Neither hot nor cold: how America's reaction to coronavirus highlights its identity problem

Sometimes, advocates for particular points of view will strain to show that the idea they are arguing for makes sense not for ideological reasons, but pragmatic ones. Take diversity as an example. Most people argue for diversity on ideological grounds, such as justice or fairness or equality. But a study by Boston Consulting Group hinted at a practical, self-interest-based reason why companies should strive for diversity: companies that are diverse make more money.

I know some mathematicians who take issue with the methodology of that study, but let's assume there's some validity to it. Even beyond that study, there are plenty of other examples in the world of diversity as a pragmatic value, from the survivability of diverse gene pools in nature to the principle of having diverse investments. At the heart of it, though, there is a principle involved in making a pragmatic claim like "diversity is good for us" that is hard to get at through reasoning. There is a chain of reasoning we have to undergo here that runs something like this: 1) It is good for companies to make a profit; 2) Diversity helps companies make that profit; therefore 3) Diversity is a useful goal for society, not merely an ideological one, because it helps us accomplish something we all agree is good, which is companies making money.

As any beginning philosophy class will annoyingly point out, though, there is sort of an intellectual dodge going on here. How did we decide that companies making money is a good goal? What do we base that on? Is that just an a priori assumption we have, one we don't feel the need to prove? If we don't like the idea of saying it's an a priori assumption, we might then launch into another pragmatic line of reasoning: it's good for companies to make money because they can then pay good salaries, which means people will be able to buy the things they want, and this will make them happy. But that, of course, is based on priori assumptions that we ought to want people to be happy, and that we know what happiness is, and that one's happiness increases along with one's ability to consume. At some point, there is always going to be an a priori assumption somewhere underpinning a pragmatic argument. 

Lately, I've been seeing people on social media who favor socialized medicine and a living wage using the coronavirus outbreak to make a pragmatic argument, rather than an ideological one, for why we all need these policy changes. The argument is that stressed low-income workers, either because they lack affordable health care or because they can't afford not to work, will go to work sick, spreading the disease. Since even wealthy people opposed to paying for socialized medicine and a living wage would be affected by poor people spreading the disease like this, those people should change their minds out of self-interest, if they won't do it for ideological reasons. It's the same argument Dr. Greg House pointed out over a decade ago when he didn't eat at the hospital cafeteria because of the workers there, one of whom he suspected of being sick: "When you make ten dollars an hour, you kind of need your ten dollars an hour." 

An example of what I've been seeing

This is better than the "diversity makes us money" argument, perhaps, in that it's easier to see the link between a policy and an outcome we consider desirable, but it still runs into the same a priori roadblock. And even to stick to pragmatic reasoning, presumably there are long-term ways to mitigate the threat the poor pose to the rich in this scenario. In some sectors, for example, we could replace the poor with machines that don't get sick. Or the rich could avoid going to stores where they might get sick. They could even hire the poor to go shopping for them. If we don't favor these changes, it's likely for ideological reasons, not pragmatic ones. 

In other words, this argument in favor of expanding social safety net payments to the poor only holds water for us if we see paying for a social safety net for poorer workers as more desirable than other solutions we could create, and we will only see it that way if we have a priori assumptions that lead us to feel that way. The best philosophies, of course, combine the ideological and the practical. Just as any practical argument has to have an a priori assumption under it somewhere, every ideological belief is useless if there is no way to implement it. But our society tends to ignore the ideological side much more than the practical one.  

I can't count the number of arguments I've seen on social media the last few weeks about whether the government's proposed solutions to deal with this threat show the hypocrisy of our opposition to socialist solutions. "Everyone's a socialist in a crisis," the progressives say, while the conservatives staunchly insist that no, intervening in a crisis doesn't change the fundamental nature of who we are. Progressives point out the hypocrisy of suddenly caring about people out of work because of coronavirus and not intervening for the more quotidian crises that happen to people all the time. Conservatives stick to their guns, certain that it doesn't contaminate the competitiveness of our people to be rescued in an emergency, but it would if we did it all the time. 

The reason these two sides are seeing different things in the coronavirus response is because they have different a priori assumptions. At heart, liberals believe in erring on the side of giving aid to the vulnerable, while conservatives at heart believe that a culture built on competition will actually improve life overall.

What we're seeing now is just the same identity crisis America suffers from all the time, but made more obvious through a crisis. We are equally descended from Puritans and Quakers. We feel with roughly equal conviction the responsibility of the individual to fend for himself and the responsibility of all of us to care for our neighbor. 

While every culture is a pastiche of different ideas, our current pastiche isn't intentional in any way. It's just the random averaging out of all the underlying beliefs, all the a priori assumptions canceling one another out like colliding waves, sapping our overall energy we could be using to respond to crises. 

If our culture actually believed anything with fervor, we'd be better equipped to deal with trouble when it came. If we were fully an individualist, fend-for-yourself nation, we wouldn't be quarantining at all. We'd say we're going to meet this thing head-on, and the free market will realize that we're about to need a lot more health care, and it would meet that problem by suddenly making a lot of medical equipment. If we are more pragmatic capitalists who understand that the market, while usually efficient, isn't always fast enough to respond to a crisis, we could use the Defense Production Act to get the free market turned around faster. But we'd still be responding to this crisis with a keep calm and carry on approach.

On the other hand, if we were fully a nation that prioritized the vulnerable, we'd be locked down much more than we are. But because we're neither fully either thing, neither hot nor cold, we end up spewing a response out of our mouths that is sort of the worst of both worlds. It's a lot like our health care system. Either a fully socialized system or a fully capitalist system without insurance--with price wars and transparent prices and all the other things we're used to--would be better than what we have now. But because we don't know what we are and tend to just let opposing forces average out, we have the worst of both worlds.

Deciding what our a priori beliefs are is hard. It's much harder now than it was for our great-grandparents, because we can no longer just look to religious dogmas to tell us what our a priori beliefs ought to be. There's nothing we can do about that. The push from some conservatives to try to get America to return to old religious dogmas is doomed. Much of the country couldn't believe those dogmas anymore if we tried. That means we have work to do figuring out what we really believe in now. Ethics in the world today is a little bit aesthetics and a little bit ontology. It's a question of what world we want to live in and who we want to be, which are open-ended questions we can answer any way we choose. The number of choices open to us is dizzying.

But we need to choose something. More than likely, this isn't going to be a threat we can get past in two weeks or four or eight. We can flatten the curve for a time, but the disease isn't going to go away. Until we get a vaccine, we're going to remain vulnerable to this. The rugged individualists in our society might be shamed into compliance for now, but will they continue to comply unwillingly if this is still going on in eighteen months? Congress might pass a relief bill with checks to the needy today, but what if the economy is still half shuttered in six months?  Twelve? How many trillion dollar relief packages does Congress have in its back pocket? How long can people keep going with disruptions to common consumer goods? 

Barring some kind of miraculous cure, the hard decisions are yet to come, when we've exhausted our ability to combat the threat in a low-cost way to the average person. And even when we do finally get past this, as I more than half expect we will, the shape of our economy at that point is going to force us to ask questions about who we are and what we want that we've been pushing off for decades. Some people have commented that it's good that we are facing a threat that only kills 1-3% of the people who get it, because we're getting a live drill that will hopefully prepare us for the deadlier disease we all know will eventually get here. It's also possible that this crisis is a good chance for us to face the questions we have needed to face for as long as we've been a country. Who are we and what do we want? Without answering those questions, there are limits to how long we can last, even without an unprecedented threat to weaken us.