Covid and the Nature of Causation
We have to make a decision: is normal life worth living despite some risk, or not?
If you’d like to listen to an audio version of this essay, click here.
Here I’m going to make a science-based case to argue that taking the sort of strong, restrictive measures against Covid-19 which were appropriate in the spring of 2020 is now largely pointless, impractical, and potentially motivated by an unreasonable moral calculus, relating to a flawed conception of cause and effect.
Truths We Tell Ourselves, Truths There Are, and Truths There Seem To Be
In History of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian historian Thucydides describes the war to end all wars between Athens and Lacedaemon (now better known as Sparta) in terms of a unique and nuanced analysis of causation.
Thucydides narrates the war in essentially two ways: descriptions of the actual events of the war, and semi-fictionalized speeches and dialogues between figures in key moments of the conflict. The speeches, sometimes interpreted to be direct relations of the real words of the figures involved, are more commonly accepted to be an exercise of Thucydides’ rhetorical analysis; in them, Thucydides is demonstrating what he believes a figure in a given circumstance would argue in the classical style of rhetoric derived from the famous sophist Gorgias, which he was trained in as an Athenian aristocrat.
Framed this way, the dialogues are a remarkable literary achievement, demonstrating the author’s ability to keenly argue in favor of positions he doesn’t himself hold, and in some cases makes clear his strong object to. He demonstrates how different political agendas can allow for the construction of entirely different (and equally compelling) conceptual universes, not only precluding the ability of participants in a dialogue to come to any sort of agreement, but alienating them from reality itself, and thereby obscuring the appropriate course of action.
There is one particularly poignant dialogue Thucydides details of a conference between representatives of Athens and Melos, a small island city which has tried to remain neutral in the war and has refused to join the Athenian alliance, thereby also refusing to pay Athens tribute or to lend her ships and men in the war. Athens utterly abandons pretense in what quickly proves to be an ultimatum rather than a negotiation: Melos will join the Athenian alliance, or all of her men will be killed, and her women and children sold into slavery. She will be wiped off the face of the earth.
The Athenians, worn down by decades of war, two plague outbreaks, and the constant threat of revolt by their “allies,” don’t waste their time with the justifications for their actions they had given elsewhere in the History, stating one of the most brutally frank declarations of imperialist ethics in the classic canon (emphasis throughout this dialogue is my own):
For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The rules of Thucydidean dialogue are being violently torn down by the historian himself, to make clear to us what has only been hinted at before: the difference between what one says and what one means, and how the truth behind elegant rhetoric is manipulation to serve one’s own ends.
The Melians respond, calmly but with obvious fear behind their words at this stunning admission of amorality:
As we think, at any rate, it is expedient—we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest—that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current. And you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.
In their desperation, the Melians try to retain the rules of the old game: the right to even make an appeal to moral justice. The dialogue in its whole is gripping, but given that the book is roughly 2400 years old, I don’t think I have to hold back spoilers: the Athenians dismiss all the desperate moral and pragmatic arguments made by the Melians, and they are subsequently annihilated.
This is the stock Thucydides puts in propaganda. What other sorts of causes are there?
There are proximate causes: the inciting incidents for events, or what (since we are talking about the Greeks here) Aristotle would classify as efficient causes. The opening book of the history is particularly concerned with causation of this type-in this instance, the battles which most immediately led to the war. Specifically, there were two incidents-a democratic revolt of a city called Epidamnos against its mother-city, Corcyra (in which Athens aided the latter), and a battle between Athens and Corinth in Potidaea.
But Thucydides makes it perfectly clear; the war was not caused by these two incidents. After a lengthy discourse on the particular events leading up to Sparta’s final declaration of war, Thucydides states:
The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken, and that the war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.
The war was framed thus as being essentially unavoidable. This opens up some interesting questions about causation! Was the Peloponnesian War inevitable once the Spartan general Pausanias was recalled for collaboration with the Persians, and Greece’s naval powers re-organized under Athenian power? Was it once the Athenians were victorious in the Battle of Salamis, effectively ending any Persian invasion of Greece?
