Against Performative Nonsense

I feel like “Against Performative Nonsense” is the working title of half the thoughts in my head these days. Let’s define it.

“Performative nonsense” is a fancy way of describing public acts, of either doing or refusing to do something, that don’t seriously affect the thing they’re claimed to affect. My favorite example is plastic grocery bag bans in, say, Canada: they weigh nothing, we’re really good at getting them to dumps, so they don’t end up in the ocean, and it is very unclear whether their life-cycle efficiency (on any measure: hydrocarbons consumed, CO2 emissions, you name it) is actually worse than reusable bags.

You can pick other examples as you please, maybe it’s activists sailing across the Atlantic to avoid a plane trip (while their support crew flies over).

I’m against performative nonsense because it’s a waste of energy and resources. I’m all for transformations of our life that make a material gain. Highly efficient public transit? I’m in favor of that. Big improvements in automotive fuel efficiency and emissions, up to and including electric vehicles? With the caveat that I live in a water-powered region, absolutely a benefit. Choosing a job and a home so that the commute is easy? Good for the world, and good for you. Do it. Probably the best lifestyle improvement you can make, often at little or no real cost.

Anyway, lots of improvements to the modern world have actually made it cleaner, greener, and indisputably left the world a better place than when they started. Let’s do those, or at least reach for things that might work, and assess them at the end.

But why do plastic bags bother you so much, Ryan?

I speak, of course, about COVID-19. It’s a bummer.

There’s a big caveat: we’re still in early days. It’s fair to say that we still don’t know what works best and worst to thwart the outbreak. I’m obviously not a public health specialist, so I have no great insight as to which drug or vaccine is likely to be really effective, nor can I tell you in the long run whether an outbreak is best thwarted by masks, social distancing, cutting off gathering sizes at 2, 10, or 2000, hot weather, cold weather, outdoor living, or dumb luck. I also can’t tell you how long we’ll have to stay locked down to stop the spread of Tom Hanks Disease. Early answers are coming in as we speak, but they’re early.

So, what’s a public official to do? My advice is: “don’t set fire to your credibility.”

There’s a noble desire to simplify the public message. I am in favor of that. If your favorite doctor in charge of Pretty Much Everything stands up and starts going on for ten minutes about how error bars work, the message may be lost. Pithy summaries will work, this is pure Appeal to Authority and public figures using rhetoric to transmit that which is virtuous; good old Aristotelian values is what we’re talking about.

I like a bit of humility, so if it was me, I’d probably say “our best understanding is…” a lot, and when I had to walk back info later (it will happen), I’d be clear about what changed our understanding, and what the new guidance was. Your rhetorical style may vary, but absent totalitarianism, following up “we were always at war with public masking” with “we were always at war with the uncovered mouth” is a bit of a neck-snapper, however noble your intentions.

But while simplifying and being clear, don’t make up stuff. Don’t be overconfident in your conclusions. Every time you overstep the evidence, you’re taking a (hopefully calculated) credibility risk. Every time you lose that bet, you lose credibility.

In facing COVID, our society has radically transformed in the space of weeks. At my place of work, doing your job from home has gone from largely forbidden to largely mandatory. We have managed that abrupt transition (along with some radical changes to how we deliver the services we provide) with more grace than I expected, and many organizations have done the same. Many industries are so hard-hit, from company to employee, that they barely exist. The bars are closed; the air travel industry has been enneadecimated: about a tenth of it remains. Pick your own example, but given what we do know, these kinds of travel restrictions and business closures, as dramatic as they are, look practical, and on early evidence are effective.

But of course there’s more. The debate is on the margins.

-A photographer in the maritimes was asked to stop a project where, by arrangement, she pulled up in front of people’s houses, and took photos of them from the curb, while keeping at least six metres away from her subjects.

-BC has closed all parks. Not just the busiest, most accessible beaches and campgrounds, where crowds naturally form on any sunny weekend, but all of them. Fancy hiking into the backcountry? Sorry, if the backcountry is inside a provincial park, then it is closed.

-people are being encouraged not to travel, which is laudable, but some folks, mercifully not in positions of authority as far as I can tell, are pleading with people not to go out for a little drive, not to go out for a motorcycle ride, and even to avoid going out for a walk or a jaunt on a bicycle.

