The War of the Narratives
How should we understand the dangers, then, of the progress narrative? How is it exactly that we could be harmed by such a positive and uplifting story?
Well, one way to understand its particular pitfalls is to see the moral failure at the allegorical heart of Camus’ The Plague to be the same that befell so many of the Zero Covid crowd. In other words, Tarrou’s confession that in taking action against the injustice of the death penalty he ironically fell into the same trap of thinking that he could decide who should live or die parallels the strident calls by so many advocates of “The Science” for urgent action against the “anti-vaxxers.” Throwing around that ridiculously dismissive epithet so that they did not have to actually pay attention to the quite reasonable questions those critical thinkers had about the completely new and untested medical intervention, they claimed to be saving society while at the same time destroying its foundation, which is rational discussion.
And they did this with the expectation that their behavior was marking them as progressive: forward thinking, intellectual.
Just as with the character of Tarrou, then, such people set themselves up as moral authorities, only to betray their own principles. And if most people who betrayed their principles during Covid still do not yet realize the extent of their failure, we can add one more level of irony on their self-proclamations of advanced intellectual power….
But the parallel, though neat, falters on this point of the perpetrator’s awareness. Camus’ novel presents Tarrou’s conflict as an effectively decided one: Tarrou made his mistakes in the past. Since then, he has tried to mend his ways. He has decided to question his conviction that he is always doing the progressive thing, and to try to preserve in himself an essential humility and humanity. His anguish is not dramatized in present action; rather, it is conveyed through dialogue, in the form of something like a confession. Of past sins.
As such, Camus’ novel dates itself. Its portrayal of a character who might overcome his own blinding political convictions does not reflect the present situation, of course, of extreme retrenchment. As a result, such an intellectual flexibility might come across now as rather fanciful. Someone owning up to a mistake? Has Tarrou never heard of the tactic of gaslighting, by which one might simply deny past action and argument and feign innocence even in the confrontation of the most damning evidence? Not even Camus’ powerful imagination, it appears, could conceive of the shamelessness of the CDC.
In such a way does The Plague reflect its time: before the “American century” and its story of unending improvement takes hold of the European mind. Tarrou, in other words, can step back from his presumption and reassess. His self-image is not dependent upon the idea he is enacting a special mission upon this Earth. But maybe what we might otherwise characterize as naivete or a quality of datedness also provides a model of recovery from our era’s confusion—even a model of recovery from the progress narrative, full stop.
But before we explore the solution to the problem of the progress narrative, we need to establish that the narrative indeed posed a threat to our society and did not just animate a bunch of loud histrionics.
And to do that, we could do much worse than to take a look at H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel War of the Worlds.
H. G. Wells, one of the pioneering authors of science fiction, wrote on many topics, including social issues, politics, and popular science. But he is primarily known for his science fiction, and his 1898 novel War of the Worlds is one of his most influential works. Adapted since its publication for the screen both small and large, War of the Worlds is similar to Camus’ novel in that his characters experience a devastating attack. And in Wells’ novel, just like in Camus’, the setting is a real place we can find on the map: not Oran, Algeria, but Surrey, England. The plot also follows characters responding to the attack in the best ways they can. In War of the Worlds, however, that attack does not come from a deadly pathogen. It comes from the Earth being invaded by Mars.
In Wells’ conception, the Martian attack is relentless and unstoppable. Proving themselves much more technologically advanced than humans, the soldiers from the red planet rampage across the picturesque Thames valley, brushing aside all armies arrayed against them and setting the landscape horrifically ablaze. But then, miraculously, just as suddenly as the Martian onslaught started, it freezes. The Martian war machines halt in mid-stride; their death-rays go quiet. And when the relieved humans venture out of their half-ruined shelters to investigate, they find that the aliens have been killed by the simplest of threats: the virus that causes the common cold.
That humans with all of their technological wizardry are saved by a lowly virus has suggested to the novel’s readers a very obvious lesson of modesty for a culture that has perhaps too confidently celebrated itself. And so, readers of War of the Worlds have placed it in the same category as other science fiction, from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein—depicting the efforts of a scientist who presumes (Presumption was the name of the 1823 play based on her novel, which she attended) to have the power and wisdom to create a new being—to the 1956 CinemaScope film Forbidden Planet’s depiction of a scientist whose gaining of an almost unimaginable power leads only to him destroying himself. This category of work seems to warn us against the human incapacity to exercise great technological power. In other words, the take-home lesson from Wells’ tale seems to be—just as in Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet—that humans need to be careful about the ways that they use their technological development. Perhaps we should avoid “meddling in God’s domain,” as the lesson is so frequently phrased.
