Black Swan, White Swan

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

It takes one second for a raindrop to fall 32 feet and 3-6 seconds to take a breath. My daughter was born into the world in a moment and the viral video that set my life on a new path was 4:53 minutes long. Our lives are made up of moments, some more meaningful, or at least more memorable, than others. Some slip into oblivion as soon as they happen while others punctuate our existence, reframing or redirecting our lives.

On March 11, 2020 everything changed. The eerie pandemic future that became our reality shifted our lives in what felt like a moment. Car consoles littered with dirty masks, downtowns deserted in the middle of the day. Covid-19 dropped us into a twilight zone of unquestionable science, the plaything of our era’s spin doctors, and the realization of Sartre’s theatric line: “Hell is other people.” 

In that moment, something light and innocent was lost. Covid-19 became a shared cultural flashpoint akin to 9/11, or the assassinations of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, changing us almost instantaneously. We saw things about the world that we can never unsee. The dream of personal freedom died or, worse, maybe it had never been alive.

But unlike the bullet that kills only its victim, Covid slowly assassinated our way of life. In a moment we went from feeling stable to unsafe, oblivious to suspicious, and unable to escape the foreboding question, “What’s next?” We underwent what ethicist Susan Brison calls a “radical undoing of the self,” a disruption of what we remember and who we are, and a jarring separation of past from present. We became a tribe of barbarians seemingly overnight, but a tribe barely able to know who we are or to imagine that what we do means anything.

How did things shift so radically in one moment? Were we really that innocent before and, if so, what have we lost (and gained) in losing our innocence?

Black Swan, White Swan

Though it may have felt like it, Covid didn’t, all on its own, turn a previously liberal society into a cult of compliance; it merely exposed a war that has long been waging against personal liberty. As the pseudonymous blogger Sue Dunham wrote, “Since 9/11, every threat to come down the mainstream news cycle seemed to huddle us around the same consensus, that some fresh element of our liberty was making the world hurt—and that we were selfish to hold on to it.” Time has been slowly evicting us from the idea that our personal rights, including our right to be, and be seen, as individuals, are inviolable.

If we want to understand how our innocence was shattered, then we need first to understand how we came to feel so safe and so trusting in the first place.

The downside to innocence is that it creates a certain opacity, shielding us from information that we might be better off to have. One reason ‘fact-checking’ became so popular, I think, is that it creates a normal distribution, or bell curve, of the information we receive from the world. It imposes some order on a messy world, allowing us to sweep away the complicated parts of life so we can move on less encumbered. Or, at least, it legitimizes ignoring the world’s messiness. But this ignorance allows us to be caught off guard by events that we don’t expect. And, when those events do occur, we interpret them as anomalies, disasters (if they are bad), or even black swan events (if they are extreme). 

‘Black swan’ is a term coined by the statistician and risk analyst Nicholas Taleb to describe a high-impact event that is deemed improbable and yet has massive consequences. Though ‘black swans’ feel unpredictable at the time, in retrospect they are often rationalized as having been avoidable. Black swans can be negative (e.g. 9/11 or Black Monday 1987), positive (the fall of the Berlin Wall) or neutral (e.g. the exponential growth of the internet).

Covid-19 has been called the black swan event of our time. The Guardian’s Larry Elliott, for example, titled a January 2021 article ‘The ‘black swan’ Covid catastrophe shows us just how fragile our world is.’ And reasonably so. Covid had an extreme impact on every sphere of life. It shut down governments and the economy, changed professional practice and, almost overnight, turned us into a draconian society of broken souls so dependent on government direction that we sacrificed ourselves and our loved ones for the sake of getting along and getting by.

But all is not quite as it seems. Taleb told Bloomberg Television in March 2020 that Covid was actually a ‘white swan’ if ever there was one. A ‘black swan,’ he reminded the interviewer, is a “rare, catastrophic event,” not “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Taleb coauthored a paper in January 2020 in which he claimed that several factors made the spread of Covid quite predictable: increased global connectivity, asymptomatic carriers, and a fatalistic public health response. For a risk analyst, that a pathogen should spiral out of control is hardly surprising.

Whether or not Covid was a true black swan event is not my focus here. Biology aside, I’m interested in Taleb’s more general epistemological point that what catches us off guard would not have done so if we had a different perspective of the world. I’m interested in what we knew (and didn’t know) going into 2020, where our focus was and wasn’t, and how this created the experience of being caught off guard.