The heroes and heroines of the current pandemic are the front line medical workers and first responders who are, very properly, cheered, applauded and sung to by people trapped in their New York apartments. Also, the clergymen who try to offer comfort to those who are in some sense dying alone even if we all in some final sense die alone. The platitudes of clergy take on meaning because those clergy seem to be truly anguished. These are some of the memories we will take with us from the experience of the pandemic; they will last long after the pandemic is over. That is part of the cultural residue or, maybe more simply put, just the culture of the pandemic, along with emptied out Times Square and St. Peter’s Square and also a pathetic President jousting with his health care advisors, as well as with the press and some state Governors.
Humanists aren’t particularly useful at a time like this, making way for all those people who have a role to play. Humanists, however, are useful in that they sense and record the many cultural moments that give the feel to this pandemic. It is worth noting that the mark and the image of the polio epidemic of the Forties were the images of all those children in iron lungs, many of them not to recover. It is worthwhile for a humanist to note that much of what had seemed important before the pandemic is now suspended or seen in the light of the pandemic. Who cares about Shakespeare or scholarship? ( I do note, however, that some people I know are very much missing baseball.)
Boccacio may have retreated to a villa to escape the Black Plague, but the Founding Fathers did not abandon Philadelphia or refer to it in their constitution making even though Philadelphia was suffering through a Yellow Fever epidemic. What can be said in general, however, is that a plague or a war or some other natural disaster can mark a recent separation between the past and the present, making what might seem the recent past seem very long ago, now that it can be noticed in the context of the new reality. A few months ago, crowds were not unusual; now they would be startling and it will be a long time before they reappear. The same idea that a new world is being born happened in the French Revolution and in the early days of the Third Reich. The United States has for the most part been spared the sense that history has begun again. It didn’t happen after the Civil War, the country quickly returning to the status quo ante, as perhaps it should not have, though Pearl Harbor does create a divide between everything that happened before it and the modern America that emerged after it.
I don’t know if this plague will redefine our sense of ourselves as well as some of our social practices. How soon would the world recover after the Martians die in H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”? Wells doesn’t say, though he does convey the same eerie sense we have now that humankind just floats above the waves of the biota and that a minor alteration in the biota, such as the creation of a new virus, can bring to a halt much of our very interrelated social life. It is amazing that social life goes on at all, people not rioting in the streets for masks, but continuing on in their occupations, their “faith communities”, their grocery stores. Wells, in his novel, had the biota come to the rescue of humanity; this time, it is the other way round: the biota the enemy of humanity.
A humanist can also note that the broadcast and cable networks have not shown any pictures of the people suffering in their ventilators, only reports of some people emerging from hospitals, recovered from the coronavirus after having been on a ventilator. That there is so much applause when one of these people leaves the hospital suggests what is truly the case, which is that there are not that many recoveries after having gone on a ventilator.
The experience of this epidemic, as the humanist will also record, is that it is an armchair experience for most. There are those people, like the front line workers, exhausted and distraught, for whom this has been a “bad war” in just the same way World War II was a bad war for my uncle who fought in Burma, while for others, like some other of my uncles, it was an easy or a good war, just as it was for Richard Nixon, who was a supply officer on a Pacific island. That wasn’t his fault, nor is it my fault that I have a secure income and a daughter in law to go out shopping for me and am able to communicate regularly and easily with my friends and loved ones. So for me the experience of the pandemic is largely vicarious. I am made anxious by what I see on the screen and I can shut that off but I can’t shut off the images that linger in my mind. We all live more and more in a vicarious world anyway and the pandemic is likely to intensify that, but more of that later. What I can say is that I am having an easy war. It is easy for me to stay at home and cogitate however much staying home might be a burden to those who have to manage telecommuting while having small children.
