Panic, Pandemic, and the Body Politic
Stopping an outbreak is never just a fight with nature. It's also a fight with culture.
Infections don't just attack weaknesses in the human body. They also exploit weaknesses in human
society. Some disasters are small, and some disasters are just very far away. Covid-19 is neither.
It's big, and it's here, and it's fast. Infection rates are currently doubling roughly every three
days. It's going to be bad, and it's going to be sad. Just how bad and sad depends very much on
what we do now. I'm writing this on the 12th of March, 2020. That means the human race has
between two and four weeks to get its shit together. We are not just dealing with germs that are
too small to see; we are also dealing with structural hurdles that are too huge to see, in the way
that right now, teleworking from my front porch in Los Angeles, I cannot see California.
These are strange, scary times, and people are acting scared and strange. My phone is throbbing
with messages from family around the world, checking in on each other. One dear friend is flying
home to Ireland tonight to care for her sick parents while her brother is in quarantine. Another
is sick, struggling to breathe, hasn't slept in days, and has decided to fixate on the fact that
she's run out of potatoes. Societies have been shaped by outbreaks for as long as we've had
societies. "Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without
warning," writes Frank M. Snowden in Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present.
"Every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that
society's structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities."
It doesn't matter whose fault it is that Covid-19 is ravaging the planet. What matters is how
we stop it -- and stopping an epidemic is never just a fight with nature. It's also a fight
with culture.
A bug or a virus will exploit any weakness in the body politic. Cholera became a huge problem
when human beings started moving to cities in huge numbers. It stayed a problem until we worked
out new ways of building large-scale public sewage systems, which involved a lot of money and
manpower. Because of diseases like cholera, we literally figured out how to handle our shit.
Ignorance of germ theory is one structural weakness. Bigotry is another. What comes to mind when
you think of Victorian culture? Silly hats and sexual repression. In the 19th century, the syphilis
epidemic was used to justify sexism and sexual repression -- when in fact sexism and sexual
repression both made syphilis more likely to spread. Doctors routinely failed to tell their female
patients when they were sick, because they didn't want to expose the cheating husbands paying
their bills. Today, venereal disease tends to proliferate in societies that fetishize sexual
ignorance and treat sex as dirty and shameful.
Prejudice and dogma are structural vulnerabilities. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the virus
spread faster precisely because of ignorance and homophobia. A lot of conservative Christians
were convinced that HIV-AIDS was Jesus' special vendetta against the wrong sort of people having
the wrong sort of sex, and some still insist that it was more spiritually effective to pray the gay
away than distribute condoms. Sadly, a virus does not care about anyone's religious principles,
or their re-election prospects. It is a tiny self-replication engine. It is morally neutral.
You cannot argue a virus out of existence. You cannot logic it away or humiliate it into retreat or
appeal to its conscience. It doesn't have one of those. A virus doesn't have goals or needs or
desires. It doesn't have a brain. You might just as usefully explain the military-industrial complex
to your Peace Lily (although after a couple of weeks of self-quarantine we may all be talking to our
houseplants). Covid-19 is a disease that largely spares children and disproportionally affects older
men. President Bolsonaro, Brazil's far-right demagogue, has the disease, and so do several aides
who dined with Trump last weekend at Mar-a-Lago. When it comes to illness as metaphor,
Covid-19 is not subtle. Susan Sontag would struggle to get a whole book out of it. But this isn't
karma. It isn't divine retribution, though people in the grip of epidemics usually turn to simple
stories like that, because they're scared. Epidemics aren't trying to punish anyone. We're doing
this to ourselves, and that, as the prophet Thom Yorke tells us, is what really hurts. That and the
lack of potatoes.
For many centuries, the conflict driving the plot engine of the human race has been the tension
between individualism and collective behavior -- between the goal of independent flourishing and
the concept of the common good. As a species, we have spent several centuries nurturing a
collective mindset that rejects collective endeavor, and most of us are living in nations that seem
perilously convinced that the human race is a thing you can actually win.
That, as they say on the twitter-dot-com, is a real heckin problem. The collective psychology of
neoliberalism encourages self-interest and short-term thinking. It both creates and requires human
lives that are organized around the kind of constant insecurity and stress that actively prevent us
from thinking beyond the next fiscal quarter. The diseases that are most successful in the coming
century will, as always, be the diseases that exploit our major failure modes and popular delusions.
Delusion is not the same as ignorance. Ignorance is not the problem here. This is a mistake that
scientists, reporters, and right-thinking liberals make time and time again. Take the threat of
vaccine resistance: Vaccinating against preventable diseases like measles only works if 90% of
a population get their shots. It is commonly assumed that the reason people don't vaccinate their
kids is that they don't have the right data. In fact, when science reporter Maggie Koerth
investigated that narrative, she found the opposite: When researchers tried to debunk
misinformation, anti-vaxxers were more likely to agree with the science but less likely to vaccinate
their own kids. Even equipped with better data, their threat models were entirely inadequate to the
existential concept of herd immunity.
A fair chunk of the people hoarding masks and stealing sanitizer are also aware that it's a stupid,
selfish thing to do -- but if you can't trust other people to share, selfish behavior makes
emotional sense even when selfish behavior is also irrational and actively dangerous. If you
design a world economy that rewards blind self-interest and makes altruism unaffordable,
it's unsurprising that some people start acting like they're in the prisoner's dilemma. "What's
true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well," wrote Albert Camus, in a quote you'd
better get used to seeing a lot of in the next few weeks. "It helps men to rise above themselves."