So what’s the harm? So we get a little overzealous with restrictions and people have to play even more video games, is that so bad?

Yes, yes it is. It has several effects which are very bad.

The first has been talked to death, and so politicized it’s not worth discussing at length: there’s a real economic cost to many of these restrictions, and eventually, economic costs kill people. They do so subtly, because unlike acute respiratory distress from a super-cold, the deaths from economic problems tend to be diffuse over time and space, and not easily traceable back to a single root. But we can see them demographically. Suicide rates, life expectancy, and so on and so forth, measures we can correlate with employment and wealth given time and data. I won’t try to make the specific argument of what the “cost of fighting COVID” is. I don’t have the data, I’m not going to guess, better people than I are actively doing just that. But there’s a price, and it will be paid.

The second is compliance. I have great confidence that stupid rules do harm to good rules. A bevy of cops chasing down a paddle boarder on the open seas is a bevy of cops not available to maintain public order. It’s a waste of resources, to tell the simplest story. Stupid rules also create disdain for all rules. If you are told you can’t sit beside your spouse in public, or you can’t go for a drive to clear your head, or that masks are actively harmful, or that you can’t photograph people from 6 metres away, you may begin to wonder if the officials making their rules know any damn thing at all. It undermines the credibility of rulemakers as thoughtful authorities. It undermines public trust in those who make the rules, and it undermines confidence in and compliance with the rules and guidance that probably are making a material difference. And at some margin, if the rules become seemingly impossible to comply with, people will throw up their hands and start ignoring them wholesale. There’s a clock ticking on the goodwill of the public, and it should tick very loudly in the minds of our betters.

These two elements can be summed up as cost and fatigue: rules have real costs, human psychology and endurance have their limits. If the rules are onerous but the guidance is understandable, people will make great efforts to heed them (as many have!) If the rules are onerous and the guidance is baffling, you are expending your reserves of authority, and you’d better make sure your PR campaign is clear, and that you’re confident you’ll get meaningful results. If the rules are onerous and the benefit is probably nonexistent, well, you’ll get clever people writing sarcastic essays on their blogs.

My readership is about 20 people, and most of them read me for entertainment, not wisdom. I’m not going to bend the curve of compliance much in either direction on my own. But I’m not clever enough that these are original thoughts. There’s many people thinking the way I’m writing, and some also writing things like this, or just talking to friends. Word gets around.

Finally, I get to my point. Have you heard of a “purity spiral”? It’s not a new concept, but it might be a new term. It refers to a circumstance in which there is no such thing as being too X. If you were in Revolutionary France during peak Revolutionary Fervor, there was no such thing as being too Revolutionary. Indeed, the revolution repeatedly guillotined Very Revolutionary participants for being Not Quite Revolutionary Enough, Robespierre being only the most famous example. (See also: every revolutionary movement of the 20th century.) Comedian Aziz Ansari does a bit about getting “out-woked,” which is the same phenomenon for lower stakes (so far), but you can recognize this idea even in daft arenas like four friends sitting around gossiping. If they’re cyclists, there’s no such thing as Too Much Training. If they’re parents, there’s no such thing as Too Much Parental Involvement. If they’re knitters, there’s no such thing as Too Much Knitting. Pick your spiral. Most X wins, and there’s never enough X. It’s a tempting, even comforting psychological trap which drives the reasoning that you literally cannot be too careful.

Right now, the X you can’t be too careful about is COVID. Or rather, that’s the purity spiral some people are spinning into. I’m here to make the case you CAN be too careful about COVID, and if you are, you’ll annoy people, and waste resources on trivialities, and ultimately you’ll kill people, because when you waste people’s time, you’re wasting their time, and you’re also destroying their confidence in institutions, which destroys the ability of those institutions to change public behavior. So please don’t. People’s lives are at stake.

In short, this is a plea for careful, thoughtful regulation (and by extension, careful, thoughtful social pressure, if you’re so inclined). We have turned our society upside-down in a matter of weeks, and I’m trusting (and from what I can assess, mostly believing) that most of these changes will bend the curve, as the saying goes. But the goodwill of the populace extends about as far as the wisdom of those regulations, and it should not be spent without thought.