On the Human Condition
I HAVE READ RICHARD HOFSTADTER and understand the root of anti-intellectualism in this country’s history, but its abysmally low point still surprises and saddens me. Almost thirty years ago, after witnessing the lights at Tiananmen Square go out and a massacre carried out in the dark, I looked towards the New Continent for its the shining torch of liberty and enlightenment. Living under this torch for more than two decades, I have noticed it dimming, but this time I have no place to turn to. Strangely, such a desperation in the darkest moment in my life has forced me to face fear straight on. I had to pull myself up by the bootstraps. “Shelter in place” gave me a luxurious opportunity to try on a variety of more leisure activities: Cooking Indian food: Curry kills germs! Drinking vodka: Alcohol kills viruses! Reading Decameron: Books kill time! Listening to Shostakovich: Leningrad Symphony kills depression! Tweeting follies of officials of major powers: Hubris, corruption and narcissism high in power kill people!

To transcend the daily routine, I voraciously read thinkers who have searched and survived in dark times: Pitirim Sorokin, Hannah Arendt, Viktor Frankl, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, Erich Fromm, Madeline Albright, and others. Surprisingly, Albright, a former U.S. Secretary of State, had the foresight to forewarn Americans on Fascism in 2018, but among her list of almost a dozen leaders and countries, China is conspicuously absent. Xi Jinping, the president of China since 2012, was mentioned once, and in a positive light. From such a cozy spot for the most threatening totalitarianism in the 21st century, we can sense the Achilles’ heel in America’s long-term foreign policy that has failed to understand and tear down the Bamboo Curtain that China is behind. President Trump’s questionable flirtation with Xi (pronounced as She) becomes more understandable in this bigger context.

Through reading Frankl’s “autobibliotherapy,” I had luck in finding intellectual companions to bewail together our current human condition. I’ve used Suzanne Collins’s trilogy, The Hunger Games, for teaching my Introduction to Political Science course. In 2008, Collins intended to give the American youth a collective vaccination against the virus of the Panem Dystopia under President Snow, who replaced “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” with “Bread and Circus.” In 2014’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway pretend to stand at the year of 2393, reminiscing how neo-communism under the Second People’s Republic of China triumphed over liberal democracy in the West. Regarding the Great Collapse of the West, they wrote: “As food shortages and disease outbreaks spread and sea level rose, these governments found themselves without the infrastructure and organizational ability to quarantine and relocate people.”¹ After the “period of the penumbra” in the last half of the 20th century, “the second Dark Age” had befallen on the West. What both of these authors have pinpointed is an epistemological trap of which Western establishments have fallen into—a Type II Error: “The conceptual mistake of rejecting as false something that is true.”²

Our current unfolding pandemic is not “unprecedented,” or something that “nobody could have foreseen” as insisted by Trump.³ As a matter of fact, from the 14th century’s Black Death to the Spanish Flu, from HIV/AIDS in the 1980s to the 2000s with SARS, H1N1 (Bird Flu and Swine Flu), MERS, Ebola and Zika, we can understand Jared Diamond’s message in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997)—that germs—change human fates. From the G.W. Bush Administration to the Obama Administration, both presidents had warned Americans of global pandemics, and their efforts are reflected in all the National Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends” reports. Unfortunately, these warnings, including those from the Crimson Contagion drill in 2019, were brushed aside by the Trump Administration.⁴

In search of light, I had an unexpected realization: during the darkest years from 1940 to 1945 in the U.S., a quiet renaissance happened. Great thinkers, many of them refugees who fled Europe, envisioned and constructed a new future for America and the world. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt seized the historical moment and pledged to the U.S. and the entire world “Four Freedoms.” Roosevelt not only systematically proclaimed the freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want at the U.S. Capitol, but more importantly, after each freedom, he emphasized “everywhere in the world” and “anywhere in the world,” pledging a commitment to all humanity. That historical episode clearly demonstrates that the U.S. and its radical progress are often driven by crisis. Sorokin corroborated this historical pattern: “[C]alamities are not an unmixed evil: side by side with their destructive and pernicious functions they play also a constructive and positive role in the history of culture and man’s creative activities. With human beings as they are, catastrophes are great educators of mankind.”⁵

Quadruple Fears
Yet, I have quadruple fears:

1. First about my physical existence in face of a global pandemic;
2. Second about the global assault orchestrated by the Chinese government against overseas Chinese, especially political dissidents;
3. Third, about the political repercussions upon myself due to my critical viewpoints on an opportunistic, populist demagogue;
4. And, finally about a worldwide racial backlash against the Chinese.

