The Pestilential Imagination (2): Consciousness as a Moral Code

“On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” (Albert Camus, The Plague, 131)

One of my non-negotiable assumptions is that literature matters. Books are important. So are poems and plays and films. We are storytelling animals who can only think in narratives, so the narratives that we consume have a lot to do with how we think about important things. If we cannot find good stories, we will have to make due with bad ones, which are never difficult to find and always easy to consume. And if all we have to think with are bad stories, then we will find it hard to have anything better than bad thoughts.

If there is anything we need a lot of during the COVID-19 crisis, it is good thoughts, which, if I am correct, cannot be had without good books. And as it turns out, there aren’t many really first-rate literary works about plagues and epidemics. We have Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, of course, and Elder Allan Poe’s “Mask of the Read…