Epidemic of Fear

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Virus in the Age of Madness. Steven B. Kennedy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

 

 

What shocked Bernard-Henri Lévy about the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 “was not the pandemic” itself—influenza pandemics also killed millions, in the last century—but “the very strange way we reacted this time around,” the way much of mankind succumbed to an “epidemic of fear”—indeed, to “the First World Fear.” “The entire planet—rich and poor alike, those with the resources to resist and those without—pounced on the idea of an unprecedented pandemic poised to eradicate the human race.” Not the physical-medical crisis but the attendant moral-political crisis disturbs him. Borrowing the language of Foucault, Lévy finds the chill of the “medical gaze,” which treats persons as bodies takes the hospital as a model for society itself, far graver than the fever caused by the virus.

An experienced ‘public intellectual,’ Lévy’s rhetorical approach can only be admired. Speaking primarily as a man of the Left to the Left, he repeatedly denounces U.S. President Donald Trump (“impossible and unhinged,” “irresponsible,” “hapless,” a man “trampling the Constitution,” “pulling dirty tricks,” and “light[ing] America on fire”—somewhere between Richard Nixon and a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse). This will surely inoculate him against criticism from that flank, and much-needed that prophylactic is, because the argument he advances puts him far closer to Trump than it does to Trump’s opponent in the presidential election campaign. Lévy gives former Vice President Joseph Biden a kindly and shrewd pat on the shoulder, saying he’s conducted his campaign “with courage and a level head,” while consistently departing from the Democrat’s masked-up public persona and his clamp-down approach to civil-social discipline. 

With Trump, Lévy knows that the world of medical research, like all parts of the academic world, “is a Kampfplatz, a battlefield, a free-for-all no less messy than the one Immanuel Kant bemoaned in metaphysics.” (Well, admittedly, Trump would omit the learned references, but he’s been saying the same thing.) Like Trump, Lévy “know[s] that listening to the ones who know, if we are indeed talking about scientists, is tantamount to listening to a nonstop quarrel and, if the listeners is a government, to inviting Fireworks and Chaos to sit at the king’s table.” “The emperor has no clothes, even if he is a physician. Especially if he is a physician.” Because would-be physician-emperors would rule the political communities the way they rule their wards and operating rooms. “There is a doctrine of hygienics that goes something like this: health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action.” Unfortunately, “the effects of that doctrine can be horribly perverse,” as seen in the last century, when hygienics became eugenics.

Plato’s Socrates saw the problem, Lévy notes. In the Statesman, the interlocutors consider “passing on the physician the responsibility for leading the human flock if the divine pastor drops the ball.” After all, the physician will see “the structural analogy between the animal body and the civic body,” with the head serving as ruler of the one, the “leader” serving as ruler of the other; “the same word, epimeleia…designates the care owed to the first and the administration at work in the second.” Yet Socrates finally demurs. “Politics, he says, is an art that, since the retreat of the gods, deals with a chaotic, changing world, swept by storms and rudderless.” “Difficult times” cause for “citizens-guardians possessing the audacity and strength to think through, carve into stone, and proclaim legal ‘codes.'” Masters of the art of the deal, the politikoi exhibit not only Trumplike smarts but Trumplike decision and determination, evidently even to the point of issuing executive orders. Physicians “might well have extended the health emergency until hell froze over,” but, as we all know and as Lévy shrewdly passes over in silence, Trump has wanted to ‘open up the economy.’ Like Trump, and, belatedly, like French President Emmanuel Macron, it is best to heed “the Platonic recommendation to rely, simply, on the Republic”—not so much raw public opinion but public opinion as refined and enlarged by the people’s representatives. “The republican authorities have grasped that, though the physicians are real heroes in one essential arena, they are neither God the Father nor the archons of a city in the grip of a new plague.” Despite “public opinion,” which “clearly wanted to see medicine calling the shots” (at least in France), one really must avoid “an incestuous union of the political and medical powers, a union that would have been not only incestuous but fatal for both partners, according to Foucault” and not only Foucault, given the irony with which Socrates treats his own proposal to make philosophers kings. Can there be any doubt that President Trump would respond to a proposal to make kings of philosophers, or of physicians, with anything other than a mocking ‘tweet’?