I might have forgotten the teachings of FDR: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We have no reason to doubt that a thunderous voice will echo again in the Capitol chamber four scores later for a “New New Deal,” not only for Americans, but “far beyond our borders.” FDR taught us: “Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”

1. Naming the Pandemic
A pestilence, a plague, or a global pandemic evolving into a threat to humanity is never a purely natural process. The necessary natural cause is always complemented and catalyzed by socioeconomic and juridical-political factors, creating a perfect storm. The global coronavirus pandemic is the latest example of this point.

First, the naming of the disease itself has become a highly charged political battle with both international and global dimensions. Due to its initial outbreak in Wuhan, a metropolis in the Hubei province of central China, in December 2019, the name Wuhan virus or Wuhan pneumonia was conveniently chosen, of course, by the Chinese government itself. On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) changed the name to COVID-19 (“CO” for corona, “VI” for virus, and “D” for disease) to avoid stigmatizing a geographic location or group of people.

2. Clash of Titans
Second, as the monster was released out of Frankenstein’s lab, a killer virus became a contagion, and then a global pandemic. This out-of-control escalation started to rip off the facade of global and national governance, and generated momentum among people to hold politicians and International Governmental Organization (IGO) public employees accountable. These politicians, from the Wuhan mayor, Hubei party secretary, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention chief, General Secretary Xi Jinping, to the U.S. President and WHO general secretary, shared the same tendency to pass the buck but claimed their responses were, to the crisis, impeccable. With failures abound and successes in short supply, these politicians had conflicts among themselves, with three top leaders still remaining, in a clash of titans.

For example, Trump and Xi have already been at loggerheads due to the trade war. In fifty days since the first reported U.S. death, the total has surpassed 40,000, more than a dozen times that of the shocking September 11 attacks. In New York and America’s heartland, the daily ravaging death tolls have heightened U.S. animosity towards China. Trump’s withholding of financial aid to the WHO, and his criticism under the pretext of the organization’s “China-centric” position, and its chief, Dr. Tedros Adhanom’s failure in sending out an earlier alarm, will further wreak havoc on the global fight against the pandemic in poorer countries. The global pandemic, already infecting almost every country in the world, has been politicized to the equivalent of World War Three: China against a probable coalition of one hundred nations, of course depending on whether the U.S. could/would offer leadership to the Allied Forces.

A pathogen is a common threat to all humanity. The key factor in my ability to perceive this threat in advance is that as a China specialist, I have been working on a project entitled “China at the Epicenter: Calamity, Protest and the Sadistic State” for the past decade. Since I have already noticed a pattern in China’s handling of calamities, natural, man-made or a mixture of both, my knowledge of the nature of the pandemic and its prairie-fire-like spread is a mixed blessing. As James Bryce said, s/he who is forewarned is forearmed.⁶ However, when you try to cry wolf to your community (a college, a city or a country), you might be treated as Chicken Little. As a part of this somnolent community facing a public health crisis, you would rather remain aslumber than an anxious night watchman waiting to be swallowed by the catastrophe.

3. Message from the Frontline
My winter break started right on Christmas Eve, through the New Year and ended on the Chinese Lunar New Year (Spring Festival), which this year fell on January 25, 2020. Under normal circumstances, this is supposed to be my busiest time for receiving guests or visiting friends. My increasing concern over the unknown virus emerging out of Wuhan convinced me to take precautions and cancel several appointments and arrangements, such as a Chinese New Year Eve dinner at home with my niece, who came from California with her husband and several old friends from China. The real alarm regarding the Wuhan virus came from a virologist working in Wuhan on January 24 as we exchanged New Year greetings through Messenger. This scientist received the best training at Wuhan University, finished a Ph.D. and then worked as a post-doc for years at American universities, and less than two years ago returned to Wuhan to continue research on virology.

