Richard Scarry and COVID-19

You may know the children's books of Richard Scarry, with their detailed illustrations of the workings of Busytown, Scarry's representation of the modern world - transport systems, electricity, urban life, food production and so on.  They are totally absorbing and have given me, and my daughter, hours of pleasure.

My friend, Clark Miller, an STS scholar and a Professor at Arizona State University, has written a fascinating account of COVID-19 drawing on the work of Scarry.  They are well worth reading.  

As he writes:

"We are taught to think of coronavirus as a product of nature, its origins in our encounters with wildlife, its illness a product of the race between its ability to reproduce inside us and our immune system’s ability to vanquish it. But this biological view of COVID-19 conceals more than it reveals; it is a disciplinary blinder that renders the disease’s next moves invisible to our tools and our models. You can’t understand this pandemic until you understand Busytown and its inhabitants—those beings whose travels, interactions, ideas, and bodies (filled with zillions of novel coronavirus molecules) are shaped by the industrial systems that Scarry reveals for us and whose lives, in turn, have shaped the circumstances that gave birth to the virus, how and where it travels, and who it kills."

Start with Part 1 and I'm sure you will want to read Part 2 and Part 3 in short order. 

COVID-19 and 'The Wretched of the Earth'

This photo shows a small part of a four kilometre long queue for food parcels in a township outside Pretoria, South Africa! (and see video). Lockdown looks very different depending on where one stands.  

Is this the experience of most of the world's population?   

Is this an inevitable outcome of treating COVID-19 mainly as a health problem rather than a whole-of-society problem?

Will we be surprised if the Wretched of the Earth bite back?

People line up to receive food handouts in the Olievenhoutbos township of Midrand

Science, expertise and ignorance

Ignorance is an important driver of scientific inquiry.  If only we could fill in the knowledge gaps, it is argued, then we would know the answers to questions that we currently don't know.  One recognised problem with this account is that sometimes 'we don't know what we don't know', in Donald Rumsfeld's memorable phrase.  Another is that sometimes we are wilfully blind to what we do know, such as that relentless economic growth and environmental destruction are related.  'Unknown knowns' as Zizek called it.

The brilliant Science, Technology & Society (STS) scholar, Brian Wynne, distinguished ‘risk’ (where the odds are known and quantifiable), from ‘uncertainty’ (with known system parameters but unknown odds), from ‘ignorance’ (where we don’t know what we don’t know), from ‘indeterminacy’ (which intersects with the first three but captures contextual socio-political factors as well as the conditionality of knowledge).  Andy Stirling has called the last of these 'ambiguity': 'when experts disagree over the framing of possible options, contexts, outcomes, benefits or harms'.

With COVID-19 we have all of these in bucketloads... what all the drivers and risk factors are, what the odds are of particular risks (they seem to vary widely across countries), a great deal of not knowing what matters and what we need to know, and a large dose of indeterminacy/ambiguity, linked to whether we see COVID-19 as a health problem, a public systems problem, a whole of society problem and so on.

Here's a post on expertise for Arena magazine, that I wrote today.

And here's an extremely interesting article from the New York Times asking why the impacts of COVID-19 have been so different in different places.