Having shrewdly put himself on Trump’s side while maintaining his bona fides with his audience, Lévy devotes many more of his pages to criticisms of, well, his audience. He skewers those who find ‘good’ in the pandemic, which has left our great cities so peaceful and clean and provides a convenient tool for political agitators. “‘A warning’ from nature, said one, demanding a transition to a world less destructive of biodiversity. ‘An ultimatum,’ said another, from a mistreated Gaia whose patience had worn thin. And, from all of them, servility with respect to the virus” or, perhaps more precisely, a demand for servility with respect to their own proposed policies. Having come to prominence as a firm critic of Communist tyranny during the Cold War, author of the seminal Barbarism with a Human Face at a time when much of the French Left in particular and the European Left generally sought to appease it, Lévy sees in the calls to suspend the ‘world economy’ nothing better than “the old Marxist refrain of the final crisis of capitalism in her morning-after guise of collapsology, or one of the children’s diseases of socialism updated as disasterism.” These socialist “profiteers of the virus” look for a scapegoat, finding it (as usual) in capitalism. Lévy prefers prudence. “To the extent possible, we had to calculate the numbers of lives saved by shutting down the world and compare it with the number imperiled by the shutdown.” It is, after all, “important not to be intimidated by the ultimately false opposition between ‘life’ and ‘the economy,’ but to compare the cost, in lives, of the spread of the virus with the cost of the self-induced coma triggered in a plan that was transformed suddenly into a laboratory for a radical political experiment.” “The only way” to do that “was to launch a major democratic debate and to get into detail, not about diverting utopias concerning the world after, but about the concrete measures to be implemented here and now in the world during.” 

“This was the first time we had ever seen all of the critical minds in the far-left galaxy applaud a state of emergency.” (True enough in the West, perhaps, although in Russia, in China, and in many other places under Communist rule, states of emergency were routinized, excusing the extermination of innumerable “harmful insects,” as Lenin unsentimentally put it.) “All of my life I have fought against the trap of secular religiosity,” even as his distinguished predecessor Alexis de Tocqueville had done, contemplating the Hegelians, Marxists, and race theorists of his own time. 

When “confronted with obscurantism with a scientific face,” one should recall “two things.” First, “viruses are dumb; they are blind; they are not here to tell us their stories or to relay the stories of humanity’s bad shepherds”; hence “there is no ‘good use,’ no ‘societal lesson,’ no last judgment’ to be expected from a pandemic.” Second, medical questions and their implications for policy are “much murkier than we have been led to believe over the past few months.” Such questions and implications necessarily address not only the body but the human soul. And we are no longer so adept at considering matters of the soul as we once were.

For example, those who have welcomed the peace and quiet of pandemic life will quote Pascal: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” Yes, but for Pascal quietude “was not an indulgence but a struggle.” Hobbies and yoga sessions were not what he had in mind. Following Paul the Apostle, Pascal said, “The self is hateful,” no many how many times one may chant ‘OM’ in search of serenity. Navel-gazing complacency is “indecent in the extreme,” insulting “to those who did not have a home to stay in” and affirming no real spiritual insights but instead orchestrating “a philharmonic of trivialities, minor pleasures, and drumrolls of well-tempered narcissism.” Such a pseudo-spiritual of epicureanism “flew in the face of Greek wisdom, which, from Aristotle on, held that man was a political animal.” It ignored that decidedly introverted ‘modern,’ René Descartes, who touched base with the moment of his cogito ergo sum only in order to fortify the “zest for the sciences, for medicine, for ethics… for intellectual speculation, for friendship, and for the world.” And it dismissed the ‘postmodern’ Edmund Husserl, who insisted that “consciousness is always conscious of something, that existence is rooted in intentionality, and that what is interesting about a given subject is not what he is but what he does and, in doing what he does, how he inhabits the world, shapes it, takes from it, and gives to it.” ‘Social distancing’? “Shaking hands was a fine gesture of civility,” a “sign of republican solidarity promoted by the American Revolution, the spirit of democracy,” and even the “peace-loving Quakers,” whom George Washington deemed useful American citizens, even if they refused to defend the republic in war. 

Neither genuinely philosophic nor genuinely political, our quietists fare no better under the gaze informed by Scripture. “Prophecy is inherently an act of exposure to another intelligence, and even a radically different one, since it is God’s.” The prophet “step[s] outside” of himself. He calls his people to do the same, to leave the comfortable servility of Egypt, to risk everything in a land God has promised for them. The example of prophecy has marked Jews ever since. “A liberal, universalist, humanist Jew” will “experience confinement with oneself only as a regrettably temporary state, one that, if it were to endure, would be starkly contrary to his vocation, which is to move toward his fellow men.” The Orthodox Jew, for his part, must “acquire a master, because there is no shaping of the self without a searing exposure to one who knows more than you”; “study is done in pairs, as philosophy was for Plato.” Torah study is war, and war is more than a tempest in the teapot of the ‘self.’ Contra Sartre, “hell is not other people, but the self,” confined as it is in its resentments, its envies, its sour isolation. The Muharal of Prague went even further, teaching that “hell is the body,” a trap for the spirit longing for freedom, a thing of “opaque matter” under “the sway of medical power.” On that note of Jewish neo-Platonism, Lévy deplores the oversight of the French, who took to hoarding food when news of the pandemic first appeared. “Few seemed shocked, at least in France, that books were not considered basic necessities,” that bodily nourishment seemed more important to a republican citizenry than “nourishment for the mind and the soul.”