This is not entirely true, in that what a crisis tends to do is reveal character, including its
incongruities. As I write, little old ladies in Belgium are clawing at each other over the last
rolls of toilet paper. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma is broadcasting recordings from his house.
Quarantined Sicilians are playing music together from their high-rise balconies, proving two
things: that the nation of Italy has always known what to do with cheese, and that a surprising
number of people own tambourines.
At midnight on Pandemic Day, I went to the local grocery store with my housemate to pick up
such essentials as gin, wine, and discount KitKats. The place was the opening scene in a disaster
movie. The shelves had been cleared of soap, bottled water, and oatmeal, but it was just as
surprising to see what was left. There were plenty of protein bars, because it turns out that nobody
wants to eat protein bars for their last meal, even in Los Angeles.
A girl wearing a Sherpa jacket and a confused expression snagged the last sweet potato.
"I don't know why I'm buying this," she announced to the room in general. "I don't even like
them. I just feel like we might need it." Her boyfriend was pushing a cart full of every remaining
box of salad greens. From the dirty looks coming their way, I wanted to warn them both to drop
the kale and run, in case things were about to turn into The Lottery.
"I lived through three wars. This is bullshit," said a blond woman pushing a half-empty cart. Her
name was Irina, she was 35, and she was from the former Yugoslavia. "It was like this for six years.
It's stupid. Of course people should try to take this seriously, try not to infect anyone, but
really -- there are no more potatoes!" People make strange choices when they're scared. Right now,
a lot of broke young millennials I know are still going in to work at bars, cafes, and BDSM
dungeons because they really, really need to keep those jobs, and -- as boomers have been
blithely demonstrating for decades -- if a species-level crisis probably isn't going to kill you
personally, you might as well pretend it's not happening. I still want to scream at them.
Unfortunately, screaming is also unhelpful right now. You can't fight an epidemic just by being
aggressively right about it. Shaming your friends isn't the best way to get them to change their
behavior fast. Shaming and blaming people might make you feel better in the short term, and
it sometimes works in the long term, when people have had time to go away and think about it
and calm down. We don't have that time right now. We have to be gentle with each other. We
have to practice trust. Because right now and in the decades to come, our biggest problems as a
species are going to be the problems we can't solve without trusting each other to do the
right thing.
The Idea of the body politic is an old, old metaphor. If a nation is a "social organism," the United
States has an extremely weak social immune system. A lot of Americans can't afford to stay home
if they get ill. There's very little sick leave, and missing one paycheck might mean disaster. A lot
of Americans can't afford to be ill, because their healthcare system is a lumbering behemoth of
modern barbarism. What that means is that most of them have internalized some or all of the
following ideas: We have to compete savagely with others, that nobody else can be trusted, that
the health and wealth of our own nation comes first, and that long-term, collective thinking is less
important than individual survival. And it just so happens that all these things are useful to the
spread of a disease like Covid-19.
People who believe that they have to compete savagely with others are poorly equipped to share out
the hand sanitizer. People who don't trust each other find it hard to believe that everyone else
will follow basic quarantine procedures, so why should they? People who aren't used to the concept
of common good don't know what to do in the face of a common threat -- except panic. Panic is
unhelpful, but sometimes it's not a bad place to start.
"I want you to panic." That's how teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg opened her speech to
the United Nations last year. She was not advising us to start stockpiling potatoes. The world
failed to panic, even though global heating is a crisis on a far more biblical scale than Covid-19.
The difference is that climate collapse is happening gradually. Of course, on a planetary scale,
the speed of exponential ecosystem upfuckery is breathtaking and scary, but most of us aren't
seeing a difference on the major timescale that matters to human beings trying to survive late
capitalism, namely paycheck to paycheck. Climate collapse is happening at about the pace of
a human lifetime. Coronavirus is happening at a far greater relative velocity, which is a measure
of how fast your friends and family members emerge from their blanket fort of denial in societies
where most of us, on a practical level, would rather die than be seriously inconvenienced.
Serious inconvenience is the new normal -- for all of us. Including the old, the rich, and the
powerful. This is a problem that nobody can buy their way out of. As with the climate crisis,
we are not yet technologically advanced enough to stop this happening easily and entirely -- but
we do have the information and the practical capacity to stop it being an extinction-level
omnishambles. We know what to do, or at least we have enough professionals who know what
to do, and part of our survival paradigm is going to involve learning how to shut up and listen
to those trained professionals instead of flinching in the face of Fox News.
You can purchase immunity from prosecution, but you cannot purchase immunity from a
pandemic. The coronavirus is a stress test for the species. It's a dry run for the disasters to
come. Well, a moist run. It's a test of our capacity to cope with planet-scale disasters, and this
time we are probably going to pass. Just about. Not with flying colors, especially given how long
it took us to close the airports, and not without a lot of grief, stress, and loss -- but
civilization is not about to collapse this year. Mutual aid networks are replicating like mad
on wheezing, overloaded social media platforms. Neighbors who have never exchanged more
than a few sentences are asking each other how they're doing and what they need, and
sometimes, sheepishly, what their names are. This will be awful, and then it will end,
and when it does, we'll have built up our resistance.