The Coronavirus: Exacerbated by Cultural Pathology

“Make no mistake; we are in a war, and wars tend to be easier to win when it is generally acknowledged that they are happening.”

There have been many arguments put forward as to why some countries have dealt with the coronavirus well and others poorly. The individualist vs. collectivist answer has been a popular choice. Other common suggestions include centralized vs. decentralized decision-making, as well as democracy vs. authoritarianism. I even saw modernism vs. postmodernism posited, which probably deserves its own essay. I want to put forward an alternative that I have not yet come across, which I do not think is an exhaustive explanation but certainly has some independent value. It is also ugly, which I think may be why so few have been willing to face up to it, gravitating instead towards the essentially academic debates listed above. As such, my alternative explanation is that contemporary Anglosphere culture is objectively awful in exactly the ways that pose a mortal danger.

Take a look at this recent Wall Street Journal story, with the telling headline “A Generational War Is Brewing Over Coronavirus.”

To be clear, our culture is wonderful in many, many ways. I am very happy to be British and to live in the U.K.—in normal times and in virus-wartime-lockdown alike. By the end of this piece, I will return to how I hope and believe that we will snap out of our nonchalance and pull together with a selflessness and courage we will never forget. But we cannot deny that, on the surface, our culture has certain dimensions of unprecedented awfulness. In normal times, this awfulness is mostly of aesthetic concern, to be grumbled about in letters to the editor of highly respected but lowly-circulated broadsheets. But, right now, it is deadly. And it doesn’t seem to me to have subsided much since the outbreak. And so, I fear that though this will get a lot better, it may first get a lot worse.

What is this awful culture of which I speak? I don’t know if there is a precise name for it, so I will point out a few of its salient characteristics, all of which strike me as interlocking to a greater or lesser degree.