Will You Follow the Science or Accept Your Fate?
If, in the US, we had done a better job of “following the science,” thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives would not have been lost to COVID-19. Our economy would still have suffered, but not to the degree that it did, and millions of people might have avoided the economic hardships they have endured and are still enduring.
For those of us who are open to the method and spirit of science, the failure of the nation to follow the science is difficult to comprehend. Why did so many reject an approach to the pandemic that would have saved so many lives and reduced or eliminated so much suffering? The temptation is to place responsibility on Donald Trump. While I do not think doing so is entirely inappropriate, I do think that blaming Trump diverts attention from other factors that made many Americans susceptible to the strategy of neglect that led to the magnitude of the catastrophe in the US. One of those factors that I think can be important involves the role of fate.
It occurred to me that fate might play a role while reading a report from the Associated Press concerning the attitude toward the coronavirus in rural America. The report included material from interviews with people who decided to do little or nothing to limit exposure to the virus and, as a consequence, invited into their communities some of the highest levels of infection and death in the country. Why did they refuse to take steps to limit the harm and protect their communities? Why did they fail to take care of themselves?
“I’m not going out and looking to catch it. I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.”
“I’m not going out and looking to catch it. I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.”
According to the AP reporter, “people in rural America are aware of the virus” but “many of them aren’t especially concerned.” As one resident of a small town in Nebraska put it: “I’m not going out and looking to catch it. I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.” As a public health director in one county observed about the people she works with: “They don’t think it’s real. They don’t think it’s going to be that bad.” Another resident of rural America commented that he did not think there is enough “concrete information” about the virus to make him change his life in spite of the fact that his state—North Dakota—at the time led the nation in cases per capita. One said about his community that “we are trying to create as much normalcy as we can. We try not to live in fear. We’ve traveled. We go out to dinner.” Another resident comments: “I hope that I don’t get the virus, but I’ve never really been a germophobe.” For some, the issue of managing fear is central. It is important not to be afraid or to behave as if you are. All of this left “Midwest medical professionals wondering how they will reverse a tide of people being treated for the coronavirus if residents of their states still aren’t taking the illness seriously.”
In reading these comments, I found their specific content, while helpful in places, less helpful than their emotional tone. Above all, their tone struck me as subdued and disengaged. For them the pandemic had an unreal quality, it shared the invisibility of the creatures that caused it. In this, they clearly sought to follow President Trump in hoping that, if they refused to acknowledge reality, it would go away. I do not get the sense that they did this simply because Trump encouraged them to, although that may have been a factor. I suspect the impulse to respond this way was something more deeply rooted in the psyche of their communities.
The term that, for me, summarized their emotional response to the pandemic was “fatalistic:” a sense that things are what they are and will be what they will be. This fatalism conflicts sharply with the scientific orientation and may well be an important obstacle to following the science. For many people, an important problem with science is its connection to a state of mind that enables individuals to imagine that they can take control of a significant threat to their lives and their communities. Thought about in this way, science may be “right” about the likely trajectory of the virus, but this does not mean that its presence can dislodge a deeply embedded sense that life is ruled not by decisions and actions, but by fate. If reason doesn’t rule the world, then something else does, something opaque and unknowable, something that can make the virus disappear, or not. Something that favors us or does not. This is the thing we refer to as “fate.”
In this test, the science can be subsumed into fate and treated as an aspect of it, something we are encouraged to do by the probabilistic element in science.
The power of fate in the psyche can foster the urge to take risks in order to test fate. Thus, the threat posed by the virus may come to be considered a test. In this test, the science can be subsumed into fate and treated as an aspect of it, something we are encouraged to do by the probabilistic element in science. That element allows the response to the virus to be treated psychologically as if it were a form of gambling, which, almost by definition, is a test of fate. Win or lose, there is something gained. If you win, you pass the test and affirm your status as chosen by fate to receive the good things, or, in this case, avoid the bad one. If you lose, you gain an objective confirmation of something you knew all along: that you were born to suffer. Putting the two outcomes together we can say that what we need in life is to accept our fate whatever it is, to go on with life knowing that the outcome is beyond our control and likely to be difficult to bear.