As a layman of science whose knowledge of biology comes mainly from Stephen Nowicki’s lessons on The Great Courses, and is barely good enough for Mukherjee’s and Christakis’s best-sellers, I have never tried to pretend to have credibility and authority on the scientific nature of COVID-19; I restrict my interest purely to the political aspect, especially its crisis management. However, my friend wanted me to be aware that contrary to the conventional wisdom then, the Wuhan virus was way more contagious and fatal than SARS, a difference similar to that between conventional and thermonuclear explosions. I was also informed that the Chinese authorities had underreported the number of infections and deaths; worst of all, despite the millions of residents who left Wuhan for ancestral homes or other cities for the Spring Festival, the Wuhan municipal government delayed alerting the public for two weeks, and the WHO, conniving collaborator by refusing to upgrade their alert level to global pandemic. This scientist basically ended the message with a S.O.S., not only for the city of Wuhan, but for China and the world: Global awareness and international assistance are urgently needed! Otherwise, the consequences are beyond our imagination!

4. New York City: Pandemic Gateway
Upon receiving this trustworthy and authoritative message from the frontline, I went into action. I called my friend at Voice of America and worked out a report on January 25, warning that New York City could be the next gateway for Wuhan pneumonia. I called my other friend who is a regular commentator for Fox News and shared with him the message I received. He raised the issue on TV and Twitter. Meanwhile, I wrote to the secretary of my spiritual teacher the Dalai Lama twice, urging for extreme precaution. I alerted my friend who had access to the Presidential Office of Taiwan. I made multiple phone calls to friends and relatives. I also spread the word out on my social media, TV interviews, and written publications. A simple tally: Since January 25 until mid-April as I finish this essay, I’ve done fourteen radio interviews, twenty-six TV interviews—with one receiving more than 2,000,000 views, and nine publications. One paper, “From Wuhan Virus to Chinazi Virus,” on January 30, had a total of 9,312 Chinese characters (words).

I purchased masks of all sorts and began to prepare food and other necessities for possible lockdown. On February 26, less than a month into the spring semester, I started preparing my two classes for possible online/remote teaching/learning by devoting one session to talk about the coronavirus. I knew that none of my two classes (Introduction to Political Science, and International Political Economy) had a legitimate section on this topic; however, my responsibility for my community as a China watcher urged me to teach such a special session. I even told my students to share the information from this session with their families. On January 28, The New York Times reported an interview with Dr. Oxiris Barbot, New York City’s Health Commissioner, who said regarding the Wuhan virus, “all indications are that it’s not nearly as deadly as SARS.” This prompted me to tweet that Dr. Barbot was mistaken and misleading; her judgment could be fatal. As a parent myself, I made one more effort to talk my independent-minded daughter living in another city, out of her long-planned, self-financed spring break trip to Denmark in March.

I did what I could—except having not sought self-immolation in front of the White House to shock the president, and therefore the general public—in the face of ignorance and arrogance towards a menacing virus. In hindsight, I still believe that even had I set myself on fire with a shouting message that “We are facing a life-or-death attack from coronavirus!”—it is unlikely that my expiration would have contributed more response than merely comments about a lunatic or fanatic college professor.

5. From Staten Island to Fifth Avenue
My peculiar sense of resignation and vulnerability during my third existential crisis in New York after the September 11 attacks and the 2008 Financial Meltdown is due to a series of racial, ideological, political and geostrategic, and even civilizational factors.

My college is unique within the City University of New York (CUNY) system due to the demographic character of Staten Island. In 2016, this outer borough elected a Republican into Congress, and gave 57 percent of the vote to Trump in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 40 percent. I remember that exactly one week after the presidential election, my college sponsored a symposium on the new Trump presidency, hosted by my college’s vice-president/provost, who happened to be a political scientist. At this venue, I warned a crowd of two hundred faculty, staff and students that Trump would have a high aptitude for bringing trouble to his presidency and the country. My Cassandra analysis was based upon both Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (the ideas of empathy, narcissism, psychopath, sociopath, cruelty, etc.), and James David Barber’s The Presidential Character (the Nixon-type combination of active plus negative on the matrix of energy and attitude). I could feel the atmosphere of unease, if not open hostility towards my talk.

