Call it what you will, the corona virus keeps up its relentless search for new hosts, indifferent to politics, borders, and all human efforts to control it with self-serving narratives. Even though everyone at some level must know this to be true, there are those who can’t resist the natural human impulse to assign blame, to find some “other” group whose bad behavior can be spotlighted and forced to change so that we never again have to face what is in reality the indifference of nature. It is such insistence on false narratives that leads us in what Barbara Tuchman called The March of Folly; that drives such actions as pulling funding from critical CDC research.
Folly be damned, Trump and many in his base march on, seemingly compelled to find someone – no, anyone – to blame. Social forces, in concert with nature – overcrowding, animal markets, belief in the curative powers of exotic animals, air travel, migration – all things beyond our capacity to control, simply cannot be accepted as the problem. Either there’s no real crisis – it’s just something manufactured by Trump haters to hurt him in November – or there must some bad actor or actors. And given the list of candidates at the center of various conspiracy theories, it’s clear that it’s the embrace of conspiracy itself, and not the content of any particular theory, that is the driving force in this drama: the Democrats, the Chinese, the Democrats in concert with the Chinese, Obama, the WHO, the CDC, etc. (Surely there’s a version involving the Clintons somewhere out there making the rounds.) All these theorists seem to agree on is that human ill will, not an indifferent universe, is responsible for this crisis and anyone who says otherwise is putting us all at the mercy of evil forces.
Often accompanying these theories is the conviction that the consequences of human actions can be isolated so as to have no impact beyond the actor’s conscious intent. For example, one might tell him/herself that an exercise in freedom such as refusing to isolate or to wear a mask is no one else’s concern. If so, they may want to consider the consequences of what may have been a single viral cell (or however many would be necessary to trigger an infection) jumping from animal to human in Wuhan, China just six months ago. The unequivocal lesson is that we are linked in countless ways seen and unseen, and President Trump’s insistence on referring to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus could suggest an awareness of this interconnectedness. Instead it just seems to stem from the need to lay blame and create yet another distraction to gain political advantage, and if Trump and his sycophants have their way, the valuable lesson about unintended consequences will be lost. Let’s hope wiser heads prevail.
Everything you say is logical. But Trump has a knack of exploiting our prejudices to keep himself in power. What happened today in the CA25 special Congressional election is frightening.
A Lesson from COVID-19
ReplyDeleteCall it what you will, the corona virus keeps up its relentless search for new hosts, indifferent to politics, borders, and all human efforts to control it with self-serving narratives. Even though everyone at some level must know this to be true, there are those who can’t resist the natural human impulse to assign blame, to find some “other” group whose bad behavior can be spotlighted and forced to change so that we never again have to face what is in reality the indifference of nature. It is such insistence on false narratives that leads us in what Barbara Tuchman called The March of Folly; that drives such actions as pulling funding from critical CDC research.
Folly be damned, Trump and many in his base march on, seemingly compelled to find someone – no, anyone – to blame. Social forces, in concert with nature – overcrowding, animal markets, belief in the curative powers of exotic animals, air travel, migration – all things beyond our capacity to control, simply cannot be accepted as the problem. Either there’s no real crisis – it’s just something manufactured by Trump haters to hurt him in November – or there must some bad actor or actors. And given the list of candidates at the center of various conspiracy theories, it’s clear that it’s the embrace of conspiracy itself, and not the content of any particular theory, that is the driving force in this drama: the Democrats, the Chinese, the Democrats in concert with the Chinese, Obama, the WHO, the CDC, etc. (Surely there’s a version involving the Clintons somewhere out there making the rounds.) All these theorists seem to agree on is that human ill will, not an indifferent universe, is responsible for this crisis and anyone who says otherwise is putting us all at the mercy of evil forces.
Often accompanying these theories is the conviction that the consequences of human actions can be isolated so as to have no impact beyond the actor’s conscious intent. For example, one might tell him/herself that an exercise in freedom such as refusing to isolate or to wear a mask is no one else’s concern. If so, they may want to consider the consequences of what may have been a single viral cell (or however many would be necessary to trigger an infection) jumping from animal to human in Wuhan, China just six months ago. The unequivocal lesson is that we are linked in countless ways seen and unseen, and President Trump’s insistence on referring to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus could suggest an awareness of this interconnectedness. Instead it just seems to stem from the need to lay blame and create yet another distraction to gain political advantage, and if Trump and his sycophants have their way, the valuable lesson about unintended consequences will be lost. Let’s hope wiser heads prevail.
Everything you say is logical. But Trump has a knack of exploiting our prejudices to keep himself in power. What happened today in the CA25 special Congressional election is frightening.
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