Dave Konstan reminded me of what I knew but neglected in my comments about the culture of the pandemic. Not only health care workers and grocery clerks serve in a pandemic. Humanists serve as well in that they supply observations and commentary about the passing scene as well as apply old literature to current situations. So I will try that. Here are some observations about how the social world will be different when it reopens after the pandemic, we no more likely to go back to the status quo ante anytime soon just as we are unlikely to go back to airports without security checkpoints even though the threat of airport terrorism has receded though not nearly enough to let security measures lapse. For the foreseeable future, crowds will be small and people will have their temperatures taken or have to show their cards showing that they have antibody protection before they go into restaurants and, most of all, more of life will be conducted online.
There are some advantages to this. Communications are more polished when the audience is larger. Diaries will be informal because they are addressed to yourself. Emails allow for grammatical mistakes and typos. Blog posts require line editing. And broadcast news programs go through a great deal of editing even if that means the material will be reduced to cliches rather than serve as a cri de coeur of the person on the screen-- though what I notice at the moment are how heartfelt are the remarks by the newscasters, they more cheerleaders against the pandemic than objective reporters of the news. Moreover, informal interactions between real people in proximity to one another does not even require the obvious objective of providing a means of communication that persists in communications across the spectrum of intended communications all the way from diaries, where you communicate to yourself, to broadcasts, where you communicate to large numbers of people you don’t know personally, all in an instant. Old married people will just hang out with one another to keep one another company and may make some observations or make chitchat not to convey information but just to reaffirm that they are spending time in one another’s company. It is like the phone calls so many people are making now not to pass on information but just to hear one another’s voices. I don’t know if you can just hang out on line, but we shall soon see if virtual reality sessions where people just take up space on one another's screens will arise as a practice.
I have previously remarked on the magic of the classroom. For some reason, just being present to hear the patter of a lecturer may work its way into the student’s mind over the course of a semester so that students find themselves using the same sort of formulations spouting out of their own mouths, and that is a minimal form of education. I think this can be repeated through virtual reality. I remember “Sunrise Semester”, which was a venture by CBS in the Sixties. It broadcast first rate professors offering what had clearly been their lecture series on American history or German Twentieth Century politics from a studio dressed up as a living room or a lecture hall. These professors knew what they were doing. They were clear, well organized, put in some dramatic pauses and gestures, and kept things moving. I have long wondered why colleges did not reduce their need for tenured faculty by circulating tapes to their students of premier lecturers from major campuses--except that, of course, would lead students to think they were not getting their money’s worth, when in fact they might be getting less garbled presentations of the material. So “Sunrise Semester” may make a comeback in the age of the coronavirus, students getting better than they usually do through telecommunication.
A humanist can be useful in a crisis, as I said, by pointing out how literary texts from the past can shed light on contemporary circumstances. Certainly H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds’, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, Daniel Defoe’s “The Journal of the Plague Year”, are all useful, the first two for documenting a sense of desperation and a rush to isolation from an intruding menace, and the Defoe particularly useful because it so meticulously set out the public health measures that would be adopted under such circumstances, such as the isolation in place that is still the first resort of public health, the novel also providing, as do the other two, the sense of fear that settles in to a population when survival itself becomes problematic for a population.
An author worth adding to that brief bibliography is Isaac Asimov. He wrote a science fiction mystery novel called “The Naked Sun” in the early Fifties in which a detective from Earth was sent with his robot sidekick to solve a murder that had taken place on one of the planets surrounding far off stars that humanity had already settled. In this case, it was a planet in which a few people lived on grand estates far from one another and consented to meet people in person only to procreate. How could a murder have taken place? The object of the novel was to once again show how robots could be manipulated to violate the law that they could not hurt people, and so supplies some insight into a technological world. The novel could also be read as an allegory in which robots took on the mistreatment and mistrust and lower status position that at the time of the novel’s publication applied to the Negro caste, as that then existed in America: the robots are called “boys” and there is always a fear of robot rebellions.
It occurs to me that the novel is also about how people will deal with one another in circumstances similar to the ones imposed by the current pandemic and so Asimov shows himself to be even better than his followers always thought he was. The Spacers, as the people of the outer worlds are called, maintain strict hygiene whenever they interact with Earthmen, which is rarely. They wear nose filters and are afraid of contagion by the many microbes that live on Earth and which are easily spread there because Earth people live in such congested quarters. So that makes the protected Spacers seem condescending to their erstwhile inferiors while the truth is that they are the ones who are vulnerable to disease, and so they have to protect their inadequately exposed immune systems. We, today, are also concerned about gaining the herd immunity that would come if large parts of the population had either been vaccinated against the coronavirus or had survived it without even having known that they had been infected.
