In July of 2020, I was fretting about air conditioning in my cramped, Washington DC apartment, marveling at the fact that no one seemed to expect me to return to the office, and lavishing affection on my newly adopted feline friend. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, by contrast, was publishing a reflection on the then roughly six-month-old (depending on when you start counting) pandemic. I knew Lévy’s name and could call up a blurry face to put to it, but I had only a vague impression of what a philosopher might have to say about Covid-19. I certainly did not realize Lévy was broadly considered one of the more irritating public intellectuals, but I quickly joined the ranks of those who found him off-putting while reading his book–really a long essay–chastising the world’s response to the pandemic.
To give you a sense of the experience of reading this book, I have to reach for an entirely different activity to supply an apt analogy. My friends play an internet-based game with their children, two boys under age ten, called Talking Points. Here is how Jackbox Games, the maker, describes the game on its website:
In Talking Points, you and your friends take turns giving short speeches that revolve entirely around responding to slides that you have not seen in advance. If it’s a text slide you read the text out loud, if it’s a picture slide… you say whatever comes to mind, whether it makes sense or… well, it probably won’t make sense.
It’s a fun game, and probably a good exercise for the kids. But I had the feeling reading this book that Lévy had similarly been given a topic—the reaction to coronavirus—and asked to free associate on that topic; extra points for linking his thoughts to a series of works of literature, history, religion, and philosophy. Lévy appears not to have taken the time to think through whether the points he was making along the way were consistent with each other and shows no disinclination toward hyperbole, reporting, for instance, that “[a]t the moment I write these lines, Donald Trump lights America on fire. He utters words that can only lead to a civil war.” To be fair, things did get a bit rough for a few months there, but “civil war” was never inevitable, nor was the possibility of such an event particularly relevant to the topic at hand.
Of course, it is partially the benefit of nearly two years’ worth of hindsight that makes it easy to dismiss much of the book. Within the first few pages of the prologue, for instance, Lévy mocks as “neurosis . . . Donald Trump’s boneheaded, unspeakably irresponsible attempts to deny the pandemic” as well as “the striking tweets in which the lunatic U.S. commander-in-chief promotes conspiracy theories about the birth and propagation of the virus.” The footnote doesn’t reference any of those specific tweets, but one assumes he is referring to no-doubt poorly articulated (and perhaps unfairly motivated) accusations about the virus’s origination in a Wuhan laboratory. Such speculations, however, look less bonheaded in retrospect, even if their presidential proponent does not.
I nevertheless picked up a few interesting tidbits, and gave some thought to a topic that has taken up far less space in the news in recent weeks. Lévy quotes 19th century German pathologist Rudolf Virchow saying: “An epidemic is a social phenomenon that has a few medical aspects.” I do think Lévy frames some of the social phenomena adeptly.
The book takes a number of turns through its five chapters, but there are three themes that Lévy returns to throughout that resonated with me, so I will focus on those here. I’ll use the present tense to describe the thoughts Lévy articulates in the book, though I’ll caveat up front that I have not done exhaustive follow-up research to see if he has changed his views in the last two years.
Dissent, for the end is near.
Lévy is particularly upset about what was, in his view, inadequate public pushback against government pandemic policies, but it’s difficult to tell precisely where his criticism lies. For instance, while he appears to scorn stay-at-home orders, he also seems to mock those who protested against them. Lévy then confusingly presents for our inspection his good citizen bona fides, saying “I complied, of course, with the practices and actions recommended to slow the spread . . .” leading the reader to ask what, exactly, he thinks others should have been protesting?
This dichotomy in his positions is reflected in his apparent respect for “experts” when they are preferable to political leaders and disdain when they achieve what he views as unwarranted celebrity status. For instance, Lévy quickly goes from praising the “impossible and unhinged Mr. Trump” for allowing himself to be contradicted by Dr. Fauci to noting with apparent concern “the metamorphosis of this adviser [Fauci] to a cult figure.” I agree that there’s an important difference between respecting expertise and blindly following credentialed individuals, but Lévy never elaborates on how to think about that difference.
Puzzlingly, Lévy asserts that “it is an iron law for any progressive that there is never a ‘good side’ to a calamity, never anything positive or useful to be taken from it.” It sounds as though he is criticizing fellow left-leaners for falling short of some shared sacred principle of which I, at least, had never before been made aware. Perhaps the issue lies in the translation of the term “progressive” from French, but I paused at this assertion about never identifying a good side to a calamity, wondering, first, if it was true and, second, why anyone would so limit themselves. Was it not President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who quoted Winston Churchill’s advice that we should never let a good crisis go to waste? Regardless of whether I agree with Emanuel on anything or, in this instance, with those praising the lockdown’s impact on the environment, why shouldn’t humans seek to take any ethical advantage possible of opportunities presented by a net negative event in the same way fair analysis compels acknowledging the negative effects of a positive event? Lévy doesn’t explore this question, taking his own perspective as unimpeachable doctrine.
