This article is based on a manuscript read at the 2021 Symposium of the Society for the History of Social Thought, with additions and revisions made in the spring of 2022, where many countries move increasingly toward “the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.” The pandemic since 2020 has given us experiences in which a sense of discomfort repeatedly arises with questions involving “the difficulty of understanding,” that H. Arendt once mentioned. The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by surprise, but the way we perceived the surprise was not completely novel: the perception that could have turned the death toll of the pandemic into a necessary recurrence and just said “sorry, some will die,” as has Brazil’s President J. Bolsonaro.
In this article we trace some typical examples of the recurrence of panic, confusion, or fear, vis-à-vis the spread of the Covid-19 among societies, where the tumult often went too far and caused harm and sufferings in its turn. Those sufferings, apparently quasi-traditional to the human experience called ‘pandemic,’ must be taken very a novel and unexpected one unique to our own time. With numerous scientific developments given to us since the last century regarding the infectious disease, the “surprise” and suffering we saw this time with Covid-19 must be a testimony to the practical impossibility of the new knowledge and understanding, that we believe we have acquired.
