Bad news affects us more than good news. We process it faster and more completely. Disasters are what we remember most vividly — a terrible date, the day the basement flooded, the time our car died on the highway. We tellingly put such calamities “down to experience,” for they loom larger and seem more real than the good days in between.
This has serious consequences. The coronavirus pandemic is our sole focus; it blots out everything else. And people in danger shun risk. They look for safety rather than opportunity. This means wanting the government to take charge and fix things. But as we’re learning to our cost, officialdom is all too willing to oblige with officiousness. Excessive nannying has included trying to stop harmless activities such as running in splendid isolation on a beach, sitting alone reading on a park bench, or attending a drive-in worship service.
When there’s little chance of joy, entrepreneurship, and adventure, people look for the safe retreat of peace, order, and good government. Those are three paternalistic ideals of nations that emphasize self-reliance less than we do. They’re in the constitution of Canada and (less precisely) that of other nations and are enumerated to contrast with the more expansive and risky ideals of America — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Debate has been raging for weeks about the proper balance between safety and freedom, stoked by the enraging examples of state governments arrogating more power than our founding document permits.
But soon, risk and safety are not going to conflict but will align. Or rather, the danger involved in avoiding all risk of infection is going to seem much worse than the danger of restarting economic activity. A Gallup poll in early April found that only 20% of people would go back to work immediately if government restrictions were lifted. But a Harris poll a week later found that 89% are worried about the impact on the economy, while fewer, 75%, are worried about the pandemic’s impact on their health. I suspect that declining concern about infection and rocketing worry about a second Great Depression will mean the graph lines cross very soon.
That’s why we’ve focused this week’s magazine on the vital issue of how our nation gets out of this mess. Under the cover headline, “After Coronavirus,” we have brought together features to address the big question of how America can move forward. Byron York proposes the steps necessary to revive the economy and return to normal life, we examine the way that different states have chosen different paths forward, for there will be no one-size-fits-all solution, we reveal how whole cityscapes will be changed permanently as people flee density ever faster, and we unpack the future of public transportation, investing, and movie theaters. Finally, we also show how the pandemic has proved conclusively that man’s best friend really is man’s best friend.
