COVID as System Perturbation (Part 2 of 2)

NYT's David Wallace-Wells counts up the ways COVID changed our world

NYT: How COVID Remade America

Wallace-Wells’ list is impressive, but, then again, he’s always impressive.

Here’s how he opens:

Five years after the pandemic began, Donald Trump is president again, but he’s presiding over a very different country now. America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world. The ascendant right is junking our institutions, and liberals have grown skeptical of them, too, though we can’t agree about how exactly they failed us. A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death … We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.

I annotate the list as I sample its sub-titles:

It turned us into hyperindividualists

It was the great experiment on how much loneliness we could endure — individually and collectively. As it turns out, we can endure plenty. This is true in large part because our new-found hyperindividualism features a dramatic loss of manners and grace, particularly in public situations, which only exacerbates the dynamic: I prefer my own company more and more as I like public situations less and less. Why? Because the people I encounter in public situations are more rude than ever, and more grossly casual than ever. Everybody’s I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude seemingly justifies behavior in public that we’d never tolerate at home, which is kind of the inverse of how I was raised. During the pandemic you’d see people wandering stores in their pajamas and just shake your head. Now, it’s standard — that level of seriously unwanted glimpses into your personal life, which you apparently feel so comfortable with as to parade it around publicly like an accomplishment worthy of compliment when I all I see is too much information.

The scale of death broke us

At times, given our locked-down status, it did feel like we were watching Soderbergh’s Contagion — as in, When is this depressing-but-gripping tale going to end? The individual tales of suffering and death, particularly the foreknowledge that, when the docs decide they have no choice but to intubate, you might never again breathe on your own — or wake up … terrifying. Those stories of hyper-anti-vaxx types renouncing their lack of faith in science on their death beds … shameful Schadenfreude. But all of this suffering seemed processed at great distance. I didn’t attend a single COVID funeral and nobody close to me died of it. And yet my Mom’s natural death was unduly isolating for her, and that hurt me plenty to contemplate. You kept comparing the total to war casualty totals from the past, as well as other pandemics throughout history. But no one scale made any great sense, because there was no obvious targets or front lines: anybody could get it and get it bad enough to die. That’s all you needed to know. The rest was just a frightening abstraction — like you were reading history as it was written, wondering how it will end.

It inaugurated a new age of social Darwinism

That feels like an overstatement, and yet, as I am now living through Trump’s entirely vindictive demolition of our federal government because it has — at times — dared to stand up to his actions … one does get the sense that he does this because he can (might makes right) and now we all get to live in his dog-eat-dog world. Trump and his staff simply brush aside any considerations of compassion or empathy. If you didn’t vote for him, you deserve this, which feels very much like revenge for if you didn’t take the vaccine, you deserve this. Everybody is some aggrieved goddamn victim now, and the rest of us all deserve their payback — because they can. Everybody embracing this logic — of course — misses Darwin’s essential point: It’s not the strong and indifferent who survive but the adaptable and responsive.

It broke our faith in public health

The most counter-intuitive and even idiotic outcome, given the tremendous effort put forward by the medical community — at their own serious sacrifice. In the end, humanity handled a powerful new virus and did so with significant ingenuity and grace, and we have our medical community first and foremost to thank for that, along with all the ancillary characters who chip in — like my hospice social worker spouse who volunteered to go out every day and deal with the chronically shut-in, mentally ill, homeless, etc. She did it because she believes in public health service, which makes the rest of our “broken faith” all the more unforgivably stupid AND ungrateful — all seemingly out of some personal anger over having our freedoms temporarily abridged. Of course, all this “righteous anger” now justifies Trump’s demolition of the federal government: they came for our freedoms and now we come for their government.

It elevated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and gave us MAHA

Like Trump himself, the perfectly wrong man for the right task. So much wasted opportunity, which stings all the more.

It may have halted the years long decline of Christianity in America

For now, a correlation but no proven causality. Spirituality has not declined in America — just belonging to a church, and that’s because they so underperform today by mixing politics with religion — a situation that was non-existent to this Catholic until Roe v. Wade invaded my faith. Still, as Wallace-Wells points out, pandemics have a long history of triggering religious revivals.

It marked the apex and the end of a decade of protest

Wallace-Wells’ interesting factoid (although you wonder about how that was confirmed):

More mass protests occurred between 2010 and 2020 than at any previous point in human history.

You get the feeling that people are worn out nowadays, thus the relatively silent acceptance of Trump 2.0’s Revenge Tour, or maybe it’s just that feeling that Americans need to see the folly of his ways in full to understand that we’re never going back, despite his promises.

It shattered our cities and disordered society

Pandemics tend to do that, so no surprise there. We are all meaner and less empathetic as a result. Most of this disorder came and went a while back, but we all seem to buy into the notion, adeptly marketed by Trump, that we are living in some hellhole country when nothing could be further from the truth for those who’ve actually traveled this world and understand how wonderful we have it here.

It sank the left’s dream of genuine political transformation

Too melodramatic for my taste, because, if only the Dems show up for Harris like they did for Biden, then Trump 2.0 never happens. I don’t need to blame it all on COVID. We just suffered two change elections spanning a pandemic — not exactly a surprise. The progressive era that we still so desperately need remains right around the corner. We just have to admit to ourselves that Trumpism is no answer — just a retreat from reality.

It may have cost Trump the 2020 election

It totally did. Zero out that economic impact and he easily wins re-election.

It may have doomed Biden’s presidency

Not “may” but definitely. Strip out the inflationary follow-on and Biden is one tremendously successful president who nonetheless had no business running for a second term and possibly lost it for Harris on that bad decision alone.