Here’s a sobering essay by Bruno Maçães about coronavirus, Europe, and cultural identity Excerpts:

In an interview published yesterday, the director of a hospital in Madrid was unusually forthcoming. Still traumatized by the images of the emergency care unit where he works, Santiago Moreno confessed that “we have sinned from too much confidence.” As he explained it, everyone in Spain thought an epidemic such as the novel coronavirus could spread in a place like China, but not “in a country like ours.” It is simple, really. People in Europe still think of China as a developing country. When news started to arrive of the outbreak in Wuhan, they imagined filthy Chinese markets and hospitals, they thought of the spitting and the lack of doctors, and they trembled. They feared for the Chinese people, not for themselves. This perception explains why, as mainstream opinion lambasted China for mismanaging the outbreak, there was remarkably little concern that the mismanagement could have consequences for Europe and other parts of the developed world. There was effectively no planning or preparation.

I should note here that the very limited number of people who have been publicly alert to the great danger facing the world—and who grew increasingly angry at the lack of seriousness in Europe or America—were almost invariably those with some knowledge of contemporary China. If you know what progress China has made and how the country is now ahead of the West on many dimensions of what constitutes a modern society, you are very unlikely to shrug with indifference when Chinese authorities lock down a major megapolis.

It was serious, but no one in Europe took it seriously. The unbearable lightness of being. A week ago, the Spanish government actively encouraged all Spaniards to go to the streets and join dozens of very large marches for gender equality. When asked about the infection hazard, one minister publicly laughed. The images of those marches have acquired a tangible, pungent horror. You see them against the backdrop of the hundreds of dead since and the laughter, the hugs and the claps from the marches stand as a lasting monument to human folly.

More:

The reasons for this cultural difference can, I believe, be explained through history and psychology. The sense of uncertainty and of the fragility of human life that I saw in Asia over the past two months is easy to explain if poverty and disease are still an everyday occurrence or at most two or three generations in the past. Often, that historical experience is reflected in public institutions: the lack of advanced social security and public healthcare systems forces Asians to contemplate in their daily lives the possibility that their world might suddenly collapse. In Europe the general psychology too often reflects the ideology of development, the idea that the most serious threats to individual happiness have been definitively conquered. Why worry about an epidemic if you have excellent public hospitals available more or less for free? What no one considered was that a virus could bring this perfect system to the point of breakdown.

Of course Europeans have their own nightmares and demons. But remember that the tragedy of the World Wars has been interpreted in political terms. They are a reminder of the dangers of nationalism and imperialism. The practical import of our recent history is to confirm our conviction in the rightness of our values, not to force us to doubt ourselves.

Read it all. This is one of the most important essays I’ve read yet about the meaning of this pandemic. Of course every single word he says about Europe applies to the United States.

All day long, I’ve been reading — on social media, in e-mails, in the press — accounts of Americans being defiant in the face of this thing. People angry at their bishop or pastor for cancelling church. People crowding bars and restaurants. People full of hatred for those who are warning about the danger — as if they were nothing but Trump haters or some other kind of spoilsports. And so forth.

What it all comes down to is hubris. The virus doesn’t have any interest in flattering our conceits or obeying our narratives.

Yes, part of this is the eternal hubris of youth: all those people in their twenties and thirties who think they’re going to get through this with just a few sniffles. They should read this:

A friend of mine got #coronavirus. He is younger than me. Played sports in college. Served in the military. As young and healthy as you could be. This is how his wife describes the illness. This is a public health crisis. No one is immune. pic.twitter.com/8dYU61PJMT

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) March 15, 2020

Besides which, if infected but they never get noticeably ill, they are still a carrier who sheds virus everywhere.

A bigger part of it, though, is what Maçães identifies as our cultural hubris. We thought modernity’s gifts of science and wealth had conquered Nature, and we didn’t have to worry about these things. We Americans are every bit as guilty of this. In some of us, it expresses itself as right-wing hubris; in others, it comes out in left-wing ways. But it’s the same thing: the loss of a tragic sense, of the reality of limits.

We are now facing the very real prospect of mass death, and of the destruction of our economies. From this will come, quite possibly, the destruction of liberal democracy. A virus is not going to kill liberal democracy, but the effects of the virus — economic collapse, chiefly, and violent social disorder — very well could. It is not fated, but if you are not thinking of at least this possibility, you are not taking this crisis seriously enough.

We don’t have to go this way, not at all. The decisions we make today, individually, and in our little platoons, will make the difference.

