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Though coronavirus fears keep us apart, this unexpected break could also bring us back together in new, and better, ways.
It sounds perverse to speak of compensations in a pandemic that could kill millions. But maybe there are some—both public and personal.
On the policy front, there is wider recognition that health care needs to be universal; that all categories of worker deserve decent unemployment compensation; that massive public deficits are not to be shunned. Once the crisis is past, it is hard to imagine our brutally stingy policies reverting to “normal.”
The personal compensations include multiple acts of kindness and generosity, as well as of fearful selfishness. In this brief period of reprieve, we seem to be appreciating the preciousness of time and using it with more discernment.
My late wife, who was a psychotherapist, taught me a term: secondary gain. It means the psychological boost that comes from otherwise harmful activity. For instance, people may try to hurt themselves, as a subconscious cry for sympathy.
One cultural secondary gain could be the resurrection of an almost extinct custom: courtship. As Tinder and kindred sites adapt to self-quarantine, people are hooking up online. They may actually learn about one another before hopping into bed. Imagine that.
Don’t get me wrong. When I was a randy lad, there was certainly plenty of casual sex. But there was also something called dating. Maybe after the quarantine, we might restore some balance.
I remember being moved by a passage in John Fowles’s 1965 novel The Magus. At one point, the master manipulator of the title, a man named Conchis, says to his youthful protagonist, Nicholas Urfe:
You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.
Maybe not quite extinct after all. Secondary gain.
