Will Trump Ever Give Up The Presidency

By Frank Bruni The New York Times

Opinion Columnist

Toward the beginning of a wise and beautifully stated essay about American partisanship and the response to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the lawyer and political commentator David French wrote, “I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

I don’t think the shudder was confined to the political class. And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just as deep.

That was when Trump supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and chanting, “Four more years!” 

This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

Republicans are planning to have tens of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace. Trump has not just blessed but encouraged this. On Fox News last month, he bragged to Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

Color me alarmist, but that sounds like an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, which is of course blatantly against the law.

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no. That’s the toxic wellspring of the dread that French mentioned. That’s the moral of the madness in Virginia.

Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy potentially answered by court packing, among other acts of vengeance, if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate.

That’s a big if, because we’re also hurtling toward an Election Day that may decide exactly nothing — and I don’t mean that night. I mean for months. I mean forever.

Talk about a shudder: On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t. He prattled anew about mail-in ballots and voter fraud and, perhaps alluding to all of the election-related lawsuits that his minions have filed, said: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

We’re in terrible danger. Make no mistake. This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground. The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.

The week since Ginsburg’s death has been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party, would realize that to endorse McConnell’s abandonment of his own supposed principle about election-year Supreme Court appointments would be a straw too many, a stressor too much and a guarantee of endless, boundless recrimination and retribution. At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”

Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

I don’t blame it on a lack of courage. I attribute it to something worse. Most politicians — and maybe most Americans — now look across the political divide and see a band of crooks who will pick your pocket if you’re meek and dumb enough not to pick theirs first. The person who leaves his or her wallet out in the open, as a gesture of good will, can’t complain when he or she winds up broke.

“It’s the Wild West,” said a Republican strategist who is no fan of Trump’s but was using that metaphor to defend McConnell to me. I had reached out to the strategist to vent my disgust.

“It’s all about situational power dynamics,” he continued. “If the situation were reversed, the Dems would be doing the same thing.” He argued that Chuck Schumer and McConnell “play the same game. McConnell just plays it a little better.”

So the lesson for Democrats should be to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate. Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list.

I wouldn’t begrudge the Democrats any of it. The way I’m feeling right now, I’d cheer them on. But Republicans reach back to Harry Reid’s actions when he was the Democratic majority leader of the Senate to justify their wickedness now. Democrats will cite that wickedness to justify the shattering of precedents in the future. Ugliness begets ugliness until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?

And who the hell are we anymore? The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

On Wednesday The Atlantic rushed its November cover story onto the web with an explanatory, almost apocalyptic note by its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, that some journalism is too important to wait. The article is about the very real chance — essentially confirmed hours later by Trump’s “continuation” comment — that he might contest the election in a manner that keeps him in power regardless of what Americans really want.

“The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,” the article’s author, Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer winner, wrote. “The mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity.”

Just a few days before those words screeched across the internet, The New Yorker published a similar, equally chilling opus by one of its star writers, Jeffrey Toobin, who explained how this election might well degenerate into violence, as Democratic poll watchers clash with Republican poll watchers, and into chaos, as accusations of foul play delay the certification of state vote counts.

Several hours after Gellman’s article appeared, Slate published one by Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.” 

Sometimes an overlap of alarms like that reflects groupthink. Sometimes it signals hysteria. This isn’t either of those times.

“The republic is in greater self-generated danger than at any time since the 1870s,” Richard Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me, saying that Trump values nothing more than his own power and will do anything that he can get away with.

I spoke with Primus, fittingly enough, as he drove home to Michigan from Washington, where he was paying tribute to Ginsburg, for whom he was a clerk two decades ago.

“If you had told Barack Obama or George W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”

What gave Primus that idea? Was it when federal officers used tear gas on protesters to clear a path for a presidential photo op? Was it when Trump floated the idea of postponing the election, just one of his many efforts to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own system of government?

Or was it when he had his name lit up in fireworks above the White House as the climax of his party’s convention? Was it on Monday, when his attorney general, Bill Barr, threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that the president considers “anarchist”? That gem fit snugly with Trump’s talk of blue America as a blight on red America, his claim that the pandemic would be peachy if he could just lop off that rotten fruit. 

The deadly confrontations recently in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., following months of mass protests against racial injustice, speak to how profoundly estranged from their government a significant percentage of Americans feel. These Americans have lost or are losing faith that the system can treat them fairly.

