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The former director of the CDC has said there is “a long war ahead.” Trump calls himself a “wartime president.” Countless politicians and pundits have talked about “beating” the virus or how “we can’t let the virus win.”
I suppose this all sounds good, in some ways. Treating something like a war suggests you’re taking it very seriously. But the problem is that Americans have heard this rhetoric before, and it came with a very different message. “We can’t let the terrorists win” meant go out and buy things, go to restaurants and bars, don’t be scared of life. Whoops!
Toward the beginning of the outbreak, I would argue this specific rhetoric was actively detrimental to the response. Well after it was clear they shouldn’t, people flocked to the beaches of Florida, to bars in D.C. and New York, to church services. They said things like “we can’t let a virus dictate our lives; we’re going to win.” How much worse is the outbreak because people heard “war” and responded how we’ve been trained to respond to such threats?
Call something a “war” and “winning” becomes crucial. But in a real war, there is an opponent who knows about you and acts in at least somewhat predictable human fashion and wants to win as well. But the virus very much does not give a shit about winning. We tried to play a game of Battleship against a few strands of RNA. It’s like declaring war on gravity. Sure, we built planes that take us into the sky, but we didn’t “beat” gravity, and I’m pretty sure gravity isn’t out there pouting at our “victory.”
It also sets us all up for the absurd rewrite of history that is already ongoing. Calling it a war means that certain incompetent leaders of the free world can eventually declare victory, no matter what happens. The pandemic will end at some point. If half a million in the U.S. die, or a million, or two million, but the outbreak finally stops: did we still win the war?
And aside from the inevitable gaslighting, it places agency and value judgments on to people where it shouldn’t. We do this with other diseases as well: anyone with cancer is encouraged to “beat” the disease, and someone who dies of it is said to have “lost a battle.” It suggests the person who lives through it is somehow stronger, better, more capable and strong-willed than the person who did not. This is, obviously, dumb: sometimes cancer kills you. It isn’t your fault when it does.
Now, there may well be some use to the rhetoric. A new editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the two or three most influential and revered medical journals in the world, argues that “it is a war we should fight to win,” and goes through a series of “wartime” steps that could be taken to get there. Among the suggestions is the need to “inspire and mobilize the public” to do things like wear masks every time we all leave the house, and other steps to minimize risks of transmission. Once the entirety of the public has internalized the direness of the situation, this sort of thing might help: a voluntary draft into full community protective measures probably rings more than a few patriotic bells.
But even in the last few days there are still reports of people gathering where they shouldn’t. There are quotes about defiance and anger at how we’re letting it change our lives. We’re letting the virus win!
I can’t quantify any negative effects of a metaphor, but the way people responded—and continue to respond, in some limited cases—suggests we might have done better with some other rhetorical twist. It’s something we might try to remember for the next unseen crisis: wars against brainless enemies don’t have winners.
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I’m actually very curious if anyone has better metaphor ideas; I’ve been known to try and replace the asteroid or boiling frog climate change metaphors with a giant pile of shit in your yard, so maybe I shouldn’t be in charge of such things. Please, discuss in the comments if you have suggestions, or if you think I’m wrong about the war metaphor.
The drop in industrial output thanks to the pandemic has led the entire planet to stop, uh, vibrating so much.
There used to be rainforests at the South Pole! A *long* time ago, but still.
Stay safe everyone.
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Maybe it’s like a game of tag with really high stakes - you don’t wanna be “it”?