Death by Smugness

Just Getting Started

The numbers are going up. To round numbers it's now about 2.5 million cases and 125,000 deaths. So about 5%.

So one in twenty of us who get it are scheduled to die until we have an effective vaccine or a cure. Meanwhile our job isn't just to avoid spreading something, but to avoid spreading something we cannot see and don't know is there.

By nature, we prefer to react to visible threats. As a species we invented science as a kind of superpower to help us with invisible threats, to let us see ahead to coming things that might matter but are beyond our senses. But as individual members of our species, we struggle with accepting the things science tells us.

2.5 million infected. It sounds like a lot. But given how easily transmitted this virus is, and given the sense of extreme urgency to “return to normal” we see played out on the news every day. It could soon enough be 250 million infected and 12 million dead. So with 5% of 2.5 million dying, we may just be getting started.

Invisibility Plays Tricks on Us

The difficulty of fighting something invisible is that you don't know if you are fighting it. You might be. You must convince yourself to behave as if every encounter mattered. Just in case.

And yet the paradox is that you become adept at thinking, "I am good at this. I am daily fighting this thing, and winning. I am an expert." It's a natural feeling. But deadly wrong.

The truth is that every experience might matter. Things we do or things we have previously done might have saved our lives. But then again, maybe not. With an invisible threat, we have no proof that anything we have done is working. The virus might simply not have reached us yet. It might be we haven't yet faced it.

It's tedious to keep taking precautions. But, unlike us, the virus is not bored with how things are going. It's patiently looking for a way in. We mustn't give it that opening.

The Avoidable Danger

Yes, some people are being stupid, and that will cost. Maybe they will get sick or die. Maybe nothing will happen directly to them but they will pass things on to others. There is probably nothing we can do to keep people who are bent on doing stupid things from actually doing them. It's not a perfect world.

But some of us are trying to do the right thing, and even we can get tricked because invisibility is hard to reason about. That is the danger I see. That is the avoidable danger. We have to make sure we're thinking right.

We've been doing this awhile now, and our urge is to declare ourselves experts. We think we've seen it. We think we're good at it. We think we can streamline it. A few people go back to work, and no one has died, so we figure we're doing it right and maybe a few more can come back. That's faulty reasoning.

We can take a test, but as soon we're out of the room where we took it, we're contacting things again. We do not go through the day with an aura of testedness protecting us. We can contract the virus on the doorknob as we leave the testing room.

The one thing we know, as there are more cases, is that there will be more chances to find out that what we are doing is insufficient. But we do not know if we are being daily stressed and our defenses are good, or if we're just lucky our neighbors have been careful, and so the virus hasn't reached us at all.

A Deadly, Paradoxical Conclusion

With more and more virus out there, we're tempted to conclude we are surviving more and more onslaught. But we cannot know. For now there is only one thing to do: Be relentlessly safe.

No, let me put that in even stronger terms. Be more safe. Don't think yourself practiced. Think of yourself as still new, still learning, still all too able to make mistakes if you fail to pay attention. Rather than try to streamline what you're doing, find ways to bolster your protections, because what you're doing so far may not be enough as numbers rise and the invisible enemy is ever more likely to be really making contact.

Some of the risk can't be avoided. The existence of people too lazy or indifferent to care may be an inevitability. But getting too smug about that can kill us, too. We need to all stay humble in the face of this, so we don't fail to address the issues that are within our control simply for not having taken the time to look for them.

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The Two Economies

Some are in a rush to
 “reopen the economy.”

The economy.
As if there were only one.

But there are two economies:

• the Essential Economy, and
• the Luxury Economy.

Yes, the Luxury Economy is paused.
And yes, it is losing money.

But the Essential Economy is still operating.

And what a lucky, lovely, life-sustaining thing that is.

Ordinary people—those who work in fields to plant or harvest crops, who drive trucks, who stock shelves or operate cash registers in grocery stores, who keep our lights on, who patrol our streets, who fight fires, who drive ambulances, who operate food kitchens, who are doctors and nurses in hospitals and clinics and nursing homes—ordinary people are, each and every one, nothing short of heroes.

Heroism pervades the essential economy, where amazing souls risk and regularly lose their lives just to keep our essential services working.

We haven’t closed that economy.
So there is no need to speak of reopening it.

Of course, there are people suffering in the Luxury Economy. A great many. Not everyone who works for the luxury economy lives in luxury, so please don’t misunderstand.

But if the Essential Economy creates enough food, housing, health care, etc. to sustain us, then the rest of it is just a dance we do because we are not making our nation more fed, more housed, etc.

If we’re not part of the Essential Economy, we’re the entertainment, amusing them and perhaps ourselves, while we wait for a handout. They’re creating all of the essential value. At best, we’re left to creating “optional additional value,” but by definition nothing we can’t do without, or we’d still be doing it.

So we’re operating at a surplus, not a deficit, and the reason we know that is that the essentials are being met even without our whole population working. We’re just bad at dividing up our collective surplus.

The things society needs to do it is still doing, to the extent we ever were. We’ve always been far from perfect at that, but that’s topic for another day. Right now my point is that the Essential Economy isn’t shut down, only the Luxury Economy is.

