We’ll win this war. We’ll defeat the enemy, a mindless foe, one oblivious to the threat it poses, the damage it wreaks. It will have no sense of its defeat.
Those of its number which survive will answer the staccato call of its protein machinery, enveloped in droplets of coughs and sweat, until it finds its way into our bodies, ultimately binding to the membranes of our lungs once again. And the battle will restart.
This war will be won. As will the next. But Sars-CoV-2 is not capable of caring about the details of its defeat. There will be no signing on the deck of the USS Missouri, nor misplaced hubris or the Hall of Mirrors of the Place of Versailles (or the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln).
Yet, there are sides, contrasted from the choices we make over the coming months. These sides mark three of the major cleavages that the war against the virus will illuminate.
👁🗽 Leviathan and liberty
Thomas Hobbes argued that in a time of persistent threat, citizens would turn to a sovereign pow…