Hope in the Age of Covid

How facts and the “superstructure” can put us all back on a positive path.

Pictured: Monty Python’s “El Mystico” erects a building through hypnosis. Such buildings are as strong, solid and safe as any other kind of building, an architect explains: “Provided, of course, people believe in them.”

When the news of the Covid-19 epidemic emerged from China in January, alongside shocking images of the residents of Wuhan (population 11 million) — I felt a sense of alarm, but not, as yet, dread. Watching footage of hazmat-suited rescue workers delivering baskets of food to quarantined apartment dwellers — who pulled the baskets into their windows on ropes, like the woman who hauls her little dog up and down in Rear Window — I mostly was struck by how surreal everything looked. The crisis felt far away, outlandish, fictional, dystopian — it felt like something that couldn’t happen here, in the United States; at least, not so gravely. Thinking of the recent SARS and Ebola epidemics, I told myself that, although they had been serious, they had been quashed pretty swiftly. Wouldn’t that happen this time? But soon the virus started jumping continents; it spread to Europe, to the United States, then to Africa and South America. In late February, I still was able to read a catastrophist essay in The New York Times with a certain sense of detachment. The author, a science reporter, advocated a Wuhan-style reaction to the virus, wherever it landed. The headline read: “To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.” Surely it won’t come to that?, I thought. Two weeks later, New York went into lockdown.