The Pandemic of Certainty: How Intellectuals Learned to Stop Doubting

This essay is the first installment in a three-part series on Covid, intellectual authority, and the unfinished legacy of the pandemic years.

The series is not an attempt to relitigate public health measures, nor to determine who was ultimately right or wrong about lockdowns, masks, vaccines, or other contested policies. Its purpose is different. It examines the obligations that arise when experts, intellectuals, journalists, and public institutions claim extraordinary moral authority during a crisis, and asks whether those obligations were honored once the crisis had passed.

Part I examines what I regard as the central intellectual failure of the Covid years: not the fact that mistakes were made under conditions of uncertainty, but the remarkable absence of retrospective self-examination among many of those who claimed the authority to guide public opinion during the emergency. Part II will explore how the pandemic encouraged a particular way of seeing society through models, dashboards, administrative categories, and expert abstractions, and what this perspective rendered invisible. As to Part III, it will consider the politics of memory, responsibility, and innocence in the aftermath of the crisis.

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The unfinished legacy: why Covid is not behind us

The greatest intellectual failure of the Covid years was not that experts and intellectuals made mistakes. Mistakes were inevitable in a crisis marked by fear, uncertainty, incomplete knowledge, and real danger. Governments faced difficult choices. Scientists worked with imperfect data. Citizens had to act without knowing what would come next. No serious person should pretend that the pandemic presented simple decisions. The failure was different: it came afterward.

Having claimed extraordinary moral authority during the emergency, many of the intellectuals, experts, journalists, academics, and commentators who helped define the meaning of the crisis have shown remarkably little interest in examining that authority once the emergency ended. They were willing to speak in the name of science, reason, solidarity, responsibility, and public morality. They were indeed willing to divide the social world into the responsible and the irresponsible, the enlightened and the benighted, the rational and the dangerous. Yet now that the consequences of the Covid response have become clearer, many of the same figures appear eager to declare the matter closed. We are told that Covid is behind us. The world has moved on. There are new crises, new wars, new elections, new emergencies, new objects of anxiety. Why reopen old divisions? Why relitigate decisions made under pressure? Why continue arguing about a crisis that has passed?

The answer is simple: because the crisis has not passed in the only sense that matters historically. Covid is not behind us if its consequences remain unexamined, if emergency practices altered the relationship between citizens and institutions, if children lost years of education and social development, and if loneliness, distrust, surveillance, censorship, bureaucratic overreach, and social fragmentation became normalized. It is not behind us if the people who claimed authority during the crisis have not yet reflected on how they used it.

The issue is not whether every measure was wrong. Nor is it whether every critic was right. The more important question is what obligations follow from intellectual authority. If one claims the right to guide public opinion during an emergency, one must also assume the responsibility to examine the consequences afterward. Authority cannot be invoked in the moment of decision and then quietly abandoned in the moment of reckoning.

The burden of reckoning

Yet this is precisely what seems to have happened. During the Covid years, expertise became more than expertise – it became moral authority. Scientific knowledge, or what was presented as scientific knowledge, did not merely inform public debate: it increasingly defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion. To question policies was treated not as disagreement, but as irresponsibility. Skepticism became a moral defect. Doubt became dangerous. Concerns about proportionality, civil liberties, schooling, mental health, democratic norms, or social trust were frequently dismissed as distractions from the overriding duty to “follow the science.”

This phrase always concealed more than it revealed. Science can tell us many things, but it cannot tell us what kind of society to be. It can estimate risk, model transmission, assess probabilities, and inform decisions. But it cannot decide, by itself, how societies should balance risk against liberty, public health against education, physical safety against social life, or emergency action against democratic accountability. Those are political and moral questions. They require judgment, humility, and a good public debate.

Instead, most Western societies witnessed the fusion of expertise and virtue. To accept certain policies was to show oneself responsible, compassionate, and rational. To doubt them, on the other hand, was to risk being placed outside the circle of respectable opinion. Public health positions became markers of moral identity. Mask, lockdown, vaccine passport, school closure, ban on assembly, policing of speech: each was defended not merely as a policy but as a test of civic character.

This is what made the subsequent silence so revealing. If these measures had been defended merely as temporary, pragmatic responses to uncertainty, then serious retrospective debate would have been natural: what worked? What failed? What did we miss? Who paid the highest price? Which harms were underestimated? Which assumptions proved false? Which emergency measures should never be repeated?

But when policies have been invested with moral gravitas, such questions become harder to ask. To examine consequences is to risk undermining the innocence of those who supported them. To ask whether the response produced serious harms is to threaten the self-understanding of people who believed themselves to be acting in defense of life, reason, and solidarity. The more virtuous the position appeared at the time, the more uncomfortable it becomes to revisit it later.