One point I did appreciate was Lévy’s admonition that there should have been a detailed democratic debate not about utopias in the world after the pandemic, but measures to be implemented in the world during the pandemic. In so many countries, workers, especially white collar workers suddenly enjoying a commute-less, sweatpant-wearing work life, focused immediately on how this disruption could change lives for the better, barely taking time to reflect on or question the massive government spending and draconian (in some places) restrictions on hundreds of millions of lives in the now. Lévy properly critiques governments for failing to engage in such a debate and says we (who?) should have resisted (how?). He then asserts, bafflingly, that “this was the first time we had ever seen all of the critical minds in the far-left galaxy applaud a state of emergency.” I’m not sure who “all of the critical minds” included, but I suspect this is exaggerated. People like Glenn Greenwald certainly raised questions about the civil liberties implications of pandemic measures and the entire country of Norway, hardly a bastion of unanimous conservative thought, famously opted early on for a far less restrictive path.[12]
Lévy laments “the absence of deep debate over the digital tracing proposals that have been presented throughout the West as the surest way to open up safely” but on the very next page notes that “some strong-minded individuals and institutions have voiced their concerns,” citing the ACLU’s warnings and work on the subject as well as draft bills from both Republican and Democratic senators to address data privacy matters, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and a Brookings Institution report. I’m not sure how much deeper he thinks the debate should have been in the United States less than six months into the pandemic.
Throughout the pandemic, I was constantly reminded of the adage about driving: everyone driving more slowly than you is insufferable, holding up traffic due to woefully misguided risk aversion. Anyone going faster than you is a maniac with a death wish. It seemed that for my friends and family, anyone doing less social distancing or sanitizing than they were was effectively licking the subway poles (and immorally transferring those germs to anyone with whom they came into contact). Anyone doing more was, let’s be honest, taking things a bit too far.
Misery needs company.
There are a few gems in the book, such as Lévy noting that he has come to find certain phrases unbearable, including Blaise Pascal’s assertion that “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” Lévy responds to those who took solace in this line:
Confinement’s happy few, the lucky ones who went off to tend the garden of their country house, and all the other joyful and good-humored confinees who had the good fortune not to be living in a nursing home, a high-rise block in East Harlem or the Bronx, or a one-bedroom apartment with noise and children, all the neo-urbanites who saw in Pascal’s thought an invitation to rediscover the simple pleasures, the delights of time standing still, the joy of daily rituals relearned, but above all the chance to find their center again and listen to themselves living, did not know how to read a sentence all the way to the end. They ignored two things. First, for Pascal, “sitting quietly in a room” was not an indulgence but a struggle, a test, an almost intolerably painful metaphysical experience, one that confronts us with our finiteness. Second, that test consisted of doing nothing, strictly nothing, and certainly not cooking, gardening, crocheting, yoga, attending Zoom happy hours, flower pressing, scrapbooking, indulging in home spa treatments, dying fabrics using turmeric powder, making papier-mâché models of Notre Dame, or taking pictures of oneself doing nothing and posting them to the same Instagram account where the week before one had posted vacation photos. They had simply forgotten that, for Pascal, the test was a test not only of nothingness, but of the vertigo and terror it induced.
Three cheers to Lévy for acknowledging that those chiding others to slow down and embrace the alone time were typically not entombed in their dwellings, unable to get a breath of fresh air or feel the sun on their skin. Reading those words, I recalled feeling my fair share of annoyance at people in houses with yards telling me it was my civic duty to stay in my hot, humid, mostly dark apartment all day.
Further, whether they were intended as a display of erudition or not, I couldn’t help enjoying Lévy’s reflections on his subjects that prompted comparisons to characters in great works.
These smug masters of the art of confinement, confiding on their blogs that they had never been so happy or so free since finding themselves right where they were, with nothing to occupy them, nearly motionless in their rooms, suspended in the current of time, had, I found, an irritating tendency to sound like Mr. Simonnot in Sartre’s The Words. Mr. Simmonot was so happy to be right where he was, so happy to be in the palace that was his own, fortified as if it were the most precious of assets, that whenever for some reason he was not at home, whenever he found himself somewhere else, he imagined his colleagues exclaiming, “Whoa! Mr. Simmonot is missing from his spot!”
