People are engaged in new adventures at least in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. My family resettled West in part of the fear of declining property values in New York City and because where we settled seemed so open and clean and so much more safe, which is what I think, even if the mountain and plains states are reaching new highs of illness. A friend of mine in New York City is thinking of trading to a larger condo in her apartment building because, I think, she wants to do something busy rather than sit in her chair waiting for the pandemic to pass. Another New York City friend goes to restaurants that are open and also to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has opened but with conditions including limited entrants spaced far apart and only one bookstore. Going to visit is a kind of adventure because there may be some risk but that is a very marginal one. They are casting their vote for the city by making their presence felt. Most people don’t have adventures in that waitresses wear masks to serve patrons, those put in significantly separated tables and store clerks moving about their wares and their customers. These people are not in adventures because they are just continuing their jobs because they have to make a living.
The possibility that extreme events will lead to adventures has always varied. Boccacio tried to escape the plague by going to a villa with friends who could share their tales with one another. My friends and I thought of leaving Berkeley to go to the Oregon coast if the Cuban Missile Crisis went sour because we understood the wind currents there would not bring much radiation if a nuclear war began. That would certainly have been a great adventure and has been a story line both before and since. How would you handle a cataclysm? Would you be resourceful or go under? Is that the measure of your mettle? A friend of mine and I commiserate that the two of us would not have survived either the Middle Passage or the Holocaust because we were not sturdier sorts. She would have jumped into the sea if she had had a chance and I would have been so despairful at being in Auschwitz that I would have waited to die rather than fight for an edge that might maybe let me survive.
The thing about the coronavirus pandemic is, as opposed to the Middle Passage or the Holocaust, is not all that dire-- except for those who get it badly. Most of us are not impacted except by the shutting down of the economy, and so that is therefore regarded by some as a fake necessity for preventing infection. Only the ones who get it get it and the dead ones have nothing to say and their families are just preoccupied with their grief. That is why politicians need to sound the klaxon call to wake the people up about the danger. Otherwise, the people will sleep. Think, rather, of the levels of displacement there can be to a population so as to access how bad a situation may be rather than to whether people subjectively feel whether they are in danger.
The Middle Passage and the Holocaust are close to a “ten” on displacement from the zero that is the usual round of life. A “ten” would be nuclear or biological apocalypse, while being out of work while at home with the flu is a “one” in that only your life is disrupted and that temporarily and nothing unsettles the values of people in that people are expected as excused from work and expected to come back to work. Let us say that a traffic fatality is a two or a three because it is startling, especially to the family, but an event also expected, just a way to write off a person for a reason sufficient as soon as it is mentioned. People didn’t stop driving. Label as a “four” or so for a heat wave that before widespread air conditioning had created excess deaths, especially of the elderly, and led young poor people to stay outdoors in the evening and so perhaps to riot. World Wars are “six”, though how amazingly persistent are populations to keep up doing what they can rather than panic or get socially disorganized, as is also the case with the Spanish Flu and the current coronavirus. Things would get really bad, let us say a “seven”, if global warming did mean that Florida was underwater or the food crops had been crispy fried, however much the global alarmists contemplate how they would manage that afterwards, a bit tantalized, a bit fearful, like a horror movie. So I would say,the coronavirus is short of a war but worse of a heat wave, although it might have gotten considerably worse if in the initial stages of spring the hospitals and resources in New York State were overwhelmed by the coronavirus, insufficient with beds and ventilators to treat the victims, as might well have happened because we knew what might happen with the nature of this disease. It seems that masks proved a very effective prophylactic, but we didn’t know that at first.