This is the missing reckoning. It is often said in defense of intellectuals and experts that they acted under uncertainty. That is true. But uncertainty cuts both ways. If decisions were made under uncertainty, then humility should have been central from the beginning. Instead, uncertainty often produced the opposite: an escalation of certainty, an intolerance of dissent, and a narrowing of permissible questions. Those who insisted on complexity were frequently accused of bad faith. The few individuals who warned of secondary consequences were treated as if they were indifferent to death. Those who asked about children, loneliness, mental health, public debt, small businesses, democratic precedent, or the expansion of state and corporate power were often told, in effect, that these questions were irrelevant.

The new “treason of the intellectuals”

Now that the emergency has ended, we are told the questions are no longer worth asking. But this is not how serious societies learn; it is how they protect themselves from learning. The intellectual’s role is not to echo the moral consensus of the moment. It is not to provide elevated language for whatever institutions have already decided. Nor is it to transform the dominant position he or she endorses into a test of virtue. The intellectual’s role, at least in the classical sense, is to preserve the possibility of judgment when others are swept along by fear, passion, conformity, or convenience. This does not mean neutrality in the face of reality, but independence of mind.

Julien Benda understood this nearly a century ago. In The Treason of the Intellectuals, he argued that the distinctive obligation of the intellectual was loyalty to what can be conceived as “the truth” rather than to power, party, class, nation, or political passion. His concern was not that intellectuals might make mistakes – everyone makes mistakes. His concern was that they might cease to recognize truth as something higher than their own commitments. Once intellectuals attach their authority to a cause whose moral legitimacy appears self-evident, criticism becomes suspect and doubt begins to look like betrayal.

That danger did not disappear with the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century that followed Benda’s publication, it has merely taken new forms. Today the betrayal of the intellectual often occurs not through open allegiance to a party or doctrine, but through identification with an enlightened consensus. The intellectual does not say, “I serve power.” She says, “I serve reason.” He does not say, “My side must win.” He says, “The science is settled.” She does not say, “Dissent should be punished.” She says, “Irresponsible speech has consequences.”

When expertise becomes virtue

The language is different, but the temptation is the same. The Covid crisis gave this temptation unusual force because it joined fear to moral certainty. The threat was real. The vulnerable were real. The deaths were real. But precisely because the crisis was serious, it required intellectual discipline and the ability to distinguish between evidence and moral panic, between expertise and authority, between policy and virtue, between criticism and sabotage. Instead, too many public voices collapsed these distinctions.

The result was not simply bad policy; it was a degradation of public thought. Experts became symbolic figures in a wider drama of legitimacy. They were not only consulted; they were anointed. Their assertions were treated as though they could settle questions that exceeded their competence. Journalists often amplified this transformation. Academics, who might have been expected to introduce complexity, all too often reinforced conformity. Public intellectuals who ordinarily pride themselves on skepticism toward power suddenly discovered a deep trust in institutional authority – provided that authority spoke the “correct” moral language.

This did not mean that experts were useless. On the contrary, expertise was indispensable. No modern society can respond to a pandemic without epidemiologists, virologists, physicians, statisticians, and public health officials. The point is not that expertise should have been ignored. The point is that expertise should have remained expertise. It should have informed democratic judgment, not replaced it. It should have clarified trade-offs, not concealed them. It should have made uncertainty visible, not transformed uncertainty into command.

The distinction matters because modern societies increasingly confuse technical competence with moral wisdom. A person may know a great deal about viral transmission and very little about childhood development. Another may understand hospital capacity but fail to grasp the social meaning of isolation. A third may model infection curves while overlooking the political consequences of emergency governance. This is not an insult to experts: it is a reminder that no form of expertise abolishes the need for judgment.

The new clerisy

Walter Lippmann saw this problem emerging already in the early twentieth century. Modern societies, he argued, had become too complex for ordinary citizens to apprehend directly. People relied on representations, institutions, specialists, and interpreters. Expertise was therefore unavoidable. But the very necessity of expertise created a democratic problem: those who interpret reality for others acquire power. They decide what matters, what can be seen, what should be feared, what counts as knowledge, and what may be dismissed as ignorance.

The Covid years intensified this issue dramatically. Citizens were not simply asked to accept technical advice: they were asked to accept a broader interpretation of reality. They were told which concerns mattered most, which harms were secondary, which sacrifices were necessary, which doubts were irresponsible, and which forms of obedience counted as solidarity. Expertise did not merely describe the crisis, it helped define the moral order through which the crisis was understood.

Christopher Lasch would have recognized this social pattern. He argued that modern elites increasingly derive their authority from education, credentials, professional status, and institutional affiliation. They often view themselves not as a ruling class but as the guardians of rationality and progress. Yet he showed that this self-understanding can make them blind. Because they are surrounded by people who share their own assumptions, they struggle to imagine that other people might see the world differently. Disagreement is interpreted as ignorance. Resistance becomes pathology. And the public becomes a problem to be managed.

