The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction
(Atlantic Monthly) What the coronavirus outbreak reveals is not the unreality of our present moment, but the illusions it shatters.
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One word I’ve been hearing a lot lately is unreal. Mostly, I hear it from my own mouth, because I haven’t left the house in a month, but also I hear it from friends on Zoom or Skype, and from the news on TV or online. Unreal, or its variations: not real, surreal, this can’t be real. That we have departed from it into strange territory.
But what if it’s exactly the other way around?
What the current crisis and our responses to it, both individual and institutional, have reminded us of is not the unreality of the pandemic, but the illusions shattered by it:
The grand, shared illusion that we are separate from nature.
That life on Earth is generally stable, not precarious.
That, despite what we know from the historical and geological and biological record, human civilization—thanks to advancements in science and medicine and social and governmental structures—exists inside a bubble, protected from the kind of cataclysmic event we are currently experiencing.
What I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that this supposed technological bubble was just that: a thin layer that popped easily.
The stronger bubble, the one that persists, is the psychological one. Even as our stark new reality becomes clear, it remains hard to accept that “normal” was the fiction. It will take some time to let go of the long-held, seldom-questioned assumptions of everyday life: that tomorrow will look like yesterday, next year like the last.
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Five hundred years ago, Copernicus re-centered the universe away from us, outward. The COVID-19 outbreak is a reminder: The world isn’t for us; we are part of it. We’re not the protagonists of this movie; there is no movie. After all the suffering and wreckage have subsided, one good thing for our long-term viability will be to have changed our ways of thinking. To have regained a humility.
I say humility because, as it turns out, unimaginable says more about the limits of our imagination than about reality itself. What we really mean when we say that this pandemic feels “unimaginable” is that we had not imagined it. Just as imagination can mislead us, though, it will be imagination—scientific, civic, moral—that helps us find new ways of doing things, helps remind us of how far we have to go as a species. How little we still understand about our place in this world—terrifying and awful at the moment—but also how much we still get to discover. How fragile and rare our ordered structures are, our fictions, and how precious. How next time, we might rebuild them, stronger.
Read More: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/charles-yu-science-fiction-reality-life-pandemic/609985/
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