There’s nothing specifically “Chinese” in a racial or cultural sense about a virus. But the Chinese being the largest country on Earth, the biggest group of humans, does make them the most likely origin of novel disease strains. So the question is, what’s the nature of the cause, the origin of the perceived danger, what’s doing the actual work in this concept? Is it the Chinese-ness that’s doing the heavy lifting, that’s the main explanatory factor? Or is Chinese-ness tangential to the nature of the concept and it’s really the existence of a large, urban population that’s the main explanatory factor?

This is what, in science, is called a factor analysis. You try to figure out what you’re actually measuring and its explanatory utility. You try to figure out which of a set of associated variables is actually doing the work. And you try to focus your analysis on the factors that are actually most important and shift focus away from the more tangential factors. So how central and explanatory is the label “Chinese Virus”?

I think the obvious, reasonable, adult answer is, it’s tangential. The explanatory value of the “Chinese” term is weak, it doesn’t add anything to our existing understanding of Covid-19 or our response to it. We won’t understand it better or respond to it better by doing a deep dive into Chinese dynastic history or genetics or the history of tea or the teachings of Lao Tzu or Mao. I think it’s fairly clear that such labeling misses the real point and falls more under childish squabbling over blame and responsibility and position than it does any kind of helpful or accurate understanding of the problem. It obscures the nature of the problem and makes real work on it harder rather than easier.

Yes, the virus did come from China and spread worldwide from there; yes, large urban populations in general are more of a risk for outbreaks. Those factors need to be taken into account in our legitimate assessment of risk and tracing of the past and future path of the virus. But childish posturing and blame games and inaccurate labels don’t help with that process, they obscure it and distract us from what we need to be focusing on.

And I could end this discussion there. But for anyone who wants to continue, I will go on.

It is true that throughout history people have feared cities and their clusters of dense population for their tendency to be ground zero for disease outbreaks and have associated rural areas with health and safety and would often flee there or send their children there during outbreaks, something you can see happening now in Paris.

So there is an underlying reality to the fear people feel of large population clusters (and other observed sources of outbreaks) during viral outbreaks. They want to stay alive and avoid danger. And that’s fine, that’s a legitimate concern. And people will use basic markers to identify likely threats. If a disease is originating from that place and spreading to this place, and you’ve come from that place to this place, then you’re flagged as a potential carrier. Understandably so. If the consequences of that potential flagging are very high, such as a very high chance of death, people will take it pretty seriously, they’ll respond to that flag, that potential for danger, commensurately.

As far as it goes, that all makes sense. It’s a necessary survival strategy built into us. Experience danger, identify the tragectory and entry point, find ways to identify and mark it, and avoid it. That’s the basic foundation of human survival strategies. It’s why we avoid foods that we ate right before getting really sick (even if it wasn’t the food that made us sick; it’s that biologically instinctive, that necessary for survival). And the clearer the apparent connection between the antecedent and the result, and the higher the potential danger, the stronger the avoidance reaction.

Ok, so there is a real value there, and it comes from an essential survival skill we do need. You do need to be cautious, because every strange new visitor (literal or figurative) is essentially an open, unsettled question. They might be bringing valuable new gifts to share and exchange, or they might be bringing in new dangers (for example, they might be bringing smallpox to the Americas that will soon wipe out 90% of your culture). The stranger is an open question of value, it isn’t known, there’s doubt. And we need a little caution and a little openness, lest we either deprive ourselves of possible goods and new connections and opportunities or do unjust harm to the stranger, and lest in our carelessness or eagerness we open our gates up to terrible new risks and dangers.

So it’s a balancing act. But it’s a necessary balancing act if we’re going to survive, because the threats are real, not only imagined. Survival flagging, possible threat identification, and avoidance/stigmatization of causes are natural and necessary for human life. They are legitimate and important survival instincts. So we can understand and respect where those reactions come from. And we use them in every area of daily life, from the way we avoid touching hot stoves to the way we avoid giving important work to an unreliable worker, or avoid restaurants with bad service, or refuse dates with unpleasant or unstable people. We discriminate. We seek better outcomes and to control our future lives by making informed choices. The problem, of course, is that even in the best cases such reactions are a lot like medical interventions. They always come with a cost.

