Sunday 19 April 2020

Covidology IV


Can we surpass ourselves? Is there more in us than meets the eye, the eye of whiggery?

All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
(from The Seven Sages by W.B. Yeats)

Prayer in these days is being dismissed as empty incantation. Raising the mind and heart to God is feeble magic and divagation from the true path of enlightened action. Fatuous waffle from the high places is to replace the inspiration that guides action. To do everything solely through our own efforts is to surely fail. Prayer changes everything in a direct immediate way through breaking the moulds of conventional reliance on practices which are not adequate to the present emergency. Action based on modelling where none of the numbers have any validity may itself be a form of secular incantation or statistical voodoo.

Death has your number.

Let’s work, let’s pray.

3 comments:

john doyle said...

In 1953 my mother was infected by the polio virus. My father prayed that she would live. She did, but she remained quadriplegic and ventilator-dependent for the rest of her difficult and surprisingly long life. Be careful what you pray for, was the lesson my father learned.

ombhurbhuva said...

Yes a hard fate and it must have been difficult growing up with it. We must think twice before pressing the petition button.
You may have seen this already - top swedish epidemologist sounding like Dr. Strangelove - 'there will be much slaughter'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY

john doyle said...

What a remarkable interview. The epidemiologist decries the lack of empirical evidence supporting lockdown, but he calmly and with great self-assurance justifies Swedish policies mostly on the basis of guesswork. If brute-force social distancing were the only option on the table then he might be right, and whether someone dies next week or 3 months from now won't make much difference -- other than maybe to the person who dies, he supposes. The good doctor doesn't even consider the possibility of isolating individual cases and tracking their social contacts, presumably because the disease is already so widespread. But if contagion can be contained in low-prevalence areas, then a substantial portion of the population could hold out long enough to benefit from the eventual vaccine.