Coronavirus as Metaphor

 It might have occurred to me at some earlier stage of this pandemic that Susan Sontag's twinned essays, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, would repay a visit in our present historical moment, but I didn't get around to it until this week. And I did find that these essays shed light on some of our present tendencies to moralize the lessons of COVID-19 (not exclusively in ways that are harmful or bad); but more on that below. Sontag's analysis, particularly in the latter of the two pieces, also proved helpful to understanding something of a conundrum that has puzzled me since our national leaders first started to react to this crisis in March of last year. 

Sontag's central idea is that human societies are never content to just let illness be what it is. We always must have it be something else. And partly, as she acknowledges, this is due to the metaphoric imagination that is all-but-inherent in the act of thinking itself, and is therefore hardly to be escaped. However, she notes that many of the dominant metaphors we use to conceive of illness are decidedly unhelpful to the sick and quite likely detrimental to the goals of human freedom and wellbeing in our larger society. 

Having followed her thus far, most of us probably know now what to expect. Illness—particularly communicable disease, illness of the contagious variety—is often analogized to an enemy invader, a foreign threat, and is therefore used to justify repressive and authoritarian measures. And indeed, in the first of the two essays, Sontag does touch glancingly upon these right-wing metaphors for illness, and all their latent fascist potential. She is more concerned though, at least in "Illness as Metaphor" (published a decade before the subsequent essay) with the kind of dangerous metaphors more commonly found among would-be sophisticated, left-leaning intellectuals of the era. 

Some of these have since fallen so far out of favor and our collective awareness (in part, no doubt, thanks to the force and influence of Sontag's own polemic) that we scarcely remember what she is talking about. She takes aim at the sexual mysticism of Wilhelm Reich and the purveyors of psychoanalytic pseudoscience, for instance, and we agree with her; but we are left astonished that the intellectual heavyweights of any era could have taken Reich's deranged rantings about "orgone energy" seriously in the first place. When Sontag asserts in an early section that "today many people believe that cancer is a disease of insufficient passion, afflicting those who are sexually repressed," we think—good lord, they did?

As Sontag goes on to elaborate the other examples of what we might call the "left-wing" and intellectual-approved metaphors for illness, however, they begin to more closely resemble ideas that are current among us. She discusses, for instance, some of the other ways in which cancer became moralized—how unhealthy habits and diets came to be understood as carcinogenic, for instance, and (whatever scientific truth there must be to at least some of these etiologies), how the "moral" would often follow from these discoveries that the cancer was a kind of penalty exacted for unwise personal choices. 

Or, Sontag notes, the ecologically-aware would see cancer—due to the carcinogenic properties of many industrial byproducts and forms of pollution—as a kind of nature's revenge for humanity's transgressions against it. One is reminded of an ugly meme that circulated on left-wing social media in the early days of the pandemic—usually something in the form of the claim that "humans are the true virus." Eventually this was denounced as a kind of eco-fascism, rightly so, and it faded from view. Still, though, leftist moralizations of  COVID-19 proliferated and still proliferate well into the crisis—"racism is also a pandemic" was a slogan one heard frequently in the summer of 2020, to name one. 

And however true it is that police brutality and structural racism take lives and destroy communities on a scale rivaling epidemic disease, however true it is that many human actions harm the natural environment that also sustain human life, it is worth recalling Sontag's fundamental point that the use of disease metaphors is almost inherently dangerous, and will likely subvert whatever humanistic or liberal intention we had in deploying them in the first place. To moralize an illness, to portray it as as a consequence of unhealthy choices or social evils (the evil of white supremacy, the evil of environmental degradation), carries with it what Sontag dubs a "punitive" undercurrent. It suggests the illness is a kind of divine visitation for our social sins; and as such, the sufferers in some measure deserve it. 

