Are we really “at war” with the coronavirus?
The language of war garners collective resolve. But that’s not all it does.
The mind tends to wander when the body shelters in place. Lately, mine has been returning to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a postmodern murder mystery set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery. The main detective, William of Baskerville, tries desperately to connect wildly disparate dots in order to find some pattern, some overarching meaning, among widespread destruction and death. In the end, he fails. No coherent pattern emerges, only coincidence and confusion alongside a few simple acts of kindness.
How much meaning can and should be found in a pandemic that has strewn indiscriminate fear and loss across the globe? Or better, what kind of meaning should people be looking for? According to the medical doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdal, our country currently lacks a “common existential narrative,” a shared story that can illuminate the meaning of widespread suffering and death. I think she’s right, with one exception—the meaning we find in war.
President Trump has declared COVID-19 the war of our time and decreed himself a wartime president. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders beat him by a number of days, as each compared confronting this virus to the waging of a war. French president Emmanuel Macron was one of the first and most direct. “We are at war,” he repeatedly declared when ordering his citizens to stay in their homes.
