SARS-CoV-2: It Only Wants Targets

Would you believe this was Adam Elkus posted this to Medium on March 13th, our last day of face-to-face classes? Before New York City?? Now that's prophetic.

... The virus has ... a power that makes it uniquely dangerous to Western society: it is utterly stupid. Scientists and philosophers debate whether viruses are even properly counted among the living. But whether it is alive or dead does not matter.

It exists, and the only thing it wants is targets.

It does not think, it does not feel, and it lies totally outside the elaborate social nuances humans have carved out through patterns of communication, representation, and discourse. And this, above all else, makes it a lethal adversary for the West. It has exposed how much of Western society – but American society in particular – is permeated with influential people who have deluded themselves into thinking that their ability to manipulate words, images, and sounds gives them the ability to control reality itself.

They implicitly or explicitly assume that by attaching labels and names to things, they can control them. They implicitly or explicitly behave as if control over narrative is control over the things narrative is attached to. The virus therefore was a problem of psychology before it was a problem of microbiology, because people did not have the “right” attitudes and words for something that in and of itself was incapable of having attitudes or making words. And from the President on down, politicians behaved (and are still behaving) as if it was something that could be spun or narrativized away.

...

But I would like to return to the obsession with using words to control reality. There were endless attempts early on to compare it to a less-threatening entity, the flu or even the common cold. In doing so, institutional actors tried to take something new and uncertain and fit it into a tame pre-existing mental model that they preferred. Acknowledging the virus as a creature of fate – of fortuna – would be to admit that it could collapse the elaborate machinery for making narrative and reveal the narrative-makers as utterly impotent.

Managing public health and disease was one of the core tasks that helped build the legitimacy of industrial era government in the 19th and 20th centuries. When civil servants are too burdened by bureaucratic red tape and the need to perform political face-work to properly pursue this endeavor, it is a sign that Western society has traded the substance of political competence for its appearance. And more generally, a society that cares more about declining trust in institutions than what institutions have substantively done to deserve trust – and which devotes far more effort towards managing the behavioral psychology of risk than actually reducing risk – is engaged in narrative-making as a singular pursuit above all else.

Which is where our virus comes in. It is a very simple creature, unburdened by all of this discursive weight. To the extent it can be said to have desires and needs, they are very humble. It only wants targets. We lack a working vaccine and estimates vary about how fast we can get one, but it was born with a natural immunity to our capacity to distract ourselves with our silly little language-games. As this seems to be the most powerful weapon our society had up to this point, we will have to go to Plan B: actually doing something to alter the situation instead of hoping that things will change if we come up with nicer-sounding words to describe it.

I have quoted most of this article. There's an extensive run into some quasi-Marxist mumbo-jumbo in the middle that I cut out.

Via bookofjoe, which almost never posts about stuff like this.