Reality Exists and It Matters: A Selection from Nicholas A. Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow (2020)
“Truth is another casualty of plague. Some of the most damaging and self-injurious responses to an epidemic are denial and lies. Deadly epidemics always drag along these sidekicks. Unfortunately, modern media technologies provide a bonanza of disinformation, the sort of thing that charlatans of earlier epochs could only dream of. . . .
Many experts who had previously opined that schools had to close and that even small funerals were dangerous now seemed willing to overlook the risks of mass gatherings for a just cause they supported politically. To be fair, most of the protesters wore masks and the protests were outdoors, which is much less risky. But the public health messaging was inconsistent. At roughly the same time, despite rapidly rising case counts, various governors reopened their states. In Tennessee in early June, the governor loosened restrictions, allowing fairs and parades. ‘Thanks to the continued hard work of Tennesseans and business owners operating responsibly, we’re able to further reopen our state’s economy,’ Governor Bill Lee intoned optimistically. But the virus does not care whether our reason for assembling is a protest, a funeral, or a parade. . . .
There are many people, and not just those in positions of power, who have persuaded themselves that reality is ‘socially constructed’—that there is no objective reality, there is only that which we define using human faculties. This is a deeply interesting philosophical idea. But this has also led to the belief that we can change reality by manipulating words or images: if we call something by a different name, it actually is different. This is only partly true, in a narrow sense. The virus is real and it does not care how we see it or what we say about it. Throughout the pandemic—from the beginning, when political figures across the world and across the United States thought it could be denied or wished away by positive statements, to right- and left-wing protests in the spring and summer of 2020 that seemed to reflect the belief that the virus was gone or would not affect people too much as long as their cause was just—this sort of thinking prevailed.
But reality matters. One analysis estimates that, if control measures such as physical distancing had been implemented just one week earlier in the United States, the nation would have seen 61.6 percent fewer reported infections and 55.0 percent fewer reported deaths by May 3, 2020. Although responsibility for the pandemic cannot be placed solely on the shoulders of any single person, group, or institution—and the United States was not the only country to downplay early-warning signs of the virus—one of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic is that some of the worst outcomes could have been avoided had our predicament been acknowledged and acted upon at the appropriate time.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of the Coronavirus on the Way We Live (2020)
