Our Lives, Someone Else’s History
A Historian Reflects on Living Through Pandemic
Whenever I end up talking about the Peloponnesian War, I, of course, talk about Pericles’ grand strategy to defeat the Spartans. You know the one. In those days, Athens’ “long walls” stretched from the city to its port at Piraeus, ensuring a steady supply of food from the ocean. He called in the farmers from their fields, told them to hang out in the city, and to let the Spartan army burn what it would. Eventually, they’d get bored and go home, lacking anything like siege equipment. It wasn’t a bad plan, but it had one flaw. What Pericles had not counted on was, well, pandemic. In 430–429 BCE, plague broke out in Athens and spread rapidly among the sheltering population. Pericles himself was one of the victims.
As a historian, I always try to put flesh on the past. That’s a jaunty — or perhaps macabre — phrase for it, but I think it’s a necessity. The past happened, often a very long time ago, and I think it generally feels, at first glance, like that was the only way it could have happened. So it is with closed books: nobody opens them and writes them different. But before the plague of Athens, there was a moment when there was no plague in Athens, when Pericles, in the face of war, decided on a plan that he thought might work. He and the Athenians lived through it while it was happening, and so did the Spartans outside. That was their lot. What will our lot be? Who could say? Right now, it feels like if we all can stay in our houses — if they let us stay in our houses — we can minimize this catastrophe, and then, somebody, somewhere, will solve the problem, more or less. I don’t know if it could have felt like that in the fifth century BCE, before anyone had heard of a vaccine. Maybe it did.
One thing I often tell my students — a reason I am not a joy to have at cocktail parties — is that the one thing nobody ever really expects to happen but that happens all the time is powerful disjunctive change. When we, sitting here in twenty-first-century America rather than fifth-century Athens, think about our world changing, we might tend to think about who will win the presidential election, or whether the economy will go up or down. We don’t think about not having a president, or not having an economy. But we could. There is, for example, no longer an emperor in Rome, or in Nineveh for that matter. Someday, there won’t be a Wall Street either, and the White House, like Nero’s Gold House (Domus Aurea) will be a relic, if anyone knows where it is.
In the second direction, a lot of people expect coronavirus to fundamentally change how we live our lives, even maybe a little like what I’ve just described. I will be honest with you that I do not and have not. I have seen all the articles about how we will be sheltering in place for 18 months, or doing it in shifts, or whatever. But even before Trump started talking about packing the pews for Easter, I really doubted it. But I think that, because of the fact that we are currently listening to scientists and experts, some people got tricked into thinking that this is a normal thing for the government to do, or a likely thing for it to keep doing, now that it’s gotten into the habit.
You can think about climate change: the scientific recommendations are clear as a diving bell, and, to top it off, we now have multiple disasters every year that have either never happened before or are supposed to happen about once a century. But politicians on both sides of the aisle — if one more than the other — thought for a little about whether it was worth it to change our economy even a little in order to save the world and decided no. Now they’re saying the same things about the coronavirus — literally the same things.
And I think some people think this will change us so dramatically because, as an old Philosophy of History person might put it, they believe the definition of an “event” is fixed in some way. They believe, we might say, that once coronavirus has done whatever it is going to do to us, it will have been obvious what it did to us, and there will be consequences for the fact that this was allowed to happen. But let me put it to you this way. Shortly before I started writing this, Ron Johnson, Wisconsin senator, said that stopping business for a while, even though right now “only” 3.4% of people who get this disease are dying, would be like stopping driving because tens of thousands of people die in car accidents every year. Senator Ron flunks math. Scientists predict that, without intervention, as many as 80% of the world’s population could get the disease. 80% of 327 million, our current population, is 261 million. 3.4% of 261 million is almost 9 million people. 9,000,000 > 10,000.
But here’s the thing: do you think Senator Ron, if he survives, is incapable of dramatically understating how bad it all is while it is happening or after it happens? I think that he is very capable, and that lots of people will help him do that. Something other than what happens will literally seem to have happened, very quickly, to lots of people. If it weren’t bad enough that the defining reality of the Trump era is scandals that never land (remember the insider trading that happened like three minutes ago)? The twenty-first century is when we all became gods, able to reshape reality itself with the power of our minds. Some people are not using it responsibly.
And so this is, very probably, not the thing that kills business as usual, because business has rarely been more powerful, and it does not want to be killed. It does not want people who will kill it to be elected, it does not want laws to be passed to impede it, and recessions only make it more powerful, as the corporations that survive gobble up everything else. And as for us, we are adaptable. We get used to things. People don’t want to believe that millions can die, and business can go on as usual, but that, in many ways, is business’ business. On we go. Down the hatch.
And yet, change will come someday — real change. Powerful, disjunctive change. It always does. Something comes after this — really after. The way we are after ancient Rome, and ancient Greece, the way we are after nationalism turned up, and antibiotics, and the United Nations. Somebody in that world to come will learn about us in school, maybe, and how it was, a long time ago. America and the EU, China and the rest. Someday, some professors may try to bring us to life, like we do to Greece and Rome, if they are good at their jobs. They may talk about this pandemic the way we talk about the Antonine Plague, or something similar — what caused it, how bad it was, why it ended. The past, unreconstructed, looks like numbers on a chart, words on a page. And we are already going there, one day at a time. We just don’t know it yet. And so, we are in it, not after it, as the blow begins to hit. We are in the city of Athens, making up our minds about what to do next.
