Reflections on the Climate Crisis at the Dawn of the Pandemic

Midtown in New York at the start of the pandemic (c/o ABC News)

This is my contribution to the ongoing Festschrift of one-year Covid anniversary commemoration.  I wrote this slightly more than a year ago, on the last day most businesses were open in Chicago.  Each person has a private psychological rubicon by which they will mark the symbolic onset of the pandemic in memory.  Mine was the announcement that in-person college classes would be cancelled indefinitely, which came on March 15th.  That date, a Sunday, was at the end of a week that I had begun by attending a political rally with 15,000 other people.  March 11th was the chronological and psychological midpoint of those extremes.  A liminal interlude during a period of time that, in retrospect, was the most surreal and indeterminate that most of us who were fortunate enough to grow up in the first world have ever known.  Here is what I was thinking on that day.

A Response to “Parenting and Climate Change” (n+1 36, Winter 2020)

TODAY IS March 11th.  As futile as it feels to try to say anything “about” the coronavirus, it seems equally absurd not to talk about it.  So I will try to say something about how we should be thinking through coronavirus, and how the virus relates it to the content of the recent discussion “Parenting and Climate Change,” the transcript of which was published in the last issue of n+1.  But I’d like to start by addressing something completely different.

Evita Duffy, a second-year undergraduate at my own educational institution, recently appeared in a photograph on the website of the Institute of Politics holding a small whiteboard on which she had written, “I vote because the coronavirus won’t destroy America, but socialism will.”  The picture sparked an instant controversy, and met with extensive criticism (and a regrettable spate of personal abuse) on campus social media.  It also became a minor cause célèbre in far-right media circles, including in the Federalist and the Blaze.  Many argued that Duffy’s blithe dismissal of the pandemic was irresponsible and insensitive to those suffering from it.  I happen to basically agree, though perhaps without sharing in the righteous outrage of some of her more virulent critics.  But I think the accusation of insensitivity disguises what is a more fundamental, and more interesting, divergence: on the question of the difference between an abstract danger and a concrete one.  In Duffy’s worldview, “socialism” is something concrete.  The very word instantaneously conjures up a set of dubiously connected facts and historical experiences.  Socialism is Venezuela; it is Stalinist Russia and Maoist China.  Most importantly, it is coming to America, possibly very soon, in the vehicle of the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign.  Coronavirus, meanwhile, is a distant (literally, foreign, Chinese) menace, one that the Republican President has downplayed and that will surely be no match for the might of the American nation.  On this view, it would be irresponsible not to warn of the real and egregious harms that will no doubt soon result from socialism’s advance.  And if doing so breaks the virus’ monopoly on public attention, so much the better.  Conversely, a doctor in Northern Italy who grew up voting for the right but has spent the recent weeks making triage decisions between the elderly patients in his overwhelmed hospital would likely endorse a reversed ordering of threats: socialism is abstract, coronavirus is extremely concrete.

In the event, Duffy may have been little better-motivated than many of her campus critics: she is the daughter of Matt Duffy, a former Republican congressman-turned-Trump media sycophant, and Rachel Campos-Duffy, a fellow Fox News personality.  Though I hesitate to speculate on the motives of someone I don't know, it seems likely that becoming a campus woke-baiter and leveraging the resultant attention into media stardom was, if not a premeditated goal, then at least an ambition in the offing. (She is now an “intern” at the Federalist, one of the right-wing outlets that gave her favorable coverage over the “Whiteboard Girl” incident.) But let’s ignore the accident of Duffy’s parentage for a moment, and suppose that she is simply a garden-variety college conservative, lonely but proud in her much-maligned worldview.  If so, then what is at issue is not the contrarian opinion she bravely chose to express, but the warped beliefs that underlie it: beliefs about what does and does not constitute a tangible threat to American lives.  Our brains are wired to respond forcefully to dangers that are immediately apparent, but we are neurologically inept at addressing abstract and future perils—even if we are intellectually able to grasp the risks they pose.  To put socialism in the former category of threats and coronavirus in the latter isn’t incoherent or invalid; it’s just incorrect.  And I approach with humility and deference someone who holds a view that differs substantively from my own, but is formally sound according to its own internal logic.  After all, the other person might be right.  I might be wrong.