When this thing is over, everybody is going to assess how we dealt with the crisis. We know now how China dealt with it: through denial at first, and then with police state measures, enforced by the surveillance state’s advanced technological capabilities, to arrest the spread of the disease. How will the West fare? Will our free but decadent societies have done better than the Chinese dictatorship? If not, then no one should be surprised if the masses allow themselves to believe that having a strong surveillance state makes the difference between life and death. Those same Millennials and Gen Z people who are drinking in the bars tonight will be clamoring for Big Brother to tell them what to do.

Our civilization is being put to the test. No, this is not going to be the end of civilization, but it could be the end of a way of life, of a way of seeing the world, of a system of government that we in America have come to believe is unquestionably correct.

Philip Larkin’s poem below is spoken to a rabbit poisoned in a campaign by the British government to end wild rabbit overpopulation by infecting them with a disease (which ended by killing 99 percent of them) has wisdom for us today. Larkin writes in the voice of a walker who finds one of the rabbits paralyzed by the infection dying in a field, and puts the creature out of its misery:

Myxomatosis

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

We can’t live as we always have lived, as if the coronavirus were merely a political problem, or somehow an affront to our dignity and position. This thing is here, and it has come upon us very fast. It feels deeply counterintuitive, but if you want to preserve the way of life in a free, prosperous society, then this kind of thing — from the governor of Oklahoma — is the exactly wrong thing to do right now:

[UPDATE: Since the governor removed the tweet, it doesn’t seem fair to keep it up here. It showed him and his kids out on the town, in a crowded restaurant having dinner, being boosters of Oklahoma small business in a time of crisis. Normally this would be the right thing to do — but in this particular crisis, it’s exactly the wrong thing to do.]

My friend Mattia Ferraresi, with whom I dined in Rome last month — it seems like an eternity ago — and who took me, along with his wife and kids, to visit St. Benedict’s cave in Subiaco, writes this powerful essay for the Boston Globe. It’s his warning to Americans not to do what Italians did. Excerpts:

So here’s my warning for the United States: It didn’t have to come to this.

We of course couldn’t stop the emergence of a previously unknown and deadly virus. But we could have mitigated the situation we are now in, in which people who could have been saved are dying. I, and too many others, could have taken a simple yet morally loaded action: We could have stayed home.

What has happened in Italy shows that less-than-urgent appeals to the public by the government to slightly change habits regarding social interactions aren’t enough when the terrible outcomes they are designed to prevent are not yet apparent; when they become evident, it’s generally too late to act. I and many other Italians just didn’t see the need to change our routines for a threat we could not see.

Italy has now been in lockdown since March 9; it took weeks after the virus first appeared here to realize that severe measures were absolutely necessary.

According to several data scientists, Italy is about 10 days ahead of Spain, Germany, and France in the epidemic progression, and 13 to 16 days ahead of the United Kingdom and the United States. That means those countries have the opportunity to take measures that today may look excessive and disproportionate, yet from the future, where I am now, are perfectly rational in order to avoid a health care system collapse. The United States has some 45,000 ICU beds, and even in a moderate outbreak scenario, some 200,000 Americans will need intensive care.

Before the outbreak hit my country, I thought I was acting rationally because I screened and processed a lot of information about the epidemic. But my being well-informed didn’t make me any more rational. I lacked what you might call “moral knowledge” of the problem. I knew about the virus, but the issue was not affecting me in a significant, personal way. It took the terrible ethical dilemma that doctors face in Lombardy to wake me up.

I put myself in their shoes, and realized that everything should be done in order to avoid those ethically devastating choices: How do we decide who gets an ICU bed and who doesn’t? Age? Life expectancy? How many kids they have? Their special abilities? Is the patient’s profession a relevant factor? Is it right to save a middle-aged doctor who will save more lives if he survives as opposed to a younger person who’s been unemployed for the last 12 months? These are the kind of theoretical questions you are asked to weigh in leadership classes at business school. But this is not a personality test. It’s real lives.

The way to avoid or mitigate all this in the United States and elsewhere is to do something similar to what Italy, Denmark, and Finland are doing now, but without wasting the few, messy weeks in which we thought a few local lockdowns, canceling public gatherings, and warmly encouraging working from home would be enough stop the spread of the virus. We now know that wasn’t nearly enough.

Read the whole thing. It is wise, and it is urgently needed. The final line is one that shatters the pride and vanity of us Americans who think we can bluff our way past this thing, because nobody can tell us what to do. Listen to Mattia Ferraresi! His country is flat on its back now, and he says it’s partly the fault of people like him, who did not want to change their way of life when doing so would have saved lives.

We moderns think we control Nature, and have beaten death back to the margins. Nature — and history — would like to have a word with us.