When the sufferers are themselves disproportionately people most harmed by structural racism, colonialism, ecological destruction, and the other social sins (as is true in this pandemic), the implicit cruelty of such metaphors becomes even more clear. And indeed, overtones of passing sentence, of rendering a verdict of guilt, upon those who fall victim to the coronavirus has been hard to escape (the discourses of "social distancing" and "vaccine hesitancy" are implicitly laden—perhaps inevitably, perhaps even rightly—with moral judgment). And we can see, for this reason, how the more "innocent" left-liberal moralizations of disease can pave the way for the unsubtle chauvinisms of the right, when it comes their turn to start making illness metaphors. 

These latter are far more prominent in Sontag's second essay, "AIDS and Its Metaphors." Here, the right is in the ascendant. Sontag discusses the way HIV-AIDS was analogized to a threat from Third World invaders, how it was racialized and used as a goad to xenophobia and homophobia (a story that hardly needs retelling here). And we can see how, in our present age of coronavirus, all of these more obviously dangerous metaphors were taken up again by the American right and its reigning demagogue, Donald Trump—never one to be subtle in his appeals to any form of chauvinism.

Trump himself of course had a long history of using fear of contagion as a recipe for stoking racial paranoia. Even before his notorious remarks in a private meeting with lawmakers in which he described the origin countries of many U.S. immigrants as "shithole countries," Trump was alleged to have asserted that people from Haiti "all have AIDS." During the Obama presidency, he exploited fears of Ebola infection to call for limiting immigration from Africa and abolishing the Diversity Visa—a policy objective he later pursued with zeal during his own time in the Oval Office. 

One would therefore expect the coronavirus pandemic to provide Trump with a perfectly congenial opportunity to stoke his pet forms of racism and xenophobia, analogizing the virus to a horde of foreign invaders. And indeed, that's in large part what happened. Trump used the occasion of the pandemic to spew sinophobia and anti-Asian racism, calling the microbes variously the "China virus," the "Wuhan virus," and the "Kung flu." As Sontag discusses in her essay, the attempt to re-christen an infectious disease after a geopolitical adversary has a long history; though Trump pursued this tactic with a brazenness and crassness that makes early modern England's attempt to dub syphilis the "French disease" seem quaint and innocuous by comparison. 

Trump also went beyond words, using the pandemic as a pretext to impose his long-sought shutdown on the entire U.S. asylum system. His March 20 order, using the public health law known as Title 42, remains in force today, more than a year later, and under a different president. Speaking earlier this week, Biden's head of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, defended the order as a "public health imperative"—a characterization that is contradicted by a host of public health experts who have spoken out against it, saying it is a disguised means of trying to block asylum-seekers and circumvent international refugee law. 

All of this is prefigured in Sontag's discussion of the metaphors of AIDS as well—she warns that that epidemic too was being used or was likely to be used in future as a pretext for shuttering borders, for walling out foreigners, for fueling xenophobic fears of Third World migration, etc. 

But as much as the American far right has seen in the pandemic an opportunity to stoke racist fears and to further their preexisting restrictionist and nativist policy agenda, there has been another dimension of their response that has always baffled me—because it would seem to contradict the former. At the same time as Trump spoke of coronavirus as the "invisible enemy," deploying the "illness as war" metaphor that Sontag discusses, as much as he has tried to raise alarm about the virus in order to further stigmatize and exclude international refugees and to encourage sinophobia, he and the rest of the right have at the same time systematically tried to downplay the severity of the pandemic. 

Trump, of course, notoriously promoted quack miracle cures for the virus to a national audience, recommending household disinfectants, UV rays, and hydroxychloroquine and other bogus (and dangerous) remedies that were already circulating on far-right conspiracist chat-boards on the internet long before Trump got ahold of them. He repeatedly told the American people that the virus was nothing to be afraid of and that it would eventually "just sort of disappear." And after he himself was finally struck ill by the virus—in a moment that many of us on the left were all-too-keen to moralize for our own ends as a form of just punishment—he later used his relatively swift recovery (with the aid of the best medical treatment available to anyone in the country) as evidence that the disease was not nearly as serious as the experts had made it out to be. 

