COVID Is the Best Thing That Happened in 2020
By: Luca Rossi
Tags: Coronavirus, Philosophy, Covid 19, Society, Future

COVID Is the Best Thing That Happened in 2020

In the not too distant future, we may look at 2020 with gratitude.

Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

Do you know what’s worse than having writer’s block? Having so many ideas that they paralyze you and you end up writing nothing. That’s what happened to me in the past two months.

I had the idea of writing this story one month ago, when two things happened. First, I read the book Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and I recommend you read it as well if you can withstand the author’s cockiness. Second, I read the Italian interview from La Repubblica with Biden’s adviser Michael Osterholm, who said that the next pandemic will be worse. Well, they call him “Bad News Mike”, but he is sadly right.

Then it hit me: that’s what I should talk about. That’s what we should all be talking about. It’s happening right now, and we are all wondering when we will get the vaccine or take off our masks or going back to having nothing to talk about with our barbers. But we fail to see the big picture.

If there is one thing that all of humanity seems to agree on, is that 2020 sucked.

It’s not that I disagree, but I’m convinced that the 2020 suckiness was a price worth paying for less sucky years in the prospect. COVID isn’t a curse, it’s a blessing.

It took me one month to find the courage to write this little story, but here it is.

That Damn Bat Soup

Alright, it was probably a pangolin, but bat soup sounds funnier.

Photo by Todd Cravens on Unsplash

Sometimes, when I’m bored, I do what all normal people do: challenge myself with moral dilemmas.

My favorite types of moral dilemmas are those that have contradicting answers whether you choose Virtue Ethics or Utilitarianism as your moral framework. Don’t worry, this is not a philosophy lesson (and I’m no philosopher), but I will give you a very informal definition for our purposes: according to Virtue Ethics, you are good if your intentions are good; according to Utilitarianism, you are good if the consequences of your actions are good.

As a society, we judge people according to Virtue Ethics (and Deontology, but let’s keep things simple), not Utilitarianism. And that’s probably the right way to do so, even from a Utilitarian perspective (the reason why I say this goes beyond the purposes of this story. I will probably tell you another time).

Nobody should punish Johann Kuehberger for saving a 4-year-old from drowning in a river in 1894. His intentions were virtuous. Except that, well, that 4-year-old ended up to be a certain failed painter who made a mustache style very unpopular.

While Virtue Ethics is probably the best framework to judge people, Utilitarianism should be the one to implement in decision-making. What’s the point in being good if you don’t do good?

That said, those types of dilemmas can touch us personally in this pandemic. Imagine that you are 25 and you get COVID. It’s probably not going to kill you. But now you can infect other people. According to Utilitarianism, you have a responsibility for each person you infect. And for those that are infected by them. And so on. Eventually, following the tree of infections that originated from you, somebody may die, and their death is on you. Sorry for ruining your day :)

According to this logic, that guy or gal who ate the infamous bat soup should feel pretty shitty about themselves, and probably should stop trying to be good altogether. All the deaths, the economical crisis, the psychological issues from social isolation, are all on that person.

Of course, they are the cause, it doesn’t mean they have a fault. It’s not like I want to punch that person in the face. As far as we know, they were blissfully unaware that they were going to cause a pandemic. But according to Utilitarianism, this doesn’t matter. They are just bad.

Are they?

Well, there is probably still hope for the bat eater. That hope comes in two forms.

One is the replaceability theory. Again, let’s not get too technical: this theory basically says that you are not responsible for the consequences of your actions if they would have happened anyway without your involvement. If patient zero didn’t eat that soup, that soup would have been eaten by someone else, and COVID might have happened anyway.

The weird thing about Utilitarianism is that it’s not a zero-sum game. Many people may be equally (but totally) responsible for the same consequences (e.g. all the people down an infection chain), or nobody may be responsible (in the case of replaceability theory).

Anyway, no more philosophy. I needed to make this introduction because the rest of my point relies on a Utilitarian perspective (i.e. we will judge the impact of COVID by its direct and indirect consequences).

One intuitive way to judge an action according to Utilitarianism is to simulate two universes: one universe where you perform that action, and one where you don’t. Compare them, and pick the best one: if it’s the one where you performed the action, you are a good boi.

The second form of hope for the bat eater is in the long-term consequences. COVID did a lot of damage so far, that’s for sure. But is it possible that, in the long-term, second-order consequences will have better outcomes in the COVID universe rather than in the non-COVID one?

