How Will Coronavirus Change Us?

“One can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.” — William McNeil, Plagues and Peoples

My grandfather lived through the Great Depression. He had to move across the country — from rural Minnesota to Los Angeles — to find enough work to keep his body and soul together while the nation sorted out its problems. It worked. He started working every Friday in a furniture store in Long Beach, eventually bought the store, and became a prosperous Southern California merchant.

But he never forgot the Great Depression. He never believed that anything truly belonged to him in a way that could not evaporate in an instant, so he worried constantly about money, saved a huge portion of his income, and never spent an unnecessary dollar — just like almost everybody else who lived through the Great Depression.

Periods of great economic instability change people. They change whole societies, who never quite forget what it was like to have everything they ever owned taken away from them in a matter of days. Wars change people too, in ways that are difficult to predict. The generation that came of age during World War II — young people who were shaped by fierce fighting and…