Many less open and more cautious societies would reject or even kill strangers on sight. And for some isolated tribal groups still living unconnected to the modern world, maybe that’s for the best. If they didn’t kill us on sight, they would probably be destroyed once they encountered our microbes. But their isolation comes at a high cost, both to the people they harm and to themselves, because they lose out on the value of everything they could gain. Avoidance is a kind of medical intervention. There’s a cost to all medical interventions. They protect you, but they do damage too, they have side effects. And by avoiding a potential hazard you also deprive yourself of potential benefits. This can be true with food, it can be true of ideas, it can be true of any stranger, metaphorical or literal. And of course they could be inacfruate and misinformed. They could be wrong about what actually needs to be avoided, what caused the bad outcomes.

Since we’re intelligent, thinking creatures who are aware of our own strategies and concerns and the possibilities, and can investigate causes and speculate about outcomes, we’ve got some options that wouldn’t be open to, say, deer or monkeys, who will tend to take one strategy or the other to extremes (extreme avoidance or extreme non-selectivity, and both carry a high cost of life, and the more vulnerable the animal and more powerful the thing being addressed is the higher the cost). But we are able to see and try to mitigate and temper the cost of our interventions, or at least recognize them. We’re able to question the accuracy of our identification if the risk factors that need to be flagged, and how serious they are. We’re able to see how our flagging of the stranger might actually harm us, and how it might harm the stranger, while remaining rational about the benefit and the danger. We can seek wise and accurate judgments and discrimination.

And wise and accurate judgments are absolutely invaluable, not only in how we evaluate the stranger, but in how we evaluate ourselves. We are all the stranger to someone at some point in our lives. We all are new and unknown or different and have the potential to either help or harm the world around us. Sometimes we are even a stranger to ourselves. We encounter new ideas, new possibilities, new opportunities, new challenges, and we have to navigate our path through them and choose between them and how far to take them. We’re little ships navigating a sea of dangers and opportunities. And what we all need to do is keep our heads and be careful. Discrimination is important. It keeps us alive, it gives us power over our future by projecting your understanding of the causal past into present action. It helps you avoid the rocks and find the islands. And the world isn’t all islands any more than its all rocks. Your trajectory matters to your outcomes. Different courses will lead to different destinations.

That’s why wisdom is paramount. Intelligence is useful for wisdom, but it’s not identical to it. And a smart, unwise person is more likely to lead themselves and others into ruin than almost anyone you’ll find. Wisdom is the steady hand that clearly see the rocks and the islands and weighs the courses justly and accurately in its eye. Wisdom is discrimination perfected by the desire for greater understanding. It is the balance between openness and caution. It sees the world as it is and as we wish it to be. Wisdom is making the sum of the variety of human perspectives and possible strategies for response one within yourself. It is the eye that sees all and selects the narrowest path between extremes.

Wisdom is what we need right now, more than intelligence, more than caution, more than openness, more than optimism or pessimism or negativity or positivity, more than criticism or comfort. And the more we fight and divide and seek our own position, the more we forget the terrible and wonderful reality of the world we face, the less wise we become.

What I see right now is some people playing politics with labeling. Labeling is a useful and necessary means for surviving and thriving in the world. But labels don’t encourage analysis. They organize instincts behind an analysis of the past and a prescription for present action. This caused that, so we need to treat this in X manner. We do it in every dimension of life, because discrimination, being able to tell the difference between things and their content, is the basis of all human survival (and communication).

When someone starts playing politics with labels, especially someone who’s fairly ignorant of the actual legitimate strategies and value and dangers and benefits being considered, that’s when it’s time to just ignore them and stop listening. Playing politics with labels is someone saying “How can I hijack this discussion and these needs and instincts for my own benefit and use them to gain advantage?”

This approach undermines the essential value of the enterprise and subverts it. We really need to seriously consider the risks of both opening the gates to someone or something and the risks of keeping them closed. We need to be careful and fair in our judgements. We need to justly balance the costs and benefits of either approach and recognize and mitigate the negative consequences of whatever approach we decide on. And we can’t do that if someone is highjacking the whole process for their personal financial or political or social benefit. There’s real work to be done, we can’t afford to waste our effort and energy on unconnected personal agendas (like advancing your career or popularity).

