In two or three days, the pandemic death toll will reach 150,000 in the U.S. Here in Idaho, we have had 148 deaths as of yesterday evening, which doesn’t seem like much in the big scheme of things (unless one of the 148 was your parent, spouse, child, friend, or coworker). Governor Little begins his press conferences by noting that two Idaho counties still lack any cases of the disease, which is his justification for assigning Idaho’s public health decisions to cities and counties and state health districts. Different locales have different needs, he says, and apparently the need of the governor’s locale is to foist responsibility off onto someone else.
The governor has good reason to look for someone else to make the tough decisions the pandemic requires. He’s still under fire from the libertarian wing of Idaho’s Republican Party for locking us down last March. Angry demonstrators, many of them carrying guns, have claimed that any government that requires masks or business closures violates their constitutional rights. They have forced their way into Health District meetings, shown up as threatening counter-demonstrators at Black Lives Matter gatherings, called the governor Little Hitler, and refused to wear masks in the face of polite requests from people at risk from the virus.
Refusing polite requests is another thing that might not seem like a big deal in the big scheme of things, but once again, if you’re that person at risk, it illustrates how exercising one’s own liberty can cause the injury or death of others.
We have gotten used to refusing polite requests in Idaho, where anti-vaccination memes and attacks on Planned Parenthood and guaranteed medical insurance have pushed health care out of reach of whole swaths of the population. It’s the price of freedom.
________
It is tempting to place libertarians and viruses together under a moral spotlight and say that they both just want to exercise a little free will in their lives, consequences be damned.
But viruses don’t want freedom or anything else. They are little genetic machines without brains. They wouldn’t know what to do with free will if you offered it to them on a nanoscale platter.
People who ascribe intelligence to the coronavirus cite its long symptomless incubation period, its airborne transmission between humans, and its rumored ability to reinfect its victims. These are all clever work-arounds of human defenses against infection, but they don’t indicate a malign intelligence on the part of the virus. Millions of viruses exist, and chance alone would dictate that these traits would come together in one or two or a half-dozen of them. Roll the dice a million times, and you’ll get something that looks like intelligence, walks and flies and quacks like intelligence, but has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence.
________
Which brings me back to libertarians. You can look at libertarians as people committed to a moral philosophy that exalts individual choice over all else, but you can also look at them as little virus particles programmed to arm themselves, dress up in camo, and march down streets carrying thin blue line flags when someone or something tells them no. Free will is hard to discern among libertarians when you consider that most of their actions are reacting against the structures of culture, the social contract chief among them.
Morality doesn’t enter into it. Intelligence doesn’t either. Free thinking enters into it as camouflage for rigid cultural programming centered on private property, law and order, racial hierarchy, and tribal inbreeding. Libertarians, as far as I can tell, have little choice but to obey software installed in them by small-town culture in the American West.
________
When I was an advisor to college students, some of the smarter ones would, in the middle of their sophomore years, show up at my office door in crisis. Why, they would ask me, were they working so hard to get straight As if the only reason was to get into law or med school and then walk into marriages/careers/mortgages for thirty or forty years and end up divorced and demented in a nursing home, alienated from their children and mistaking their CNAs for old colleagues? I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this scenario was at the heart of their questions.
It was impossible for me to answer their questions kindly. I tried. I told them that this was simply the cycle of life for white upper-middle-class Americans and there were less pleasant alternatives. I told them that they would be helping people to lead lives blessed by health and justice. I told them that the joy was in the journey, not in the destination.
These answers, it turns out, were cowardly misdirections at best. There aren’t many worse lives than the ones that end up alone and demented, and if that’s what a life of privilege gets you, it’s not worth it. Also, I was spending time in faculty meetings with people who had gone into academe to help young people see the richness and nuance of the examined life, but whose middle-aged obsessions were less about self-awareness and more about getting tenure or making sure that someone in their department didn’t have it easier than they did. I was pretty sure idealistic young doctors and lawyers faced similar transformations as they matured. Finally, the joy of the journey wasn’t apparent in the faces of my former students when they showed up in my office ten years after graduation. What I saw was exhaustion and bewilderment coupled with a dogged waiting-for-retirement endurance.