What does this whole line of argument have to do with Trump's simultaneous contention that the virus is an existential threat from a geopolitical adversary, a sort of bio-weapon unleashed upon us by China, and that the danger of it is so grave that it justifies totally shutting off access to the asylum system, in violation of other U.S. laws and international treaties we've signed? Is this not a contradiction? How does one portray a disease as an all-powerful threat and an overhyped non-issue at the same time? 

There is most likely no way to square that circle. The two ideas are in conflict with one another, but it would hardly be the first time Trump engaged in hypocrisy and paradox. 

Sontag's essay, however, shows us that this contradiction is at least not new in the history of right-wing responses to infectious disease. She notes that right-wing opinion on the AIDS epidemic underwent a similar oscillation between these two apparently-incompatible extremes. The far-right bigots from the Christian Right, the Moral Majority, etc., who originally depicted AIDS as God's divine judgment upon gay people, permissive American society, liberal cultural mores in general, simultaneously sought to downplay the severity of the threat it posed. 

"[T]hese same mythologists," Sontag writes—speaking of the Falwells, the Buchanans, and their ilk, "who have been eager to use AIDS for ideological mobilization against deviance have backed away from the most panic-inspiring estimates of the illness. They are among the most vocal of those who insist that infection will not spread to 'the general population' and have turned their attention to denouncing 'hysteria' or 'frenzy' about AIDS." Now doesn't that sound familiar!

Sontag theorizes that the reason for this shift was that portraying AIDS as a threat to everyone in part deprived the right of its moralizing thrust. Within the most dire predictions of pandemic disease afflicting all humankind there is an implicit moral universalism and cosmopolitanism, after all. We must care about the fate of others affected by this disease because we might suffer from it ourselves. 

Even more to the point here, we also cannot regard the virus as purely a divine visitation and punishment upon a stigmatized group, if it is disclosed to also menace people who do not fall into this category. The right therefore lose the main lesson they sought to derive from epidemic disease—namely, that it shows the iniquity of living a certain way, of being a gay man or an intravenous drug-user, say. It also contradicts the attempt to portray illness as purely a threat posed by certain racial or ethnic categories—Haitians and Africans, when the epidemic under discussion is AIDS, Chinese people (and all East Asians by extension, according to logic of racism), when it is COVID-19. 

As Sontag puts it, "Behind what they now consider the excessive publicity given the disease, the[se right-wingers] discern the desire to placate an all-powerful minority by agreeing to regard 'their'  disease as 'ours'—further evidence of the sway of nefarious 'liberal' values and of America's spiritual decline. Making AIDS everyone's problem and therefore a subject on which everyone needs to be educated, charge the antiliberal AIDS mythologists, subverts our understanding of the difference between 'us' and 'them.'"

One is reminded of a piece Adam Serwer penned for The Atlantic during the height of the early COVID-19 wave in the spring of 2020. He noted precisely the sort of reversal we have been discussing in the right-wing rhetoric surrounding COVID-19. It went from being a crisis and emergency, in their rhetoric, to being an overblown, overhyped non-issue. Serwer notes that this striking turn occurred alongside a growing perception in the media coverage and the data on the virus that it was not in fact "everyone" who was equally affected by the virus. 

Here, as with AIDS, the ravages of the disease fell hardest on the already marginalized. Black people, Native nations, people in prisons and detention centers and nursing homes, immigrants and refugees working in meatpacking facilities. Suddenly, it was "their" problem, and to speak of it simultaneously as "our" problem was to blur the distinctions crucial to the right-wing imagination, to suggest that "we" might have something in common with prisoners, with undocumented slaughterhouse workers, and the rest. 