From the day when presidential candidate Trump boasted that his soaring popularity would not be effected even if he fired a gun into the crowds on Fifth Avenue, I knew there was a white privilege not available to black and brown people. I had not thought about my own personal safety, despite my secondary workplace, the CUNY Graduate Center, being located on Fifth Avenue. Indeed, I had thought about what would happen if I or an African-American or Latino male colleague had said what Trump said. We would not be allowed to go home with impunity. I had also reflected on the fact that my dear CUNY colleagues, for example, Frances Fox Piven (whom I call her the “Godmother of Social Protest”) and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, have made far more contribution to the U.S. and humanity than an egomaniac narcissist, and do not deserve such a threat. I know that as an “outsider,” to bump into American politics with a critical view of a sitting president is not a breeze, especially when this president doesn’t hesitate to stir up racial suspicion and xenophobia to fire up his base. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, one white female student walked out of my classroom protesting my “white hate,” for criticizing the President, who has dubbed the media “an enemy of American people.”

6. Citizen Entanglements
I however cannot escape my entanglement with controversial American politics as a citizen and political scientist. Based upon my observation, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary General Xi Jinping has concealed truths early on concerning the coronavirus. Around the turn of the new year, Chinese authorities clamped down doctors who blew the whistle. For example, Dr. Li Wenliang and the Group of Eight medical doctors were reprimanded/summoned by the police, publicly humiliated and condemned by China Central Television (CCTV)—the leading mouthpiece of CCP propaganda. Under his self-proclaimed “personal leadership and management,” Xi created a leading group in response to the coronavirus filled with ideologues and propagandists, lacking a single scientist—not even the minister of health. Nevertheless, for Trump, Xi was his “good friend,” and on January 24 Trump tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

As I was trying to share my concerns with the people around me and the media to urge others to take precaution, on January 31 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director, Robert R. Redfield, insisted: “The risk at this time to the American public is low.” The next day, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted a limerick that ended with “Risk is low for #coronarvirus.” Beginning February 29, the Surgeon General was advising Americans: “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” On March 31, Adams said on Fox & Friends that “the data doesn’t show” that wearing a mask in public would help people during the coronavirus pandemic.

7. Xenophobia, Unmasked
As a scholar who has lived, worked, and frequently traveled to the monsoon region of Asia, I know one simple fact: all the countries that have more successfully dealt with the COVID-19 crisis required the public to wear a mask, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and certainly Taiwan. To meet this need, Taiwan increased its daily production of surgical masks from a little bit more than one million pieces in January to 17 million in April. So far Taiwan has already donated 16 million pieces to the West and its allies (the U.S. received 2 million from the first batch of 10 million).

For decades, in the circle of Asian studies, scholars have voiced their concerns about the U.S. lagging behind East Asian countries in many categories, not only manufacturing, but also in infrastructure, city management, education, and social service. In 2011, after U.S. problems were further exposed during the Great 2008 Financial Meltdown, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and the Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum published their best-seller, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. I thought then that if the American elites finally realized this urgency for catch-up, there would be a glimmer of hope. Instead, five years later a “MAGA” president exploited this embarrassment and prescribed a “make you feel good” steroid to the angry crowds. A sudden surge of faux self-confidence and real xenophobia swept away serious attempts for self-reflection and self-rejuvenation, especially in manufacturing.

The atmosphere for public discourse on what the U.S. could learn from other countries was further poisoned by racialized polarization attributable to a populist president who utilizes anger as political fuel, and scapegoating as a political cudgel in governing. When people like me are juxtaposed with “our American professors,” our authority and credibility are further undercut in the classroom. Understandably, a partisan split over the coronavirus threat exists: In February, 40% of surveyed Republicans were “not concerned at all,” in contrast to only about 6% of Democrats. Although the Republicans kept losing their self-confidence in March, dropping to 23% after mid-March, there still existed a 20 percentage point difference from Democrats.⁷

On the one hand, among non-Chinese communities there were rumors that the coronavirus was only afflicting Asians, sparing Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. The worst part is that some good-hearted Americans friendly to the Chinese did not want to talk about this “Asian disease” either, in order not to deepen racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans. At the global level, Aso Taro, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, suggested in late February at a G7 conference that the crisis of coronavirus should be brought to the table. He was told off by an Italian official that coronavirus is “a disease for the yellow people, not for us.”⁸ Any Asian specialist would be able to tell you that Japan has surpassed Italy by at least ten steps in science, industry, service and medicine: Basically we are comparing the Fiat with the Lexus. Ironically, one week later, Italy was upended by “a disease for the yellow people,” quickly surpassing China as the country with the highest death toll, only to be replaced later by the U.S. If Aso had to swallow this kind of insult, I had no quixotic spirit to pick a fight.

