Last
week, I briefly mentioned the irony of how, a little more than half a century
ago, the world was able to handle
pandemic bigger than the one going around now without disrupting people’s lives
enough for hardly any of them to notice. Just ask Americans what happened in
1957, and I can assure you that among the minority who don’t draw a complete
blank, Sputnik and Jailhouse Rock will come up way more often than the Asian
Flu Pandemic of ‘57.
So what the heck is going on now to convince American society that it is a good idea to bring ordinary life to a screeching halt, just to slow down a disease that mainly kills old and sick people at somewhere less than 15 percent of the background rate?
To put things in perspective: every year in the US, about 35,000 people die in road accidents. So far this year, 166,000 have died of covid. Covid looks worse, until you remember that the average age to die of it is somewhere between 75 and 80. A quick glance at an actuarial table will reveal that these people can typically expect to live some 9 to 12 more years. Road accident victims would, on average, have lived another 40 years before dying of natural causes.
So we’re looking at a threat on the same order of magnitude as road accidents, with a major mitigating factor being that covid won’t be here year after year after year. A lot of reasonable people have looked at this and come away thinking that the best response would be to keep life normal for most people while providing the more at-risk demographics with the means to isolate themselves. This is what Sweden has done, successfully, with a per-capita death rate nearly the same as America’s.
But
here’s the thing – any old blogger can yammer on about the things I’ve just
said, and in fact, at this moment, many thousands of them are doing exactly
that. What I intend to do is to to get under the hood of what’s going on and show
just why it is that so many people in America seem to have lost their
minds.
At the
end of the day, “people are stupid” is just a dumb cliché. In reality, everything
that’s going on right now has a detailed explanation within the mass psychology
of the American mind.
So,
without further ado, here are the three strands of irrationality which I think
have combined to create the American overreaction to the Coronavirus.
1.
Most Americans Believe in the Myth of
Progress
A few
months ago, I devoted one of my essays to explaining the concept of the “Myth
of Progress,” and how the last few centuries of rapid technological change have
conditioned people to see history as a tale of the inevitable and irreversible
banishment of mankind’s problems through the adoption of new technology.
The Myth
of Progress has so much power because it frequently fits the facts: think of
how much nicer life is with the printing press, the germ theory of disease,
antibiotics, X-rays, weather forecasting, hot running water, machine-spun
cloth, etc.
But
sometimes, the myth blinds us to facts. If you lived in the sixteenth century
and believed in the inevitability of technological progress, you might have
spent your whole live insisting that the Philosopher’s Stone was just a few
years away.
Likewise,
in our own day and age, you can see Congress pouring several trillion dollars
down the rat-hole of the F-35 out of a mistaken belief that, because it is a whole
“generation” newer then the F-15 and F-16 and their Russian counterparts, it
must be much, much, better. But according to many of the people who actually
have to fly the F-35, it isn’t an improvement at all; there’s a reason why they
often call it the “Penguin.”
The
persistence of the Myth of Progress is the reason behind so many people’s firm
belief that the current pandemic will end with the successful creation of a
covid vaccine, despite the fact that scientists have been trying to vaccinate
against various members of the Coronavirus family for decades with little
success.
Now this
is not to say that I expect no covid vaccine to be created at all – in fact,
Russia has already announced plans to start vaccinating people later this
month. But nobody can know in advance how effective this vaccine is going to be. It will likely be better than nothing, but the problem is that coronaviruses mutate very rapidly (there are
already at least six strains of the one that causes covid-19) so even if you go
through the motions of injecting people with a weakened variant of something that you isolated in the lab several months ago, it isn’t going to protect people
against all of what’s presently out there in the wild.
However,
this doesn’t stop people from continuing to believe in both the inevitability
and moral necessity of finding a vaccine or a new drug or something
that will stop the virus dead in its tracks. After all, from the point-of-view
of a true believer in the Myth of Progress, infectious disease outbreaks belong
in the past. They are not like cancer or road accidents or other respectable
causes of death.
We enlightened
21st century Americans can afford to be rational about cancer and
road accidents and other humdrum hazards of the modern world. We are allowed to
think about the costs and benefits of public policies that would mitigate those
hazards. And we can do that with the knowledge that the complete
suppression of these dangers would involve an unacceptable loss of personal
freedom.
But learning
to live with the Coronavirus, on the other hand, is tantamount to returning to
the Middle Ages, and turning back the clock is the one thing we must never
do.
2.
Doctors And Journalists Have Too Much
Influence
The Myth
of Progress accounts for one strand of irrationality in the excessive reaction
to the Coronavirus, but taken alone, it is far from sufficient to explain what
is going on right now. To do that, you also need to look at the class interests
of the two classes of people who are influencing public opinion the most:
doctors and journalists.
