Whether this Covid 19 crisis is leading to unprecedented economic destruction has entered the conversation since last week at this time, and one of the problems is that nobody seems to know (or is able to explain clearly) what will help and what won't.
Social distancing has so quickly become normal that it is jarring to see TV characters shaking hands on shows made just weeks or months ago. Yet as fast as all this is proceeding, it is also moving slowly in daily life in unknown directions.
But there are perhaps things that can be said in general, that apply to other crises but are becoming very real now, very fast. And that is the nature of our responses.
We all have to deal with anxieties, with the continual cognitive dissonance of daily lives as the world wobbles. Today (Wednesday) I was reading about how the US economic crisis could be more severe than the Great Depression, when the back of my chair was pulled by an earthquake under me. And I mean a literal earthquake--a 5.2 offshore that did no reported damage.
Beyond that, and beyond acting with prudence and responsibility on behalf of ourselves, our loved ones and everyone else, there is the question of resilience.
I published a previous post on people in Italy singing, and the clapping across a city to honor healthcare workers--these practices have become viral in the old good sense, spreading all over Europe.
But an essay in Slate by Lili Loof Bourow provides an astringent challenge to the idea of American resilience. For example:
Bourow reminds us that (apart from unheralded heroics by some to survive the Great Recession) our only conspicuous example of resilience in recent years was the response to terrorism and 9-11, and that was to courageously go shopping (as President Bush recommended) while we meekly allowed ourselves to be turned into a surveillance state. "We have been led to believe that consumerism is the only political power we, the people, really have.... this is how we at home win the “battles” that have become notional and emptied of any ideal but rationalized selfishness. There’s no risk. There’s no sacrifice."
Yet for this crisis, the choice of selfishness v. sacrifice is already present, and may turn out to be defining. Before this transformative weekend, way back on last Thursday (a whole week ago), when all of this started to get real in a big way, the New York Times online published a relevant array of articles/opinion pieces, as the news veered sharply towards national crisis.
For example, three prominent doctors with experience in disaster medicine wrote a piece headlined How the Coronavirus May Force Doctors To Decide Who Can Live and Who Dies. The subhead: "In the face of overwhelming demand and limited resources, health care would need to be rationed, with agonizing decisions." Since then, we've learned this may have already happened in other countries.
The headline on regular Times opinionater David Brooks was headlined Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too. The subhead: You may not like who you're about to become.
"Some disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, can bring people together, but if history is any judge, pandemics generally drive them apart." Brooks goes back centuries for much of his evidence, but also gave examples from the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 675,000 Americans during and shortly after World War I, in which 53,000 Americans died. He quotes John M. Barry in his book The Great Influenza that when health care workers in "city after city" pleaded for volunteers, "few stepped forward." "In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help taking care of sick children. Nobody answered...There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food."
Brooks exempts health care workers from this failure, including those in Washington state responding to the worst coronavirus outbreak in the US. "It also wouldn't be a bad idea to take steps to fight the moral disease that accompanies the physical one," Brooks concludes.
Author Jon Mooallem found that looting and criminal behavior was almost nonexistent, and the norm was immediate helping. Individuals organized themselves into effective groups to pull people out of the rubble, to put out fires and take care of the injured.
“It’s there in front of you, so you do it,” a nurse named Dolly Fleming would later explain; she could find no more incisive theory to account for all the cooperation she’d witnessed. During the quake, Mrs. Fleming had found herself on a thrashing staircase and, seeing a teetering child in front of her, instinctively tucked him under her arm and strained to keep them both steady. Decades later, at age 93, the one cogent thought she could remember having through those four and a half minutes was: “I’m thankful I’m here. I’m thankful I’m here so I can hold on to this little guy.”
What was especially striking to me about this account was how it comports to what I read in researching an article I wrote about local scholars who studied altruism--specifically rescuing Jews from the Nazis. These were longer term and life-risking efforts, and yet they too were spontaneous, and people seemed surprised when asked why they did it. (However, the answers that these scholars--Sam and Pearl Oliner--finally came to are summarized in their eight elements of caring, appended to the end of my article. They are worth looking at now.)
There are obvious differences between an earthquake and what looks to be a months-long pandemic. But Mooallem draws some conclusions:
You’d be forgiven for feeling pessimistic, for dismissing what happened in a small Alaskan city long ago as quaint, and far less possible in our society now. And yet: In the 56 years since the Great Alaska Earthquake, an entire field of sociology, disaster studies, blossomed around the Disaster Research Center, with sociologists parachuting into scores of other communities after natural disasters around the world, and it’s stunning to look back and recognize how much of the resilience, levelheadedness, kindness and cooperation those sociologists saw in Anchorage turned out to be characteristic of disasters everywhere.
Many of our ugliest assumptions about human behavior have been refuted by their observations of how actual humans behave — though we seem tragically slow to shed those old myths...
In 1975, 11 years after their work in Alaska, two of the Disaster Research Center’s founders, Russell Dynes and Enrico Quarantelli, speculated about why they continued to find essentially the same scenario repeating itself: why, rather than encouraging conflict or violence, these catastrophes appeared to bring out the best in people. In ordinary times, they wrote, we suffer alone; any acute experience of our own vulnerability can isolate us, or even make us resentful of others: “The victim often feels discriminated against since there are others who have been spared.” But a disaster affects everyone, and peels us away from “mundane matters” to the “very issue of human life itself.”
When “danger, loss and suffering become a public phenomenon,” they went on, “all those who share in the experience are brought together in a very powerful psychological sense.” An unrelenting immediacy sets in: “Worries about the past and the future are unrealistic when judged against the realities of the moment,” the sociologists wrote, and distinctions between people fall away, leaving only “human beings responding to one another as human beings.”
Thrown all together, in one unrelenting present, we are made to recognize in one another what we deny most vehemently about ourselves: In the end, it’s our vulnerability that connects us."
In the end, it's our vulnerability that connects us. I think that's partly what's behind what has become my favorite and most basic statement of morality: "You'd do the same for me." That's a statement about fairness and morality, about faith and hope, and about societal and cultural ties that bind. But it is also based on a statement of fact: sooner or later, I may need somebody's help.
And as the story of Mrs. Fleming suggests, it becomes a statement of what each of us stands for, what each of our lives means. Even if we don't respond spontaneously, do we want to think of ourselves--or to be remembered-- as someone who tried to help?
This is as true for pandemics as other kinds of disasters. Author Frank Snowden, who has studied pandemics throughout history, tells a New Yorker interviewer:
"Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today."
The evidence so far from the current crisis is mixed--stories of ordinary denial and panic, and of almost inconceivable opportunism and evil, and misplaced racial fears. But also stories of generosity, dedication and sacrifice as well as responsibility and resilience. In the end it becomes another illustration of that old teaching story, ascribed to various Native American tribal traditions. One version:
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"
"The one you feed," the grandfather replied.
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