The two pandemics.
A vignette on trust, truth, and being terrified.
Today I watched as they dug a mass grave in New York.
No matter how long I live, that is something that I cannot live to unsee. It carries a symbolism that the world had hoped it would never encounter again. It is a brutal blow to the back of necks already bowed.
Moreover, it is a cold and hard fact. It, along with the banal horror of waiting for a daily death toll as you prepare your nightly dinner, is substance among a world in which the unsubstantial has been let loose. It is a glimpse of the true battle, fading in and out of view through the smoke of constant anxiety, fake news, culture war and all the rest of the unending noise of being a person, alive, today.
So, I don’t have much to say now. But I know that I have to say this:
The disturbingly ancient lesson that history is reminding us of now is that the world is a dark enough place anyway. It certainly doesn’t need all of the shadow that the worst bits of us bring to it.
It doesn’t need fake news. The social contract between thinking beings is hard enough to maintain as it is before you pull the rug of collectively agreed upon truth from under their feet.
It doesn’t need indulgent fearmongering. The parent clutches her child close enough to her chest, staring out at the night sky, alert to all the dangers that lurk beneath it, be they primordial or modern in nature.
It doesn’t need prejudice, be it of the egregious or everyday type. Living in a society has always been hard, it has always been a profound challenge for people to live amongst people who behave in ways, and think in ways, that they do not. It has always, also, been the predominant way that human beings have lived, survived, and thrived.
It certainly doesn’t need an embedded culture of paranoia that feeds off anxiety and reproduces it as faithlessness in one another and a distrust of your neighbour on an industrial scale. We are all, always, on some level, terrified. But at the heart of all human life is the long and arduous journey to knowing the distortion of your own mind, looking past it to knowing how much of what you fear is real, and finding the courage to respond to it rationally.
Think about that, next time you rant about “the kind of people who go jogging in a pandemic”, or about the morals and motives of any given politician right now, and please try to notice where your observation ends and your reflexes begin.
Think about that, next time you forward some alarming bit of news via a friend on WhatsApp without checking it first, or say things like “they’re saying now” without knowing who they are or really even caring enough to find out if what they say means anything.
Think about that most of all, when you openly and publicly cast doubt upon truth simply because it’s spoken by established order, be it public broadcasting, government, or independent experts. Think about that when you say “They wouldn’t tell you” or “I don’t trust a thing that man says”. Think seriously about how hard it is to discern important truth and put it in every living room, now more than ever, and just how easy it is for cynical hands to crush that fragile treasure.
It seems to me that we have built a world perfectly predisposed to have its social fabric, its deepest sense of trust in one another, torn apart by a virus. We have spent at least thirty years weakening the institutions of truth that were supposed to be held in common. We built the largest network of humans ever, one almost as big as the species, and modelled the internal logic of its environment on virality itself. The old cliché about a lie travelling halfway around the world before the truth has laced its boots is no longer a humorous overstatement, it’s a laughably wrong understatement. A global system of networked individuals has left everyone exposed, and everyone vulnerable, to a contagious cynicism about the world, the truth and the neighbours.
And that’s all it comes down to really. The physical pandemic is crushing enough. We didn’t need all the extra danger in the form of a very mental one too.
