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COVID has become a metaphor for our helplessness in the face of the broader calamities afflicting our polity, society, and planet.
In 1978, Susan Sontag wrote what many regard as her best book, Illness as Metaphor. At the time, she was being treated for breast cancer. Her book, an elaboration of three powerful and original essays in The New York Review of Books, persuasively argued that the use of illness as metaphor was perverse, both conceptually and for the patient.
At the time, theories of New Age psychology blamed cancer patients for their cancers. They had “cancer personalities”; their negative thinking had brought on their cancers. Earlier, in the 19th century, some romanticized tuberculosis as the mark of a sensitive soul. All this, Sontag argued, was dangerous nonsense. Illness was just illness, to be endured, resisted, and treated.
Sontag also addressed illness as political metaphor, as in descriptions of “the sick body politic,” and calls for reform or dictatorship to cure it. For Hitler, “European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis, and to a cancer that must be excised.”
At other times, the illness metaphor suggested a terminal conclusion of hopelessness and resignation. She quotes John Adams, writing in his diary in December 1772: “My Country is in deep Distress, and has very little Ground of Hope … The Body of the People seem to be worn out, by struggling, and Venality, Servility and Prostitution, eat and spread like a Cancer.”
Observing the various reactions to COVID, and its connection to other political and social “ills,” put me in mind of Sontag. COVID, consciously or subconsciously, has become a metaphor for our helplessness in the face of the broader calamities afflicting our polity, society, and planet.
COVID represents events beyond our control, experienced up close and personal. It serves as a metaphor for other fearsome events.
Not only is the planet burning up, the democracy under siege, and the life chances of younger people collapsing under the weight of inflation, recession, college debt, unaffordable housing, and unreliable health care—but in our own lives everyone is having to deal with what seems to be a semipermanent plague.
For many, the reaction is magical thinking. I can’t do much about the broader calamities, but I am weary of COVID, so I am going to throw away the mask and live as if COVID were over. Everyone is going to get it anyway.
COVID as metaphor also feeds into a dangerous sense of political despair—a different sort of magical thinking of resigned passivity. For some on the right, the conclusion is that we need a dictator; for others on the left, the disabling conclusion is that democracy is doomed beyond repair.
Sontag recovered from breast cancer by dealing with it as an illness, not a metaphor. We need to live with COVID as responsible adults—and recover our wits and our democracy.
