The Black Death marked an interesting turning point in European history. It was of course a monumental tragedy, killing as much as half of the entire population of fourteenth-century Europe, inflicting terror and suffering on an unimaginable scale. If you managed to survive it, your chances of thriving in the post-plague world were relatively good. With so much newly available land and resources, science and agriculture saw significant advances. As labor became more valuable, serfdom largely collapsed, and greater rarefication encouraged other forms of innovation. Post-plague Europe even seems to have been healthier overall. Call it the natural selection effect. 

In the middle of the Covid pandemic, I wondered whether we could look forward to a similar post-plague “springtime.” Mortality rates were thankfully far less grim, but Covid still represented a major social disruption. Perhaps that would inspire advances or salutary cultural reforms of some sort? Five years later, I am still of mixed minds as to whether this happened.

After the Plague

Unquestionably, there were some good things. Covid precipitated shifts in labor, which this work-at-home mom sees as a net gain. I’m aware that some lament the decline of the office, but was cubicle culture really so great? Education was another field that saw a major paradigm shift, as the bankruptcy of bureaucracies and teachers unions was exposed. That reckoning was badly needed, and it would be wonderful if future generations saw this as a turning point for American education. 

Unfortunately, Covid also intensified a number of already-existing social problems. Lonely, isolated people became more lonely and isolated. Paranoid people became more paranoid. After a brief moment of solidarity, most people seemed to retreat back into their political and social bubbles. In political or culture war terms, I have reflected sadly that post-Covid America looks a lot like pre-Covid America on steroids. Could it have been otherwise? That question still haunts me years later.

My own perspective is surely colored by the fact that I experienced 2020 in a somewhat unusual way. The pandemic, for me, happened to hit at a distinctive moment when I was rebounding from a rough patch in life. I’ve told this story elsewhere, so I won’t rehash the details, but it just so happened that 2019 was such an awful year for me personally that by 2020 I was maxed out on feeling grim. It was, in fact, one of those rose-tinted moments when I seemed to be miraculously recovering my capacity for joy, such that all the simple pleasures seemed wonderful, and no calamity truly fearful. I’m sorry to say that this effect eventually wears off, but it’s lovely while it lasts. I actually remember musing philosophically on the possibility of dying of Covid and concluding: I should probably take prudent steps to avoid it, but why worry? We’ve all gotta go sometime. 

Of course, my own mood at that time juxtaposed very strangely against everyone else’s. All around me people were having breakdowns, and I felt no inclination to judge, but I just couldn’t feel what other people were feeling. I hadn’t quite rejoined the weary world. I look back on 2020 like a participant-observer anthropologist: I was present, but in a somewhat distanced, chin-scratching sort of way. 

Examining pandemic-era America in that frame of mind, two major questions recurred, directed to two different sorts of people. The groups could be mapped with ease onto the political spectrum, but here I’ll just focus on their defining characteristics. The first group leaned into the lockdowns almost as if they’d been waiting for them, tossing human community overboard with barely a whimper. To them, I found myself repeating (in various forms) the question: What are you willing to risk for the good of human connection? (Or do you simply not value it at all?)

The second group had an obvious, intense psychological need to view the pandemic as another morality tale in elite malfeasance. Immense selection bias could be employed to that end. With them I was looking for constructive ways to broach the question: Given a sufficiently strong and holistic mistrust of authorities, what protection can you have against conspiracy theorists, grifters, and demagogues? At what point does reflexive skepticism become self-destructive?

These still strike me as relevant questions. Five years on, it could be a good timefor people to reflect back on their own reactions to 2020, considering where they were mistaken and what lessons might now be learned. Is anyone doing that?

The Lonely Ones

As a college student, I had a poster that I thought was quite funny, courtesy of Despair.com. It depicted a single tree on a snowy hillside, stark against the horizon. “If you find yourself struggling with loneliness,” it read, “you’re not alone. And yet you are alone. So very alone.” I thought back on it during Covid, because it seemed to capture many people’s pandemic experience. Covid imposed, but perhaps also exposed, a deep loneliness that went far beyond practical necessity. It turned out some people were strangely addicted to that frozen landscape.

Much has already been said about the insanity of the teachers unions, the extended lockdowns, and the punitive-feeling restrictions on institutions (and especially churches). It made some sense in the early days. Everyone was reeling, information was limited, and it seemed genuinely possible that social distancing could save many lives. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that the isolation enthusiasts were not in any way “following the science.” That raised the further question: What was driving them? Why were they so determined to keep civic life at a standstill when this wasn’t even serving a worthy end? 

For politicians, I think it’s plausible to see this as a “mini totalitarian moment.” That’s surely a major aspect of China’s otherwise inexplicable “Covid Zero” regimen, but we saw milder versions of the same tendency here in America. Politicians tend to be power-hungry. Some of them quite enjoy having control over the minutest facets of citizens’ lives. That’s obviously bad, but at least it’s a familiar problem, endemic to the political classes of all societies. The grassroots response was considerably harder to understand. 

Why did so many ordinary people lean into extreme isolation with gusto, cutting themselves off from the world in drastic ways that clearly weren’t justified by either law or science? I remember having arguments about this in the fall and winter of 2020 (on social media, naturally) with friends who contended that we should simply accept that school and church would need to be suspended for at least two or three years. I found their complaisance astonishing. As I pointed out, the lockdowns didn’t even seem to be helping. Why smother civil society for basically nothing? 