In the end, my students’ questions bothered me more than they bothered them. They got over their crises, took their GREs and LSATs, and passed into a vast constructed reality where free will, if they had ever had it, was no longer something to be expected or even yearned for. They were running in the harness, some of them more easily than others, but someone or something else had hold of the reins.
After some years, I realized that the examined life was a mixed blessing, even for a literature and journalism professor in a small liberal-arts college. I left the classroom. In the presence of our pandemic, that may look like an act of wisdom and free will, but it wasn’t. I just didn’t have the stomach to make it to retirement.
________
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung addresses free will as a matter of consciousness. Humans can make choices within a clearly defined arena, but only if they are conscious of the game that is being played there. You have to know the rules and you have to play fair.
That arena is quite narrow when you are young, because children have to behave in severely prescribed ways (the Swiss model, as it were). When you are an adult, it’s wider. You can choose from a limited range of actions: you can get married or not, have kids or not, become a doctor or lawyer or other professional (again, the Swiss model). If you don’t like the choices at all, you can become psychotic or a psychologist.
After thirty or forty years, your actions will again become constrained, this time by old age. Your children will begin to treat you like a child, your body and memory will start betraying you, and death, the ultimate constraint, will come jogging onto the field, a ringer from the opposing team.
Jung complicates this vision of free will with his theory of archetypes, which he defines as the deeply established patterns of behavior that humanity knows as gods and demons and heroes and villains. You can fall into one of these archetypes, or it can fall into you, and your consciousness and free will go away.
The good news is that when an archetype takes control, it feels great. It feels like you have made the choice all by yourself to become far greater than you’ve ever been before. You don’t question what it means to be human any longer, or if you do, you have the glory-filled answer every time you look in the mirror. Becoming what you have become is the ultimate expression of enlightened free will, even if it means that you lack free will from that point forward.
One of the rituals of fall in the city of Stanley is bow-hunting season, which comes at the end of August. You can tell opening day by the camo-clad face-painted bow hunters who show up in the Stanley Bakery for breakfast. If two people dressed and painted like that sit down next to you at the counter, you are in the presence of archetypes. Just don’t ask them if they’ve gone to all that trouble with costumes just to sneak up on a latte.
________
It’s a bad sign that the coronavirus is programmed to refuse all requests, polite or otherwise, that concern normal life, business-as-usual, the status quo ante, or whatever you want to call it. We’re not going to get a V-shaped recovery. Links will go missing from supply chains, and Amazon orders will fail to appear, even if your credit card still works. Universities will die. Foreclosures will crash housing markets. Infection rates won’t fall off to insignificance and we’ll lack hundreds of millions of vaccine doses well into 2021 and maybe 2022. Deaths will not stop at 150,000.
Demonstrations and counter-demonstrations will gain permanent residence in the centers of our cities. Costumes will proliferate as archetypes come pouring forth from long-repressed memories of Mad Max and Batman movies. If these villainous times require gods and heroes, gods and heroes will emerge, because the heroic and the demonic call each other into existence. They both find their meaning in the overwhelming drama of battle between Cops and Commies, Freedom Fighters and Fascists, Good and Evil.
There will be blood. One of Jung’s axioms is that archetypes use up, crumple, and discard the human beings they use to become flesh. Then they reach for another. If it’s you or me, we won’t be the first or the last humans sacrificed to a god.
________
Our governor is not a hero. He’s uncomfortable and awkward in a suit, and it’s best not to imagine him in a cape and tights. He stumbles through his speeches and looks tired and old. He’s probably wondering about the dumb luck of his predecessor, who didn’t have to deal with a pandemic or a broken economy.
He’s trying to muddle through. To the extent that his own party will let him, he relies on scientific data to make his decisions. This sort of thing encourages the would-be heroes who will run against him in the next Republican primary.
For the rest of his term he’s going to have to choose between the human and the heroic. So far he’s chosen the human, and that’s the far better and more realistic choice. Let some other sucker try to guarantee human freedom in the face of pandemic and economic collapse.
I don’t want the responsibility for your free will, he’s saying. Take care of it your own self, he’s saying. Plenty of people will feel compelled to do that, even if in their superhuman rage they lose all sight of what they’re fighting for.