowhides on the Pacific coast for shipment back to Boston. On his return to Harvard, he finished college and went on to a law degree and a successful career as a lawyer and politician.

A day of liberty

I highly recommend the book. Dana is an exceptionally clear and moving writer.

I shall never forget the delightful sensation of being in the open air, with the birds singing around me, and escaped from the confinement, labor, and strict rule of a vessel, —of being once more in my life, though only for a day, my own master. A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is entire. He is under no one’s eye, and can do whatever, and go wherever, he pleases. This day, for the first time, I may truly say, in my whole life, I felt the meaning of a term which I had often heard, —the sweets of liberty.

Dana’s day of liberty was spent with his friend and shipmate, Stimson. How many of us today seek escape from the strict rule of covid-19? To be our own masters, maskless, gathering with our families and friends, singing, laughing, and sharing a holiday? Ah, for a day of liberty.

The dark side of liberty

Dana and Stimson’s day of liberty was granted by Frank Thompson, captain of the Pilgrim. A 19th century sea captain ruled the ship, its officers and crew. At sea, the captain had complete liberty; he answered to no one, could do whatever pleased him, direct the ship wherever he wished.

Well into the voyage, John, a Swede and the best seaman on the crew, stood up for an injured shipmate who was about to be flogged for complaining about his injury. As Dana watched, Captain Thompson had John tied to the rigging and began to swing a rope on the man’s bare back:

As he [Captain Thompson] went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out, as he swung the rope: “If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! —because I like to do it!— It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”

The man writhed under the pain until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us: “O Jesus Christ! O Jesus Christ!”

“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain; “he can’t help you. Call on Frank Thompson! He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”

At these words, which I never shall forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick, I turned away, and leaned over the rail, and looked down into the water. A few rapid thoughts, I don’t know what,—our situation, a resolution to see the captain punished when we got home,—crossed my mind; but the falling of the blows and the cries of the man called me back once more.

Dana did not have a chance to see the captain punished, although he did stand up for seaman’s rights and started important reforms. On Thompson’s next voyage, before Dana could accuse him of wrongdoing, Thompson contracted a fever in Sumatra, died in misery, and was buried at sea.

Liberty in 2020

In 2020, how are we to treat liberty? Is the desire for liberty, a force that has unleashed the death and destruction of covid-19, like the uncontrolled brutality of Captain Thompson? Or is liberty only Dana and Stimson’s delight that we are temporarily denied by the pandemic?

John Stuart Mill

To answer these questions for myself, I turned to Dana’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, whom I recollected from first-year college humanities class as the formulator of a balanced and measured definition of liberty. Get his writings from the library.

From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Mill is clear. Enforced wearing of masks is legitimate curtailment of liberty because it protects mankind from the virus. Enforcing masks for the protection of the wearer is illegitimate. I guess this means it is okay to remove your mask as you inhale, but you must put it on while you exhale.

This is an argument that might convince some anti-maskers.

John Stuart Mill was onto something.

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The CDC Triumph

In 2005, Republican President George W. Bush read a book on the 1918 flu pandemic. The potential devastation from a recurrence of that world-shaking catastrophe struck the president powerfully; he immediately insisted that his cabinet begin work on a pandemic response plan. The 9/11 trade towers attack sensitized Bush and his cabinet to the potential disruption of improbable but highly impactful events. Eventually, this would lead to a CDC triumph.

The CDC Triumph
The CDC triumph: the pandemic playbook

The CDC pandemic play book

Bush’s cabinet produced a nearly 400-page playbook detailing evaluation of dangers, limiting disease spread with travel bans and closures, marshaling critical supplies, managing adequate health care facilities, implementing social controls and practices, tracing contacts, the discovery, production and distribution of treatments and vaccines, best practices for avoiding panic and promoting compliance to healthcare measures. The playbook was tested and refined on Ebola, SARS, H1N1 and other infectious outbursts. The 2017 revision of this playbook still exists on a Center for Disease Control website.

Pandemic preparedness

The 2019 Global Health Security Index, a report produced by an international group of institutions, including Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and The Economist magazine, ranked the U.S. number one among 195 nations in pandemic preparedness, largely on the basis of the playbook.

The week before the November 2020 general election, ten months later, the U.S. has almost 230,000 dead, roughly 70,000 more deaths than Brazil, the next hardest hit country. Brazil ranked 22 on the Global Health Security List. The United Kingdom, ranked 2 on the Global Health list has almost 50,000 dead. Columbia, ranked 65, has only 30,000 dead.

