Tag: Coronavirus

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Emerging on a New World, Part Two: Nobody Knows Nothin’

When I was a budding novelist, I quickly learned that the publishing world didn’t care about my aspirational goals. I had to conform to the publisher, not vice versa. As many positive thoughts I lavished on my first novel, it never saw print because it wasn’t very good.

Eventually I learned, over the 20-year process of writing three more unpublished novels, how to write fiction. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t believed in raw talent worth developing. Positive thinking, while it bridged no gaps, at least provided a landing platform. But between the dream and the realization was a long stretch of hard work.

For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that our political class is marked, not by positive thinking, but by magical thinking. Psychologically, “Magical thinking” is defined as the belief that one’s personal thoughts, fears, and goals influence the outside world. Young children indulge in magical thinking all the time: a child who prays every night that his parents will stop fighting, for example, could feel he’s to blame when Mom and Dad stop the fights by splitting up. It’s normal for kids, but a grownup who indulges in such fantasies is called a schizophrenic. Or a politician.

You remember when Barak Obama, after winning the Democrat presidential nomination, inspired his followers with rhetoric about the day the oceans stopped rising. Or Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention: “I alone can fix.” Trump at least had actually built things with steel and concrete, while Obama had built nothing but his own persona. But both were overpromising based on a magical (or at least inflated) view of themselves in the world.

During the Democratic debates Elizabeth Warren brought the hammer down on mild suggestions that there was no need to overhaul the entire health care system. You gotta Dream Big! If she ever got the chance to enact her Day-One agenda, “Big” would have included cancelling the constitution as Step One, since much of what she wanted to do was clearly outside its parameters. Elaborate promises are nothing new in political campaigns, but the size and scope of this year’s Democrat vision is breathtaking. Bernie Sanders, likewise, seemed to think he could materialize his socialist dream by yelling about it.

DreamBig: the Next Generation is even farther out in the galaxy. Got Climate Change? Let’s just re-structure our entire civilization. We won WWII, didn’t we?

“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” said everybody from Mohammed Ali to your kindergarten teacher. They never add that somewhere between Believe and Achieve is a lot of stuff: planning, coordinating, hard work, setbacks, tedium, failures, and thousands of details. Since we don’t dream in details, the gaps between here and there are too readily filled with know-nothing thought. And that leads to last-minute sloppiness and long-term incompetence, like the Obamacare website rollout and Iowa Caucus 2020.

A habit of magical thinking is extremely dangerous when a real crisis spills out like an escaped virus from a lab. Too much of the political class (I’m naming no names) has outsourced its brain to chosen experts and crossed its fingers and wished upon a vaccine that “the Economy” (whose breadth and complexity they never came close to grasping) will somehow survive long enough to a) snap back to its former glory, or b) surrender to a total makeover. It’s not likely that either of those things will happen. More likely is a dysfunctional hybrid. What can we do with that? I’m still thinking.

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The Good Infection

By now we’ve all received a crash course in infectious diseases and our hands are raw from soaping and sanitizing. (Have we ever been so aware of our hands before?) I’ve been combing the web for news, all the while reminding myself that nobody knows nothin’ yet, but I came across this bit of information that started the wheels turning in my head. I wheeled from science to theology, which is not as disjointed a track as some would think.

COVID19 is called a “novel” virus not because it’s fictional, but because it’s new. New to humans, that is; not to animals. Animals have their own viruses and are equipped to develop their own immunities, just as humans are.  As human populations adapt to the peculiar RNA sequences that make up seasonal flu, so animals adapt to their own bugs and blights. These viruses almost always stay within species. But sometimes one will jump.

That’s what apparently happened in a Wuhan “wet market,” a place where live animals are sold, and often killed and eaten on the spot. A bat virus jumped to a human carrier and—in unscientific terms—dug in. Because the human immune system didn’t recognize the RNA sequencing of the foreign invader, the human became infected. And before he (let’s assume he) even knew he was sick, he had infected a number of others, and they went on to infect others, and the thing grew and grew and some people died. 

One person. From just one person fever spirals out into the world, multiplying sickness and death and panic and enforced isolation and grim speculation about how many more millions will die before we acquire the immunity we need.

What makes this hyper-vigilance necessary is that the COVID19 virus is very quick: quick to spread and quick to mutate. Every flu develops singular strains, and so does this one: only quicker than most. Already it has developed at least two strains. The other cause for alarm is that it attacks human lungs and solidifies mucus, blocking air passages and causing asphyxiation. That’s why smokers, asthmatics and COPD sufferers are at particular risk.

Are you scared yet? Don’t be. Or, as beings better than I have said, Fear not. For behold, I bring you good news. We’ve already been infected by the most benevolent virus possible.

Take a deep breath. In the beginning we received our breath from God himself. And then we wrecked that ideal origin: “from one man sin entered the world.” The virus of sin is 100% contagious and in all cases fatal.

But after this had gone on for a few thousand years, long enough to prove beyond any doubt that the disease was not curable, a good contagion intervened. You might say that divine RNA jumped from heaven to earth, from God to man, just as an alien germ somehow bridged the gap animal to human in Wuhan.

The good contagion infected a handful of followers. Then a few hundred more. Then 3000 on one day. Eventually it spread, as fast as human feet and wheels and trains and planes could  take it, to the ends of the earth.

I’m optimistic by nature, and at the moment I’m hopeful about how long the present crisis will last. But optimism may not be warranted; those grim predictions about millions of deaths around the globe may come to pass. But this remains: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Death may be sown even in my small circle. But this remains: No malevolent virus can overcome the strain of divine life that infects a believer in Christ. So take heart, and believe.