Covid-19 and Wisdom

Kevin Hargaden, director of the Jesuit Centre for and Justice in Dublin,

I lost a friend in the pandemic. He was a member of my parish for many years, and he was one of the people I most looked forward to seeing every Sunday. He was a man full of passions: music, sport and most importantly justice. He didn’t just lament the cruelty in the world, every year he travelled to communities in the developing world where he had built longstanding relationships with people, arriving with a truck-load of toys, clothes and medicine, and leaving everyone he met with a smile on their face.

My friend was wise in many things, but at the end of his life he fell for some very stupid lies. He became convinced that the pandemic was a scam. He refused to take common-sense precautions, fearing they were part of a nefarious plot. He turned down the vaccines, insisting that they were dangerous. During one of the massive waves of infection we endured, he contracted the disease, and it ran rampant through his system. Although in otherwise good health, and decades short of what we might consider a long life, within weeks he was dead.

I feel his absence still, every Sunday. I struggled with grief at his passing, but also with anger. Why didn’t he just wear a mask? Why would he not just take a vaccine! He’d surely still be here with us now.

My friend is one of an increasing number of people who have been seduced by conspiracy theories. I met another man recently who told me that the environmental collapse we are experiencing was a hoax. He told me it was all just a scheme to depopulate the earth and that if I wasn’t careful, I’d soon be forced to live on a diet of insects and lab-grown food. I was as friendly as possible and gently suggested that I have never met a group of people capable of keeping small lies secret, nevermind massive ones. He granted there was truth to that, but then told me how billionaires had machines to make tornadoes … There was no rational conversation possible.

The official response to conspiracy thinking is to hit people with the facts, but when some educated adults have convinced themselves that the world is flat, no amount of lecturing will work. My friend who died denying the reality of Covid-19 may well have been pushed further and further into his delusion by the sense that he was being patronised by people with PhDs. If people have left all reason behind, you can’t help them by hammering them with rationality.

Christianity is firmly set against anti-intellectualism. There is no space in the Gospel for embracing ignorance.

St Paul tells us that our spiritual life should be marked by the ‘renewal of the mind’ (Rom 12:2). We must resist the temptation to believe tall tales and leave the world of facts behind.

Christianity does not settle for mere intellectualism either. The path of faith is one that goes beyond mere knowledge. We are encouraged to seek out instead something better: wisdom.

My friend who died of Covid-19 while denying its existence could not have been saved with a presentation of yet-more facts. He was an intelligent man with an internet connection and a library card – he could have gotten all the data he needed! What he lacked was wisdom. In an age when people believe more and more crazy things, we do not just need more intelligence, we need more reflection, discernment and wisdom. We need the ability to assess the facts, to understand the data and then to interpret it in a way that helps us live our lives well. Our mind, heart and our soul must be fully engaged as we make our way through this complex world.