Science can open up the possibility that the trajectory of your life is not fixed or given, that fate need not rule the world. But that means giving up the whole engagement with fate and what fate represents, including the test it offers and what we can hope to acquire if we take the test. Those who follow science think that they have something to say about whether they contract the virus or not. Those who think that way pose a threat to a way of life in which it is important to accept that our fate is what it is: to struggle and to suffer. But for those who follow science, the greatest prize is not available: knowing that we are chosen by a higher power to receive the most valuable thing. For this, we must put our lives in the hands of fate.
One possible way to account for the power of the belief in Trump’s false accounts of reality on the part of his followers is to note that, to believe in these accounts against all evidence and reason, you would have to really need to believe in them, and you need to believe in them because their truth is bound up with the conviction that fate rules the world as, through his actions, Trump has assured that it does. What is arguably Trump’s defining quality—his impulsiveness—made him ideal to play the role of the agent of fate. But not only did Trump act as the agent of fate, he also did everything in his power to assure that the rule of fate is universal, that the suffering of his followers is not theirs alone but will be imposed on everyone. Given a sufficient degree of fatalism, it may not be possible to imagine that suffering can be escaped or even lessened; but it is possible to believe that it can be shared.
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If where we stand on the divide between reason and fate is not a choice, and given the terms of the problem it can hardly be a choice, then what determines where we stand? In attempting to answer this question it might help to focus on the defining feature of science: for science, things are what they are for reasons and those reasons are embedded in the process by which things have become what they are. Once we understand how things become what they are, it may be possible for them to become something different. By knowing how things become what they are, we can intervene. Knowing the dynamics of the spread of the virus, we can intervene in ways that alter the rate and extent of its spread and end the pandemic or prevent it from happening in the first place.
One way to answer this question is to consider whether individuals have a formative experience that includes the idea that the life they lead is not predetermined but depends in some vital way on their presence in it.
What determines whether this idea has a place in the individual’s or in the community’s psychic life? One way to answer this question is to consider whether individuals have a formative experience that includes the idea that the life they lead is not predetermined but depends in some vital way on their presence in it. In other words, where we stand on the science/fate divide depends on the extent to which our parents relate to us as someone yet to be determined rather than as someone already known and therefore predetermined. If they are prepared to learn who we are rather than assuming they already know, then our internalization of our relationship with them establishes in our psyches a template for relating to the world not as a place in which a scripted drama unfolds, but as a place in which the drama is yet to be written. This does not mean that we can be whatever we want to be or wish that we were. But it does mean that, at least along certain dimensions, there are possibilities yet to be determined.
By contrast, where our growing up experience was preparation for our involvement in a scripted drama, the attitude organized around fate is the “right” attitude, as is the response to the pandemic driven by it. Science, by offering a false hope, just gets in the way. The rule of fate represents its own kind of truth. While applying that truth to the behavior of a virus may be misusing it, we should not ignore the communication embedded in that application and insist that all it is is wrong.
Postscript
In early March, when the coronavirus began to appear in New Mexico, our governor instituted a series of restrictions aimed at closing down the state so far as that was possible. Only “essential” businesses were allowed to open, gatherings were severely limited. Later, rules on wearing face masks and social distancing were added. The result was that, in much of the state, virus activity was kept under control. In late spring, because the state was meeting its goals in limiting virus activity, the governor began gradually to lift her restrictions. And, predictably, virus activity gradually increased until, in late October, it had clearly gotten out of control. Early in November, in response to a situation that could only be described as dire, the governor announced that we would be returning to the earliest and most severe restrictions. In her news conference, she presented data and explained the rationale for her restrictive measures. But, reduced to essentials, her presentation had only one message, repeated over and over again and delivered in an, at times, impassioned voice: This is a deadly virus, please take it seriously; stay at home, avoid contact with strangers. The day after the news conference and announcement of new restrictions, our neighbors held a yard sale.
References
Schulte, G. (2020) Surging virus cases get a shrug in many Midwestern towns, Associated Press, Nov 14, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/iowa-south-dakota-coronavirus-pandemic-nebraska-north-dakota-bf7197b284401dea8b779cfa764dfab2, retrieved 11/15, 2020