“Tribal,” “identity politics,” “fake news” and “hoax” are now mainstays of our vocabulary, indicative of a world where facts and truth are suddenly relative. Yours may contradict mine, eroding any common ground and preventing any consensus. Yes, there were conspiracy theories and there was viciously ugly feuding before — there were duels! — but there were no Facebook or Twitter to accelerate the sorting of people into ideological cliques and to pour accelerant on the fires of their suspicion and resentment.

Those fires are burning hot, with dire implications for what happens after Nov. 3. Sizable camps of people in both parties don’t see any way that the other could win honestly and won’t regard the ensuing government as legitimate. Trump has essentially commanded his followers to take that view.

And he’s foreshadowing legal shenanigans by his team that would leave many Democratic voters feeling robbed. Try this on for size: Litigation to determine the next president winds up with the Supreme Court, where three Trump-appointed justices are part of a majority decision in his favor. It’s possible.

“Things that seemed off-the-wall are now on-the-wall,” Hasen told me. Last February he released a book, “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy,” the title of which now reads, if anything, as understated.

What’s the far side of a meltdown? America the puddle? While we await the answer, we get a nasty showdown over that third Trump justice. Trump will nominate someone likely to horrify Democrats and start another culture war: anything to distract voters from his damnable failure to address the pandemic.

Rush Limbaugh — you know, the statesman whom Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year — has urged McConnell not even to bother with a confirmation hearing for the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and to go straight to a floor vote. Due diligence and vetting are so 2018.

Some Democrats have suggested boycotting the hearing in protest and in recognition of the (usually) predetermined outcomes of these grandstanding sessions. Some floated the impeachment of Barr (who deserves it) to gum up the timetable. 

You know who has most noticeably and commendably tried to turn down the temperature? Biden. That’s of course its own political calculation, but it’s consistent with his comportment during his entire presidential campaign, one that has steered clear of extremism, exalted comity and recognized that a country can’t wash itself clean with more muck.

He’s our best bid for salvation, which goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.

There is another school of thought: Maybe we need some sort of creative destruction to get to a place of healing and progress. Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back up.

But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

 

Life on Venus?

 Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds

The detection of a gas in the planet’s atmosphere could turn scientists’ gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life.

An image of Venus, made with data recorded by Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft in 2016. So close, so similar and very mysterious, the planet is surprising scientists with a chemical signature spotted in its clouds.Credit...PLANET-C Project Team/JAXA

By Shannon Stirone, Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye

High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.

If the discovery is confirmed by additional telescope observations and future space missions, it could turn the gaze of scientists toward one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Venus, named after the Roman goddess of beauty, roasts at temperatures of hundreds of degrees and is cloaked by clouds that contain droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. Few have focused on the rocky planet as a habitat for something living.

Instead, for decades, scientists have sought signs of life elsewhere, usually peering outward to Mars and more recently at Europa, Enceladus and other icy moons of the giant planets.

The astronomers, who reported the finding on Monday in a pair of papers, have not collected specimens of Venusian microbes, nor have they snapped any pictures of them. But with powerful telescopes, they have detected a chemical — phosphine — in the thick Venus atmosphere. After much analysis, the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation for the chemical’s source.

Some researchers question this hypothesis, and they suggest instead that the gas could result from unexplained atmospheric or geologic processes on a planet that remains mysterious. But the finding will also encourage some planetary scientists to ask whether humanity has overlooked a planet that may have once been more Earthlike than any other world in our solar system.

“This is an astonishing and ‘out of the blue’ finding,” said Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the papers (one published in Nature Astronomy and another submitted to the journal Astrobiology). “It will definitely fuel more research into the possibilities for life in Venus’s atmosphere.”

“We know that it is an extraordinary discovery,” said Clara Sousa-Silva, a molecular astrophysicist at Harvard University whose research has focused on phosphine, and another of the authors. “We may not know just how extraordinary without going back to Venus.”

Sarah Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist and head of the Johnson Biosignatures Lab at Georgetown University who was not involved in the work, said, “There’s been a lot of buzz about phosphine as a biosignature gas for exoplanets recently,” referring to the search for life on worlds that orbit other stars. “How cool to find it on Venus.”

She added: “Venus has been ignored by NASA for so long. It’s really a shame.”

David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who was not part of the work but has long promoted the possibility of life in Venus’s clouds, said, “That is pretty damn exciting!”

The work needs to be followed up, he said, “but this could be the first observation we’ve made which reveals an alien biosphere and, what do you know, it’s on the closest planet to home in the entire cosmos.”

Venus is one of the most beautiful objects in Earth’s sky. But at a closer glance, the less lovely it becomes.