In this case, I feel confident that Duffy, even the most generously-interpreted version of her, is wrong.  But it is important to see in what way she is wrong, and with what ramifications.  The misconstrual of the concreteness of threats as directly indicative of their magnitude and moral significance is one of the main sources of our inability to make good collective judgements today.  At the moment, the most concrete threat we face is either socialism or coronavirus, depending on which “news” sources one gets one’s ideological fix from.  By contrast, global heating is the archetypal threat of the abstract type.  It is supremely intangible for the vast majority of living humans: it will kill people, but probably not anyone you know, and at an unspecified future time you will have trouble grasping because you are a human, not an immortal 4th-dimensional being or an A.I.  It will kill only indirectly.  You cannot die from it the way you can die from getting sick or being shot by communist death squads.  This is the state of affairs Kate Marvel is lamenting when she says that, while dire scientific forecasts have failed to motivate people into action, stories of those personally affected by a warming world have proven more effective.  This is the central challenge of climate advocacy today: to render abstractions concrete, to turn graphs into narratives.  The panel discussion “Parenting and Climate Change” is premised on the notion that having a child ought to be the ultimate catalyst for making intangible dangers suddenly hit home, as new parents realize the magnitude of what their children will likely have to live through.  They should start to tell themselves a frightening story.  Yet, as Katy Lederer points out, studies show that becoming a parent does not correlate with any increased concern about the climate crisis.  Is this because, as Lederer posits, people are experiencing a “somatic intermission,” unwittingly closing themselves off to visceral realities that would be too painful to bear?  Of course not.  The fraction of individuals who have the learned capacity to be so emotionally affected by climate change is tiny.  If it were large, there wouldn’t be such a difficulty in making people appreciate the threat in the first place.  Needing to tune out the climate crisis for the sake of one’s emotional wellbeing indicates that one is already woken up to the threat.  Most people aren’t.

Why, then, does parenthood fail to awaken those who still slumber?  Probably it has at something to do with the relatively higher fertility rate among conservative women.  But the overriding fact is that global heating is, by nature, too immaterial, too distant a threat to cause even most new parents to fear for their lives and the lives of their children—even though it will, soon enough, produce consequences orders of magnitude more terrible than anything humanity has experienced since World War II.  Conversely, numerous studies have shown that parenthood does correspond to heightened fears about the economy and healthcare.  Coronavirus may well prove to have the same effect.  These are just the dangers people can see in front of them.  To prioritize them above all others is sadly, simply, human. 

Coronavirus and global heating are opposites in another way, too: the former is a threat almost entirely to the elderly, while the latter is a menace, albeit a delayed one, exclusively for the young.  This fact has revealed something unexpected.  When elderly people act in ways that endanger their grandchildren, we say it is tragedy, we lament low youth voter turnout, we regret that the baby boomers are buffeted by forces they can’t understand, and so on.  But when young people continue to frequent bars and restaurants despite the real risk of infecting the elderly with a potentially deadly virus, we are quick to call them stupid, arrogant, and deplorably irresponsible.  This suggests that we as a society view inaction in the face of a concrete danger as a greater moral hazard than selfishness in the face of an abstract one, even if the latter is likely to be far more destructive.  This style of socio-moral sanction is not fit for purpose in the 21st century, and our survival may depend on collectively rectifying and reversing it.  And I say that in full awareness of how much it may seem in poor taste, given that we are living right now at the dawn of a global pandemic.  

Over the next few months, coronavirus will become the most concrete threat many living humans have ever had to face.  “The power of today” no longer means the power to avert catastrophes for the future inhabitants of earth; it means preventing exponential viral spread next week.  For now, the virus is the sludge we’re all silently traipsing through, the note humming in the background of our every thought, the unspoken word that hangs in the air between the silent café-sitters as they wait out the hours until the (possibly permanent) close of business.  Global heating is like this unspoken word—it is literally in the air—but with the crucial difference that it remains, for the time being, imperceptible for the vast majority of living humans.  Will there come a time when this word becomes universally audible, when the climate crisis fills the mind of every human with the same reasonable and pervasive fear that the coronavirus epidemic does today?  Possibly, maybe even probably—but far, far too late.