Serenity and Covid-19

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“O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”—“Serenity Prayer,” Reinhold Niebuhr (1932)

People attribute the Serenity Prayer to thinkers as varied St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Marcus Aurelius and Sir Thomas More. Such succinct wisdom and common sense seems to have to have come from abroad and long ago.

But no, it was an American theologian and public intellectual, Reinhold Niebuhr, who penned the Prayer. He did so in the depths of the Great Depression, when the whole nation was grappling with the question of what could be changed and what couldn’t.

The Serenity Prayer states the essence of realism. In industry, war and politics, its underlying wisdom helped set the stage for the “American Century” that followed. How much Reinhold Niebuhr contributed to our leadership during that century, and how much he merely expressed it, is a matter for historians.

Are we still able to lead? We’ll know in a few years, of course. This November’s election will tell us a lot.

But Donald Trump is not the first American president to indulge in an orgy of inventive thinking. Remember when some unnamed official under Dubya said “We make our own reality”? Remember when Dubya’s Administration started a war in Iraq, which is still ongoing, on the false assumption that Saddam was developing WMD? You can’t change things that exist only in your own paranoid fantasy, but you can do a lot of damage trying.

Dubya and Cheney were not alone. We fought an entire Cold War out of fear that Soviet Communism would consume the world and destroy our way of life. In October 1962, we came within minutes of destroying civilization, and perhaps the world’s biosphere, to stop it. But Communism stopped itself. Both China and Russia discovered that it didn’t work. Both abandoned it all by themselves, China in everything but name.

Now comes SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a virus. It exists. It kills. It maims. It spreads in air, especially in enclosed spaces and in crowded gatherings. It spreads from children to grandparents and parents, often leaving recovered minors bereft of adult love and guidance. It has spread all over the world.

These are things we can’t change. We can’t get rid of the virus without a time machine big enough to transport our entire species. That we don’t have. So what can we change?

We can change our own behavior to slow down the virus and stop its spread and devastation. We can test, trace contacts and quarantine. We can isolate known and suspected cases. We can wear masks and keep separated to slow down the spread. We can think hard and act appropriately, every time we leave our homes, to protect our families, our neighbors and ourselves. These are things we can change.

We can also have patience. We’re not living in the Middle Ages, when the best minds fought the Plague with prayer and exorcism of “demons,” and sometimes took harmful measures like bleeding and purging sick and exhausted people.

We have science. In fact, we have the best medical science in human history. We understand DNA and RNA. Chinese scientists dropped the complete genome of SARS-CoV-2 in our laps just about the time the virus arrived on our shores. A global consortium of scientists is now working on a vaccine, with dozens of candidates already in human trials. Other scientists are working on cures, still others on studying the virus’ behavior in detail so we can refine our practical precautions.

Vaccine development is a tricky business. No one can say when it will turn the tide. No one wants to be too optimistic, for fear of encouraging even more foolishly risky behavior than we’ve shown already.

But it’s hard to believe we won’t have something as much as two years down the road. It may not be 90% effective. We may have to take booster shots every two months. But science and medicine will get the upper hand eventually. All we have to do is wait and not succumb in the interim.

What we can’t do is hurry. That will bring change for the worse. The multiple disasters in the South and West, now creeping back up into the Midwest, amply demonstrate the folly of haste. We can’t get our economy back until we “crush the curve” of increasing cases and deaths. And we can’t do that until we change our behavior in ways that we surely can do, with focus and discipline.

What we also can’t do is send all of our kids back to in-person schools this fall. If we do that, they’ll spread the virus among themselves. Then they’ll bring it back home to their parents, siblings, and grandparents—and any other relatives or friends living in their extended families. That would be a great way to accelerate the pandemic and cause a panic.

The safety of in-person education is a devil that depends on the details. Schools in warm climates can hold classes safely outside. In cold climates, kids will have to learn inside, beginning in just a couple of months. Unless their air-conditioning systems have proper filters and proper aim, crowded classrooms will become petri dishes of SARS-CoV-2, and therefore so will the students’ homes. Even extreme social distancing and sterilizing every desk daily won’t stop the virus from spreading if the HVAC system is sending active viruses into every classroom.

And then there’s the small matter of age and maturity. At what age can children reliably wear masks properly and keep them on properly through hours of instruction? At what ages will fidgeting, play, authorized and unauthorized interaction, and children being children make masks and distancing useless?

There are no simple or universal answers to these questions. The answers depend upon the climate, the shape and maintenance of the school buildings and their HVAC systems, the density of classes and of students in them, the students’ ages and maturity, and the knowledge, seriousness, discipline and diligence of students, teachers and administrators.

So there is absolutely no “one-size-fits-all” solution for opening schools. That’s why the decision to open them, the way to run them, the tradeoff between online and in-person education, and the general tradeoff between increased risk of infection and the presumed greater power of in-person education, must be left to each school—and maybe each class, child and his or her parents—individually.

It does no good to announce that schools are open if students and teachers don’t attend, or if both are so preoccupied with how close they are sitting and who is sneezing and coughing that learning suffers interminable distractions. Therefore the decision to sit in or Zoom into classes should be made as locally, and as much based on all the relevant tiny details, as humanly possible.

So the outlines of Serenity in the age of Covid-19 are clear. Each of us individually can only change our own behavior; we should do so to protect ourselves and each other with all the things that we know now work: distancing, avoiding crowds, wearing masks, testing, contact tracing and quarantining. Each of us must diligently avoid second-guessing the experts. Intead, we must listen hard, think hard, and decide for ourselves, our loved ones and our community how to act.

As for economy, its picture is even simpler. We can keep the economy afloat—and avoid widespread human misery—by making sure that everyone in America has enough food, shelter and money to make it through the year or two it will take to have and distribute an effective vaccine or implement another winning medical strategy.

Yes, we will build up big deficits meanwhile. But we Americans are incredibly fortunate in that regard. No only are interest rates at historic lows, but the whole world still covets our Treasury securities as the safest investments in a crisis, notwithstanding the chaotic incompetence of our current leadership.

So we can borrow the needed money cheaply. Then we can recoup and repay the debt easily by raising taxes once our economy resurges. It goes without saying that the rich, who will generally ride through the pandemic in fine fettle, ought to pay a bigger share of the post-Covid taxes, so as to retire the debt as quickly as possible.

All these are things we can change. What we can’t change is make the pandemic go away by magic or wishful thinking. We can’t “open up” the economy too soon because people will protect themselves by staying out of it anyway. The virus’ recent and disastrous resurgence has proved that fact by actual experiment. For similar reasons, we can’t force schools, teachers and students into in-person education by decree. We may build it, but they won’t come.

One other thing we can change is our attitudes. We can stopping thinking about the pandemic and its effect on the economy in terms of ideology, political conflicts, vague abstractions like “freedom,” or paranoid conspiracy theories.

Instead, we can start thinking in terms of cause and effect. If we force people back to work while the disease rages, they and their families will get sick and we will have a workers’ revolt. If we force students back to crowded in-person classes, they and their teachers won’t come, or they and their families will get sick if they do come, and parents and teachers might stage a rebellion. This is not abstract ideology; this is Cause and Effect 1A.

If we can keep these simple, concrete thoughts in our heads, and if we can impart them to our elected representatives, we will have actualized Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer in our difficult time. We will have a Good Niebuhr Policy. Then we can emerge from the pandemic—which will end, most likely in less than two years—with our bodies, our polity, our society, ourselves and our kids, and our economy relatively intact. All we have to do is maintain Serenity and focus.

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