I think this is just the case. And the bat eater is probably a hero.

The Titanic, Antifragility, and the Power of Fucking Things Up

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In the beginning I mentioned Antifragile. In this book, Taleb defines the concept of antifragility as the opposite of fragility: the capability of a system to gain from disorder. The classic example is natural evolution: life evolves and becomes more complex not despite changes in the environment, but because of changes in the environment.

An antifragile system is made of many fragile units. The failure of many of those small units allows for the survival of the strongest ones, making the whole system stronger. Another example is capitalism: many businesses fail so that a few can survive and thrive. The wealth generated by those few successful businesses is far greater than the losses made by the many unsuccessful ones, and the whole system gets stronger.

The same principle can be applied when evaluating events from a Utilitarian perspective.

If history is indeed an antifragile system, we can expect that small bad events lead to a stronger society, and this seems to be exactly the case.

Take the Titanic, for example. With 1,500 casualties, it was surely a tragedy. But think about what happened next. Security standards and procedures had to improve drastically to minimize the probability of something similar happening again.

Imagine an alternative universe where the Titanic never sunk. At that time, people thought that the Titanic was unsinkable. They would have never improved security standards, at least not by much, and there would have been less strict limits on passenger capacity.

But technology would have improved regardless. Ships would have gotten bigger. There were 2,240 passengers on the Titanic. Imagine a ship built 50 years later, with 10,000 passengers, but with the same fragility of the Titanic. If it sunk, it would have killed more people.

Sooner or later, disasters are bound to happen. The problem is not whether a disaster happens, but the scale of its damage when it happens. Usually, the earlier it happens, the smaller the damage is.

The same can be said, for example, for plane crashes, for side effects in drugs, for terrorist attacks.

An antifragile system is made of many fragile parts that have to fail on their own, for the entire system to get stronger. You may not like it (I sure don’t), but that’s how it works. Sacrifices are necessary to build a strong antifragile system.

When we put things in perspective by looking at our past and future history, we realize that COVID is bad, but not THAT bad. It’s bad because both its infection rate and lethality are higher than the flu. But it’s not that bad, because the survival rate is very high. This pandemic will eventually end, and history will go on.

In the 21st century, we are better equipped to handle epidemics than in the past, but we can also expect more of them, even in this decade. With two pandemics going on at the same time (COVID and AIDS), it would be naive to think that we won’t have others in the following years.

On October 29, 2020 the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) issued a report proposing a plan to lower the risk for future pandemics. The report claims that we are anthropogenically paving the way to a new “era of pandemics”, through the destruction of biodiversity and climate change. Most animals (especially birds and mammals) will be forced to migrate, potentially transmitting as many as 850,000 viruses to humans.

This is especially relevant now in the 21st century, when we are more overpopulated and interconnected than ever.

So the bad news is that a pandemic worse than COVID will eventually happen. Way worse. Maybe even worse than the Black Death. We can even go extinct because of a pandemic, pandemics are probably our most likely cause of extinction after unaligned Artificial Intelligence.

COVID was a blessing because it was a sort of test for humanity. We can learn our lessons from this pandemic and apply them to the next ones.

When we will get the next Black Death, it will suck, but we will hopefully make use of the lessons we learned with COVID. In a parallel universe without COVID and those lessons, that Black Death would be way worse.

Of course, provided that we do learn those lessons, in epidemiology, medicine, sociology, policy-making, etc. About that last point, I’m pretty disappointed about how my government (and probably others) are handling things now.

After about a year of dealing with this pandemic, I can safely say that we fucked up, and continue to do so. Of course, “fucked up” is relative, because some it could have been worse (hey, we got a vaccine now!), but it could have been a lot better too.

But I’m still optimistic that this is not for nothing. We humans have a whole history of learning from our mistakes. Humans fuck up, that’s their thing. And they learn fast, even if sometimes history seems to repeat itself.

Mistakes high in scale are way worse than mistakes high in frequency. That’s why it’s good to fail fast when the scale is still small.

This is my two cents on why I think that COVID is, in perspective, a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, if you lost some loved ones, I’m truly sorry. But you probably may get a bit of comfort knowing that they didn’t die in vain. They are the unsung heroes that will save us from the next crisis.

Let’s just hope I’m right.

Happy New Year!

Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

And remember to keep your mask over your nose, not under 😷