If genius is achieved by tempering the lust for exceptionalism, and stupidity by the denial of one’s own ordinariness, then America faces a significant handicap. Its economic system is greased by the promise that everyone can be extraordinary. But the virus reminds us we are nothing more than biovectors. No one is special in a pandemic. We must all act as if we are invalids.
Americans aren’t used to playing the invalid, however. This is a country that has participated in most of the major wars of the last century, yet which has experienced only two acts of war on home soil. As a result, the American imagination for international calamity has been developed largely vicariously. It has also allowed the politically dominant demographic—white suburbanites—to grow up so physically safe it is almost as if we’ve lived our whole lives in a virtual space. That this relative comfort might bear on the general public’s ability to imagine disaster is captured by what behavioral psychologists call the “white male effect.” Asked to rate the “perceived threat” to individuals and the public of a number of social and environmental hazards (handguns, ozone depletion, drugs), that white males consistently and categorically reported perceiving lower risk than every other group. Attempts to explain the underlying cause of this discrepancy point to the importance of “identity protective cognition,” or in other words, individual experience. Hans Castorp was on to something: There is, perhaps, a strain of stupidity—a blind spot—begotten by uninterrupted well-being.
This naïveté about suffering is especially egregious when there has always been suffering at the heart of American life, physical, bodily, immediate disasters that the comfortable ignore or under-report: the AIDS epidemic, mass incarceration, the genocide of Native Americans, slavery’s barbarism, the thousands of black men and women murdered by police violence and white terrorism, the abuse of asylum seekers and their children, the overt criminalization of poverty, a nonexistent social safety net that forces the sick to choose between their lives and their livelihoods. These waves of mass death and anguish have failed to accrue material reality for spectators who have never felt personally threatened by them. On the subject of suffering, most white or middle-class Americans can choose ignorance.
Opining in public on things you don’t really understand is a form of idiocy in which Americans, in particular, are known to indulge. In early March, after suggesting that Covid-19 is milder than the flu, Trump told the CDC that he was as knowledgeable about the virus as any medical professional. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability,” he reported. “Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” Indeed! Maybe Kushner should have joined him.
On an individual level, the hubris of asserting our opinions over experts’ makes us ignoramuses. On a national level, it may be our sole stroke of genius. To incorporate the opinions of those who exist outside the establishment is a fundamentally democratic impulse. When everyone is given the right to claim expertise, anyone can punch up the social hierarchy.