In Wells’ novel, of course, those who wield that great technological power are an army of alien invaders—not humans. But there is so much to Wells’ Martians to suggest their standing in for an advancement already underway—one not prospective and imaginative but one very present and real in the lives of his fellow citizens. In other words, War of the Worlds in some ways reads not as a speculative piece of fiction—imagining what might come, in the future—but as a coded realist one—what is already happening in the present.
For one thing, the emergence of the Martians’ vehicles of invasion from underground, where their flight from across space has buried them, points toward a subterranean location of the power the English of the period already possessed—and in spades, so to speak. And that resource is coal. The Martians’ overrunning of all opposing force in metal machines points to one of the main products of that coal, which was steel. And that the Martians arrive on Earth not with an atmosphere of mystery but with a quite open agenda of annihilation, with a declared rationale—resources on their home planet have run unsustainably low, and they have decided to take the Earth’s resources for themselves—also mirrors the manifold imperial activity of the British, who during the time were similarly involved in all kinds of reasonably explained conquest and theft, and had been for rather many decades.
So, as newfangled as the machines in the novel might be, Wells’ story is, on the one hand, as old as time itself: humans have for many millennia waged war on others for their resources. But on the other hand, the story raises a new and uncomfortable question for a nation that had leveraged its great quantity of coal into a catbird’s seat of global dominance.
To wit: Decline?
Yes, decline. Wells’ novel captures a very specific point in Britain’s exploitation of fossil fuels. Written just before the British peak in coal extraction, but just after the warnings about the possible exhaustion of British coal extraction found in the work of such thinkers as William Stanley Jevons and his 1865 The Coal Question, the novel gazes with some consternation at the frenzy of development that has transformed the countryside: bicycles! railroads! with more technological advancement to come! All of it eating up resources at a ravenous pace, and piling up waste and shrouding the land with smoke.
But the novel also looks at a probable future with even more concern: What will happen to all of this activity once the resource that has unleashed it has been depleted? Might the “advanced” members of his society come even more to resemble a martial race, continuing to devastate the planet to feed its unending hunger?
There are so many reflections we might have on Wells’ novel in the time of Covid! But certainly one reflection worthy of comment is the extent to which Wells has overestimated humans in his story. Of course, the novel depicts humans as fragile creatures, limited in their knowledge of the universe and powerless to stop their invaders (or, in our interpretive conception, to control the consequences of their own clever harnessing of surplus energy). But War of the Worlds depicts relatively few of the human failures we have suffered through, during Covid.
During the onslaught of the Martians, for example, none of the attacking creatures from space pauses to lecture humans on morality or mock them for their apparent backwardness. The Martians do not exercise, in addition to their voracious destructiveness, a warped logic to try to demonstrate to their observers that they are in the right to attack. Again, Wells—like Camus—presumes a foundational basis of reason. The Martians have a good excuse for attacking. They need more stuff, and Earth has it. Morality has nothing to do with it. Why sermonize?
And another sign of the naivete of the book is that after the deaths of the Martians, no human politician pops up to assert that the virus was the strategy for dealing with the foreign menace, all along.
Nobody in Wells’ novel refuses to learn the lesson of humility offered by the spectacle of an irresistible alien force defeated not by superior human ingenuity but rather a quirk of terrestrial biology. Instead, the characters of the novel—the readers of the novel—all get it: Humans were lucky, this time around. Maybe we should learn to appreciate those things that we all too commonly overlook, those things that, in this case, saved us.
It certainly says something about our time that a novel about the near extinction of the species might appear to us as rather naïve, today. Wells’ Martians were mean, in other words, but it’s not the common cold virus they can’t hold a candle to, in their unthinking destruction. It’s the Covid-inflamed crowd.
Consider: It wasn’t too long ago that a large segment of Americans supported the suspension of the basic human rights of fellow citizens who had not agreed to participate in an uncontrolled medical experiment with a transfection agent that had already proven itself both frighteningly unsafe and woefully ineffective. About how many supported such policies? Go back and look: at least a third. It happened in late 2021, during the holiday season, or what we might call the Winter of Misery and Death for the Unvaccinated that Wasn’t. In stark contrast to so many references in this series of posts, which ask the reader to reflect on the writings of early modernity or Aristotle or Plato, 2021 is not ancient history. That was only two years ago.