Often called Earth’s twin, Venus is roughly the same mass as Earth. Many scientists think that Venus was once covered in water and possessed an atmosphere where life as we know it could have flourished.

In earlier days of the solar system, Earth was not so hospitable to the likes of us. There was life here then, even an entire biosphere that did not survive in the oxygen-rich environment that later developed. And much as Earth over time became a home for jellyfish, ferns, dinosaurs and Homo sapiens, Venus was transformed by something into a hell.

Today, the second planet from the sun has an atmosphere stifled by carbon dioxide gas, and surface temperatures that average more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The dense atmosphere of Venus exerts a pressure of more than 1,300 pounds per square inch on anything at the surface. That is more than 90 times the 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level on Earth, or the equivalent to being 3,000 feet underwater in the ocean.

It is hardly a place that makes visiting or research easy, although that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. Space programs have tried dozens of robotic missions to Venus, many of them in the Soviet Union’s Venera series. But the planet eats metal, within minutes melting down and crushing spacecraft that have landed there. Of all those attempts, only two managed to directly capture images of the planet’s surface.

Whereas frigid Mars is currently ringed by orbiters and prowled by NASA rovers, Venus is being studied by only one probe, the lonely Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki. Future missions to the planet are still mere concepts.

Although the surface of Venus is like a blast furnace, a cloud layer just 31 miles below the top of its atmosphere may reach temperatures as low as 86 degrees Fahrenheit, and has a pressure similar to that at ground level on Earth. Many planetary scientists, including Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz, who proposed the idea 53 years ago, have hypothesized life may exist there.

Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales, set out in June 2017 to test that hypothesis using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, looking for signs of various molecules on Venus. Different species of molecules will absorb radio waves coming through the clouds at different characteristic wavelengths. One of the chemicals was phosphine. She did not expect to find it.

“I got intrigued by the idea of looking for phosphine, because phosphorus might be a bit of a sort of go-no-go for life,” Dr. Greaves said.

Chemists compare phosphine to a pyramid — one atom of phosphorus topping a base of three hydrogen atoms. The NASA spacecraft Cassini detected it in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. In that setting, Dr. Sousa-Silva said, life is not necessary to form phosphine. The immense heat and pressures can jam the phosphorous and hydrogen atoms together to form the molecule.

Phosphine is shaped like a pyramid with three atoms of hydrogen bonded to a single atom of phosphorus.

Phosphorus

Hydrogen

But on smaller, rocky planets like Earth and Venus, the researchers say, there is not enough energy to produce copious amounts of phosphine in the same way. There is one thing, however, that appears to be very good at producing it: anaerobic life, or microbial organisms that don’t require or use oxygen.

On such worlds, “as far as we can tell, only life can make phosphine,” Dr. Sousa-Silva said. She has long studied the gas, on the theory that finding it being emitted from rocky planets that orbit distant stars could be proof that life exists elsewhere in the Milky Way.

Here on Earth, phosphine is found in our intestines, in the feces of badgers and penguins, and in some deep sea worms, as well as other biological environments associated with anaerobic organisms. It is also extremely poisonous. Militaries have employed it for chemical warfare, and it is used as a fumigant on farms. On the TV show “Breaking Bad,” the main character, Walter White, makes it to kill two rivals.

But scientists have yet to explain how Earth microbes make it.

“There’s not a lot of understanding of where it’s coming from, how it forms, things like that,” said Matthew Pasek, a geoscientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “We’ve seen it associated with where microbes are at, but we have not seen a microbe do it, which is a subtle difference, but an important one.”

Dr. Sousa-Silva was surprised when Dr. Greaves said that she had detected phosphine.

“That moment plays in my mind a lot, because I took a few minutes to consider what was happening,” she said.

If there really was phosphine on Venus, she believed there could be no other obvious explanation than anaerobic life.

“What we find circumstantially also makes complete sense with what we know thermodynamically,” she said.

The team needed a more powerful telescope, and the scientists next used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, in Chile, in March 2019.

This time, they found, all signs pointed to phosphine, and a lot of it, ranging from 5 to 20 parts per billion. Although those numbers might seem small, that’s thousands of times more than what is in Earth’s atmosphere.

Dr. Sousa-Silva, Dr. Greaves and their colleagues had planned to complete additional telescope observations earlier this year. But the coronavirus pandemic and Venus’s limited time above the horizon interfered with their ability to gather more evidence, leaving many questions unanswered.

