The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Pandemic
Seeing an end to this crisis means prevailing over infection rates—but also a rising sense that we are adrift.
Photo: Anna Shvets, Pexels
We shall fight it at the supermarket, a socially-distant two metres apart. We shall fight it with covered faces, first with panic-made and then with panic-bought masks. We shall fight it from home, surreptitiously, pants-optional on all-day Zoom calls. And we shall fight it online through the vaccine appointment queue, doing our civic duty but taking care to game out the schedule to ensure that we do not get stuck with that off-brand shot.
Surviving the COVID-19 pandemic has required more effort than merely evading a virus. It has forced us to weave loose and often contradictory narrative threads together—about masks, lockdown restrictions, and vaccine efficacy, eligibility, and availability—into a coherent story. The do-it-yourself version, like a parody of Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, may offer some small measure of control, but it does not excuse the dearth of clear, linear narratives from our elected officials. Seeing an end to this crisis means prevailing over infection rates—but also a rising sense that we are adrift.
We watched our leaders defer to experimental economics and science modelling for deliverance throughout the pandemic while failing to leverage the one thing at which they are especially skilled: telling us a story. Narrative, as historian Yuval Noah Harari reminds us in Sapiens (2011), is the defining attribute of our species. Story is how we navigate time, build relationships, and band together. We’re now well over a year out from the first lockdown order and it’s still very much the choose your own adventure pandemic. We have lots of plans but what’s the plot?
This is a curious result for a society obsessed with leadership. We are awash in presidential and political biography, business memoir and self-help confessional, conferences, courses, and certificates. You cannot clear an interview for an entry-level position today without offering some anecdote in which you, personally, stood up and led others to victory. Some see leadership as attendance, like that cliché about parenting. Others aver that it’s a command performance of applied iron will or micromanagement. Mostly, it’s about establishing a focus and then driving others to share that focus from their respective points of departure.
Focus is what we admire in Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” from 1863. In fewer than three hundred words, Lincoln ventured not so much a point of order as a point of plot, drawing a direct line between 1776, the Union cause, and the “unfinished” work ahead. We admire the same focus in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “fear itself” first inaugural in 1933—perhaps even more so, because he rolled it into his "fireside chat" radio series through to 1944. And we admire it in Churchill, drawing that line in the sand in 1940, uncertain about the days ahead but nevertheless clear about it.
Focus is what we are missing now. What are our conditions for success? What is our rallying point if we lose ground? What else should we be prepared to sacrifice? There is a popular political aphorism about never letting a crisis go to waste. I think enough time has now passed from the start of the pandemic to conclude that our leaders have done just that. Why? Well, that will take time.
Perhaps the most charitable view is that for all of the reflexive “wartime” comparisons, we took the crisis incrementally, day-by-day, rather than building to some major offensive. It is difficult to plot such narrow practicality.
Another view, recently offered by University of Toronto professors Vivek Goel, Peter Loewen, and Janice Gross Stein in the National Post, sees a more classic signal versus noise problem:
How do we reconcile the voice of experts—who provide important advice to governments, yet often disagree amongst themselves in the face of rapidly evolving research—and the responsibility of elected officials to make decisions based on their evidence?
This is a nontrivial problem but one, as they observe, easily mitigated by the fact that such experts are accountable to our leaders. Experts provide data points. Elected officials plot them.
Is there something to the cynical view, namely that our leaders now only focus on telling us what they think that we want to hear? Why, for example, did Ontario Premier Doug Ford time lockdown rollbacks to coincide with looming holidays?
Maybe we had a false start, collectively deferring to the American lead only to find no lead at all. Does it matter that the patient zero nation, China, failed to ring the alarm?
Future analyses may cite some or all of these causes. They are interesting but I doubt they will matter. Telling a story does not require having all or even the right facts, a moral imperative, or knowing the future. We know this from the many examples we have of leaders creating false narratives for their own depraved ends. Steering the ship of state means keeping the plot. There is no excuse for losing it. So, the question is, what are we going to do now to hold them to account?