And yet there are all those adventures that do not depend on external provocations. Everybody in their lives thinks about their great adventures and romanticizes their successes and keeps quiet about their failures. Everybody talks about how they courted their wife or suppressed being jilted. Everybody talks about when a child was born and does not bring up a miscarriage. You got a great job and it became a career and hurts too much to think about a job failure. My wife and I crowed about the apartment we found that we lived in for forty years. Those adventures are also scalable in that getting a spouse is way up there and getting a good apartment is somewhat less than that even if psychologists emphasize the down sides of adventure when they say that losing a spouse or a job or a residence are stress factors rather than opportunities to create a new life, a new person, however are the memories that remain. So you don’t need a coronavirus to make an adventure. They are all around you, whether trying a new restaurant or a new book or a fresh acquaintance or even a new potential customer that you are trying to earn you a commission.
So what makes something an adventure? It is a matter of free will, this understood sociologically rather than philosophically. Free will need not be defined, however it may be said correctly, as Spinoza did, as an inclination created by the complexity of a self, or else by Kant, free will as something inevitable because language cannot render it otherwise in that there has to be a meaning for “should”. It is better to say that free will is. Like all other things. in the exhibition of a behavior readily recognized in ordinary life., such as love or subordination or other formal aspects of social life, as Simmel would call them. An adventure takes place when there is an exertion or choice that can make the difference between success or failure. There is no free will if there are not the objective circumstances of having some resources that might make things better even if your soldiers died in the event. Those are heroes rather than suckers or fools. You may have connived a potential spouse by first befriending you. A relative of mine once faked at being a cutter in the garment industry so as to get the job, confident that he could make do until he got skillful at it. A graduate school student thinks themselves glib enough to impress a professor. There is a risk, but not totally outrageous, in which case it is not an adventure but a tragedy or just a victim. There is no adventure in going into the Somme. The same logic applies to the coronavirus. The examples I have offered are all measured risks, a comparison of resources versus likelihood to succeed without getting sick. People are pretty safe if they wear their masks and separate from strangers. It is foolhardy, like the President, to flaunt risks so as to treat life as if it were ordinary. The problem is that there is no certainty and so people who are overtaken by illness even without taking inordinate risks. That is the nature of this disease. We don’t know how to be certain that it will not make you a victim. That riskiness is part of its character and it will remain so until it is extinguished, which is also the case with other epidemics and pandemics, people maneuvering as best they can, trying to maneuver around the hotspots of risk, unless they relish the heroism of taking necessary even if cautiously ventured risks so as to, let us say, become front line workers in coronavirus hospitals.
Moving to a new region certainly makes me think it an adventure, much to be preferred to settling into a nursing home where one dotters about until one dies. I knew a woman in her eighties who really did not like the confines of a single room and having nurses going about to handle their bodywork, however necessary it might be. Instead, she went home so as to die in her own bed. But even transitioning to living in a nursing home can be an adventure: to see how to normalize a regime; to emotionally focus on a few long time objects like a chair or a framed photograph, and wondering how to engage with the other people on the ward. Long term child inmates in hospitals and orphanages do that, and so could old people however much they, like the younger ones, are forced to. It is the attitude that makes a person free rather than turning a person into a victim and accomplishing that seems the ultimate object for people to do with themselves. In my own view, Christianity is a form of victimization even though a Christian is free to prosper in having shed superstition because they are now allowed by themselves to become a higher sort of victim in that they have this super subordination to a God for whom a person ever has to be grateful. Dignity is better.
It seems to me that, in that philosophical sense, it is to be praised that coronavirus has not overcome and demoralized its population. It has not made the people, except those who die or are maimed, as victims. Rather, people will and are persevering through it. There is about nine months to go until most people get immune and a year or two after that until New York City and other places recover. Not as bad as the displacements of things like the Middle Passage or the Black Plague, nor even the terror of H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”, where people weren’t at all heroic or adventurous but ran hither and yon to avoid the relentless Martians who were finally defeated through nothing of the efforts of the human race but by the ravages of Earthly microbes. What a terrible fate, which was to have no agency or will, just the forces of nature. Not so, I say, with coronavirus, where militant efforts can make a difference to alleviate it even if Trump so missed his chance to be a hero rather than Howdy Doody’s Mr. Bluster, a puppet who the kids in the Peanut Gallery knew was a figure of fun because all he did, as his name just said, was mostly just bluster.