Like most root causes, it’s ultimately unclear-causes cascade back further and further to a litany of precise irretrievable events in a potentially infinite regression. While it’s unclear where the precise causes for great events should be located, they take on an avalanche-like quality, reaching a point where the precise inciting incident seems effectively irrelevant-whether or not Athens had met Corinth in the Battle of Sybota, Sparta would have declared war sooner or later-once the atom bomb existed, it was going to be dropped somewhere. Athens was in a position where it needed to attain military hegemony over Greece to avoid its own annihilation, hastening its imperialist ambition; Sparta, with a massive and restless slave population which had to be constantly overseen, could not let the situation grow out of hand for much longer without a potential war quickly becoming unwinnable. These “inciting incidents” become little more than the pretenses of propaganda-not true causes. Like a chess game, pieces move all over the board until, before you know it, and perhaps even without having lost a single piece, you realize there is no chance of surviving the next three moves.
Seeing Covid for What It Is
I bring up these versions of causation in Thucydides, because I think each one is so instructive in analyzing the nature of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the responses it engendered.
Almost as soon as Covid emerged, it was used for political ends. It was, oddly enough, initially something that seemed to grab the attention of right-wing conspiracy theorists before anyone else-perhaps it suited their flair for the dramatic. In the early months of 2020, I can remember the first instances of mask-wearing and disinfecting that I encountered coming from middle-aged, right wing uber drivers (before the pandemic started I drove as a side job, and uber drivers commonly join facebook groups in their city to exchange useful information) angrily talking about deep cleaning their cars after picking up Chinese people at the airport. At that time, taking the virus seriously seemed like a good sign you were paranoid and/or racist. Once the pandemic made serious landfall in the US, the narrative changed to the need to shut down all inessential services, and the stock market tumbled. Suddenly, the right shifted its reasoning to “fuck grandma, save the share prices.”
Of course, the response to this reasoning by the left wasn’t entirely reasonable either, making moralistic arguments along the lines of “no life should be sacrificed” when, of course, this was a functionally impossible goal. In practice, somebody did still need to show up for work and risk exposure to the virus, and they did get sick and die at higher rates as a result, regardless of whether they lived in a blue or red state.
Fairly rapidly, pandemic-specific cultural conventions started adhering to political ideology. Increasingly, masks became seen as a sign of liberal frailty, social distancing and lockdowns as big government overreach. Naturally, conspiracy theories about China, Bill Gates, and vaccines soon followed. Rural towns quickly became conspicuous for their disinterest in following any sort of Covid protocols, whereas Florida did roughly what anyone would have expected Florida to do. On the other hand, those who didn’t wear masks or take strict precautions to isolate from others were regarded by liberals as sociopathic, incapable of concern for their neighbors, evidence of the moral degradation brought about by the Trump era.
There was at least some empirical support for this view, with early-pandemic research showing Americans to display the most lax adherence to public health guidelines compared to respondents on any other continent, with a particularly poor performance in relation to mask-wearing. This tendency, of course, only became more cemented, particularly once vaccines were introduced, with one November 2021 study finding “More than 20% were unwilling to vaccinate, expressing concerns about vaccine efficacy and safety and questioning the disease’s severity. Poverty, working outside of the home and conservative political views are predictors of unwillingness.”
Once it became clear that the percentage of the US population willing to vaccinate was not high enough to achieve herd immunity (supposedly a path to effectively eradicating the virus), movements were made in the direction of compulsory vaccination, with the Biden administration trying to compel large companies to force their workers to either vaccinate or receive weekly testing and masking requirements, regardless of local regulations. It was a politically risky move, punctuated by the bizarre choice by one of Biden’s speechwriters to have the President tell the American people that “this is not about freedom, or personal choice,” a line Biden read in a mocking tone that may put it on the short list for instances of political seppuku when we look back at it in three years. In any event, the measure was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court, but it certainly fanned the flames of polarization around the vaccination issue.
What was so strange about the vaccine mandate measures by the Biden administration is their apparent lack of effectiveness as a long-term solution. The political cost was extreme, the likelihood of it surviving the courts obviously low; but without patching the gigantic strategic hole of effective global vaccine access, such a measure would not have led to the eradication of the virus anyway-and that’s only if the vaccines were effective enough at preventing breakthrough infections, which Delta and Omicron have now made abundantly clear they are not. It seems as if an internal political conflict has come to characterize the response to the virus, at least as much as the straightforward matter of bringing the pandemic to something close to an “end.”
