On COVID-19 and pandemics: a Stoic perspective
[This post has been revised, updated and expanded with respect to the original: latest update on 1 April 2020.]
As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, the long anticipated next pandemic has now arrived, and it has quickly become a new reality for all of us. Welcome to the age of COVID-19. Also predictably, you have already been exposed to a barrage of nonsensical or pseudoscientific notions about the virus, that you have been told by obviously incompetent government officials that there is no reason to panic, and that you are worried about what might happen to you and your loved ones in the near future. For all these reasons, here is a Stoic guide to the COVID-19 epidemic, and — more generally — to any future pandemic. Keep it handy.
The way I’m going to tackle the issue is by using a threefold Stoic curriculum as it was taught in ancient schools: we are going to look at the epidemic from the point of view of “physics,” logic, and ethics. The word physics, for the Stoics, actually refers to a broad approach to the understanding of the world, which includes what we nowadays call the natural sciences and metaphysics. Logic is also understood in a broader-than-usual sense, to mean anything to do with proper reasoning. Finally, ethics too has an enlarged meaning in Stoicism, as it encompasses not just the study of right and wrong, but our best…
