Stranded Opposites: Pandemic Edition
This morning, my Facebook feed offered me an article by Vinay Prasad that The Atlantic published in September titled, “The Downsides of Masking Young Students are Real,” in which he argues that, because there is clear evidence of the costs of masking to young people, the greater burden is actually to prove that masks are beneficial. This does not at all seem to me to be the mainstream narrative.
It’s worth noticing that it’s quite likely the pandemic will never have a “VE” day. Presumably sometime in the future, perhaps sporadically, mask restrictions may be loosened, but it seems to me there’s every likelihood that it won’t be due to some final solution, but more due to the fact thapeople will be saying, “Are we really going to do this forever?” Then, I suspect, some of the counter arguments to the most popular current strategies may start to break through into places where they haven’t before: Yes, Covid is more severe than the flu, but most infections are not so severe as to be truly life-threatening, or even severely life-altering. Yes, Covid kills people across the age spectrum, but does it really threaten young people as much as older people, or healthy people as much as unhealthy people, particularly people with lifestyle-induced co-morbidities? Yes, among unvaccinated populations, Covid has the capacity to flood the health care system, and that’s dire, but is that true among the vaccinated?
In other words: Is the way we’ve been doing it really the only way to do it?
I think at that point it might become clear that a dialectic will have started to happen between opposing viewpoints that could have been happening all along, except that so many people have been entrenched in what Charles Eisenstein has called stranded opposites — ideological stances that no longer have the power to influence each other.
To be clear, I think that the response to the pandemic has generally been sensible. I think the masking we’ve done so far has generally been worth it, and I support vaccines. I think that people who are brawling with flight attendants over mask rules have a lot of work to do on themselves, and I think that people in the prevailing conservative media ecosystem have a lot of work to do on themselves, too, because the prevailing conservative media is almost congenitally incapable of making a clean point these days, is not trying to have a civilized dialogue, and may actually be fomenting the death of American democracy, which I consider to be an imminent and unfortunate possibility.
But I’m also pretty clear that an intelligent dialectic has collapsed altogether, to no small degree, and that you can’t pin all of that on Tucker Carlson. Virtually all social conversation is being shunted through the tropes of a now well-worn culture war, and it makes us ALL less wise. Many left-leaning people I know are living in a bubble, too, which they do not see. (Note: I still consider myself left-leaning, as well.)
The Atlantic has been making a concerted effort the past year or so to not be in that bubble, and I greatly appreciate it. A clean dialectic does not result in a mushier America. It results in a smarter America. We can start by not being categorically allergic to ideas that even so much as remind of us of the “them” whom, honestly, we may have actually come to abhor. Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting it.” He’s talking about the kind of education that allows one’s education to continue indefinitely. It’s an essential part of the growth mindset, and ultimately of a moral life.