Next weekend, I am planning to meet up with an old friend in Las Vegas. I have a direct flight booked with Virgin Atlantic, a reservation at the best restaurant in town and, most importantly, two tickets to Crazy Horse Paris at the MGM Grand. But in the past few days I’ve been having second thoughts. The problem is, my friend lives in Mexico City.
Just how concerned should I be about catching swine flu? According to my colleague James Delingpole, not remotely. He wrote a piece earlier this week in which he assessed the risk as vanishing-to-zero: ‘I’m not going to die of swine flu, you’re not going to die of swine flu, none of your friends is going to die of swine flu, none of your Mexican pen pals is going to die of swine flu.’ His view is that the British and American governments are deliberately whipping up their populations into a paranoid frenzy in the hope of restoring their battered authority. Far better we should think about this pandemic — and what our leaders can do to protect us — than dwell on our bleak economic prospects. He concluded with a quote from H.L. Mencken: ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’
No doubt there is some truth in this, but the swine flu outbreak has had the opposite effect on me, forcing me to face up to some of the trickier dilemmas posed by the credit crunch. Should I modify my behaviour in order to avoid catching swine flu? To my mind, this is no different from deciding whether I should start stockpiling food in case the economy collapses. In both cases, the likelihood of the worst-case scenario becoming a reality is low, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take any precautionary measures.
The difficulty presented by both cases is that we don’t have enough information to make a rational decision. How can the risk of catching swine flu be calculated when the rate of infection is still unknown? Even if it was known, that still wouldn’t be enough, since it’s impossible to predict what that rate will be in a week’s time. Similarly, how can we calculate the probability of the economy collapsing when we still don’t know how far-reaching the consequences of toxic debt will be? To quote Donald Rumsfeld: ‘There are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’
In the case of swine flu, the sensible thing would be to err on the side of caution, particularly as I have four young children. But I’m a bit concerned about applying the precautionary principle across my life. For instance, it might mean I’d have to become a practising Christian. According to Pascal’s Wager, we should all behave as if God exists because even though his existence can’t be proved, the consequences of ignoring the Ten Commandments if he does are completely catastrophic. In other words, even though the likelihood of the worst-case scenario coming about is remote, the cost of taking the necessary precautions is slight compared to the cost of ignoring them, i.e., burning in hell for all eternity.
Then there is my diet. At the moment, I place no limit on the quantity of dietary fat I consume, including saturated fat. Not only is this because I’m unconvinced by the evidence linking dietary fat to the so-called ‘lifestyle diseases’ — cancer, heart disease, stroke, etc — but even if there was, I think the chances of my succumbing to any of these diseases is too small to worry about. But if I’m going to take precautions against catching swine flu, why stop there? Shouldn’t I also change my diet? I’ve given up smoking and cut down my alcohol consumption. Why not give in to the diktats of the health nazis across the board?
The answer, I think, is that a life circumscribed by the precautionary principle would not be worth living. We should no more change our behaviour in response to swine flu than we should stop our children from playing outside for fear that some harm may come to them. Elf and safety inevitably leads to a life of pinched and hidebound timidity. So I’ve made my decision. I’m going to Vegas.
Comments