Way back
in April, I wrote a post explaining in some detail how doctors’ and journalists’
worldviews are heavily influence by their membership in the comfortable classes.
In short, the idea is that not everyone in America is equally well prepared to
deal with the financial ramifications of a long shutdown. And let’s just say
that if your biggest worries are what to watch on Netflix and whence to order
take-out, then you may be a bit too isolated from the experiences of the
typical lower-middle-class or poor American.
Now it just so happens that the doctors and
journalists who are shaping everyone’s opinion about whether are shutdown is
necessary are also among the people with the least to lose from a shutdown.
Journalists can work from home. Most doctors are essential workers, and even
those who aren’t are still wealthy enough to weather off a temporary economic
downturn.
A good
example of the bubble in which these people live comes from Rod Dreher, the
top-billed writer at the American Conservative. While I agree with much of what Dreher is saying about the broader facts of American decline, I am
unimpressed by his decision to frame his personal experience of the present
shutdown as ‘covidtide’ – basically, an extended Lent in which orthodox
Christians like Dreher have a special opportunity to draw closer to God by
denying themselves the pleasures of full participation in modern society.
All due
respects to Dreher’s religion, but I think it would be naïve not to note that
his experience of ‘covidtide’ is influenced by the fact that the
shutdown has done little to disrupt his ability to make a living.
Dreher’s articles are still appearing in regular order on the website of the American
Conservative. The people whom he looks down on for chafing under the covid
restrictions generally do not have anywhere near his degree of worldly security.
Finally,
one more point worth noting is that members of all professions have,
with few exceptions, an exaggerated idea of their own profession’s ability to
solve problems rather than create them. This is true for doctors, lawyers,
politicians, clergymen, educators, scientists, engineers, policemen, or
whoever.
An
infectious disease expert like Dr. Anthony Fauci has spent his whole life studying
the hazards posed by infectious diseases and devising ways to mitigate said
hazards. It should surprise nobody that he is hyperfocused on slowing or stopping virus transmission. But
when he comes out and says something to the effect that we have no choice but
to keep the country shut down for at least a year, we all need to seriously
consider whether or not he has actually done a balanced cost-benefit analysis.
Perhaps
Dr. Fauci hasn’t put much thought into the way that shutting down so much of
the economy will worsen the lives of millions of working-class Americans, and
lead to increasing poverty, lack of health care, child abuse, divorce, suicide, homicide, addiction, etc. It isn’t a surprise to see him overlook these things – after
all, they aren’t what he was trained to protect us from. But they’re still
worth thinking about.
3.
This Is All A Political Shibboleth, Anyhow
Let’s
just admit it already: for millions of Americans, wearing a mask isn’t really
about stopping the spread of virus particles. It’s mostly just a way of saying
that you hate Donald Trump.
Oh, sure,
very few of the people who are ostentatious about wearing masks even when they
aren’t required to are consciously thinking this thought. At the same time, it
isn’t a coincidence that Joe Biden’s handlers have made sure that he has worn a
mask in nearly all of his photoshoots this summer, even though he mostly remains in or near his house, while at the same time President Trump,
who’s in public all the time, rarely ever wears one.
Here’s
the thing: if you are a governor or mayor or some other local authority figure, and you want everyone to know that you think Donald Trump is
a childish buffoon whose blundering and blustering is getting thousands of
Americans killed, then the best way to get your opinions out there is to impose as
many burdensome restrictions as possible on the people beneath you.
And if
you like Donald Trump and want to prove to everyone around you that you won’t
countenance anybody trampling on your liberties, then the best way to do it is
to flout every covid restriction, even the ones that make sense.
That’s
where we are as a country, in this topsy-turvy Year of the Bat. Even something
as serious as the deadliest virus since 1957 can’t escape being flattened out
into a two-dimensional game of “are you for Trump, or against him?”
I suppose the bright side of this is that it will only go on as long as people are consumed by a burning desire to signal their love or hatred for the President. That's why I suspect that a lot of the over-the-top social distancing requirements and hysterical finger-pointing will vanish a week or two after the election, no matter who wins.
In the meantime, I don't think there's much reason to hold out hope for Americans to make a collective return to their senses.
People do what they are told, and people believe what they are told.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the general public is concerned, that is all you need to know. The question is why those at the top of the hierarchy ordered the lockdown.
Well, as a first order approximation, I guess that works. Most of the people, most of the time, will do what they're told to do.
DeleteStill, there is a big amount of variation in how much respect different people are giving the lockdown requirements. And I think that the best explanation for what is going on in their heads - rulers and ordinary folks alike - consists of the three things I described in my post.