We Learn Less from Fauci’s Diary Than from Our Appetite to Read It

The news that a senator has released the private diary notes of a former public health adviser, and that the author of those notes now appears before committees and on podcasts to speak of “accountability” and of filibuster strategies, is a curious lesson in modern government. Here is a physician who once advised the sovereign on contagion, now made a protagonist in a drama of documents, hearings, and procedural manoeuvres. His diary, we are told, covers the years of a great pestilence; his testimony now concerns the origins of the disease and his own conduct in advising on it. The entries themselves are less before the public eye than the fact of their release, which is already treated as a kind of political theatre rather than an inquiry into prudence.

When I wrote of the sovereign’s duties in the Wealth of Nations, I placed among them certain public works and institutions which, though they might not repay the expense of a private undertaker, are of great advantage to society. The containment of a highly infectious disease belongs plainly to this class. No single merchant could undertake it; the benefits are diffused, the costs concentrated and odious. In such emergencies, the sovereign must act, and must employ agents. Advice about disease control will have visible beneficiaries—those whose lives are saved—and invisible losers—those whose trades are closed, whose wages shrink, whose quiet pleasures are interrupted. Policy thus alters the whole price system in ways no man can calculate exactly, and yet cannot prudently be left undone.

For this reason the public is entitled to ask whether those agents served the public good, or some narrower interest. The modern fashion is to demand “accountability” by brandishing emails and diaries, as if the private style of a memorandum settled the public quality of a decision. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments I argued that we ought to judge conduct by imagining an impartial spectator, well-informed and unconnected, whose praise we truly desire because it is praise of what is praise-worthy. That spectator would ask, not whether a sentence in a notebook sounds arrogant or fearful, but whether, given the knowledge reasonably available at the time, the adviser sought to preserve life, to respect justice, and to weigh burdens fairly between classes and places. A harsh phrase written at midnight may be venial; a cool indifference to the fate of the labouring poor would not be.

Yet we deceive ourselves if we suppose that any diary can rescue us from the limits of centralized knowledge. In my own century I warned against the “man of system” who imagines he can arrange society as on a chessboard, forgetting that each piece has a principle of motion of its own. Modern public health, with its models, metrics, and mandates, is peculiarly tempted by this conceit. A virus spreads by human contact, but human beings are not particles: they are parents, workers, shopkeepers, each with projects of their own. To close a workplace is not merely to subtract production; it is to break a network of mutual assistance and to redirect countless small streams of income. The best plan for disease control will fail, if it ignores the pride, poverty, and patience of those who must live under it.

Because men are not angels, it is idle to build any scheme of policy that requires unusual virtue. Officials respond to the incentives before them, as butchers and brewers do; the difference is that officials spend other people’s money, and dispose of other people’s liberty. If their reward lies chiefly in avoiding blame on a committee dais, they will choose the course that least endangers their reputation, not that which best balances health and livelihood. If legislators find electoral profit in prolonging an inquest, they will do so, though the inquiry yield more heat than light. A wise constitution therefore constrains all parties: it demands transparent reasons for restrictions, clear criteria for lifting them, and an honest reckoning of unintended harms, especially among the poor who have no lobby of their own.

The present quarrel over diary notes and filibuster tactics bears all the marks of what I once called a conspiracy against the public, not in the narrow sense of criminals whispering in taverns, but in the broader sense of interests who find advantage in keeping the citizenry inflamed and divided. Some seek vindication for past opposition; others seek to avert censure for past measures; each wraps itself in the language of patriotism and truth. The impartial spectator, surveying this contest, would be slow to grant either side the monopoly on virtue it claims. He would insist on evidence of injustice or corruption before condemning any adviser, and he would be still more severe on those who use the language of justice merely as a stratagem in the higgling and bargaining of party politics.

The true measure of the pandemic response, and of the conduct of those who shaped it, must finally be found where it always ought to be found: in the condition of the labouring poor. Has the annual produce of the land and labour, as it comes to be consumed by them, recovered? Were they protected from ruinous disease without being abandoned to ruinous unemployment? Did children of modest families lose years of education for gains in safety that could not have been otherwise obtained? These are questions which no diary, however candid, can answer alone, and which no hearing, however theatrical, will take up unless the public insists upon it. Until then we shall continue to mistake noise for knowledge, and blame for justice.

uncertainty_note":"I cannot judge the particular praise-worthiness or blame-worthiness of this adviser without far fuller knowledge of the policies adopted, the information then available, and above all their detailed effects on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people."}```