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Daily Comment

(Against) Virus as Metaphor

By Paul Elie

March 19, 2020

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3/21/20, 4)16 PMAgainst the Idea of the Coronavirus as Metaphor | The New Yorker

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I

Illustration by Timo Lenzen

n retrospect—in the rueful retrospect we are living in already—we’ll say that the virus was

there all along, in the circumstances that enabled it to spread. It was there in a globally

integrated society of travel, work, and commerce, the connecting and conveying powers of

which far outstripped the capacity of our health systems to deal with their effects and

challenged our willingness to reckon with the downsides of such integration. But it was there,

too, in the language and imagery of viruses, which has been commonplace in our society for a

couple of decades now—so much so that the ubiquity of virus as metaphor may have left

many of us unprepared to recognize and fear the lethal literal viruses circulating among us,

and to prepare ourselves and our societies against them.

It was there in the computer virus: the notion that the snags and missed connections and bits

of botched code in our computers behaved virally, spreading through the system, or the

network, to countless individual machines. So we bought and installed virus-protection

software and watched as it was updated, showing us, in a little onscreen box, how many tens

of thousands of viruses it had successfully blocked.

It was also there in the journalism and

non"ction literature that adapted the

modelling techniques of social science (and

its emerging application, Big Data) to

explain everyday phenomena, seeing the

way a virus multiplies as a pattern to be

marvelled at and sought after. We learned about the epidemiological curve and the in#ection

The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.

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point where it tips into epidemic, and we saw how such models could explain everything

from the renovation of our public spaces to the nature of friendship to social life generally. As

the interpretive idea of the epidemic took hold—spread, we would say—we learned of the

wisdom of crowds, the value of indiscriminate sharing, and the power of friction-free

networks through which information moved seemingly unhindered.

It was there, most blithely, as an expression of the reach and spontaneity of social media. We

watched as cat videos, practical jokes, blunders, over-the-shoulder half-court shots, and

celebrity meltdowns all went “viral.” And it was there in the notion that those who could

make things go viral were to be celebrated, cultivated, compensated, imitated. The term

devised for them—we realize, in rueful retrospect—has a distinct echo of the worst virus of

modern times, the in#uenza pandemic of 1918. They were called in#uencers.

It was there, "nally, in our national political life. The man who holds the office of President is

said to be fearful of actual germs, but he has a gut-level attraction to notions that can go viral

—and a seeming addiction to Twitter, the digital tool that has the power to make notions go

viral more swiftly and broadly than any other. As an actual virus, the coronavirus that causes

covid-19, "rst developed and spread, he twiddled his thumbs, so to speak, pumping out

messages about political rivals, people he dislikes, and friends he may favor with clemency—

and about the virus, which, he said, was in#amed by the “Fake News Media.”

In “Illness as Metaphor,” "rst published in the New York Review of Books, in 1978, Susan

Sontag traced the in#uence of metaphors associated with diseases—tuberculosis and cancer,

in particular—and how they were applied to sick people so relentlessly that they sometimes

obscured the nature of the illnesses. It was said, at the turn of the last century, that people

contracted TB due to “too much passion,” whereas, half a century later, people were said to

get cancer due to psychological repression or “insufficient passion.” Sontag wrote, “My point

is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the

healthiest way of being ill—is one most puri"ed of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”

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In “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” from 1989, she brought the same conviction to the aids

epidemic, showing how, as the dominant metaphors had it, people became ill because they

were prone to “moral laxity or turpitude,” and that the disease was a divine punishment. She

concluded, “With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it

from loaded meanings and misleading metaphors seems particularly liberating, even

consoling.”

Sontag’s work suggests that metaphors of illness are malign in a double way: they cast

opprobrium on sick people and they hinder the rational and scienti"c apprehension that is

needed to contain disease and provide care for people. To treat illness as a metaphor is to

avoid or delay or even thwart the treatment of literal illness.

Our own situation is different, but not unrelated. Rather than applying societal metaphors to

illness, we’ve applied illness metaphors to society, stripping them of their malign associations

in the process. It may be that our fondness for virus as metaphor has made it difficult for us

to see viruses as potentially dangerous, even lethal, biological phenomena. In turn, our

disinclination to see viruses as literal may have kept us from insisting on and observing the

standards and practices that would prevent their spread. Enthralled with virus as metaphor

and the terms associated with it—spread, growth, reach, connectedness—we ceased to be

vigilant. Jetting around the world, we stopped washing our hands.

In the weeks ahead, we are going to see a profusion of metaphorical interpretations of the

coronavirus. We’ll be tempted to make them ourselves. But we must keep in mind the need

for language to function in a literal sense, so that we can think clearly as we respond to the

covid-19 virus.

A Guide to the Coronavirus

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How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros

and cons of ordering food.

How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.

What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.

How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?

Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.

The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be

widely available.

We are all irrational panic shoppers.

The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.

How pandemics change history.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He is the author of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Reinventing Bach.”

More: Coronavirus Pandemics Metaphor Susan Sontag