Preparedness results

The U.S. was the most prepared and it has had the worst results. The U.K. was second most prepared and their results are not good. Columbia gets a low B on preparedness and protects their people better. Angola is in the bottom segment of the list and has only 275 dead, far fewer than our own Washington State.

Looks like preparedness is overrated.

Think twice, grasshopper. That hop to a conclusion sailed clear off the dock. Preparation without execution is a wandering ghost: free floating intent with no consequence.

What in blazes is that supposed to mean?

Preparation without execution is null

Preparation does not matter if it is ignored. Read the CDC playbook. The plans were ignored and neglected. Protective gear was supposed to be stockpiled. Congress refused to allocate funds and the stockpiles were under supplied. The play book calls for extensive testing and includes guidelines on developing and deploying tests. The U.S. flubbed this badly at the beginning. The official test didn’t work, which was an unfortunate but recoverable misstep. But the U.S. did not follow its own plans to correct and recover. Over and over, the playbook was ignored. Testing is still below the plans in the playbook. I could go on. You can check it for yourself. The official 2019 playbook is here. The full implementation is here.

The playbook was ignored. Would the plans would have worked if they were followed?

The CDC playbook is not dead

Astoundingly, the plans developed by the CDC under Presidents Bush and Obama were followed and used. Just not by the U.S. I looked at two countries that have dodged the covid-19 bullet: Taiwan and New Zealand. Both have documents with nearly the same name as the U.S. playbook. Taiwan has its Pandemic Influenza Strategic Plan. New Zealand has its New Zealand Pandemic Influenza Plan.

The plans of the three countries are long detailed documents and I confess that I have not read them in their entirety, but I have read enough to convince myself that all three are the same plan, close enough that I would be surprised if there was not a lot of cribbing. I’ll be a U.S. chauvinist: I think New Zealand and Taiwan did most of the copying, but I don’t know that. The difference is that both Taiwan and New Zealand followed their plans, the U.S. did not.

The day after I wrote the above paragraph, I stumbled on this, a video report from the New York Times that makes the same point far better than I.

The CDC playbook test

Two countries that executed the playbook and one that wrote the book but did not execute the plan is as close to a gold standard test of a strategy as you can get.

Results

Now let’s see the results. Taiwan, population 23 million, 554 cases, 7 deaths, no new covid-19 cases in the last 200 days. New Zealand, population 5 million, 1950 cases, 25 deaths. U.S., population 328 million, 8,990,196 cases, 229,141 deaths on the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard.

Compare apples to apples

That comes out to 24 cases/million for Taiwan, 390 cases/million for New Zealand, and 27,400 cases/million for the U.S.

If the U.S. had kept covid-19 in check like Taiwan, we would have under 8,000 cases. At New Zealand’s rate, 125,000, instead of close to 9 million. If we compare deaths, 100 at Taiwan’s death rate, 1600 at New Zealand’s death rate, instead of 230, 000 deaths in the U.S.

Covid-19 hoax

If we had followed our own playbook for a pandemic, we could have expected a few thousand deaths. Less than the estimated 22,000 flu deaths we had in 2019. Like Y2K, covid-19 would have been declared a hoax, not as bad as the flu.

The CDC triumph

There is a silver lining to this: the U.S. CDC playbook won. We didn’t use it, but it won. The scientists who wrote the playbook are still here. They have the same abilities they had under Presidents Bush and Obama. They are here for us to call on.

All we have to do is elect a government that will use our treasures to save us.

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The Radicalization of America: Whatcom County

I read an article in the New York Times this evening “The Radicalization of a Small American Town.” Brian Groh, the author of the Times article, describes a microcosm of the radicalization of America, a small town in Indiana that has been devastated by the economy of the 21st century, wracked with pain and death of opioid addiction, crippled by the response to the covid-19 epidemic, and violently political.

Radicalization of America
Sunrise in Whatcom County

Instead of the friendliness, lack of pretension, and sense of decency Groh remembers from his youth, he recounts the story of a former neighbor who was recently threatened when he expressed a political opinion.

Groh laments the change.

Opioid crisis and the radicalization of America

It’s a good story, but I wonder if many of his neighbors would agree with his view. I looked at opioid death statistics in Indiana where statewide deaths per thousand are above the national average. The county in the article has one of the lowest rates in the state. We in Whatcom County are fortunate: although opioid and other drug deaths are still far too prevalent, some statistics show a slight decline in the opioid death rate in Whatcom County between 2002 and 2018.