Many of the authorities who whipped up such appallingly irresponsible enthusiasm for this unconstitutional oppression are still in office, and certainly the majority of willing participants in that fervor are still alive and free. And they are either incognizant of having done anything wrong or shamelessly comfortable with having made such an egregious mistake, because there has been no answering movement of self-assessment in response to that clamor for violence against those “backwards” (read: critically thinking) others.
Certainly, very few have publicly acknowledged their basic error in the brave spirit of Tarrou. Instead, there have been quite obvious attempts to cover over that error or to rationalize it. So that today we are treated to a strange spectrum of assertions from such people, from, I was only working with the best information available at the time, to What mistakes?
Of course, such protestations effectively surrender the possibility of effective and honest communication. They sabotage that rational discussion that is the foundation of modern democracy. And, as such, they demonstrate one way that energy decline grips us: with the retreat of public trust in institutions and institutional communication. The reversal of an age of reason, in other words, is not an age of belief but one of disbelief.
So, let’s review the facts. Omicron, which emerged as the most prevalent Covid variant in late 2021, quickly proved itself by far the most infectious but also by far the least destructive variant to that point. Faced literally with an epidemic of sniffles, the authorities were forced to abandon their plans for camps for the unvaccinated, but not before so many of the “hesitant” had already lost their jobs and been shunned by those who were sure they knew better. Those who were sure they could judge who lived and died.
Of course, the resistors of the approved jabs would later avoid the epidemic of post-jab damage that is upon us now, but they did not know that, at the time. They only knew that they had been delivered, much like Wells’ beleaguered armies of the Earth, from an all-too-certain fate, by a mild virus.
No one could even pretend to rationally argue, in the early days of 2022, that any vaccine might be necessary to usher us into a safe world, post-Covid. Which is not to say that various agencies and authorities did not try to push such an agenda!
Which is not to say that some agencies are not attempting similar messages, even now.
In spring of 2022, accordingly, the hysteria centered on Covid was steered by media handwaving into the protesting of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the demand of aid for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, whose fight against Russia has gone much like our fight against Covid—which is to say, remarkably terribly, only without the rescue from our own stupidity and aggression by a virus.
Did you read that last phrase, dear reader? We were saved, just like the characters of H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction text, War of the Worlds, by a virus.
The result for those paying even a modicum of attention to the bizarre events of our days is an air of unreality. Did we really just live through that? we might as well be asking one another. Did that really happen?
Did the U.S. federal agency in charge of drug regulation actually actively discourage an early treatment proven successful in treating the disease, calling the drug, which had won a Nobel prize for its discoverer, and which has been taken literally by billions of human beings, “unsafe”? Yes, yes it did.
Were Canadian truck drivers, who had effectively kept their fellow citizens alive during lockdown, vilified by their liberal compatriots for daring to defend the principle of bodily autonomy for which those same liberals had so strenuously argued in the case of abortion? And did not that liberal laptop class of Canada who had been kept alive by those truckers direct strange epithets toward their benefactors, calling them “fascists” and standing by while those workers’ bank accounts were seized and their livelihoods destroyed? Yes, yes they did.
And has a large segment of the U.S. population forgotten any lesson that might have been learned in the very recent abject and morally disgusting failures of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and any conviction they might have had in ending the government’s “endless wars,” in order to direct their hysteria into an enthusiasm for the wholesale slaughter of an entire generation of Ukrainians? Yes, of course. It’s still happening now.
If anything, H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was perhaps more perceptive about Martians than humans. No one during the war Wells imagined with the alien invaders volunteered to sell out their fellow citizens for slave labor because they had refused to participate in a crackpot medical experiment whose name was inspired by a campy science-fiction TV show from way back in the early 1960s. Well, but if it was called “Operation Warp Drive,” it had to be super-duper advanced, right?
Of course, Wells was still, as a nineteenth-century British citizen, in touch with an earlier way of making sense of human civilizations. He did not have the blindfold of progress stretched across his eyes, so that he couldn’t see the dangers associated with the modern hubris of an expectation of unending improvement. His novel proposed to answer that hubris by reminding his audience of the power of those invisible natural things we like to overlook.
