Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Epidemics are not part of America’s collective memory. The colonial era’s smallpox and yellow fever epidemics, the three cholera epidemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866, the great flu pandemic of 1918 — none of these left a deep imprint on the national consciousness. None fit into a larger national story, at least none that Americans cared to tell. If the polio epidemic of the early twentieth century is remembered, it is mainly because it led to the polio vaccine and fits into a story about the triumph of medical science and American know-how. The AIDS epidemic is still a vivid memory in part because of its effect on the mobilization of the LBGT movement and an expanded vision of human rights. We Americans like our tragedies to have a happy ending.  A practical, inventive, yes-we-can people: that is the version of America many of us remember hearing about and believing in from childhood. Until recently, contagious disease has not troubled that understanding, and for good reason — experience has given us grounds for confidence. Advances in medicine have subdued the most lethal contagions. Disease hangs over all of us individually, but it has not threatened our collective life, much less our sense of ourselves. The Covid19 pandemic, however, will likely figure in our history in a way no previous national encounter with disease in the United States ever has. It is too big and disturbing a horror to be forgotten — not merely a medical story but also a social and cultural one: a story about a country unable to contain the forces of unreason within it. The American response to Covid19 has encapsulated an era when a nation that has always thought of itself as a success has had to confront the possibility that its luck has run out. At moments of crisis, from the Revolution to the Civil War and two world wars, the United States has not only benefited from its institutions and its wealth. It has also been exceptionally fortunate in political leadership. But it was America’s distinct misfortune in 2020 to confront a new and deadly virus at a time when a plague was already consuming its political life. Politics always matters for health and disease. Political decisions shape social structures and the allocation of resources, which in turn influence who gets sick and dies. Ordinarily, however, the chains of causality from politics to disease are long and complex. Not so this time. The impact of politics on the Covid19 pandemic was immediate and direct.  If Covid19 had struck in the decades before Donald Trump became president, it probably would not have mattered whether the administration in office was Republican or Democratic. The president would have turned to the nation’s leading experts in public health and medicine, relied on their counsel, and rallied the nation to cooperate in stopping the spread of the disease. Unlike AIDS in the 1980s, Covid19 did not inherently provoke culture-war divisions. A minimally rational president of either party would have seen the pandemic as an opportunity of the same kind that presidents have had in wartime to rise above partisanship and become the nation’s defender.  That is not to say the American response would have been ideal. It would have had to overcome the longstanding inequities of its healthcare system and its underinvestment in public health. And because Covid19 was a new threat, any administration might have made mistakes, especially at the beginning of the pandemic when critical scientific questions about the disease were clouded in uncertainty. But Trump did not simply make mistakes stemming from inadequate scientific knowledge or other factors beyond his control. He deliberately misled the public. He promoted bogus cures. He modeled antisocial behavior. He held rallies that put his own supporters and their communities at risk of infection, and he turned the White House itself into a superspreader venue. To suit his political interests, his aides muzzled scientists in the government and overruled the public health guidelines they developed. Above all, Trump so thoroughly politicized measures such as the adoption of masks and social distancing that he made the denial of scientific evidence and the defiance of scientific judgment into emblems of Republican identity. Sucked