“The finding itself is astonishing,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who was not involved in the research. He said that although he was “skeptical of it being life, I don’t have a better explanation for what it is.”

The team spent a year recreating the Venusian environment in computer simulations to test different explanations for the phosphine’s source and abundance.

“The light is constantly breaking the phosphine down, so you have to continuously replenish it,” said William Bains, a biochemist at M.I.T. and one of the co-authors of the papers.

Volcanic activity and lightning on Venus would not be sufficient to add more of this constantly disappearing phosphine, according to the researchers’ models. But living things could emit enough of the gas.

“What we’ve done is rule out all other sources of phosphine other than life,” Dr. Bains said.

Other planetary scientists counter that a non-biological origin cannot be ruled out.

“Despite prior speculation (mostly by the same authors), this can hardly be taken as a biosignature,” Gerald Joyce, a biologist at the Salk Institute in California who has experimented with creating life in the lab, said in an email. In their own paper, he noted, the researchers wrote that “the detection of phosphine is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry.”

A similar note of caution was voiced by James Kasting, a geoscientist and expert on planetary habitability at Pennsylvania State University in State College, who said, “The model atmospheric composition that they show is, at best, incomplete.”

The finding also follows a history of detections of gases on other worlds that can be byproducts of life. But these gases, such as burps of methane or oxygen on Mars, can also be produced by chemical reactions that do not involve life at all. So far, such signals have been intriguing, but they are not convincing proof of aliens.

While few doubt whether this phosphine is there, what kind of life in the clouds of Venus would it take to actually make the gas?

Such living things would have had to evolve to survive in a high-acid environment, perhaps with protective outer layers similar to microscopic organisms in Earth’s most extreme environments.

In a paper published in August, Dr. Seager and her colleagues suggested that microbes borne aloft on air currents called gravity waves could live, metabolize and reproduce inside droplets of sulfuric acid and water. And given the amount of gas being produced, the population of these microbes would be ample.

As to how these microbes got there, the best guess, she said, is that they originated on the surface when Venus had oceans as late as 700 million years ago, but they were forced into the skies when the planet dried up.

And nobody knows whether the microbes, if real, are based on DNA like us, or something entirely different.

“When looking for life elsewhere, it’s so hard to not be Earth-centric,” Dr. Sousa-Silva said. “Because we only have that one data point.”

Before their imaginations run away, the researchers want to gather more telescope data and see their models tested and challenged. Robotic space missions to Venus could also advance the search.

India’s space agency has proposed a mission, in the coming years, as has a private rocket company, Rocket Lab.

And NASA, which has declined to fund a number of Venus missions in recent decades, announced in February that it would consider a pair of proposed spacecraft among four finalists competing for a round of funding.

“For the last two decades, we keep making new discoveries that collectively imply a significant increase of the likelihood to find life elsewhere,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of NASA’s science directorate, who helps select missions to explore the solar system. “Many scientists would not have guessed that Venus would be a significant part of this discussion. But, just like an increasing number of planetary bodies, Venus is proving to be an exciting 

 

Risky business: the shadow of constant threat is changing us

Covid-19 has heightened our perception of danger so that every day is a series of finely balanced calculations. How do we decide which are the risks worth taking, asks Sarah Perry 

Sarah Perry LONDON GUARDIAN

Last week the nearby primary school, disconsolately quiet since March, opened its doors again. For months I’ve passed its empty playground on the morning walk, and watched black curtains drawn over the windows gather perceptible dust; so it’s pleasant to see them opened to the sight of September, and the gates unlocked, and children marshalled through with new books for the new term. Meanwhile restaurants in town are welcoming diners in, though the waiter wears a metalworker’s visor, as if those diners might very well spit sparks. The salons are open, and are busy; the airports are open, and are not. The thought of all this causes a lightening of my spirits which is quite involuntary, and has little to do with my daily scrutiny of charts of infection and fatality, having its causes more in feeling than in fact. The oppressive sensation of constant risk, which has cast its shadow on the everyday like obstinate cloud cover, is moving away. Unconsciously I think: the risk is fading – it must be – they are opening up the schools! Acts which were once ordinary, and which became for a time as risky as barefoot walking on a mountain ridge, are becoming ordinary again. So it has become necessary to caution myself, and recollect that no cloud cover moves without a wind to shift it, and winds can change, and bring back the old bad weather. 