8. Discordant Chinese-American Communities
As a student intellectually baptized by a leading political philosopher on generalized agnosticism, I have developed a moderate skepticism in politics. However, among the Chinese-American community, there have been a small but vocal number of zealous Trumpians. Strangely enough, among them are many anti-communist professionals, religious activists, democracy advocates, and devoted Falun Gong practitioners. At the intellectual level, some neo- or ultra-rightists have targeted their so-called “White Lefties” (白左) and hold political loyalty to President Trump as a litmus test of Chinese-American new citizenship in their chosen home. As the saying goes, “My President, right or wrong.” We know this is chauvinism. Or, “My Country, Right or Wrong.” We know this is ultra-nationalism and super-patriotism.

This evangelical zeal has inspired strong passion among Chinese-American Trumpians, who created a hostile public space for any dissenting voice toward Trump, his behavior, and his policies on social media. The Chinese-American community has been further torn apart and atomized by anti-Trump and pro-Trump camps, in addition to the old cleavages created by emigration before or after the Communist take-over, from Taiwan/Hong Kong/Southeast Asia or Mainland China; pro-KMT/pro-DPP or pro-Communist; pro-Unification or pro-independence for all ethnic groups (Tibetans, Uyghurs, etc.) and regions (Taiwan, Sichuan, Henan, Guangdong, Hong Kong, and even Shanghai).

Since the Chinese government and its omnipresent Foreign Propaganda and United Front Work departments strategically strike new wedges into complex cleavages and manipulate them for their own purpose—bullying, intimidating and threatening to report critics of Trump to the FBI or Homeland Security—can easily silence many politically unsavvy new citizens. Open calls for forced conversion to Christianity, white supremacy (some Chinese-Americans hold the delusion that they are a superior race and a natural ally to the “Aryan race” or “Anglo-Saxon nation”), social Darwinism, McCarthyism and internment policy can be heard on social media in Chinese (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and of course WeChat).

As a China researcher, I am increasingly convinced by mounting evidence from both China and other scientists in the world, that the virus itself probably had a connection with the Virology Institute of China’s Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the only P4 level bio-hazard lab in association with China’s biochemical weapon research for the military. Because of my strong suspicion of this military connection, during my February 1 interview with Voice of America, I gave my conjecture that the coronavirus had a composite feature of the SARS virus in combination with the HIV virus, and that a possible escape of the virus through the unregulated management of lab animals and resale to food markets might be the cause of the virus breakout.⁹

Entering February, President Trump continued to praise his good “friend,” President Xi, for his competent work in China. After more than two weeks of a city-wide lockdown in Wuhan, Chinese law enforcement treated their patients as criminals; the Party-state, already a “perfect dictatorship”—dubbed by Oxford political scientist Stein Ringen—expanded its capillary power through the medical health institutions upon the Chinese population. Oblivious to all these brutalities, on February 7 President Trump tweeted: “Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus…. He will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!”

9. Parade of Political Elephants
At a February 28 rally, Trump claimed criticism of his sloppy coronavirus response was nonsense. Like the Mueller investigation and impeachment, “This is their new hoax.” A fatal virus that would soon infect more than 700,000 and kill more than 40,000 (continuing to rise exponentially) was politicized as a new “hoax” by the Democrats. Unfortunately, I happen to be a democrat—both the capital and lower-case forms. For a while, I had a feeling that I was watching a parade of elephants that kept marching on, ignoring yells from onlookers. Even if someone tried to stop the pachyderms, their thick skins made transmitting the message impossible. However, I do not think the failure to foresee the coming tempest solely fell upon the Republicans. As I’ve already criticized Dr. Barbot earlier, I must also point out that on March 2, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—who went away as a show horse at his failed presidential bid—tweeted his encouragement to New Yorkers to “get out on the town.”

Nevertheless, the tornadoes surrounding me on social media intensified their vengeance. Someone openly called for my “expulsion” from CUNY and New York due to my tweets contradicting the rhetoric from Trump! As a Chinese-American, I really had felt this: When you get credit in your American identity, you get blamed in your Chinese identity. Before the disaster materializes, your forewarning could easily be regarded as part of a conspiracy; and after the disaster has devastated a multitude of people, your failure to convince the complacent, as well as cynical populace, is blamed by those you tried to forewarn.

