i am grateful to the four readers who engaged with my essay for their careful attention, and also for showing me inadvertently how it failed to make its mark. I first put the phrase “technologies of humility” into circulation in 2003. The “technologies” I support are not, as my essay observes, merely a mental state—“a stance of modesty vis-à-vis the powerful and still poorly understood forces of nature and society”—but rather a set of “institutional mechanisms” designed to incorporate “memory, experience, and concerns for justice into our schemes of governance and public policy.” The humility I advocate is thus not a personal attitude but rather a collective practice of societal self-reflection aimed at understanding why we persistently repeat the same kinds of mistakes, overestimating our power to control futures as yet in-the-making.
This is precisely the distinction that Zeynep Pamuk charges me with conflating, but her own comments suggest an imperfect understanding of the ways in which the regime of preparedness makes U.S. decisionmakers impervious to their own blind spots. Knowledge, Pamuk says, can be incomplete not only because of what we do not yet know, but also “because of choices made about what types of knowledge should be pursued, and how.” Indeed! The first rule of policy is that one must frame a problem right in order to find the right facts and come to the right conclusions. My aim is to call attention to the manifold points at which well-intentioned policymakers, well-prepared for the “coming plague,” failed to assess what I have called the “politics of public health.” Instead of worrying about the political context into which their decisions would land, they repeatedly focused on closing gaps in our scientific knowledge of how pandemics arise and spread. As recently as January 2021, Margaret Hamburg, one of the nation’s most prominent public health experts, said in a public forum that we had failed because of insufficient “efforts to identify critical gaps in knowledge that would affect the contours and control measures for this pandemic.” Her emphasis was on more biological knowledge and better management, not absence of political understanding and resulting lack of control.