It is to the credit of the first line workers now that they continue to show up out of dedication to their professions. They are the ones for whom this is a hard war. My granddaughter, who is training to be an emergency room nurse, was disappointed that she did not have enough training to be put in the front lines, however grateful her mother and I are that she was spared. That is what people do in times of crisis: they either step up or they don’t and the fate of nations depends on that, which is something that as a humanist I can say. The Russian people stood up against the Nazis. They put their own feelings about the Stalin regime aside to do their duty and engage in self sacrifice however much they were also prodded to do so by party apparaticks standing not far behind the front lines. Here it is voluntary, and that is a tribute to the American spirit or maybe the spirit of medical professionalism, take your pick. Part of my vicarious experience of the pandemic is the very expressive faces of health care workers and teachers, those people exhibiting both distinct personalities and a common seriousness of mind and purpose that brings great credit to the human race and a tear or two to my eyes.
The patter about the epidemic is also worth noting. Since there is no cure or treatment yet and even though experts don’t know much yet about the enemy they are fighting, and so separation and isolation are the only strategies to pursue, press briefings by top officials are largely about the story of the curve: are cases or ICU admissions or deaths going up or down? Everybody has learned that death is a lagging indicator, its decrease way behind the number of people admitted into ICUs. We may today confidently assert that the curve nas flattened, at least on the East Coast and the West Coast, but the peak in the midwest is not yet here and there is no assurance that there won’t be any relative peaks after the economy starts to reopen. Everybody including the President speculates about that and only health officials are leery of making a certain estimate. So this is an epidemic where the rollout of statistics is a significant part of the experience of the epidemic.
An old abiding issue in American culture has raised its head perhaps because commentators are so obsessed with the issue that they cannot help but allude to it. That issue is race relations. There is a differential impact of the pandemic on people of color. Hispanic and African Americans are a disproportionate number of the victims and the Surgeon General says that is because Blacks, in particular, carry with them the health deficiencies that have plagued them for a very long time. It is also because the poor always suffer more in that they live in more crowded conditions. Some Black advocates have owned up to say that the young people in their communities do not watch the six oclock news and so haven’t kept up with the danger into which they are putting themselves and their loved ones by continuing to congregate and play basketball, but that is to blame their own too much in that white college youth congregated until recently on Florida beaches and continue to play basketball in suburban communities.
Advocates also point out that so many people of color work in health services that they are required to put themselves at risk. But I do not think it is as accurate to present that fact as another aspect of the victimization of people of color because it is a sign of how much we rely on those Black and Hispanic health workers, that they are heroes rather than victims, and so to be praised for providing casualties in the war on the pandemic, but it is difficult for advocates to abandon their long told story of victimization for an alternative narrative. It is also worth noting that there is another demographic to be considered. Women are far less likely to die from coronavirus than are men and this is part of another well known phenomenon, which is that women are healthier and more resilient than are men, especially now that deaths in childbirth have been reduced to a very substantial degree so that a mother who dies in childbirth is a fluke rather than a not very unlikely tragedy.
Yes, it is a fluke that a woman should nowadays die in childbirth, but whether the current pandemic is a fluke or something that would inevitably assault us is something to be considered in retrospect even if the coming of one pandemic or another had been predicted by any number of experts for some time. President Trump can be forgiven for not taking to heart the warnings from intelligence agencies and other experts that had been offered. Intelligence agencies are notable for phrasing their warnings in ways that don’t indicate anything operational, just that a possibility is to be kept in mind. That was certainly true of the warnings before 9/11 and, before that, in the months before Pearl Harbor. The pandemic was inevitable only because globalization meant that some disease that popped up somewhere would wind up everywhere. Moreover, the control by people of their environment is always problematic however much humankind thinks it is in control. Tell that to any hurricane. So part of the experience of this pandemic is the awakening of a sense of how fragile are social organisms, that, as a child down my block puts it, “There is no planet B”. He said that with global warming in mind but we can say that with regard to all the pandemics and eruptions that disturb human society, back to Pliny the Elder, who tried to rescue people who lived on the other side of the Bay of Naples when Pompeii was inundated with lava, Pliny dying in the attempt. He was a brave man.