Here I note a small difference: My spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was mindful of an imminent danger, but sent a calming message to his followers worldwide as people started panicking before the plague, comforting everyone that nothing, including the coronavirus, is permanent, so we can face it with confidence and calm. In contrast, the political leader of my country was mindless of the danger in its early stage, but boasted his prescience after the disaster became full-blown and scapegoated everyone from the media to Democratic leaders, from China to the WHO. If people follow the latter sort of leadership in coping with a calamity, you can expect failure, frustration and finger-pointing from this crowd.

10. Backlash against the Chinese
In full anticipation of widespread fury, I could do nothing to stop a big backlash against the Chinese, first in Milan, London, and New York City; later in Moscow, Tokyo, and Lagos. Nobody would know that I tried my best to inform. No stranger would pardon me from the sin committed by the Chinese, even though that country has already banned me from entry for the past twelve years. During the most tranquil time I could personally feel that my presence, even the presence of my family (my wife and daughter) could not soften my image enough, and be perceived as an intrusion into the reserved space of some Americans.

On March 20, President Trump started calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus” at his press briefing. Negative sentiment against Chinese-Americans was further encouraged with a license from the country’s highest office. As the worst moment that I could ever imagine already befallen upon me, I’ve heard and read of an increasing number of racial attacks, both verbal and physical, against Asian Americans, including some of my friends and acquaintances. Lockdown, for me and my family, is not an inconvenience, but more a refuge to hide at home. We Chinese have joked that this is the Year of the Mouse, so we have to hide deep in the burrows and nervously watch the outside. However, thinking beyond the Year of the Mouse and the coming many years, if I want to continue to follow my wanderlust, I may have to tell everyone that I’m Taiwanese.

Talleyrand of France once said this infamous quote: “This is a blunder, even worse than a crime.” A blunder hurts yourself. Unfortunately, blunders abound in most major powers, major IGOs, and major public institutions during this global pandemic. It revealed a systemic failure of governance at both national and global levels. The corona of all blunders should be presented to the leaders and leading public health experts in the West for their pseudo-science, and even anti-commonsensical comments on a no-brainer topic: the utility of wearing a mask. The WHO, the White House, the CDC and Surgeon General in the U.S.; the British Health Minister and Minister of Transport, England’s chief medical officer; the Canadian Chief Public Health Officer and more, all had denied the protective function of surgical masks for the public. But at the same time, they were calling on the public not to compete against frontline health care workers for masks.

Even after Canada had required its citizens to put on masks in public, its Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, still insisted: “Recognizing that actually the evidence is not quite there but it’s an added layer of prevention and protection against the spread to others.”¹⁰ After the White House finally recommended on April 3 that Americans should wear a mask, President Trump said bluntly that he would not wear one.¹¹ I am not sure which makes him look sillier: wearing a mask or denying its protective utility. Still I can understand the logic behind his behavior. Imagine that four years ago presidential candidate Trump could confidently shout to his fans: “Make America Great Again!” Four years later as more than 20 million Americans have lost their jobs in less than a month, and thousands and thousands wait in line to receive free groceries, how could he bellow out his message through a surgical mask—for him, a symbol of sickness and the image of a loser: “Keep America Great Forever!”? MAGA for MASK? Forever?

11. Betrayal of Western Elites
As the elites in the West have been sounding out an uncertain bugle regarding a simple mask, why are they unable to acknowledge their lack of preparation for such a global pandemic? For a great country like the U.S., as authorities have been advising people to use their imagination and creativity to create makeshift masks, many look ridiculous and some surely are a shame on face of the greatest industrial society on the planet. Why has it taken so long for the country to follow in the footsteps of places like Taiwan and produce masks? (The good news is that finally on April 17, Honeywell’s factory in Smithfield, Rhode Island started producing N95 masks, “a total of 20 million masks per month.”)¹²

The failure is not merely lying in the use of obscurantism by public officials for their un-reasoning. A deeper failure is that public officials have completely forgotten the foundational principle of modern capitalism: enlightened self-interest. If after decades of neoliberalism, the public health, public education and other public infrastructure were neglected and destroyed under the “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein), and the margin of error for our society was drastically narrowed as a real process of “Third Worldization in U.S.” (not in Samuel Huntington’s original use for racial interpretation), it is quite understandable that we were caught off guard.

