Shaun Cammack at The Deseret News:
When the stakes are high, like during a pandemic, we often click into a tribal psychology that identifies the problem, or problematic persons, and desires to eliminate them. It’s the kind of “us versus threat” response that kept early humans alive in our ancestral environments. When you see a tiger lurking on the edge of your village, it’s no time to talk. But tribal psychology can’t solve this pandemic. It’s human intelligence and creativity that’s creating mitigating strategies and medical treatments. And these efforts fundamentally call for disagreements, both political and scientific as well as moral. There must be room for such disagreement, not only in the universities and research institutions, but in the every-day life of the everyday American. A tiger means panic. A pandemic means think. “But,” the objection quickly follows, “we know what we need to do!” No, we don’t. Consensus is almost always an illusion, and it’s a disastrously risky gambit to put all your eggs in one basket or, rather, to reject the possibility that other people might have other plausible baskets. And the only way to know this is to talk with them, to let them explain their reasoning and justifications.