A lot of pandemic narratives are competing for space in our heads. Some of them are outright assaults on reality, such as the idea that the coronavirus is no worse than a bad cold, or that it’s a form of the flu, or that it’s a booby-trap bioweapon designed in a Canadian lab and left out where Chinese spies could steal it and take it home to Wuhan, where it would explode.
The coronavirus isn’t the flu. It has a higher fatality rate, for one thing, and spreads more easily, for another. It’s not just a bad cold, unless that cold kills you or leaves you with organ damage. And I keep thinking Canadians are nice people and wouldn’t do that sort of thing.
Except for the bit about Canadians, you can trust me here. As a general rule, I try not to lie to anyone, except out of kindness, and lately even a kind lie looks like a cruel one.
For example, evil Canadians will take advantage of people who have been told there’s no such thing as an evil Canadian. If you think there are only good Canadians in your world, you’re wide open to an evil Canadian sneaking up behind you, hiding a tar-sands oil pipeline behind his back, getting ready to bash you over the head with it. Or on the first day of your University of Wuhan North American internship you’ll fall for the old Bioweapon: Do Not Steal Petri-Dish Trick.
So—following the example of our president’s new press secretary—I won’t lie to you, okay? At least not on purpose. At least not consciously on purpose. I’m not always on board with what my unconscious blurts out, and given how sleepy I am this morning, it’s written most of what you’ve read so far.
But today it looks like my unconscious is looking out for you. It’s warning you not to believe everything you are told, because there are liars in the world and they will lie to you and then tell you their lies are the truth. You’ll end up believing in a reality that doesn’t exist, which is a workable definition of a psychosis.
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Here’s a reality that does exist:
U. S. coronavirus deaths exceed a hundred thousand. More cars with out-of-state license plates are appearing in Sawtooth Valley. Our local inns and motels are open or opening. The first night Idaho’s governor allowed indoor eating and drinking, the town of Stanley was full of bare-faced people touching each other. Nobody’s opening the Post Office doors with coat sleeves anymore.
In the grocery stores, people with bare faces look surprised and sometimes angry when they see people with masks. It’s the age-old look of cognitive dissonance, an emotionally painful condition that occurs when what you see contradicts what you think you should see. It’s a congenital disease for humans. We all have it.
People often ease the pain of cognitive dissonance by denying what they see, rather than changing their beliefs to fit whatever it is they’re looking at. Over time they become as blind as cave fish.
A simple enough statement, but it depends on some complicated arbitrary assumptions: 1) Reality is not inside our heads. It exists apart from you or me, and it doesn’t care whether you deny it or not. 2) A careful and honest examination of reality will yield facts you can use to conduct further examinations and find more facts. 3) Language can be used to communicate those facts to other people, who may, as a result, stop denying reality long enough to learn something that will save their lives, especially during a pandemic. 4) Even though language is a powerful witness to objective reality, it is always subordinate to it. Just because you can articulate something doesn’t mean it’s true.
These are demonstrably weak axioms, even if they do make the scientific method possible. They have been more or less defeated by philosophers who are smarter than me and better with language than I am, although you wouldn’t know it if you read their works in translation. A lot is lost in translation from French to English, or so they tell me.
Their arguments reduce the scientific method and objective reality to cultural artifacts, carrying unexamined notions of Anglo-European superiority and the supremacy of soulless scientific materialism. They’ve been helped out by quantum physicists, who have devised experiments that demonstrate reality is in our heads, at least if those heads are paying attention to subatomic phenomena.
No matter. In the past, when people have resisted Anglo-Europeans, they have been blown to smithereens by advanced weaponry. It wasn’t philosophy, but it was a strong argument for soulless scientific materialism.
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It’s occurred to Julie and me that when we’re still wearing our masks come mid-summer, angry people in the Post Office will tell us we’re not supposed to be wearing them. If a person has driven for days to get to a green high-mountain valley that once had a functional and welcoming tourist industry, they won’t be happy when they find that a lethal virus has beaten them to it.
The Myth of the Frontier, which the Sawtooth Valley tourist industry has long capitalized on, is that high alpine valleys are pristine, untouched, there for the taking. What locals you meet are charming rustics if not savages. Everybody gets to be a pioneer.
Tourists don’t want to see personal protection gear on the locals, because it reminds them that they’re refugees rather than explorers. It reminds them they’re not even successful refugees, as the locals appear to think that they’ve brought the virus with them. Rustics in masks and goggles are not cooperating with the pioneer spirit.
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The Salmon River Clinic has antibody tests now, but their positive or negative results are hard to interpret. We don’t know that having the virus means you won’t get it again. We have yet to understand the extent of residual damage once you’ve had it. We have a good idea that transmission of the virus requires both exposure and time, but we don’t know how much time and we don’t know what constitutes exposure.
Julie and I were going to get tested until we realized that if the test showed antibodies in our blood, we’d wonder about false positives. If it didn’t, we’d worry about false negatives. In either case, we’d worry about touching anything in the Post Office just touched by a vacationer newly arrived from a South Dakota meat-packing plant.
Scientists all over the country are working on these uncertainties, and they will eventually find answers. But the scientific method is slow. It takes years, and sometimes decades, to know something for certain. We have accumulated a lot of certainty because of science, but that’s because we’ve been at it since the 16th century.
Even in the face of all we do know, uncertainty manages to stay ahead of certainty. Virologists know a lot about coronaviruses, but not enough to tell us how to end this pandemic, what a vaccine will look like, and how we can avoid second and third waves of the disease.
Most of us don’t have the time for the scientific method, which is why many of us live in less scientific worlds, ones where things aren’t so confusing and unpredictable.
It becomes a rabbit-hole problem, because many people prefer certainty to sanity. They’ll tell you that there was no moon landing, that the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was an inside job, that JFK was killed by the CIA, that Russia put Donald Trump in the White House. They will tell you in one breath that the coronavirus is harmless and that it has been spread deliberately throughout the world by an elite that isn’t satisfied with the 80% of the wealth that it already has. They will tell you that if we just burn down all the 5G towers, everything will be back to normal. (I’m not sure what we would have to do to get back to normal in Sawtooth Valley, because we don’t yet have 5G towers.) They will mutter darkly about lizards in human suits, mind-control chips in vaccines, stolen babies, and worse.
That’s not to say there aren’t conspiracies. But conspiracy theories depend on absence of proof, and an abiding belief that all official accounts are cover-ups, and that a cast of thousands has obeyed conscience-shocking orders more or less simultaneously and perfectly. They leave out mistakes and incompetence and betrayal when they explain what happened and why. Any account that leaves out human incompetence or betrayal is from a reality that doesn’t exist.
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Summer is coming to Sawtooth Valley, and with it, thousands of tourists from all over the world. We hope they’re virus-free. We hope they’re all sane, but we know sanity isn’t easy to maintain when it requires a permanent state of anxious not-knowing. We hope that if things go wrong, the tourists don’t go crazy and start looking for someone to blame. We hope they believe in the scientific method, if only because it will slow them down. We really hope that they’re not secretly all evil Canadians. We hope they wouldn’t rather get a worst-case scenario over with than face an ambiguous future. We hope they won’t lie when they could tell the truth. We hope the same things for ourselves.