In a recent editorial in First Things, Rusty Reno condemns current social distancing, forced closures, and quarantines as un-Christian. Our ancestors, who believed that Christ conquered death, “continued to worship, go to musical performances, clash on football fields, and gather with friends,” during the Spanish flu, while we, who apparently do not, “cower in fear.” Reno accuses Christians who support such measures as subscribing to a “disastrous sentimentalism,” which values physical life at the expense of eternal, and ignores the fact that limited goods like healthcare always have to be “triaged." But Reno is wrong about the past, and he is wrong about the present. Our ancestors fought to preserve life, and we should fight just as hard as they did. The real challenge before us today is how to save the lives of the sick as well as the lives of the poor. It’s a challenge of our own making. In our pursuit of unlimited wealth, we’ve forgotten that our debt-driven, consumerist economy has an achilles heel: sickness. Now that the pandemic has struck, we are faced with the uncomfortable truth that we have been ignoring for a good long time: you cannot serve God and Mammon.
Reno’s nostalgia for our ancestors is understandable, but naïve. It’s tempting in a time of fear and chaos to look back to an age when things were supposedly better, and people weren’t afraid in the ways that they are now. But the truth is, the fear of death is part of human nature. Even Our Lord prayed “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” (Matt. 26:39), and this natural fear, with its corresponding desire for life, motivated our ancestors to work just as hard as we are to save lives. Even a quick look at history can set the record straight. Francesco Aimone has studied public health measures in New York City during the Spanish Flu. It turns out that our ancestors directed everything they did towards the preservation of life. If they kept schools, theaters, and businesses open, it’s not because they were somehow less afraid of death. It’s simply because they followed what we now refer to as the “South Korea model.” Theaters provided a venue for public health education. Schools provided an opportunity for mass surveillance of children and their families, as well as a gateway to mandatory quarantine of the sick. Businesses might have remained open, since the Board of Health did not think the rate of infection was very high, but their hours were staggered as a means of social distancing.
We live in different times and different circumstances, and so we have to use different measures to achieve the same goal. For a start, we’re fighting a different disease. COVID-19 has a longer incubation period, which allows it to spread more quickly undetected. This is particularly problematic for densely populated areas like New York City. How high is the risk of keeping business open? In New York City, Spanish Flu killed 30,000 out of 5.6 million people. Aimone tells us that even that number resulted in bodies being piled up at the cemetery. Reno assures us "that only a small percent of the population of New York is at risk” from COVID-19. But let’s look at real numbers. If you open businesses and just implement social distancing, COVID-19 would kill 292,000 people in New York State, which works out to about 129,000 people in New York City: four times as many as the Spanish Flu. The use of a stay-in-place order cuts that number of projected deaths by over 80%, to 22,000. So let’s be honest. We’re not just talking about “triaging” limited health care goods when we talk about closing businesses. We’re talking about the lives of 100,000 people: enough to fill Yankee Stadium to capacity… almost twice over.
Saving all those lives will cost a fortune. No one knows how low the stock market will go and how far the economy will crumble if we stay at home for much longer. So it seems like we have to make a choice. Do we stay in lock down as long as needed, and sacrifice the economy to save the lives of the people who will die if we don’t? Or do we sacrifice those hundreds of thousands of people to save the economy? No one has yet been able to quantify how many lives would be lost in the future to economic collapse, and there is no evidence that we are looking at a giant increase of suicides, as the President opined. But the pressure’s on nonetheless. With the Wall Street Journal, the President, and Reno himself calling for us to get back to work, the Lt. Governor of Texas recently suggested that the elderly offer themselves up on the altar of sacrifice.
There is a case for going back to work that stems from the value of life, rather than contempt for it. One way to make it is to weigh quality of life over quantity. Anyone who has tried to fight for the lives of the vulnerable in last few decades can tell you that that’s a slippery slope. It discounts the lives of the unborn, the elderly, and the disabled. Push it far enough and you have abortion, euthanasia, and eugenics. Push it even farther and you have Nazi Germany.
Another way to make the case to go back to work is to point to all the lives that have been saved by the technological and economic advancements of the last several decades. That at least ostensibly puts life against life, and not life against money. But it’s another slippery slope. The Devil is in the details. If we go back to work right now, it’s not like the virus politely steps out of the way. Sen. Lindsey Graham pointed this out in response to the President. People who are sick and dying can’t work. If we go back to work without dealing with the pandemic in some other way, we kill 100,000 people in New York City alone, and our economy still collapses. We can’t go back to work now without employing the South Korea model: wide scale testing and mass surveillance. The trouble is, we don’t have the testing kits. Nor are we likely to any time soon. So that’s a non-starter. To say nothing of the mass surveillance we’d have to implement if we did.
Even if we had the testing kits (which we don’t), and we wanted to live in a society with mass surveillance (which I hope we don’t), we’d still be missing the point. The fundamental problem with Reno’s reasoning is his “triage” mentality. Triage makes sense in a hospital when you have two people before you in need of a limited good. You have to have some way of deciding who gets it and who doesn’t. But to sacrifice the life of an actual person here for the sake of a lesser good, or to pit it against some non-existent, imaginary person of the future, is a different thing altogether. That’s not the mentality of the E.R. nurse, who cries at night over the agonizing decision to use the ventilator to save one patient and not another. That’s the mentality of the miser, who pats himself on the back at night because he skimped on health care today, let both people die, and bought another ventilator for tomorrow, “just in case.”
