Common Sense on Covid

 Common sense consensus on covid  is that complete elimination is a mirage and moreover it will be a new recruit to the hazards of life to which some will succumb.  It is odd that now at this time the utility of mandates should be urged.  Even philosophers are climbing out of their burrows and shaking their tiny fists at anti-vaxxers and the hesitant.  These are people that are famous for the devising of complex thought experiments which tease out all the facets of moral problems who yet have failed to see what is patent.  Bari Weiss on her ‘common sense’ substack has a range of views on the mandate.  The medical people are dubious about it particularly Vinay Prasad whose cogent analysis breaks the population down into  various groups.  (Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. )

Bari Weiss common sense

For the philosophers in the academy who want to eke some moral maundering out of covidology: some texts.

Lament for the Makers by William Dunbar

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

Now dansand mery, now like to dee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.  (extract)

Lament

Aes Triplex by Robert Louis Stevenson:

THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.  (opening lines)  (find at: Aes Triplex

‘To Philosophise is to learn how to Die’. by Michel de Montaigne. (no. 20)

His last and very apposite paragraph:

Children are frightened of their very friends when they see them masked.  So are we.  We must rip the masks of things as well as off people.  Once we have done that we shall see underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.  Blessed the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.