Serwer quotes the words of a judge in Wisconsin. Whether taken out of context or not, as Serwer notes, the remark came to epitomize a certain attitude that was all-too prevalent in white America. Disputing the claim that a particular county had suffered an outbreak of the virus, the judge objected that these statistics stemmed from counting the people—many of them undocumented immigrants—who worked in meatpacking facilities in that county, rather than just reflecting infection rates among "regular folks."

However callous, her words reflected a statistical and psychological reality. Throughout this pandemic, the  county-by-county statistics on virus deaths and infections have obscured the fact that not everyone in those counties is affected equally. Those of us with work-from-home jobs and living in relative affluence ("regular folks," as the judge might call us) would look at those numbers as say, "Gosh, how are these case loads so high, and yet I don't know anyone with the virus?" The answer is likely that most of those numbers were coming from nursing homes, prisons, detention centers, assembly lines, slaughterhouses—in short, all the places where stigmatized and forgotten groups are warehoused in congregate settings, placed at heightened risk, and left out of sight out of mind by those with social power. 

Asking right-wingers to care about the pandemic therefore required asking them to care about "them," about the groups who belonged to the great "not-us." It collapsed the distinction so important to racist demagogues and nationalists and chauvinists between these groups: it therefore threatened contagion and pollution. Here, then, is the ultimate irony. Trump never abandoned his central demagogic appeal to the fear of contamination, of the puncturing of the protecting envelope segregating "us" from "them" (the wall, if you will). He simply shifted the form of contagion he was talking about. In his rhetoric, he came more to highlight the contagion and pollution to identity that stems from contact with the "other," from glimpsing a shared moral identity and set of universalistic concerns with the "other," than he did literal contagion by infectious disease. This was why he went from stoking fears of the pandemic to doing all in his power to downplay it and portray it as someone else's concern. 

Of course, Trump is no longer in power. Our current elected leaders are taking far more forward-thinking and universalistic steps to address the pandemic, including most recently by agreeing to press for the waiver of intellectual property restrictions at world trade negotiations to help boost vaccine production in the Global South. Still, though, the Trumpian currents of our society are with us, and even within each of us. As the pandemic enters a new stage of severity and deadliness in India and among the world's poor, there is a tendency to shift once again into seeing this as someone else's problem—a tragedy, perhaps, but not one about which a great deal can be done. 

Sontag predicted this too, for what it's worth. In speaking of the future ravages of AIDS, she lays out one plausible scenario in which the First World learns to live with the virus and manage it, and practically therefore forgets it is happening, even as it continues to claim millions of lives in the Global South. And even though people would regret and pity these outbreaks, she hypothesizes, they would also regard them as inevitable—the sort of cyclical and horrendous thing that is simply natural and periodically-occurring in places "like that," places "over there"—"shithole countries," in short, for, here as elsewhere, Trump was simply giving voice in particularly crude and ugly terms to a thought that lurks in the id of white America more broadly.

Is there a way to draw attention to these dangers—to the danger of writing off global outbreaks as no longer "our" concern—that does not rely on other moralistic metaphors for the virus—ones that may come back to harm the same stigmatized groups they were meant to protect? The "illness as existential threat" metaphor, the "illness as war" trope, for instance. Is there a way to extract the humanistic and universalistic lessons of this pandemic—the fact that it poses a threat to us all, that "no one is safe until everyone is safe" and all the rest of it—without simply finding one more spurious way to moralize something that is essentially amoral and chaotic and random—a disease caused by microbes who did not set out to prove anything, to teach anything, to instruct humanity in any way whatsoever, but simply to replicate themselves and thereby incidentally ensure the destruction of their host? 

I think yes; I think that extracting human lessons from events that were themselves purposeless, that making "meaning out of meaningless suffering," as Richard Wright once put it, is a good and necessary and quintessentially human endeavor. But Sontag's book is salient for reminding us to be cognizant of the meanings we are making, to be conscious of ourselves in the process of constructing metaphors, and to note the purposes to which these can and will be put. Because these ends will often not be our own, nor will they redound to the benefit of either the sick or the well.