No lessons learned

Max Lacour has a useful Critic reminder that the COVID-19 Inquiry is still grinding on. He offers us a brief survey of its first report.

No lessons learned from lockdown

Despite all the nuance and retrospective moderation, the Covid inquiry leaves us no closer confronting the failures of technocracy

“The state ceremonials of classical Bali,” wrote anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “were metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality; that is, theatre to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen – make it actual.” Through its processions, royal cremations, and ritual extravaganzas, the 19th Century Balinese court both built and mirrored and a shared understanding of the cosmos and the Balinese people’s various roles within it.

Modern Western state rituals, like public inquiries, such as the UK’s COVID-19 Inquiry, often function in an analogous way.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of something which nobody paying attention will have missed. Lacour sums it up in his final paragraph.

Now, perhaps the second report will tackle these questions and open a public conversation about the proper role of models, science, and experts in our politics and our lives. And perhaps, after the first report’s surprising nuance, it is incumbent upon me to remain hopeful. But, dear reader, I am not. Technocracy tends to be ratchet-like and technocratic failure tends to prompt calls for better, brighter technocracy next time. 2020 thrust lockdown into the realm of the possible and, absent a wave of popular scepticism, there is no going back. And, based on this first report, it seems like all we can look forwards to is a future in which better, properly scientific lockdown is our common-sense policy-expectation.

As Lacour says, technocracy does tend to be ratchet-like and the response to failure is more of the same but better and brighter. In people such as Keir Starmer we have a technocrat who is already likely to fit Disraeli’s description of “one who practises the blunders of his predecessors.”