We have a problem, but not a raging crisis. Thank heavens. Covid-19 is bad enough.

Rural Indiana

I’ve visited Mr. Groh’s rural Indiana. I’ve never lived there, but it felt like home as I listened to conversations among farmers at the tractor dealership where I was installing software. Both my Dutch and German ancestors spent a few decades in the Midwest before they made their final jump west to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. In rural Indiana, I felt like I could have been in Lynden or Ferndale.

What’s changed?

Groh’s experience does not match my experience in Whatcom County. I agree that the rural America I see today is not the place I saw when I was growing up. But the question is what changed? Did Whatcom County change? Or did I?

Well. I changed. I know that. I went off to college and graduate school.

What I learned

There, calculus taught me that differentiation and integration are mathematically two aspects of the same operation. In chemistry and physics, I learned that science can measure and predict the changes around us with greater precision than muddled impressions of undisciplined observation, but it continually refines and deepens understanding rather than lays down immutable laws.

At the age of nineteen, a mathematical logic class forced me to plumb the mysteries of the proof of Gödel’s theorem, which asserts that no matter how much you know, there will always be things you can’t fully understand. By twenty-one, I had learned to read classical Chinese and was forced to notice that the Athens-Jerusalem axis of western civilization has not been the only foundation for successful societies.

Then I realized that a humble farm boy had best quit straining the seams of his underpants. I came back home to work that out, but I was no longer the kid I was growing up and already I saw Whatcom County through changed eyes. But I also realized that my eyes had become exotic. I fret over Gödel’s theorem. My neighbors don’t.

Fifty years later

Fifty years later, I’m still working on that project. I see that my neighbors and relatives have many virtues. They are tough, self-confident, often happy. Some are prosperous, some think the prosperity they deserve has been withheld by forces they should control but can’t. Some are accomplished, many are stylish. A significant number are convinced that they have right on their side. I’m still the lout with manure on my boots that I was fifty years ago.

My experience is in the software business, which is like most businesses, as far as I can tell. You don’t last long in the software if you can’t spot who is likely to get the work done and who is likely to screw things up. I learned to stay away from loudmouths who succeed by refusing to pay their help, stiff their creditors, shift blame, and counter reason with bluster. They may succeed for a while, but eventually business caves in around them and everyone loses. That’s about as far as my politics go.

Doubling down

I also know it is easier to double down on a bad choice than it is to switch to a better choice. Switching to a choice that you once rejected is a humiliating struggle. I’ve been wrong often enough to know the sick feeling and bad taste that fouls my gorge when I recognize a misjudgment. I’ve faced it often enough; I don’t wish it on anyone.

When a bad choice is not all bad, the struggle is more painful. If a segment of the population prospered for three years while others struggled, the segment that thrived will not readily give up their gains. They will be proud of their sagacity. Those who look up to prosperity often throw their lot in with the prosperous even though they have reaped few benefits. Humans are not good at balancing long and short-term gains.

2020 vs 1960

In pandemic 2020, everyone is overstressed and close to anger. Add an atmosphere that promotes strife and tension over calm, and you have a community inclined toward violence.

But is the Whatcom County community fundamentally different from the same place sixty years ago? I say no. It was not ideal then and it is not ideal now. McCarthyism was still a topic sixty years ago. Racism was casually accepted among my parents and grandparents. Abusing native Americans acceptable behavior. The Ku Klux Klan flourished for a while in Whatcom County. Dig into the local newspaper archives and you soon run into language and propositions that might make you flinch.

Given today’s conditions, I think the county of my youth would have been inclined toward violence, perhaps more so than today. Although gun enthusiasts are vocal and prominent today, guns and ammunition were more easily available fifty years ago. Most country people had weapons for dealing with varmints and were ready to use them. More so than I see today.

Racism was more overt, mistreating the tribes was usual.

But serious violence never erupted. That’s important. Today, folks rant about antifa and the far right. As a kid, I overheard talk about threats from Bolsheviks, Wobblies, Fascists, Communists, and so forth, but it all turned out to be nervous fretting.

Is Whatcom County radicalized?

I don’t think so. No more today than fifty years ago. What I do see today, like fifty years ago, is a huge and quiet majority of concerned good people who want to live their lives in peace with their neighbors.

That hasn’t changed at all.