Examining older chronicles of confinement cited as precedent, Lévy observes that they largely did not “fall into the trap of seeing their trip to the dungeon as a lucky opportunity to be seized.” Responding to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line that “hell is other people,” Lévy states that past societies “knew that Pascal’s room, Thoreau’s hut, and especially their own den was a dark chamber, an unhealthy space full of resentment; they knew that one is nothing when alone, that one thinks most often of nothing at all, and that hell is not other people, but the self.”
Perhaps. I imagine there are counterexamples. To be honest, however, I understood both those who bristled at the confinement and those who thrived under it. As my libertarian nature grew increasingly frustrated with (often absurd) government edicts, my never-far-below-the-surface introvert found that the need for copious amounts of alone time was finally satisfied–I felt that I had spent a lifetime preparing for this moment and, with some embarrassment, embraced the pajama-clad life away from the press of humanity. I’m not convinced that acknowledging such pleasure is a slippery slope to civilizational decline.
Policies, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Throughout his book, Lévy addresses various government actions taken in response to the virus, alternating sympathy with outrage.
For instance, he expresses his shock that, in France, books (“[n]ourishment for the mind and the soul”) were not considered basic necessities. Fair enough. Frankly, defining the terms “basic necessities,” along with “essential businesses,” always seemed a foolhardy endeavor to me. But if books were basic necessities for Lévy, shouldn’t he allow others to define what they consider their own such necessities? Painting supplies for artists? Instruments for musicians? Ping pong tables? Video games? And would he distinguish between professionals and hobbyists? Beyond food, water, and shelter, one man’s essentials are another man’s frivolities.
I tried to avoid judging Lévy’s work here with the benefit of hindsight, but some of his policy positions—and even more, his dismissal of others’ opinions—seem questionable in retrospect. He asks, for example:
[W]hat are we to make of the department head at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris stating calmly that “for the very old,” going through “ventilation and intubation” will be “more harmful” than “coordinated care and support”?
Was that not where much of the medical community landed, in the end? Was Lévy’s horror over Trump’s promise to withdraw from the World Health Organization a bit misplaced given that body’s apparent capture by China (which he concedes on the very next page!)? Might such resources not have been better diverted elsewhere? He also lauds policy choices with consequences I’m not sure he understood, such as Europe’s “flood[ing] the market with liquidity.”
Lévy touches on the environment, claiming that he wants the “ecological principle” to become a permanent part of our legal codes and that he agrees with those who want to activate “History’s emergency break.” But Lévy continues:
[A]s for the plan to push the pause button so as to allow the planet to breathe; as for cutting off globalization’s power supply, which, according to some ecologists, the new electricity fairy was about to bring about with a wave of her ionic, renewable wand; as for bracketing and suspending the laws of the world as it was before, about which were being lectured nonstop and for which Covid-19 would act as the circuit breaker – well, bravo! It was working! But not in the way we were told it would! Certainly not in the direction of greater equality! Because we were withdrawing from the poorest of the poor, and they were the ones who were going to pay the price of our radical generosity.
Not like this, he says. Well, why not? Is change only good if it happens the way he desires? Would better (in Lévy’s view) environmental circumstances only be welcome if they are the result of his success in persuading lawmakers of particular policy merits? One gets the impression that Lévy would feel dismay at ending one of the various humanitarian crises to which he draws attention (laudably) if it didn’t come as the result of the western intervention for which he advocates.
Indeed, while there are certainly ends that do not justify the means, I began to suspect that Lévy’s pandemic policy preferences conveniently map on to his political preferences. How else to explain the following balancing statement:
. . . [A]ll things considered, a heavy dose of caution, and even pandemic regulations like those in Australia authorizing visits to the beach provided one did not build sandcastles or sunbathe, or in California where one had to remain mobile on the beaches (yes to walking, running, swimming; no to sunbathing, picnics, and volleyball), are preferable to the irresponsible stupidity of the Belarussian leaders who deemed it “patriotic” not to cancel soccer matches or to Trump brazenly and blindly declaring that the country would be open for business by Easter.
Can’t we muster outrage over all government absurdities without finding our own side to be the lesser of evils? Lévy extols and promotes “falling as democracy’s calvary” but, if disfavored outcomes had been arrived at by democratic means (such as the election of the President Trump whom Lévy (with good cause) berates), I imagine that Lévy would dismiss such results as the ignorance of the masses or the malevolence of the mob.
Interestingly, Lévy engages in a kind of early pandemic era lockdown utilitarianism, comparing lives lost from the virus to lives lost from the economic shutdown. He compares “lives in the abstract” saved by pandemic policies with his work reporting on specific lives: refugees trapped on Lesbos, Bangladesh, day laborers.
