Not post-truth at all: in fact universities turned out to be right

In their response to COVID-19, universities proved they are not “post-truth” institutions

COVID-19 has dominated our lives for 12 months and now, with the end in sight to the massive disruption and death it has caused world wide, it’s time to reflect on what shape we’re in after this 21st century plague.

Australia has done well. Although we’ve been hit by an economic shock that will take years to recover from, and endured the massive inconvenience of lockdowns and travel bans, we’ve also escaped the heavy toll of death and illness most other countries have suffered.

Why is that? It’s mainly because our federal and state governments took the science-based advice which was available, and Australians were generally willing to believe that expert knowledge was worth something.

So the fact that we are emerging from the pandemic reasonably well is a victory for science. It’s a victory for the Enlightenment and the system for acquiring, building and testing knowledge which emerged in the West over the last four centuries and built today’s world.

This science underlies the astonishing effort which quickly created COVID tests, analysed virus genomes, gave reliable advice on public health and produced effective vaccines amazingly fast.

There’s also been a dark side. The pandemic has shown up those who are deluded and just plain wrong. Among the vanquished are the culture warriors, anti-vaxxers, white supremacists and worse, who somehow decided that science and scientists were the problem.

Many of them have contorted themselves into a position in which they believe, on the one hand, that they are defending their own stunted vision of European civilisation, while at the same rejecting the fruits of Western empiricism — the science and medicine that beat the pandemic.

Fortunately Australia has escaped the worst of this perverted ideology. We can just look in wonder at the United States where a sizeable portion of the population is all on board with it. They’ve decided that reality — whether an election result or evidence of a contagious illness — is an alien concept.

So on the first anniversary of the pandemic we can acknowledge that we in Australia have done something right. We can also acknowledge that our institutions, while imperfect, have passed the test. That includes government, the health system and, yes, universities.

It’s an amazing thing. Although universities were battered by critics for being anti free speech, post-rational and post-truth, all along they had been harbouring the specialist knowledge and highly skilled people needed to defeat a new disease.

It turned out that they had not in fact, abandoned the Western intellectual tradition. On the contrary, they had nurtured it and honed it with critical thinking (and possibly enriched it with a leavening of diversity and appreciation of other cultures).

This is not to say that universities never deserve criticism or ridicule. They sometimes do. They are multi-headed beasts which often pull in different directions and sometimes attack each other with a ferocity far worse than their most self-righteous critics.

But we also need to remember that universities are like democracy — not perfect but better than all the alternatives.

Since I live in the world of reality I know it’s possible that critics of universities may not all agree with me.

But still, they should ponder.