The Prognosis

It is striking how often historical events arrive with their meanings plainly legible. When Napoleon clattered by Hegel’s window in Jena, in October 1806, the philosopher famously perceived in the emperor’s appearance “the soul of the world . . . seated on a horse.” The thought that fit the moment was ready for its occasion. In summer 1914, when Europe went to war “like a sleepwalker,” as the economic historian Karl Polanyi later recalled, it enacted a fate it was already dreaming. In our time, 9/11 declared its significance almost the instant it happened, as if everyone had just been waiting. With the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoking, the patent meaning of the towers’ collapse was easily parsed in the next morning’s papers: it was the end of every decadence, the beginning of a new unity, a new discipline, a new age. And so it seems to have been with the pandemic.

Everyone appeared to know right away what COVID‑19 meant. Some, like George Monbiot in the...