If you buy a piece of property and discover a fence on it, you should figure out why it’s there before you tear it down. That’s Chesterton’s version of the precautionary principle. When you change things without knowing all the details, you might cause more trouble than you expected.
This is one of the recurring political / social principles that Pigweed and I often mention on our podcast.
We all struggle between two competing needs — the need to explore and investigate and find new things, and the need to protect (or at least not ruin) what we already have. It’s a hard balance to strike, because you can’t know all the consequences. E.g., is it a good idea to wrap all our food in plastic? It’s cheap, and it dramatically reduces food waste, but is there a downside?
I was just listening to a story about people digging for lead, not knowing there was a lot of Uranium mixed in with the lead. Of course many of them died.
You can’t possibly see all the ways things can go wrong, but you should at least try.
Mark Shea likes to put it this way (or he used to, anyway), Step 1: “What could it hurt?” Step 2: “How could we have known?”
Along those lines, Are we harming children’s speech development by wearing masks?
Of course it does. How could it possibly NOT? In what world could hearing speech less clearly and not being able to observe the mouths of others not harm children’s speech development in the aggregate? I have absolutely no expertise in the area of speech pathology and this is crystal clear to me because it’s so freaking obvious.
I tend to think that mass masking is of very little value in controlling Covid spread, particularly in the age of omicron, but that’s secondary. What’s insane is the refusal to admit that there could be any downsides to masking or that factors have to be weighed AT ALL. Why is it so hard just to say, “Sure, this is going to cause developmental issues for kids, but unfortunately it just has to be that way right now.” Instead there’s this insane insistence that because masking is held to be necessary it can’t POSSIBLY cause any problems worth considering.
I agree that it’s obvious.
The resistance to admitting that masks are useless in the Age of Omicron is a curious phenomenon, and the refusal to admit that there might be any downsides to masks is simply ridiculous.
“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” If people would get that straight, a lot of these debates would be so much easier.
Perhaps, when you add it all up, masks are a good idea. Or perhaps they’re not. But the failure to admit that there are pluses and minuses that have to be taken into account is a sure sign of partisan nonsense.