The Covid response revealed this divide with painful clarity. For many members of the professional class, restrictions were burdensome but manageable. Work moved online. Salaries continued. Homes became offices. Risk could be mitigated through delivery services, digital tools, and private space. But for many others, the same policies meant lost income, closed businesses, interrupted schooling, isolation, dependency, humiliation, or a collapse of ordinary life. Yet those who suffered these consequences were often told that their objections were selfish, misinformed, or politically suspect. This was more than a failure of empathy on the part of intellectuals – it was a failure of perception.

The comfort of innocence

The top down perspective considered abstract populations, curves, compliance, mandates, and messaging. The bottom up angle showed children alone in bedrooms, elderly people dying without family, students drifting away from school, shopkeepers ruined, friendships broken, families divided, workers exposed, rituals suspended, and citizens learning to distrust one another. Both realities existed. But only one was consistently granted institutional and moral authority.

That imbalance is what any serious reckoning would have to confront. It would have to ask not only whether policies reduced transmission, but how they reshaped social life. It would have to ask who bore the costs. It would have to ask why certain harms were visible and others were not. It would have to ask why the people most insulated from the damage often spoke most confidently in the language of necessity. And above all, it would have to ask why so many intellectuals accepted the moralization of expertise so readily.

The answer, I suspect, lies in the comfort of belonging to the would-be “responsible class.” Covid created a social identity organized around prudence, intelligence, compassion, and trust in institutions. To occupy that identity was reassuring. It meant one was not like the reckless, the conspiratorial, the populist, the ignorant, or the selfish. It meant one stood with science, decency, and care. This identity was powerful precisely because it converted compliance into virtue and dissent into moral failure.

But identities built on virtue are difficult to revise. Once people have cast themselves as “the responsible ones”, they are reluctant to ask whether responsibility may also have required skepticism, proportionality, or attention to consequences. Once they have treated critics as dangerous, they are reluctant to admit that some criticisms may have been valid. Once they have mocked concern for civil liberties, social trust, or children’s development as secondary, they are reluctant to acknowledge that those concerns were not peripheral, but central. This is why the post-Covid silence matters. It is not merely an absence of debate. It is a form of self-protection.

To be clear, responsibility does not, in my understanding, require theatrical confession. It does not require humiliating experts, demonizing officials, or pretending that the crisis was simple. Nor does it require adopting the views of those who got other things wrong. Serious reckoning is not revenge, nor a search for scapegoats. It is the ordinary discipline of historical and intellectual honesty.

It would begin with a few simple admissions: that knowledge was uncertain. That trade-offs were real. That many harms were minimized. That dissent was too often moralized. That institutions made claims to authority that now require scrutiny. That the burdens of the response were unequally distributed. That some people saw consequences earlier than those in power wished to admit. And that the language of “following the science” often concealed political and moral choices. None of these admissions requires denying the seriousness of the virus, embracing conspiracy theories, or pretending that all critics were wise and all officials corrupt. They require only the willingness to think. And yet that willingness remains strangely scarce.

Silence as sedative

The phrase “Covid is behind us” now functions as a sedative. It allows institutions and intellectuals to move on without accounting for what happened. It transforms an unfinished historical problem into a closed episode and suggests that the desire for reflection is itself unhealthy, obsessive, or divisive. But I would argue that the refusal to reflect is more dangerous than the reflection itself. Societies that cannot examine their own conduct during crises are bound to repeat their failures the next time fear demands certainty – the new Hantavirus scare points exactly in that direction. The question, then, is not whether we should remain trapped in the Covid years – we should not. The question is whether moving forward requires forgetting, or whether it requires understanding. There is a difference between refusing to let a crisis dominate the present and refusing to learn from it. The first is sanity. The second is self-deception.

The intellectual class should have led this reckoning. It should have asked what it got wrong, what it failed to see, what it helped legitimize, and why it was so often hostile to those who raised uncomfortable questions. It should have examined the relationship between expertise and power, between moral certainty and public conformity, and between emergency and precedent. Instead, much of it has preferred silence, dismissal, or selective memory. That is the real scandal. Not that intellectuals were afraid – fear was understandable. Not that experts made mistakes – mistakes were inevitable. Not that governments improvised – no crisis comes with a manual. The scandal is that so many of those who claimed the authority to instruct society during the emergency now deny society the seriousness of a reckoning afterward.

Covid is not behind us precisely because this reckoning has not occurred. Its absence is itself part of the legacy of the crisis. If the first failure was the moralization of expertise, the second was the narrowing of vision that followed from it. Once a society learns to see through dashboards, models, mandates, and official categories, many realities disappear from view. The next question, then, is not simply who claimed authority during Covid: it is what that authority failed to see.