Alongside the political problem, there is the nagging issue of virology: the virus is, by its nature, extremely contagious, and every time it infects someone, has the opportunity to mutate and become more infectious. This has reached a point where effective prevention of transmission appears virtually impossible, with Covid having become an airborne contagion which can persist in the air for hours, not limited merely to droplets-the goal now is not to avoid getting Covid, but to perhaps try to contract it a bit less often (the twitter thread below is commentary from one of that study’s authors):
But it’s unclear whether even this makes sense in light of the apparent (and possibly long-term) benefits of “superimmunity,” the result of contracting a breakthrough Covid case after being fully vaccinated. This is a potentially appealing option with Omicron, a relatively benign variant, when there’s no guarantee a significantly more dangerous variant won’t emerge in the future. Of course, your personal preferences on the matter may not be terribly important, since it seems like anybody and everybody either has Omicron or will some time in the next month.
The Maze of Blame
My point in laying out this data is to try to appropriately complicate what is in fact a complicated issue. I’m not saying the only appropriate response here is to stop wearing masks (though I will readily admit, I only wear them for other people’s comfort), especially for immunocompromised people. For people who are concerned, it is worth noting that one-way masking, provided that mask is an N95, is about as low-risk as anyone can reasonably expect.
Where I do have to take issue with the phenomenon of what I think should be fairly regarded as Covid hysteria, is a need to decouple moralism from practice. It is true that anti-vaxxers are wrong, and they should get vaccinated-but the pandemic would still be here even if they did, and had done so at the first opportunity. More to the point: they’re not going to. For those who are living like it’s May of 2020, and more to the point looking down on even fully-vaxxed people who aren’t-I have to ask what the game plan is.
You’re already fully vaccinated. You probably have way more tests at your disposal than you really should, and hell, odds are pretty high that you’ve already had Covid, even if you don’t know it for a fact. And let’s make it perfectly clear: it is very, very, very unlikely that Covid is going to be eradicated in anything like the near future, if ever. Unless superimmunity is the panacaea some are offering it as (in which case you would be better off simply contracting Omicron and getting on with your life), the status quo is probably roughly what you can expect from now on. If you’re hiding out waiting for a miracle, I’m afraid the fastest production of a vaccine in human history was it; you’re not getting another.
I would not blame anyone for simply being afraid-for first-world people, this is the scariest time to be alive in living memory. But what I think does need to be dissuaded is responding to Covid not based on what we know about the virus itself, but in an effort to differentiate oneself from a position that is perceived to be morally inferior. The pandemic has proven to be a force larger than ourselves, for which blame cannot be pinned down to our own Corcyras and Potidaeas-the Biogen conference, Ron DeSantis, the intransigence of the CCP when the virus was first identified in China, or your uncle’s unwillingness to get vaccinated. In actual truth, the real causes are myriad, unfolding ever further back in time, like the roots of a tree into the soil. What we are left with is the virus itself; a force which goes beyond the human capacity to control. It is, quite literally, a force of nature.
But my chief goal in lifting some of the weight on people’s conscience’s-either due to their “inappropriate behavior,” or the burden of needing to behave according to some standard of what is “appropriate”-is not only to ease their anxiety somewhat, but also to encourage people to pull themselves out of an antagonistic narrative when evaluating problems of this type; to try to see things as they actually are, external to their own feelings and perspectives.
This is a problem which seems utterly pervasive in our moral and political landscape. It is all too easy to reduce complex realities to simplified, linear narratives, typically with good guys and bad guys. When we do this, however, it is important to recognize that we are inhabiting the realm of myth-appropriate in some circumstances, harmful in others. Morality, as I argued in my essay on dialectical naturalism, is and can only be derived from physical reality, and that reality is an unknowably complex one, although I believe it to adhere to a recognizable rationality. To make any headway in analyzing it and arriving at more sensible (and ethical) courses of action requires some level of detachment-from bias, from emotion, from social pressures to arrive at one conclusion or another (as a left-wing anarchist, for example, I am not really supposed to be concluding that strict social distancing and mask-wearing is probably not worth the trouble). The possibilities and questions which arise when we do this are rarely comforting or pleasant, but they can at least be more concrete and effective.