And so, you see, to speak of “need” to reopen “The” Economy is a slap in the face to the contributions and, frankly, to the sacrifices made by these heroes.

Let’s be blunt: The whining is about when we luxuriate anew, when profit-taking can resume, when we can start polluting again, when businesses can get back to exploiting within impunity.

These things we so urgently need to get back to are not needs. These are just things that some among us are used to doing because money makes them feel important.

But these activities are not what is important—if they are even good for us at all.

We in the Luxury Economy are likewise not what is important.

We matter as individuals. I don’t meant to suggest we’re expendable. But what qualifies as hardship and what is mere inconvenience is something we owe scrutiny. There are some in the Luxury Economy sitting comfortably on accumulated wealth as others are panicked, barely getting by, worried about keeping a roof over their head or where their next meal will come from. But that isn’t a collective wealth problem, that’s a problem with how we distribute surplus.

Also, many of the people sustaining themselves on amassed wealth think of themselves as virtuous, that they did the right things, that they are deserving of their comfort now. But we see now more clearly that if they earned all that wealth in the Luxury Economy, they’ve provided none of the value that is now sustaining them. They’re just lucky they are now sustained. They are asking for handouts right now, just like the rest of us. They differ only in being more smug, in their sense of entitlement to those handouts they need as much as anyone.

We often run on autopilot, indulging the presumption that things are as they are for good reason. But based on an unscientific survey of my friends, most of whom are on the prowl for yet another Netflix series to binge, my guess is that we have time on our hands, time that could be spent contemplating whether we should ge back to familiar routines or get busy finding new ones.

And so, just to sum up…

The fact that many of us have jobs that do not contribute to essentials is proof of our collective wealth. When we need food we go to work—but not to make food, because there is enough, even if badly distributed and poorly shared. No, when we need food, we go to work just to make money, a dance we do to feel worthy of surplus food and essentials made by a few.

We who do not create the true value, the essentials that are largely and miraculously and heroically still available even now should be thankful supply lines are moving and should be asking how we can help that, how we can assure they are properly paid for arduous, dangerous, and relentless work, how we can make sure their families are taken care of while they do this, and how we can make sure their health care is assured, not whining about when we can resume pointlessness again.

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If you haven’t read my essay Corny Economics, you might want to head there next. This post was intended as a sequel, but I tried to write this on the assumption that you might read them in either order. Otherwise, I might have here used the parlance of Corny Economics, replacing “Essential Economy” with “Corn Economy” and “Luxury Economy” with “Harmonica Economy”.

The 1920 photo by Lewis Hine titled Power house mechanic working on steam pump was obtained from Wikimedia, which identifies it as being in the public domain.

The “drop caps” effect I used is a modified version of the helpful advice from Chris Coyier’s article Drop Caps at css-tricks.com, which I found in a Google search. He suggests it’ll work across multiple browsers, and it looked to me like it should. I used it in a span tag, since my use was a one-off and I didn’t want to fuss with style sheets. And I liked the color enough that it influenced some of the other design, and that in turn led me to the idea of working the entire piece in vary sizes and colors, so I evolved the article from there. I had been looking for a visual way to make some of the points clearer and this was one of several things that catalyzed the final result.

I find I often write text to fit visually, I don’t just mark things up after-the-fact. I change the lengths of sentences so that in plausible line-breaking on various browser settings, I expect it to look good. In cases where I am looking for a particular break, I experiment with reshaping windows and watch for widowing and often just replace spaces with non-breaking spaces ( ) so that if a line break occurs, it has substance and semantic units fall, perhaps more raggedly, in meaningful units.

Humanity's Superpower

Science is a superpower.

Science is an ability to see things our eyes do not yet show us, things that if we wait to see them, we'll find it's too late to react to.

Science is a superpower.

Science lets us see long distances. It lets us see inside things. It lets us see, prepare for, and avoid coming disasters. It gives us an edge in the quest for survival.

Science is a superpower.

Science is why we can predict hurricanes and not just be surprised and blown to bits by them in the moment they happen.

Science is why were able to land humans on the moon and return them safely to Earth on the first try. We had seen past our optimism to the many ways we could fail, and planned to avoid them.

Science is the superpower that told us decades ago that the climate would be changing, that we needed to prepare. It lets us see that the polar bear plight isn't just sad for a bunch of majestic but distant animals, but a way to metaphorically visualize a world made unlivable by changing climate if we continue to ignore that amazing power, learning the lesson too late.

Science is the superpower that allowed Li Wenliang to see and understand the threat of Covide-19 long before the virus had spread.

Science is a superpower.

Science is a superpower that stands as a rock against rationalization and politics, that acts as a beacon to guide us through swirling fogs of wishful thinking and denialism.

Science helps us to recognize and manage a great many dangers without resorting to stupid human tricks. It gives us the tools to bust myths safely.

Science is a superpower.

Without Science, our first encounter with a dangerous force is likely to be our last. Science offers super-vision, the ability to see beyond what is merely available to our eyes. But only if we opt to use that power.

If we super-stupidly elect to close our eyes to Science, rendering ourselves super-blind, we're just asking to find ourselves super-dead.

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Author's Notes:

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The public domain image used here was obtained from Wikimedia and was donated to them by Wikimedia user Mpfiz, whose contribution is gratefully acknowledged.