But the risk was low: to begin with. That a new virus had emerged from a marketplace was no great surprise – it had happened before, and would happen again. And in fact the disease it caused was largely a matter of a feverish cough, though certainly it was troubling that a few landed in hospital with gullets prised open by tubing, in due course to die alone or to survive, depleted, as the fates allowed. It was no worse than the flu, said a traveller on the last train I took this year. Well, perhaps: but in 1918 and 19 the flu had killed more than the first world war, and there’d been mass graves, and so on. At any rate the risk was not severe enough to confine the plucky British within doors, but – we understood that certain calculations had been made in Downing Street: we should wash our hands with Pilate’s enthusiasm, if more frequently. Bare facts emerged, were grasped, and slipped out of fingers sore from too much soap. Eighty per cent of cases were mild; the fatality rate was 1.4%, unless it was 2%, or 3.4%; the virus lived cheerfully on clothing and handrails and newspapers for 72 hours (mindful of this, a friend of mine quarantined all post in the porch for three days). 

Early on it was commonly said that we were all in the same boat, a unifying sensation that was not unpleasant 

This was early March. Within a fortnight, the clouds had rolled in. Risk and the perception of it had altered and escalated, and the degree of escalation altered according to one’s newspaper or neighbours or whether one wasted time on Facebook or Twitter or both. The prime minister looked his electorate dead in the eye and predicted the loss of their loved ones; 20,000 dead would be a happy outcome. So after all the risk could not be satisfactorily mitigated with soap and water, and moreover – news reached us from Wuhan, from Lombardy – seemed not to be equitably distributed. Children were immune, so that was all right … except that was not quite it: they spread the virus without so much as a sniffle. The elderly were dreadfully at risk, and anyone over 70 was elderly, whether they cycled in the Alps or not. The overweight were at risk, and ought to stop eating junk food, unless it was for the sake of the economy, in which case the chancellor would buy them a quarter pounder with cheese (they must pay for the milkshake and fries). People of colour were disproportionately at risk, and this might be a matter of genetics, or it might be that the structures of racism overshadowed the distribution of a virus as they did everything else. 

Early on it was commonly said that we were all in the same boat, and in fact I recall, in the early days, a unifying sensation that was not unpleasant: the slam and bolt of a nation battening down the hatches. Eighty years and a day before we entered national quarantine, Virginia Woolf had recalled a “sudden profuse shower just before the war which made me think of all men and women weeping”. There is consolation in a common grief. But it is not the same boat: it is the same storm, and different vessels weather it. It would require a wilful dereliction of the intellect to believe that the risk to a Black woman managing a hospital ward is equal to the risk to – let’s say – a columnist deploring the brief and slight curtailment of her liberty. 

Often the avoidance of risk to the body has exacted an inhuman cost from the soul 

Still: there is no life without risk. To be born at all is to be subject without consent to mortal risk, and after that there are countless daily risks taken without a qualm. Say the phone rings; you answer. This is a reckless act: what might come of it? A car journey perhaps, and the roughly one in 200 lifetime odds of dying in a road traffic accident; or possibly you will fall before you reach the phone, and join the other 5,999 who will die that year of an accident at home. These are the calculable risks, but the numbers never amount to much: they’re countered and corrected and countered again like the workings of a mechanical clock. Odds of injury and fatality are set against all the intangibles of love, necessity, impatience. A woman who avoids dark lanes on her evening walk takes a greater mortal risk walking down the aisle, and would be better off carrying a lock knife than a bouquet; but show her the statistics, and I doubt she’d remove her veil. So the past few months have entailed the constant negotiation of new risks and known ones, and risks that can be quantified and risks that cannot. Might an elderly man prefer to risk an unfamiliar disease than the familiar sorrow of loneliness? I suspect he might. Often the avoidance of risk to the body has exacted an inhuman cost from the soul. Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, a kind and gentle boy who’d contained the promise of a kind and gentle man, was buried by strangers required to handle his coffin as they might handle a biological hazard; his mother could not risk attending. 

i

 The burial of Ismail Mohamed   Abdulwahab, 13, from Brixton, south   London, who died alone in King’s College   Hospital in April 2020. Photograph: Aaron   Chown/PA 

At certain times and in certain philosophies, risk to all intents and purposes does not exist. I’ve known devout Christians refuse insurance for their car or their home: what risks can there be to the child of a god that ordains the fall of every sparrow? The Greeks consulted the oracle because their lives were governed by the gods, and by the forces of fortune and fate, and you cannot look into a future which does not exist. Napoleon took his risks because he was a fatalist, and, says Zola, rode placidly into the fusillade, “understanding that his time had not yet come”; the Islamic precept of al-qadr proposes that Allah has predestined the lives of his people; a determinist understands that every event is necessary, having its causes and in due course its effects. Nonetheless all these would pull an infant from the path of a falling rock. Dispense with God and the fates, and the possession of free will becomes a risky business, since each act or failure to act ricochets like a pinball, and we’ve only ourselves to blame. 