And this is a problem in every society, in every political party, in every town, in every individual human relationship. It’s a problem each of us have to struggle with. How often, in your own life, have you realized that you were more concerned with scoring personal points than you were with really solving the problem? Anyone who has been married should be able to realize that it’s the most basic of human temptations, and one we have to fight at every level.

Everyone who has had children knows that the most likely outcome of asking two children to do an unpleasant but necessary task like cleaning a room is that they will argue about who is to blame for what and squabble over who is responsible, and they’ll almost entirely ignore the actual work. The Berenstain Bears book “Messy Room” capture this process perfectly. Parents don’t care about the politics. Mama bear just wants the room cleaned, the necessary work done. And the kids’ arguing just makes her more annoyed while she gets on with the actual work. As parents, part of our job is to teach our children to set aside those petty squabbles and jockeying for position and focus on the actual need.

Adults who waste our time with squabbling and jockeying for position, insults and blame games, are just big children who never learned to grow up. They’re still out on the playground or in their room with their rivals and are more concerned about their position and hurling insults and building the case for themselves than any real work that needs doing. People like that only make things harder and frustrate the people trying to do the real work and count the real costs. They only give a bad name to whatever side of the debate they’re on, when what we need is cooperation and balance.

So what can be done about such people? Well, like all discrimination that allows us to pick out things that are harmful, identify and avoid is one strategy. Don’t get caught up in their games. Ignore the games (because you might not be able to ignore the people entirely) and deprive them of the results they’re seeking from that tactic. Respond to correct and redirect them toward the actual work at hand, if possible. That would be the most ideal solution. Draw the focus to what actually matters. If they’re truly persistent and won’t stop hijacking the discussion disruptively and unproductively, though, you might have to avoid them altogether for a while. They might need a time out.

So be the adult in the room. There is hard, serious work to be done in life. We have to be careful. There are real dangers and risks and losses and real benefits and gains to be had from whatever path we choose. And it’s in all our best interests to see them clearly so we can navigate them in the best way possible, maximizing the positive and mitigating the negative.

There are going to be some hard, necessary choices, because the world isn’t set up to make us feel good, and our survival can’t be predicated on the goal of making everyone happy and treating everything as if it’s all a universal good with no legitimate potential for danger (or a universal danger with no potential for good). And we need to recognize that making such simplifications is likely to be our first instinct. And subverting the process for our own personal benefit at the expense of the actual pressing need is likely to be our second instinct.

We can’t avoid making some necessary negative judgements any more than we can avoid making some necessary positive ones about what’s helpful and beneficial. We can’t comfort ourselves that we’ve judged rightly because we’ve reduced everything down to a single goal and a single category and a single judgment (it’s all good or it’s all bad). That’s not reality. Everything has a benefit, everything has a risk.

Everything with any value or power can go right or wrong. Every measure we take to protect ourselves will also carry a cost for us or someone else. Every measure we take to open ourselves up will carry a cost for us or someone else. (We can see this playing out right now with our response to the Covid-19 virus; we gain in one kind of safety and lose another.) The best we can do is to make our decisions with clear, open eyes, judging as fairly and accurately as possible, balancing the risks and gains as fairly as possible, with a clear eye to the secondary and tertiary consequences.

We must be wise, and we must feed the flame of wisdom. We must reject extremes that distract us or seek to reduce the issue to a unitary judgment (it’s all about being nice and making people feel good, it’s all about keeping people safe and surviving). We must correct or reject distractions and traps meant to sideline our efforts into petty squabbling over position. We must strive to be the wise adults in room, neither fragile and fearful and vulnerable nor aggressive and thoughtless and untouchable. Those are the unbalanced extremes of useful instincts that we need both of in balance to survive and succeed. We must be on guard against ourselves as much as others. We must draw the line of good and evil down the heart of every person, every important idea, every weighty choice, every new challenge, every deliberate response.

We may never be safe, we may never be wholly in control, we may never act without consequence and cost, we may never be perfect, we may never be without cause for criticism and blame. But we will at least try to do our best, and so hope to thread the eye of wisdom’s narrow needle.