If the state has failed its citizens in offering the public good, why should public figures continue to give out false information and distort the market signal for more masks and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)? If both the state and market have failed, why should both the public authorities and health system not directly call for people’s good genes and altruistic sacrifice to donate their PPE in storage? Instead, they have been calling heroic citizens to stay home, even as many have been infected with COVID-19 and are dying, in order to protect the health system. This is sick, a malaise in political governance diagnosed by Max Weber as “institutionalization”: an agency has lost its purpose except preserving its own existence.

I have never seen such a big failure on both sides: On the one hand, the citizens have completely forgotten that the state is a “necessary evil” even after so long an indoctrination of neoliberalism. I read a report in which a LGBTQ activist went to Miami Beach’s Winter Party Festival in early March and said: “I was thinking, ‘OK, well, hold on, the government did not cancel it, so it should be fine.’”¹³ As an educator on political science in higher education, I have to take a part of the collective blame for our civic education. Honestly speaking, I would not advise members of the LGBTQ community to trust the Trump Administration and Florida’s Republican governor to prioritize their interests. On the other hand, the public authorities have underestimated the intelligence and morality of average Americans.

Looking at the issue under my discussion from a simplistic, binary ideological spectrum, I would say that the simple legacy of Adam Smith and Western Enlightenment has been betrayed by the two extremes. To put it in another way, from the Talmudic saying, where some remember the first part: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Some only remember the second part: “If I am for myself only, what am I?” It is a pity that many people standing on the extreme right have lost their reason/rationality and become anti-intellectual, anti-science and extreme faith-based believers. The “regressive left” (to borrow from Richard Dawkins) have turned into “The Good Person of Szechwan” under Brecht, who could not reconciliate the tension between being good in an evil society or the carefree “Little Red Riding Hood,” oblivious to the big grey wolf hiding in the forest.

* * *

History will proceed as a resultant of reinforcing and conflicting forces, despite any individual’s wish. Understanding this point, I can with ease go back to Boccaccio, who closed the door of the first Dark Age after the Black Death and ushered Europe into the corridor leading to the Renaissance. As Boccaccio wrote, “Let the bigot tend his idols, let the trader buy and sell… The deceiver is struck down at the foot of the deceived.”¹⁴

---

Notes

[1] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 51.
[2] Ibid, 62.
[3] Aaron Blake, “Trump keeps saying ‘nobody’ could have foreseen coronavirus. We keep finding out about new warning signs,” The Washington Post, March 19, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/19/trump-keeps-saying-nobody-could-have-foreseen-coronavirus-we-keep-finding-out-about-new-warning-signs/.
[4] David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen Sullivan and Michael Crowley, “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded,” The New York Times, March 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html.
[5] Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity (Transaction Publishers, 2010 [1942]): 10.
[6] James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959): 8.
[7] Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy, “Red vs. Blue on Coronavirus Concern: The Gap Is Still Big but Closing,” The New York Times, March 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/21/upshot/coronavirus-public-opinion.html.
[8] u/QuiffLing, “Deputy Prime Minister of Japan Taro Aso: ‘Coronavirus was brought up in a G20 conference late February, but Europe had no reaction. A week later, Italy asked for a G7 phone conference; but just a week ago, Italy had said coronavirus is a disease for the yellow people, not for us,’” Reddit, March 24, 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fog1jl/deputy_prime_minister_of_japan_taro_aso/; https://6do.news/article/2416886-62.
[9] 【夏明：新型冠状病毒是SARS的升级版 或有人为干预】2/1 #时事大家谈 #精彩点评, YouTube, https://youtu.be/x57VjSnNHZ8.
[10] Sarah Turnbul, “Canada’s top doctor, health minister say they’ll wear masks if physical distancing isn’t possible,” CTV News, April 7, 2020, https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-s-top-doctor-health-minister-say-they-ll-wear-masks-if-physical-distancing-isn-t-possible-1.4886533.
[11] Kevin Liptak, “Trump announces new face mask recommendations after heated internal debate,” CNN, April 3, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/politics/trump-white-house-face-masks/index.html.
[12] Tomi Kilgore, “Honeywell’s Rhode Island facility has started producing N95 face masks,” Market Watch, April 17, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/honeywells-rhode-island-facility-has-started-producing-n95-face-masks-2020-04-17.
[13] Patricia Mazzei and Frances Robles, “The Costly Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier,” The New York Times, April 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/florida-spring-break-coronavirus.html.
[14] Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, a new English version by Cormac ó Culleanáin based on John Payne’s 1886 translation (Wordsworth Classics, 2004): IXIII.