We are living through a national tragedy like our ancestors before us. How few and far between the generations that have known only peace and prosperity, if ever there was such a thing. We are living through events that will become someone else’s history, but they are not yet history. They are our lives, as history was always someone’s life first. When the walls closed in on Athens, just as much as with whatever happens next, now. There is always a moment before whatever happens happens — when it is about to happen, then, when it is happening. We are in that last one now, a happening whose shape is yet to be determined. And some of what happens will be man-made — maybe a lot of it, even apart from the fact that the president kept us from getting prepared because he didn’t want to look bad.
After all, won’t social democracies weather this same crisis much better? There is a lot of talk about what we need to do, to keep ourselves safe, and we must do them — but we have to keep in mind we will not get to do them in Bernie Sanders’ or Elizabeth Warren’s America. We are in Trump and Mitch McConnell’s America, and even if we do this social distancing right, we will have to live through it with whatever kind of short-term, means-tested relief someone can wrestle past Mitch McConnell — let’s say 500 dollars if you own a second residence and can answer three riddles, each more fiendish than the last. I’m not smart enough to figure out what the first (only?) relief bill does and does not do yet, but I do know that as soon as the Democrats painfully wrested some oversight concessions from Republicans, Trump signed a waiver saying he wasn’t interested in them, and that appears to be that.
So, these are not only very hard times, but they will be much harder than they should be because of who is in charge of our government, and how our economy works. I could never be, or imagine being someone who valued the health of the economy over anyone’s life, but it is still true that if you lose your health care because you lose your job, there’s lots of stuff you can die of, especially if the hospital beds are full. Or you could lose everything else: your ability to pay a mortgage (more likely your rent), all your money, your credit, your financial future for decades to come. That these are man-made problems that a vote in the Senate tomorrow could at least help defray doesn’t change the fact that they will happen.
But here is a second thing I tell my students. You can often chart the anxieties of a decade by who the bad guys are in movies. This isn’t an iron rule but, for example, when they first made Red Dawn, the bad guys were mostly the Russians. In the remake, starring Thor, it was mostly the North Koreans. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out why. But what that means is that movies about space aliens are actually pretty often about world peace. You understand? Since the bad guys are from somewhere else, all of us down here can be together on one side. There is no more American scene in all of world cinema than Bill Pullman telling a valiant cadre of marines, ex-marines, and Randy Quaid that from now on, July 4th will be everybody’s Independence Day. But American or otherwise, all of us on one side and something alien on the other is hopeful — a vision of something better.
In hard times, which we cannot control, we are in this together, those of us who want to be and do not hold the levers of power. The virus and our government are not doing right by us, so we are trying to do right by each other. We will be marked by it — some of us will even die of it — but we try to be brave because, well, it’s happening, and it won’t make it any better not to be brave when we can. Something very bad is happening. But someone, somewhere is developing a vaccine. Someone is bringing their life’s work to bear on this. Someone is figuring out which medicines slow this virus down and tire it out, and how fast they can get them to us. And beyond that, the rest of us, doing little things: paying for services we don’t want to use this month, or ordering takeout or delivery from restaurants we want to save, if we can.
Somewhere, someone is so tired and heading back to their shift, and someone else, who doesn’t know them, is ordering food and coffee to be delivered. Someone is doing more than they can, more than they ever have before, and someone else is picking up the slack at home, so desperately afraid and desperately proud. A physician, a nurse, a janitor go to work all day, and when they come home, they sleep apart from their family — they might have it, who knows? They are doing it for us. They go on, whether the government is serving them well or far too poorly. Someone can’t go on, and someone else is doing anything they can to give them a break. Someone is there for them, too minute for histories. They’re all the same. And there have always been people there, doing what they can in a time when no one could do enough. That connects us, each to each — those we study, and those who will study us, and those who are alive today.
A third and final thing I tell my students. At no point in their earliest years did anyone tell my grandparents that they would have to do most of their growing up during the Great Depression. Nobody told them World War II was coming or that my grandfather would be drafted into it. They didn’t know. They didn’t expect it. They were living normal lives until history opened up like a pit beneath them. And that was what that part of their life was like. And on a larger scale — because the human mind has barely changed in a hundred thousand years, let alone three thousand — one day you’re in a toga, the next in polyester. Life is different, and so much the same.
Something does come after this, macro and micro. There will even be more things like this in our times, the ones we grace with our presence. We who are born into these times are sharing a luminous puddle in the midst of an infinity, having had the luck, good or bad, to be born within some decades of each other, despite the vastness of time itself. The edges of our puddle blur into a darkness, the light moving on down the line, imperceptibly slow — for now. But though those who come after us will live in different times, they will not — not yet — live in different worlds. Their times, too, will veer away into paths where they’d rather not go and did not expect, paths that interrupt the normal functioning of things. They will do what they can with them, as we are doing with these. And maybe they will write about us after all — not that we’ll know.
For now, our present problems. God, I hope they get better soon, and we make it through as well as we can. But we are in this together, we have always been in this together, even if everyone is not in it together with us. We are together against it all, against the cruelty of the times that play host to us, on our way through, and even through the fights we were born to lose. We are together for the ones we can win, no matter how long it takes, and we’ll catch the boulder as it rolls downhill, if we can. We are not better than our ancestors, and they are not better than us; there is only the story that goes on towards its end. A change will come, time will roll on, but for now: now.
Andrew Tobolowsky is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary. He is socially isolating with his wife and a small but fierce dog named Pancake.