Of course, Reno is right to point out that life, like wealth, is also a limited good with a higher purpose. “Our commonwealth is in heaven” (see Phil. 3:20). When confronted with the choice, we must sacrifice our lives in this world so that we and others may dwell with God in the next. This is the witness of the martyrs. But the glory of the martyrs consists precisely in their Christian rejection of the triage mentality. Theirs is a total sacrifice.
What would have happened if Christ employed the triage mentality? Human life is, after all, a limited good, and Christ possessed a human nature as well as a divine one. Picture Christ, standing in the Garden of Gethsemane, confronted with an opportunity to expend his life on a yet higher good: the salvation of souls. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). If Christ had held anything back, it’s not that he would have saved some souls then and some souls later. He wouldn’t have saved any souls at all. But Christ was no miser. “Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself… even [to] death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). Christ understood that all limited goods have a purpose, and we should offer them up in fulfillment of that purpose when the time arises.
The real dilemma we face is not one of triaging our wealth, which we would be obliged to spend in the service of life if we actually had it, but of acknowledging its absence. In a debt-based economy, few people have very much actual wealth. Sure, vast numbers of people may enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is created by consuming wealth before we produce it. As long as we keep the economy ticking over, as long as we keep producing so as to pay the bills that keep coming due for our consumption, it more or less works. But there’s a catch. For all the things that debt enables us to do, there’s one thing it prevents from doing: we can’t stop. Once we’re in the cycle, we have to stay in the cycle. And if we get sick, it all comes crashing to a halt.
A survey prior to the pandemic found that 74% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. What happens when one of these Americans gets sick? Ideally (as far as the market is concerned) nothing; they keep working. A year ago, the New York Times ran an article headlined “The Death of the Sick Day,” showing how employers were using technology to bridge the gap between the office and the sickbed, enabling Americans to continue production with a compress on their head and a thermometer in their mouth. Our friends across the pond marvel at our unwillingness to yield to the basic demands of our mortal nature. But what choice do we have, where those unfortunate enough to be unable to work from home, even for a short spell, or to incur medical expenses that no amount of production on their part can satisfy, incur the ultimate censure that the market has to offer: bankruptcy.
Our present lockdown is like a sick day for our society, and it incurs all the same costs on an astronomical scale. We’re so far into the cycle of consumption and production that after only a week and a half, businesses are closing, jobless claims are through the roof. There may yet be months ahead. And each business that closes, each jobless claim filed, represents more real people who have just fallen out of the cycle of consumption and production. If they have any real wealth stored up, they may be able to live off of that for a time. But 74% of Americans don’t. Without another paycheck, they put their groceries on the credit card. And so we begin a new cycle, not of the consumption and production of real goods, but of the consumption and production of money: checks to taxpayers, unemployment, government-backed loans, and “unlimited quantitative easing.” Our euphemism for all this is “economic stimulus.” Another name for it is “socialism.” How long can we keep this up before hyperinflation sets in? Nobody really knows. But I don’t think we want to find out.
If we lived in a society where real wealth was widely distributed, we would be obliged to stay home and spend it to save the elderly. But we don’t. We live in a society where the possession of real wealth is rare, and the vast majority of people depend upon the continuous “ticking over” of the economy for their basic living necessities. The classical Catholic moral theologians acknowledge that no one is, strictly speaking, obliged to give up their basic living necessities to another person in need. “If a man found himself in the presence of a case of urgency, and had merely sufficient to support himself and his children, or others under his charge, he would be throwing away his life and that of others if he were to give away in alms, what was then necessary to him” (Thomas Aquinas, S.T., IIa-IIae, q. 32, a. 6, co.). So we find ourselves in an impossible dilemma: it seems like if we go back to work, the elderly die; if we don’t go back to work, the poor starve. But it’s worse than that. As I noted above, we don’t even have the testing kits to go back to work. So we’re stuck.
Jesus once preached to the people, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24). Real wealth is not an evil in itself any more than life is. But we serve wealth, and it becomes an evil for us, when we place it above the goods that it is meant to serve. Apparent wealth is not wealth at all; it evaporates as soon as our society’s service of it ceases. For decades, we have convinced ourselves that things were different, that we could serve both God and mammon. Then we got sick, and our mammon failed us.
The real choice before us is not between the fear of death and the courage to leave our homes, as Reno would have it. Nor is it even between the fear of poverty and the courage to stay home, as many others would have it. The real choice before us is the same choice that has faced each and every member of the human race since Adam: will we trust in the works of our hands, or will we trust in the Lord? We’ve seen how far the works of our hands have gotten. It’s time we turned to the One by Whose hands we were made, and began again with the Psalmist:
“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Fill me with joy and gladness;
let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.” (Ps. 51:7-8)
It’s not that a miraculous cure will necessarily drop out of the sky one day if we pray for it. More likely we will have a long road ahead of tweaking isolation measures and squashing outbreaks, all the while doing whatever we can think of to feed the hungry now, and pick up the pieces when all is said and done later. If these measures work, it will be because God himself prospered the work of our hands (Ps. 90:17), and because we learned through this time of suffering to turn ourselves and our society once more towards him. Only God knows what the future may hold. But “we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him…” (Rom. 8:28).