Time Bomb

Did we learn the right lessons from the pandemic?

Some clever clogs—possibly Kierkegaard—once said that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. One could take this to mean that embracing uncertainty and boldly venturing into the unknown is what truly matters. But if you emphasize the first phrase, you conclude that reckoning with the past is sometimes critical to getting on with the future. As we pass the five-year mark since the beginning of the covid pandemic, it’s become clear that we need a bit more understanding backwards before we can properly live forwards again.

The impact of that time still assails every aspect of our lives, both personally and communally. Almost half of Americans believe life will never be the same as it was before. That might even be a good thing – “20/20 vision” bought many of us squinting into the light. But with very little accountability for those who made everything worse, the lessons of that period remain frustratingly unresolved.

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Reading some of last week's op-eds on the anniversary, it's clear that we live in interesting times—not in the “exciting” sense, but in the fractured, disorienting sense. There is no shared reality, no single information field. Competing narratives swirl in parallel, with almost no overlap. Disciples of every theory cling tightly to their explanations of what we just experienced, and their conclusions are often completely contradictory, as if existing in separate universes.

Take, for example, New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells. He recently offered a condensed version of the pandemic’s fallout, but his take is simplistic and fails to acknowledge plausible counter-explanations for many of his conclusions.