I’m broadly in favor of considering such comparisons as directionally useful in analyzing policy options. But isn’t any such determination—made by the experts of whom Lévy is now a skeptic—a form of centralized arrogance? Can any one person or administration or government really calculate and meaningfully compare the lives saved to those lost by a lockdown, much less the relative quality of those lives? I believe it is almost certainly better to give individuals as much liberty as possible and allow information to proliferate, permitting experience at local levels to yield more information.
A bit preciously, but presciently, Lévy points the reader to what the world was ignoring as it focused on the pandemic: ISIS, Syria, Uighers, Hong Kong, global warming, deforestation, Yemen, migrants, and of course:
Vladimir Putin, who has swallowed the Crimea and ceded no ground in the Donbass, had not lost his sense of direction. Pursuing his dream of shattering the European Union . . . Putin was playing the toreador, thrusting his banderillas into European borders to see just how much of the unacceptable we would accept. But Europe, or Europa, who had been a princess raised by a bull, seemed now like a blind bull, a sacrificial beast dropping its head ever lower with each thrust of the spear.
I confess that these issues were not top of my mind in the summer of 2020 and can only give Lévy credit for reminding readers of them.
Just asking questions.
Lévy is at his best, I think, not when moralizing from on high, but when raising topics for further consideration. For instance, this delightful parenthetical on the benefits of the pandemic for “big tech”:
(which wants us to call it Alexa or Siri to lull us into a cloud in which there’s no reason to consider traveling since jet fuel pollutes and one has absolutely everything – operas, symphonies, the world’s greatest museums – served up digitally on the tray of an eternal breakfast in bed).
Technology made the pandemic tolerable, but I’m not sure we would have accepted the most oppressive government responses had their consequences not been quite so tolerable for many of us. I would like to have heard more from Lévy on this topic.
I also appreciated his detour into etymology toward the end of the book, looking at the Latin word mundus, which he says has two meanings: first, the real world, “[t]he one in which people strive, grieve, hope, and die.” But it is apparently also a word signifying “what is neat and clean. Immaculate and without strain, Aseptic. Sanitized. Disinfected.” He continues, “[a]nd it is the name of another world, one unconcerned about and forgetful of its accursed and appalling side, which it is our human task to confront.”
Lévy recounts one particularly disturbing incident, of which I had not been aware. Per Lévy, the chairman of France’s science council told the Senate that the academy had decided to “delay” the “release from confinement” of “18 million at-risk individuals” who “cannot deal with Covid-19 under reasonable conditions.” (Quotations Lévy’s own.)
I shared his concern that the pandemic was allowing some of us (maybe myself included) to bask in our human desire for isolated, disinfected perfection. We would have no fear of missing out if there was nothing going on away from our Netflix couches, our home yoga studios, and our restaurant delivery. Lévy, however, warns: “alas, we were well on our way to forgetting the world. It had been bothering us for ages. It had been a little dirty. We had been trying for a long time to keep it at a distance. That, at least, was accomplished.”
Conclusion
I didn’t come away persuaded of anything I hadn’t already thought. And that is despite being very much inclined to agree with the writer and, indeed, likely more skeptical of almost all pandemic restrictions than Lévy appears to have been. One man’s madness is another man’s reasonable precaution is another man’s understandable error.
But more to the point, Lévy’s thoughts presented here do not strike me as original and the constant references to philosophers and literature come across as attempts to display his education and reading rather than the employment of elucidating examples to move his conceptions forward.
In concluding—somewhat out of left field—Lévy wrings his hands about a rising tide of populism in the west. He describes his generation’s “masters” as
committed souls who had fought the beat with bare hands (the International Brigades in Spain, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Malreux). And they were, in our eyes, the most admirable of men because they were both present in the world and present in words, combining the art of the fighter with that of the poet.
In tribute to Lévy and his book, which I can at least concede was written quickly in the face of rapidly shifting circumstances, I will also conclude on a bit of a tangent. Those last lines quoted above, as I read them in March of 2022, called to mind Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I don’t know if his prior comedic art is what Lévy had in mind, but looking to see what Lévy has had to say in recent weeks, it appears that he has found a master in the new generation, writing:
May the gods be with him: The free world, which is also at stake in the battle for Kyiv, and the Europe of principles have found a new, young, and magnificent founding father.
Lévy is not a writer I’m likely to pick up again, but I don’t regret spending a few hours getting to know a man of big ideas, strong opinions, and ongoing hope for humanity.