One lesson to be taken from this imagined future is that there will be a stratification between those once infected and/or vaccinated, which will become most people, and those not so. All elderly people and also all those with diseases that might compromise them should they become infected, as we shall find out over time, and as already seems to be true of people with kidney failure because the coronavirus often leads to kidney failure, are likely candidates for becoming protected populations if they are not to be taken as sacrifices to the inevitable. Gov. Cuomo has already declared what he says is “Matilda’s Law”, named after his mother: his mother is not expendable. In order to insure that is the case, then there may need to be early retirements so as to spare people who are on the brink of becoming part of the most at risk populations. Does that mean the future holds a new kind of isolation for at risk populations who at one time were free to roam the streets even in the midst of flu season, when oldsters are also more likely to catch a fatal case? We shall see.
Here is another parallel. In Solaria, there are only some twenty thousand people, each of whom lives on a large estate maintained by robots so that they have no need of human contact and so the “natural” state of things is to keep one another at a distance, even to the point of engaging in sex only for the purpose of procreation, the Solarians not having invented and Asimov not even suggesting the possibility of IVF, that making in person sexual contact unnecessary. What the Solarians do for social contact is engage in telecommunications through devices which allow people to scan one another rather than see one another. That distinction between “seeing” and “scanning” is an important one. People can go on walks or have dinner together vicariously. Asimov must have thought such devices highly advanced because any viewing on Solaria requires a high degree of technological adjustment, while here on Earth, right now, people can telecommunicate through Skype and Zoom all on their own. The question arises, however, whether what can be done interpersonally differs when people are scanning or seeing one another. On Solaria, people can be unclothed without immodesty if they are scanning however appalled they are at being in the actual presence of another human being even if the people are fully clothed and keep a distance between them. What will be the rules of telecommunications in our present world until such time as that vaccine and herd immunity come into play?
At the least, for the near future, we will feel it strange to have many people around us when we go out on the street in our masks, just as, at this moment, it still feels eerie to see so few people on the streets, all or most of them in masks. We will recoil from crowds or assemblages of people, more secure with just our family, assuming that all of them are in our own magic circle of the uninfected. Our homes will seem ever more like our castles: a place of safe refuge to which to retreat after having, if necessary, made our way into the outside world during the working day. Indoors, we will not need masks and can rely on telecommunications to keep us in contact with others, enough food stored up to make it through a spell without shopping, only vicarious visitors welcomed.
Our aesthetic senses will also get readjusted so that we can regard crowds at sport stadiums as unnecessary and so treat sports more like movies in that they are totally vicarious experiences without the need of cheering crowds. I still don’t like concerts and operas where everyone claps like crazy and prefer movies where only a real work of art gets a round of applause when the showing is over. There will be other aesthetic consequences in that culture responds to and doesn’t just participate in the creation of its atmosphere. Should there come a time when there are enough masks (and testing) to justify a partial reopening, there can develop a market for “fashion” masks. And tastes will change. The television medical drama “New Amsterdam” delayed its episode on a pandemic for fear it was too close to reality. If the pandemic goes on much longer, there will be a sitcom set in a COVID-19 ward-- that is, if production companies figure out a way to make their programs safely. Also, the content of some productions will be altered so as to refer to a time before the pandemic, just as happened when American musicals during the Second World War were set in previous times so that no reference need be made to the war. “Meet Me in Saint Louis” was set at the turn into the Twentieth Century. You can get the same effect today by watching “Jeopardy”, which is running a great many episodes that were in the can by the time the pandemic came about and so you see no references, no masks, no social distancing. It is a pleasure to see those people, not that they are carefree-- just without this particular care.
“The New Yorker” had a cover of two people with masks kissing. That is romance in these difficult times. But go a step further. People will still continue to court because, after all, that is, as I have argued elsewhere, essential to human relations, but it might be very different in a world of screens. People will be very picky about whom they choose to meet in person and so much of courtship may be conducted on screen, which means that Skype sex will replace telephone or smart phone sex during many of the early stages of courtship. Nothing essential, though, gets changed by that: people still have to figure out what one another are like and whether they find one another charming or more than that. It will be a brave new world out there, though by no means an unrecognizable one in that the basic parameters of human life, like courtship and friendship and family will not have changed. It is like blackouts or rationing in time of war. We will adjust to it.
People are also more likely to look into the living rooms and studies from which people Skype and so know them more intimately than when they are seen only in a studio. Kristin Welker, an NBC correspondent, seems more human in her very tasteful and coordinated living room, and Kate Snow, another NBC correspondent, has a very large and comfortable and immaculate kitchen from which she makes her reports, while other correspondents have atrocious wallpaper in their studies or basements. How much privacy will people give up when they are “only” being Skyped?
And, contrary to Asimov, the people who do the hard work that requires interpersonal contact, such as stocking groceries or working a register, may not be denigrated as robots or slaves, but elevated in the public mind as the essential people they are even though what they do has always been part of the division of labor, back to when there were merchants in Babylonia. Every pharmacist and delivery man is a hero and we would be better off if that were the case especially if it means that their wages are more or less permanently increased in that they are being awarded “combat pay” for their dangerous jobs. That is certainly a more perfect society than one in which investment bankers are treated as either the great heroes or villains of the social system. And so the relationship of the social classes may well change as a result of the pandemic, even if the basic things, like love, friendship and the family, will not.