The closing of churches and synagogues, museums and parks “and other sites of lay meditation in which humanity satisfies its uncountable noncommercializable spiritual needs” followed from the same mindset. “The sight of a sovereign Pope, heir to John Paul II’s ‘Be not afraid’ and a veteran practitioner of the eminently Catholic ritual of the blessing of the sick and afflicted in the slums of Buenos Aires, distancing himself from the flock, communicating only through the internet ordering that fonts of holy water be emptied, and performing the stations of the cross in the courtyard of the basilica facing an empty St. Peter’s Square” erased “the Jewish image of the Messiah waiting among the scrofulous beggars outside the gates of Rome” and forgets “Jesus’s healing of the leper.” Charles de Gaulle proved himself a better Catholic than the pope when visiting Tahiti in 1956, two years before assuming the presidency of the republic. Lévy remembers a news clip he saw as a child: De Gaulle’s “limousine is blocked by a procession of lepers. He gets out, shakes their hands, holds a child in his arms, hugs the organizer of the strange demonstration, says nothing, and continues on his way.”

Not only has the response of governments to the virus further abridged citizens’ liberty by collecting still more personal data “that everyone knows can be put to bad uses,” but “living in a perpetual state of alert and suspicion” undermines trust among those citizens, the trust that enables them to associate with one another, to resist government encroachments, to sustain republican regimes. This is “a life terrified of itself, gone to ground in its Kafkaesque burrow, which has become a penal colony,” a life “in which one accepts, with enthusiasm or resignation the transformation of the welfare state into the surveillance state,” already far advanced in communist China, with Europe not too far behind. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and the ‘panopticon’ of the surveillance state.” This can only cause “a profound break… with all the wisdom of the world, notably but by no means exclusively Jewish,” which says “that a life is not a life if it is merely life.” Books are basic necessities, and the Book of Books joins with the books of the philosophers in telling us “that humanity is never identity in and for itself, never reducible to itself,” but thrives “only if…it leaves the confinement that is life in its native state.” In Biblical terms, to bow down before the virus is idolatry, worship of the Baal of the twenty-first century. Under that dispensation, the lion will indeed lie down with the lamb—on “an animal farm” ruled by tyrants underneath the figurehead king of terrors, the newly-crowned virus.

Idolatry means worship of man-made things. “Ironclad egoism” undergirds “COVID-inspired moralism.” Even the Left, perhaps especially the Left, should understand that the policies in place in most countries hardly conduce to greater civil-social and political equality. The Islamic State, Erdogan of Turkey, Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China all have taken the distraction caused by the virus as an opportunity to enhance their own powers at home and abroad. America withdraws from the world, leaving it to the likes of them. The enemies of the United States, “which are the enemies of freedom, are crashing through the world as if America no longer counts for anything, carries no weight, no longer exists.” Without the United States, “the globalization of the twenty-first century will be Chinese or will not happen at all.” 

Against that harsh prospect, Lévy looks not to Karl Marx or Carl Schmitt but to the “somber but committed souls who had fought the beast with bare hands” in the Spanish Civil War—the American Ernest Hemingway, France’s André Malraux. “They were, in our eyes, the most admirable of men because they were both present in the world and present in words, combining the art of the fighter with that of the poet.” They “gave us the weapons and the tools not to remake [the world], but to repair it,” resisting “the twin villainy of accepting the status quo and pretending to ‘cure’ it.” “It was under their hand that we went to Biafra, to the Vietnamese boat people, to Bangladesh”—as Malraux himself had wanted to do, at the end of his life. 

Lévy is right to take the engagé intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s as his forebears. Neither quite a philosopher nor quite a Talmudist, he is nonetheless a real ‘intellectual,’ familiar to Americans since Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the British since Thomas Carlyle—a lay preacher, a rhetorician who does not aim merely at self-aggrandizement, smart enough but too honorable for sophistry, although primed for oratorical exaggeration when hammering a point home. Unlike so many among his contemporaries, he has never been gulled by ideology—the characteristic deformation professionelle of his kind. He artfully both courts and resists chattering-class fashions, while in the end standing firmly for the rights inherent in human beings, rights we owe (to give it an old-fashioned formulation) to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.