Plenty has been said about abuses of power on the part of governors, bureaucrats, and Anthony Fauci. There’s been far less discussion of those who seemed positively eager to be quarantined, actively lobbying for more draconian lockdowns and personally shutting themselves away for months or years. This wasn’t a function of repressive or overbearing authorities. It was voluntary. So why did people do it? Something kept people locked away at home long after the virus had stopped giving them plausible reasons.

Covid-hygiene evangelism did of course have a pseudo-religious character, which is a familiar twenty-first-century phenomenon: modern people like to fill meaning gaps with social causes. But that generic explanation does not adequately explain the appeal of this particular cause. Though I still find the whole thing bewildering, it seemed to me that Covid functioned for some as pseudo-scientific confirmation of a long suspected “truth”: human attachment isn’t worth it. It’s too risky. Other people will be the death of you, perhaps literally. Don’t go out and meet people; it’s much safer to go home and barricade the door.

Perhaps this was an American variant of the Japanese “hikikomori,” an extreme form of voluntary social isolation that is increasingly common among Japanese youth. If so, that’s alarming. Science can bless us with vaccines and antidotes for disease, but there’s no way to engineer a world in which human bonds don’t involve risk.

Elite Malfeasance and Populist Skepticism

In stark contrast to the people who wore masks even in their own bedrooms, there was another very different set of people. While some refreshed their browsers every five minutes in search of the newest handwashing technique, others were hanging out with friends swapping conspiracy theories. They saw virtually everything that happened as further confirmation of the incompetence and moral bankruptcy of established authorities.

Not every authority failed the Covid test, and it’s important to remember that. My pastor and bishop were both magnificent through the Covid crisis; thanks to their leadership, we were going to Mass again by Easter 2020 (albeit from our cars in the church parking lot), and receiving all our sacraments by midsummer. It turned out that our spiritual leaders genuinely cared about our spiritual lives. In context, it felt heroic.

Unfortunately, there were also authorities who lied, manipulated the public, suppressed good-faith social media discussions, broke their own rules as convenient, and showed a blasé indifference to every possible harm except the spread of Covid. Some authorities were even callous about Covid deaths, depending on who was dying. Obviously, those missteps all severely undermined trust in experts. But the problem of entrenched skepticism has multiple tributaries, and regardless of who is most to blame, we need to reflect on solutions. Systematic mistrust can cause enormous harm.

To a point, it can be reasonable to approach established authorities with a measure of skepticism. Elites of all sorts (politicians, scientists, journalists, CEOs) inevitably respond to a range of incentives, some healthy and others perverse. There’s no universal solution for corruption, or groupthink. But reflexive skepticism only gets us closer to the truth if we find better advisors or learn greater epistemic humility (or both). That’s easier said than done. There is a reason, I suppose, why Socrates was “the wisest man in Athens” for recognizing what he did not know. Most ordinary humans, when they reject established experts, cling all the more tightly to the influencers of their particular sphere. That makes them terribly vulnerable, because it’s easy to exploit and manipulate people who are entirely in the thrall of their own tribe’s prophets. 

I think back on the debates over the “lab leak” theory. On the one hand, this theory wasn’t crazy, and suppressing it on social media was a clear abuse of power. Even so, it was alarming to see the confidence with which many people asserted it, even when their credentials were roughly requisite to mine. (I have a PhD in philosophy. You can definitely trust me to distinguish a natural virus from one doctored in a lab.) Gingerly approaching these sorts of people, I observed: You could be right, but why are you so sure? How would you know? Why even have an opinion about this? Debates about masks or school closures made sense; those things affect our daily lives. The origins-of-Covid debate was not like that, but people got obsessively invested in it anyway, and it was hard not to see this (in at least some cases) as a manifestation of a larger need to read all calamitous occurrences as further evidence of oppression, corruption, or elite malfeasance. We can’t even broach the possibility that sometimes bad things just happen. If we’re hurting, someone must owe us a pound of flesh.

Quite often, it’s the skeptics themselves who pay that price. Whatever one thinks about a given vaccine, it’s obviously a mistake to make health decisions on the basis of culture war angst. But I clearly recall middle-aged adults bravely declaring their refusal to submit to the regime of Fauci, or simply explaining to me that they would not be vaccinated because they “weren’t afraid of Covid.” I understood that to them, this felt like a bold rejection of the obsessive safetyism of the moment. Their disdain was relatable, but examining the matter soberly, what did fear have to do with anything? As mentioned above, I wasn’t particularly afraid of Covid either. But I do have five dependents, so it seemed prudent and responsible to take reasonable steps (as opportunity allowed) to avoid dying prematurely. Vaccine skepticism seemed like a paradigmatic case in which potentially reasonable skeptical questions merged with a river of confusion and angst to the point where it was nearly impossible to distinguish them. Rational debate became difficult.

On top of the not-unreasonable theories, there were also some genuinely crazy ones. I recall, for instance, that some people seemed fairly convinced that the CDC had helped China engineer Covid as part of a strategic plan to establish despotic control over their respective states. Strange times make for wild theories, and I promise I’m not keeping score. But does that theory still seem reasonable? Perhaps people who were convinced by it in 2020 should now reflect back on their epistemic process, and consider whether it merits some revision.

What would it have been like to be in Europe in 1358, just five years or so after the plague? Were people still wearing their hairshirts, or did things seem to be looking up? Five years after Covid, I still hold out some hope that we are on our way to a healthier, less-fractured culture. We might get there quicker, though, if we all took a little time to reflect on what the pandemic taught us, not just about society, but about ourselves individually. The pandemic ended, and despite some bruises and scars, we remain an enviably free society. Let’s try to preserve that freedom.