Being much more advanced than Wells, we do not have the same clarity of vision. But there is an important lesson to be learned here, in the difference between Wells’ flight of fancy and our own even more unbelievable recent experience on planet Earth.
The facts of the matter are that, because of the panicked intolerance of at least a third of the population, and the authoritarian dreams of “experts” who had no business offering up themselves as leaders of Cub Scout troops, never mind of governments or government agencies, we were inches away from civil war, during that fateful winter of 2021-2022. And if Omicron, a mysterious variant of Covid that appeared to have been hidden away for some time from the natural evolution of the virus, had not come along to infect everyone with what was obvious to almost everyone was even weaker than the flu, who knows what would have happened.
Good thing those wanting to lock up their fellow citizens mostly tended to be of the political party against private gun ownership!
And yet, this lesson has not taken hold. Instead, we have been treated to a version of events by which our deliverance from Covid has somehow issued from the success of a “vaccine” leakier than a kitchen colander. No one in the mainstream media has managed to grasp our real-life version of the moral of Wells’ novel, when the world was saved by a microscopic germ. But that winter of 2021-2022 provides us with a very important lesson nonetheless, which even those “vaccine” celebrants might grasp, if they try.
And that lesson is about the populace of the United States: at least a third of them will support the persecution of dissenters from obviously ineffective public policy, if that public policy allows its supporters to tell the story they want to tell about the situation, which is something along the line of “The Science Will Save Us.” And that is the case, no matter what the problem is, from which “The Science” will save us. At least a third of the United States’ population are ready at the slightest signal to sign up their neighbors for the gulag, as long as such action might preserve a cherished narrative of continued improvement for themselves.
It is a valuable lesson, and it is necessary to learn it, if only because it was such a costly one.
Your path back to normalcy is The Vaccine, the authorities said, and the population only too eagerly clamored for the jab; and the cost will be counted over the decades to come.
Your enemy is not the virus but your neighbors, the authorities said, and at least one third the population was ready to direct against their neighbors all of the violence that might result from their pent-up frustration with their restriction and fear.
The failures of Covid were many, and so should be the lessons. But if there is only one lesson to be gained from the entire fiasco, it is this: if one third of the population of this country is ready to condemn as many as another third for not participating in what was essentially an empty gesture against such a comparatively minor threat, we can most certainly count on at least an equivalent proportion selling out their fellow citizens when the stakes are real.
Why did the Martians invade the Earth? Wells explains that the Martians had run low on resources on their own home planet and so cast envious eyes across the solar system to the rich bounty available here on Earth. In this, Wells was hardly exercising much of his imagination; he was rather only drawing on millennia of human experience. Probably since the fabled Dawn of Time, every human war has been a war about resources. And the reason for this is clear. What we sustain with a positive Energy Return on Investment is not just our favorite narrative about ourselves, the story that we will improve endlessly until the end of time; it is also our very lives. Our existence depends upon that positive balance. And if we are ready to panic and fight over a story, just wait to see what happens when our lives are at stake.
The apparent invisibility of energy is often discussed in scholarly studies, the fact that nobody seems to notice the contribution of energy to their daily lives. Yet the importance of energy has not been fully grasped by these same scholars, who do not seem to understand that their own assumptions about rationality and perspective and peace also depend upon those unending flows. Because what has happened over and over again in history is that when a group runs out of resources, it acts in desperation to take over someone else’s. It does so as a matter of self-preservation. It fights for its life: blindly, viciously.
On October 30, 1938, a New York City radio program broadcast an adaptation of Wells’ novel as a series of real-sounding news bulletins. The Martians were invading New Jersey, and the state militia had been deployed! These fictional storylines captured the imagination of Americans already on edge with the ongoing developments of a Europe drifting again toward resource war, and panic ensued. The program, directed and narrated by a young Orson Welles, gained for Welles a notoriety he was to leverage into a very successful film career. But the program also served, in some small way, to warn the American public about the barbarity of the great conflict that was to follow, that would soon transform its world.
Today, in our own world, we are running low on important resources. And it will not always be the case that a virus will save us from ourselves. There is a very strong possibility that the next time the Martians will attack with an emboldened vigor. We who wish to remain human must figure out a way through such a War of the Worlds. Like the members of Camus’ “sanitary squad,” we will need to find the resolve and wherewithal to fight a plague, not of a pathogen but of a blind and desperate panic.
And that will require that we find another story to tell.