I Wish You’d Died of COVID-19
Ben Samuels, ‘23
April 2020
Yes, you read that right. I do. Because I don’t think you got the message.
The fact that a pandemic would occur at some point was obvious. What was uncertain was how people would respond. And you, reader, are dangerously close to responding in precisely the wrong way. After making such an effort, locking ourselves in our houses for months and psychologically bracing for impending death, it’s natural to be tempted into feeling powerful in the face of such a victory. Especially considering the fact that older people are dying at a much higher rate than the younger generations. There’s the rush of adrenaline that comes with the feeling of having beaten an enemy, without being tempered by the fear we would experience if we were actually at risk. Plague should be a traumatizing, humbling experience for a society, of the power of nature and history. Yet riding capitalist feelings of anti-historical confidence, we run the risk of blowing right by the real lesson of this pandemic. Dear reader, the blunt hand of science has passed you over for the grave, to all our collective misfortune.
Before the first cases, it wasn’t hard to find a buzzing of nervous energy under the surface; frightened speculation about a world that had broken down the barriers of physical space with the Internet and social media. Surveys of any kitchen found spices from every continent. Exposé food documentaries were very popular, as the naturally selected viewership of fancy, life hack-y Netflix shows found ways to express their simple uncertainty about not knowing where their food came from. And then there were fears about disease, historically the reason to avoid people that didn’t look like you—namely, that they would be home to invisible bugs that would kill you with plague—reaching across the entire world, eased by modern technology that have put everyone in the world within hours of one another. These are changes in the very fabric of human existence that we still haven’t fully digested.
It may be too far a poetic stretch to say that this plague is nothing more than a physical manifestation of that fear. But the sense of our future that we have had for years does represent a strangely specific awareness, one that would be impossible if this were anything but historically inevitable.
The philosopher George Hegel famously conceptualized history as dialectic, a pendulum swinging back and forth between theses and antitheses. It’s a push one way or another to warn us that we’ve gone too far. As we crept forward, terrified of this unchecked abundance of power, we feared the unmeasured might of the backswing of that pendulum.
Trade and culture mixing among people does many good things: it makes both of them richer, it diversifies culture, and so on. There’s no need to spend time extolling the virtues of people mixing, because today we know it so well already -- it’s often called “equality” to shield it from criticism, giving you a sense of its dramatic importance in the modern mind.
But pandemic is the other side of that coin.
As I write this, Gilead Sciences has just completed Phase 3 of testing for their treatment drug, Remdesivir. Wuhan, where the virus originated, has reported no new cases. New York City, the current locus for the disease, is seeing a drop in cases. Across the world, lockdown measures have been effective in mitigating the virus.
Now that we’ve dramatically held our breath for a force of God to strike back against our presumptuousness, we’ll exhale after the unprecedented effort we’ve made. We romantically set up a clash between science and history, prepared for the societal collapse and flagellation of the Black Death, we lifted our heads to find instead our “enemy” vanquished. Having beaten history on the battlefield of our design, and finally freed ourselves from the barbarian cycle of human existence, science paves the way forward to an age where we do not worry about things like antitheses to our paradises of equality.
But the latter rests on a fundamental misconception about the workings of history. It is made of humans, and if we are still here, so is history. For example, we sit wide-eyed at home, waiting for when the government tells us we can open our non-essential businesses again, or ride the public transit system paid for with our tax dollars without fear of being kicked off and fined. Americans from sea to sea have dutifully abandoned their constitutional rights without causing too much fuss. They have sat docile at home, made videos about how weird it is, and agreed that their right to assemble isn’t really necessary anymore. In the end, we may have thrown ourselves from the frying pan right into the fire, saving points on the DOW while undermining the entire idea of being American. Or maybe not. Maybe that will, by happy accident, turn out for the better, and usher in an age without nations, which in turn will have a pushback that we must understand how to handle in turn. With you still alive, and prepared to live your life with the myth of this battle in the back of your mind, I’m inclined to believe we won’t pull through.