Would it be better to know nothing about coronavirus?

On the myth of the blissfully ignorant plague victims of yore

A village.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

The Black Death is our cultural model for all things pandemic, and I find myself talking about it often as the novel coronavirus spreads. The contrast between our world and the medieval world of the plague can raise curious questions — such as, wouldn't ignorance about the virus and its effects confer a certain bliss?

After all, if you didn't know a threat was coming, and you didn't know how to stop it when it arrived, you wouldn't have the same moral responsibility to act. If it were the old days, perhaps we'd hear vague rumors of a spreading sickness. We'd pray it wouldn't come for us, but it would, and without an understanding of viral transmission, there'd be nothing we could do to prevent it. COVID-19 would arrive and claim its victims fairly quickly, and then we'd get back to normal life. No months-long shutdown. No social distancing. No 10-person attendee caps at our loved ones' funerals. We could salve our grief with the comforts of community — and we could do it all without a whit of ethical dilemma.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.