Hope in the time of COVID-19

There is a meme circulating on the interweb within boomer and conservative circles that claims that the "survival rate" of the coronavirus is 98.2% but that you don't see this "good news" anywhere in the mainstream media. In fact, in a New York magazine article with a Waffle House employee who had survived an extreme case of coronavirus that had required hospitalization, he mentioned these same figures as part of his argument that the lock down might be worse than the disease. And this from someone who almost died from coronavirus, but who now just wants to go out to grab a beer.

In the case of the person who shared this meme on my Facebook page, I pointed out that simple math indicates that this death rate translates into 6 million American deaths. (As a comparison, this dwarfs the number of American deaths from all American military conflicts combined, beginning with the Revolutionary War and including all present conflicts). Not to mention that without social distancing, the death rate would be much, much higher, so that 6 million American deaths might be a conservative estimate. But even using the numbers from this “optimistic” meme, even the most rudimentary grasp of mathematics would indicate that coronavirus would be a tragedy unlike any this country has ever seen (“only” 675,000 people died during the Spanish Flu, for instance).

But the reason I mention this is not only to point out how dumb this meme is, nor to discuss whether the numbers it uses are accurate. Instead, I wanted to point out how completely uncritical you have to be in order to pass along this meme. I get that access to good information about the coronavirus is something that I take for granted, because most of this country doesn’t take the time (or have the time) to remain informed, let alone that they generally lack the media literacy skills to sort the good information from the bad. But in the case of this meme, we’re not talking about some sophisticated act of “Russian” propaganda directed at deep-seated unconscious prejudices in the American electorate; we’re talking about a meme that at face value is incredibly dumb, and that almost anyone in this country, assuming they have a third grade education in math, can debunk in mere moments.

A charitable reading of this meme might be that people are merely scared and anxious, looking for any good news at all, so that when “good news” crosses their path, they accept it without thinking. And I suspect that there’s actually a lot of people for whom this is true. I doubt the people who share this meme want 6 million Americans dead as the cost of getting their own lives back to normal, because I suspect that very few, if any, who do share this meme have taken the time to do the simple (and horrific) math that this meme proclaims as “good news.”

But I think that what this meme also reveals is the way that our desires shape our thoughts and beliefs, and the way that any left project needs to account for this problem. It’s neither enough to criticize our existing reality nor to win arguments about policy or ideology, because these arguments rarely change minds (even among us “intellectuals” who think we’re beyond being shaped by our desires). Instead, the left needs to be able to offer an alternative vision of society—a way of living that people can both imagine as possible and also desirable—if we’re going to have any chance of changing the world.

Unfortunately, neoliberal ideology has so long dominated the American imagination that we can’t imagine very much beyond being able to have beers and barbecues with friends. Add to this the instability of capitalism, and we hold onto these impoverished dreams even tighter. And so much so that we’re willing to entertain a cull of millions of Americans just so that we can return to normalcy again, even if that normalcy entails going to jobs that we hate for pay that is too low with benefits that are inadequate. But if that’s the best we can imagine, that’s the best for which we can hope.

So, in the midst of all our righteous criticisms identifying capitalism and its henchman as the true cause of this crisis, we shouldn’t forgot the importance of hope. Criticism might help us dislodge the false hope that motivates so many, but it’s only an authentic sense of hope that can reorient our desires in a more compassionate and humane direction. And without that sense of hope, our criticisms might do little but intensify the feelings of despair that have led so many in this country to the point where they’re willing to sacrifice millions all so that they can go back to their shit jobs and their shit lives.

Marx ended his Manifesto with the call: “Workers of the world, unite!” But he wasn’t only offering practical political advice about how workers might win a proletarian revolution; he was also offering a vision of the future. And that vision is found in the last word of his exhortation: unite! Rather than a society in which we are willing to sacrifice one another to the endless demands of capitalism, it was a world in which we all stood in unity, and a world in which we weren’t motivated by our own selfish desires, but by the collective good of all. And it was as a consequence of this collective good that each of our individual lives improved too.

At times this juxtaposition might seem like more of a metaphor than a reality, but in these times, the reality of this choice couldn’t be more clear. We are literally facing a choice between the sacrifice of millions so that capitalist life can continue for the many, or else, the sacrifice of our personal self-interest (and corporate profits) so that we collectively come out of this better off as a society. And it seems like this might be something worth building on. We are all being given a lesson in how placing the public good above our our self-interest creates a world that is more humane and compassionate, and how the world we’ve built—predicated on personal self-interest and corporate profit—is one that would sacrifice any single one of us in order to feed the insatiable demands of corporate profit. And helping people imagine such a different world—helping people imagine what a humane world based on compassion might look like—seems like the preeminent challenge for the left.

Or, as Marx might have put it, we need to help people imagine a sense of freedom that goes beyond the bourgeois “freedom” to buy and sell, in favor of a more authentic sense of social freedom, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Or more simply, we need to help people imagine how we’re all better off when we realize that we’re all in this together.