Civil Commotion

Engineering design is, in no small part, the art of the trade-off. Including feature X means the cost goes up, excluding feature Y means sales go down. How do you balance considerations like these and find the sweet spot?

Engineers are taught to use cost-benefit analysis, to weigh and assess design alternatives preferring the most profitable financial outcome. Cost-benefit analysis got a severe black eye when it was learned that Ford engineers knew that the Pinto gas tank could fatally explode in certain rare collisions and proceeded with a design that they knew might kill some small number of people.

This was not so cynically amoral as it may sound. Engineers could easily design and build an automobile that would infallibly protect passengers in the event of any reasonably foreseeable collision — but nobody could afford to buy it; such calculations must be made.

There are two profound difficulties with cost-benefit analysis. The first is the difficulty of assigning a probability to a particular event, and the second is the difficulty of assessing the cost. What, for instance, is the statistical likelihood of an automobile collision that exerts a particular magnitude of force at a particular location on the automobile body? And what is the likely settlement cost of such an accident to the manufacturer? It’s one thing if the accident kills the parents of three young children, and it’s quite another if the accident kills the unmarried high-school dropout who delivers pizzas.

Again: It’s unpleasant to think about, but engineers do and must think about such things because nobody could afford an automobile that would infallibly protect passengers against any reasonably foreseeable collision — ‘reasonably foreseeable’ itself being a slippery notion.

I am thinking about these things because, at this exact moment, New York Governor Cuomo is conducting his daily coronavirus briefing and insisting that there is no point at which restoring the economy is more important than a life, contra Donald Trump, who seems to think that we’ve spent enough battling coronavirus and it’s time to get back to work. Cost-benefit analysis is all but impossible when it comes to social policy, because there are billions and billions of activities and transactions that can’t be foreseen and whose costs can’t be evaluated. Even so, cost-benefit analysis is what Trump and Cuomo are disagreeing about, and each is assuming a cartoon-character posture.

Ironically, millions of Americans are informally, intuitively, making such calculations a dozen times a day right now. Go to the store, and risk infection, or wait 2-days to have SuperMart put that item in the trunk of the car? Few of us would hesitate to go to the pharmacy to pickup a prescription for a sick child, but few of us would go out to buy a bag of potato chips.

Risk, statistics, cost-benefit, even when assessed informally, are at the center of all decision-making, and the idea that they can be evaded is naive.

I’ve wondered for years: Is the average preacher an idiot, or a whore who specializes in servicing idiots? That is, do they believe the insane stuff they peddle, or do they know better but peddle insane stuff because it’s easy to sell to idiots? I’ve favored both ends of that spectrum through the years.

Today, for instance, Holy Man Albert Mohler undertakes to correct Christianity Today’s editor over the provenance of evil.

Daniel Harrell, who prior to his experience was pastor of the Park Street Church, an historic evangelical congregation in Boston and then a church in Minnesota, he just recently joined Christianity Today as editor in chief, and he evidently intended to spark a discussion with an article that was posted at Christianity Today on the 17th of March.

[ … ]

He wants to argue that a virus is a part of the creation that God has made, the way God made it. He writes, “The theological tendency is to view God’s creation as a good thing gone bad, all due to our avaricious overreach as humans.” He goes on to say, “Any cursory survey of human history confirms this.” But he writes, “Unless God’s creation defies every characteristic of biological reality, bacteria and viruses are not bitter fruits of the Fall, but among the first fruits of good creation itself.”

He continues, “If the science is right, there would be no life as we know it without them. God makes no mistakes,” argues Harrell, “and bacteria and viruses indeed are mirabilis (from the Latin meaning remarkable, or even amazing or wondrous, adjectives,” he writes, “frequently used to describe creation) and part of the plan from the start.” He concludes the paragraph, “Better to view creation not as something perfect gone awry, but as something begun as very good, only not yet finished.”

You can see the problem. The science is definite, unambiguous: pathogens and viruses long-preceded humankind. Christian theology is equally definite: The world was perfect, without hungry pathogens, before the Fall and the introduction of sin into Paradise — after the appearance of humankind.

This is, of course, too ridiculous. Pathogens preceded humankind and, worse, evolve more rapidly than homo sapiens. New species of killer bugs are going to appear vastly more rapidly than we can kill them, and pandemics are going to be part of the human experience until the sun burns out.

But notice: Mohler writes just as if this is a serious conversation, something learned men might reason and disagree about. He is serious — and, therefore, I put him among the idiots, not the whores. Today, I mean.

A mish-mash of thoughts that have stacked-up during the past week, in no particular order.

• First, Bruce Gerencser made a striking post last evening about a church in his area that continues to hold Sunday Services — collection day.

  There’s not really much you can do about or for stupid people. As I’ve said many times through the years, The stupid are like the poor: they’ll always be with us. But these self-serving morons endanger others, too, and that should not be permitted. Ohio’s governor erred when he didn’t order churches closed, too.

• However inconvenient it is that needful services are unavailable, restaurants are closed, store shelves are empty of things that are needed, and vacation plans are upended, I incline to find it heartening. Most Americans are taking the CoronaVirus pandemic seriously and searching for alternative ways of getting the job done while minimizing contact with others. Our best defense is vigorously mobilizing — and that’s good.

• The world is going to be telling the stories of Trump’s screw-ups — and laughing — for 1000-years. And marveling that America elected such a corrupt and incompetent pile of sewage.

  I said shortly after the election, and still believe, that this is the end of the Evangelical Right. This is on them, and this is the meaning, literally, and fulfillment, of their death-wish theology. They are not part of the decent, educated world, and the best defense is to put them out of your life.

• I have thought often these past few weeks of a parlor game that was popular 20 or so years ago — Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The rapid spread of the virus affirms the premise of the game, which is that there are no more than six degrees of separation between any two people on earth. A knows B, who once attended a play starring C, who is the cousin of D, who once attended a church service conducted by E — who is the … Pope.

  This is a principle beloved by conspiracy ‘theorists’ — aka, nutjobs — but makes an important and relevant point: We are not so far apart as we may like to think. Just because no virus cases has been reported in your county does not mean that you’re safely in Outer Darkness. The kid delivering your pizza may be just a few connections removed from someone just returned from Italy and asymptomatically infectious as all get out. To work, social distancing has to be, basically, comprehensive.

Stay healthy and hunkered down.

This was almost a gimme for the First Felon, an opportunity to soothe and shine. Naturally, he blew it.

This is the object of the Evangelical Right’s adoration — and tells you everything you need to know about Trump and them.

The problem here is not in plain sight, and amounts to this: Theology is not a branch of knowledge; it’s a branch of bunco. We can say that because theology never does the hard work of establishing its premises — never establishes that Our Invisible Friend is real, never establishes that Our Invisible Friend superintended the production of the Bible, never establishes that the Bible we have is a faithful rendering of the originals of the multiple texts which comprise the Bible.

To skirt those problems, theologians grandly announce that they are ‘presuppositionalists’ — meaning, they presuppose the truth of those unproven and unprovable claims — and get busy telling everybody what to do.

Going more deeply into make-believe does not change that theology has no more intellectual dignity than astrology.