The National Parks: Americans’ Worst Idea (Lately)

With everything that's been going on these days, you wouldn't think that the National Parks’ Facebook page would be among the most depressing, but it is. I usually love seeing posts of peoples’ National Park vacation pictures and hearing about their trip plans - they're gorgeous pictures and the trip plans give me inspiration for future trips. But these days, it's served as an almost constant reminder of how this country is failing to take this pandemic seriously.

Trips to National Parks are hardly the idyllic vacations you might imagine, as many of our National Parks are extremely crowded, as are the bordering towns. And this is to say nothing of the human contact people have at busy park locations, ranger stations, gift shops, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, campgrounds, and so forth. Moreover, people travel from far and wide to visit the parks, either via long road trips or by airplane, so that seeing these Facebook posts is like watching the virus spread in real time.

Several months ago, I was hardly alone in predicting that the lack of a federal response would lead to a stark divide in how this pandemic unfolded, with blue states handling things much better than red states. And with the exception of California’s new spike, this largely seems true. However, what I didn’t anticipate was the way that this would shape political culture. Of course, there are the outright COVID deniers, but I don’t mean this relatively fringe group of MAGA chuds. Instead, I mean the mainstream American public who live in the red states that didn’t take COVID seriously. Many of these people are otherwise well-meaning people who do recognize that COVID poses a danger, but I also think that they’ve been lulled—willingly—into believing that they’re responsibly dealing with it. As a result, we not only have a population that is acting extremely irresponsibly but it is also a population that believes it’s acting responsibly.

For example, a staggering number of people are using air travel for their National Park trip (despite Dr. Fauci stating he’s not flying anytime soon). And from what I can tell of the experience, flying seems much different these days. There is hand sanitizer everywhere, airports are generally empty, airlines require people to wear masks, and many airlines are leaving their middle seats vacant. And if you live in a red state, where the severity of the virus has been downplayed, I can see how it would be easy to think that these disruptions must be making you safe. After all, we tend to judge things by how they differ from normal, and no vacation during this pandemic can be considered normal.

However, I think this has led to a collective and dangerous delusion. In a pandemic, we shouldn’t judge the safety of our behavior based on how different from the norm it is, because this tells us very little. For instance, we could hypothetically be modifying our behavior in ways that make the pandemic worse. Instead, we have to judge our behavior by the standards of the virus—are we modifying our behavior in a way that mitigates its spread? This is the only measure that counts. But this standard of judgement requires that we do not look at how much we have been inconvenienced, but instead at the scientific data about how this virus spreads, because it’s only against this standard that we can judge our behavior.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is how most people are viewing the pandemic. Instead, I think that most people have had their lives disrupted quite a bit, and they take this disruption as a sign of their own responsibility. After all, they aren’t doing what they would normally do, so they’ve necessarily changed their behavior because of the pandemic. However, most people are only changing their behavior to the extent that they are forced to change their behavior (which in many parts of this country is very little, compared to places like NYC), or else, they are changing their behavior in ways that don’t really impede their plans (such as by using hand sanitizer), without acknowledging that their behavior requires a much more dramatic alteration. And so, these people—millions and millions of Americans—are acting in ways that endanger their lives and those around them. But perhaps most problematically, the disruptions to their normal lives make it easier for them to believe that they’re acting responsibly.

To say that this is a frustrating situation would be the understatement of the year. Instead, it’s downright infuriating. And yet, it’s unclear where this anger should go. If this were merely a situation of ignorance, then a response might be to try and educate the uninformed. But there’s something more complicated going on. This isn’t the type of ignorance that is the mere absence of knowledge; it’s the type of ignorance that is the presence of falsehood (some of my fellow Kierkegaard scholars might appreciate the distinction). After all, no one is denying that a pandemic exists—this is a fact that almost everyone acknowledges. However, the proper response to this knowledge would be to conduct even a modicum of research into determining if you’re safe. But instead, people are using the unavoidable disruptions that they face—such as masks on planes—as evidence that they’re acting safely. These people don’t want to know more about the pandemic because if they know more they might have to change their lives more dramatically. And these people really want to go on vacation. So, they tell themselves that the precautions being taken are sufficient. The problem is not really a lack of knowledge but a lack of will.

So, what can you do when confronted with this kind of stubborn ignorance? People who truly don’t know something often appreciate knowledge, but people who don’t want to know something typically react quite poorly to it. And so, as with so many of our political problems, we have to figure out how to deal with a problem that political philosophers have been wrestling with since the time of Socrates, who showed us exactly what happens when you push people too far.

For this reason, I can appreciate the response of the lone dissenting voice amidst all of these frustrating posts. In response to a post asking for advice about places to visit in Texas, this solitary soul didn’t bother trying to explain that it was not a great time to go on vacation. After all, they knew that this attempt wouldn’t go far. Instead, they offered what struck me as a reasonable response given the situation.

Their recommendation? Don’t forget to visit the COVID-19 Memorial. Unfortunately, to see it, none of us has to travel very far.