Pandemic notes 7.0: The selective nihilism of Death Race ’21

by David Benjamin

“A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

PARIS — Day before yesterday, according to the news, the global daily average for new cases of SARS-CoV-2 was 515,571. In America, 2,363 people died of the disease — overnight. Despite these persistently fearful numbers, I still have friends and relatives — twenty-odd months into a plague that has buried, at last count, 229,547,353 people worldwide — who treat Covid-19 as either a hoax, a case of liberal hysteria, a mere bagatelle, or all three.

Anti-vaxers tend to explain this blithe brushoff of a pandemic whose depredations rival the Great Influenza and the Black Death — 679,000 deceased Americans — by asserting a sort of disassociation. “Oh, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I’m feeling just fine. Nary a sniffle.” It’s as though they’re shielded by a sort of electromagnetic aura, off which the virus bounces like warheads off the Mother Ship.

Common among refuseniks is an apparent belief that one’s refusal to acknowledge the pandemic is a neutral choice of no concern to anyone else, an exercise of individual liberty that exalts their integrity. This principle consoles and unites the 80 million infectable, transmissible, vulnerable and mutant-available Americans who scoff at the needle. This is a solipsism not only unChristian in its disdain for the weak, the sick, the aged and the outcast. It is manifestly unAmerican in its contempt for “a more perfect union,” “domestic tranquility” and “the general welfare” — all of which precede, in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, “the blessings of liberty.”

Most curious in the denialism of the pro-Covid community is the conviction that no one else is possibly harmed by the presence of maskless disease carriers circulating among our children. No one else, they suggest (without exactly saying), could get sick from us ’cause we ain’t sick and we ain’t gonna get sick. Besides, they remind us, kids are immune. They doubt, strenuously, the inevitable emergence, from within their own tissues, of a new variant that figures out a pathway past even the youngest and strongest immune systems, the mutation that can start killing thousands of little kids.

Let me try a less melodramatic example of how the unjabbed, especially in a nation that’s hip-deep in vaccine vials, affects other folks’ lives — like mine.

I’m in Paris now, via Madison, Chicago and Brussels, the sort of journey I used to arrange online in thirty minutes, but one that now takes days and resembles a beach assault through barbed-wire barriers strung with red tape. To get on board an airplane — despite being fully Pfizered — I had to change my airline and my route to Brussels at the last minute, costing an extra $200. I was responding to suddenly heightened restrictions against Americans who set foot, even to merely change aircraft, in Great Britain. Along the way, I’ve had to take PCR tests, at $60 each. I’ve been surveilled and nagged by the newly formed and predictably incompetent Belgian Covid Police. My wife, equally Pfizered — with papers to prove it — had to leave a Paris café because she had yet to obtain her official European Union pass sanitaire. She ended up getting one, for another €20, at a Covid speakeasy on rue Calvaire where pass-deprived foreigners were lined up like hipsters at Sal’s Pizza on Saturday night.

None of these hassles threatened either our lives or our health. But they would have been either unlikely or non-existent were we flying to Europe from an America that posed little or no threat of contagion. We wear the stigma insinuated into our passports by 80 million public-health agnostics.

I say agnostic, but more accurately, the anti-vaxers of the pro-Covid club practice, in faith and inaction, what might be called selective nihilism. In their complacent philosophy, they choose to deny any fact or policy that fails to satisfy a set of immutable prejudices that are conveniently — and not very coherently — unique the the individual philosopher.

Let’s try an extreme but pertinent example. A common breed of selective nihilist is your devotee of racial hatred, whose greatest hardship is that he must exist in an increasingly diverse American melting-pot that puts him in frequent proximity to the many mongrels he abhors.
Inevitably, he’s bound to stumble into an encounter with one of his racial enemies that challenges his hate — an unsought act of kindness, a helping hand in an emergency, a moment of modest heroism, a speech that fills even the confirmed bigot with grudging inspiration.

Here, the true test of selective nihilism is the power to shrug off (without thanks) the intercession of the non-white Samaritan, to disregard the eloquence of the subhuman orator as either an accident or a case of clever simian mimicry. The devout bigot treats an occasion of grace and kindness by a despised inferior — however frequent — as the anomaly that proves his rule, as a fleeting phenomenon like phosphorescent swamp gas or an eclipse of the moon.

The bigot selects information that suits his fancy. He seeks out none that stick in his craw. He sees his every human encounter through hate-tinted lenses. He remains unchanged, unchangeable, adamant and pure.
Mind you, this tightly focused world-negation is not an active or inquisitive sort of philosophy. It’s the sort of belief that only speaks — typically in righteous, inarticulate rage — when aroused from an almost constant state of hibernation.

This is the nihilism of the non-communal anti-vax community. Its devotees assiduously elide the blunt factuality of the disease they’ve chosen — either politically or indifferently — to ignore (until they catch it). In self-defense, they cite factoids — that Anthony Fauci, for example, briefly de-emphasized the need for masks, in February 2020. They memorize scientific terms, both popular and arcane, that bolster their denials, reinforce their suspicions and magically suggest a non-vaccine cure — words like convalescent plasma, hydroxychloroquine, comorbidity, ivermectin, monoclonal, immunocompromised, remdesivir and, just for fun, loop-mediated isothermal amplification!

Of course, the word to which vaccine nihilists cling like limpets is “freedom,” which serves as camouflage for a shorter, meaner word: “me.” Spouting freedom gives license to claim an exceptionalism which — with 80 million co-religionists — is less exceptional than, say, Mormonism. It is an invocation that sanctifies their defiance of enemies — doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, the president — whose only offense is trying to keep everyone “free” from sickness, death and grief.