So the element of risk has become the measure of value. It is possible to think of risk as currency, with an exchange rate dependent on our desires. Say you are short of eggs, milk, cruciferous vegetables: these can be bought at the risk of a man failing to maintain his distance in the aisles, and few would think it too high a price. But what if you also wanted wine and cigarettes? We’re required to distinguish between want and need, and this has never been easy. Shortly before Easter I came out of the supermarket with flowers, gin, two chocolate eggs; wheeling these signs of my debt to pleasure past shoppers queueing in ranks across the car park, I smiled my apologies as I went. Were white roses in a jug worth the possibility of causing a stranger’s persistent dry cough? I had no idea. The roses didn’t last. 

Risk once had a kind of valour: this has been lost, if briefly. Annie Dillard, recalling a drag race which left her swinging on crutches for weeks, writes: “What else can you risk with all your might but your life?” This is all very well, but risk the lives of others and the valour dissipates. Meet your lover in bomb-wrecked streets because you value your desire above your life, and you’ll be a fit subject for novels. Break lockdown for that same purpose, and risk conveying the virus to the postman and the neighbours and even perhaps to the cat, and you may not be forgiven. Perhaps the self-sacrifice demanded of us now might have been easier when communities were pressed into a few acres; when babies were passed from breast to breast, and you’d overhear the rattle of your neighbour’s cough. But I suspect this is to valorise a past peopled with men and women not an ounce better than we are. In his A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe wrote of measures taken against “all manner of presumptuous rogues”, this echoed in legislation drawn up in the blitz, when the government was driven to make looting from bombed-out houses a capital offence. There never was the “blitz spirit” evoked in the early days of the pandemic, and there was never a “plague spirit”: it is all only ever the human spirit, for all the good that does. 

Since we are asked to make daily acts of self-abnegation for the sake of strangers, the avoidance of risk has taken on the quality of a moral good. What has emerged is a kind of religion: facts and statistics alter by the week, and by the nature of the papers that print them, so we must proceed at the instruction of ministers, and less on the basis of knowledge than of faith. These, said Schopenhauer, “are totally different things, which for their mutual benefit have to be kept strictly separate” – and besides, aren’t we all sick of experts? The religion has its rituals and its liturgies: stay home, protect the NHS, save lives, forever and ever, amen. There were early acolytes, signalling their devotion to the mitigation of risk by adopting masks of their own volition, wearing latex gloves as a pilgrim used to wear a scallop shell: these were voices crying in the wilderness, and the cost of their care for themselves and for others was the risk of looking foolish. For a time the particularly devout could be identified by the duration and enthusiasm with which they applauded medics on a Thursday evening, and a refusal to participate risked excommunication from the goodwill of the neighbours. 

A new generation of hermits and anchorites keeps itself confined beyond the demands of the law, and the media conducts a kind of auto da fé on the faithless, though it is never the establishment that finds its feet put to the fire: it is the working classes heading for the beach, indolent and wanton, or people of colour going about their family business. So I cannot blame those who crept out of their quarantine when, as it turned out, an adviser to the government had crept without shame out of his: a communicant might spit out the sacrament if they knew the priest was faithless. 

I think of this year as having been a process of pinching off flames at the wick. Often the image comes to mind of an air-raid warden patrolling a city in blackout, seeking out risk with a keen and dark-adapted eye: put that light out! The possibilities an ordinary life affords – those of work, of conceiving and raising children, of making art; of pursuing new loves, or nurturing old ones – have been necessarily halted, and I daresay there will be flames that have been permanently extinguished. But after all it is no bad thing to be presented with the sharp, hard understanding of what has always been the case: that we wake each morning in a state of mortal risk. Audre Lorde found a lump in her breast, and was told it would have to be removed. In the weeks between the finding and the removal she was forced to confront her own mortality with “a harsh and urgent clarity”, and discovered that what she most regretted were her silences. She was a Black woman, and a lesbian: for her to exist at all entailed an elevated risk. “Of what had I ever been afraid?” she wrote. “To question or speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death … the final silence. And that might be coming quickly … What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?” 

So we put that light out; we keep the city safe. But suppose the present urgency of risk is itself a source of illumination – what, in that case, do you need to say?