Saturday, March 14, 2020
coronavirus
OVERWHELMED BY A MEDIA VIRUS?
I have
never admired C.S. Lewis more. I hope you’ll read the following essay he wrote
in 1948.
Replace
“atomic bomb” with “coronavirus.” This is not to say that COVID-19 isn’t a
threat nor to suggest that we shouldn’t take reasonable precautions.
However...read ahead.
In one way
we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an
atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the
sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you
would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and
cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of
cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of
railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other
words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.
Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced
to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us
were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage
over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly
ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists
have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which
already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance
at all, but a certainty.
This is
the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull
ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let
that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying,
working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing
tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled
together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our
bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
— “On
Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
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