Science, Art and the Coronavirus

Perhaps you've heard: the unfortunate conflict between scientists and artists is still going on. This conflict is not always such a big deal, but, perhaps you've heard, there's a deadly worldwide plague going on.

Not every scientist is in conflict with every artist. Some scientists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of the arts, and some artists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of science. These people -- I don't know how large a group they represent, I can only hope the group is large and growing quickly -- have grasped that neither science nor art by itself can address all human needs. They realize that art and science can compliment and help each other.

Then there are people like Frank Castorf, an idiot and perhaps Germany's most famous living theatre director. He's become even more famous in the past couple of days by publicly complaining that he doesn't like being told by Angela Merkel to wash his hands, and that he resents not being able to shop and dine out as he is accustomed to do.

And so, since he is one of Germany's most prominent representatives of art, he's causing a lot of damage. Who knows how many deaths he will be directly responsible for.

I wonder, does Castorf resent Merkel telling him what to do because she's a woman? If Germany had a male Chancellor at the moment who was passing along the advice of scientists -- that's all that Merkel is doing, of course: passing along the advice of scientists about how we can best hope to survive this epidemic, not exercising any sort of personal authority over Frank Castorf -- would Castorf enthusiastically support social distancing and masks and hand washing? I suspect he might. He might think of it as a paramilitary sort of discipline. He has some stupid macho tendencies.

Castorf is also, like Donald Trump, making this worldwide crisis all about him. He claims that before the coronavirus outbreak, young people in the theatre wanted old men in the theatre to die as soon as possible. (Castorf is 68 years old.), and that now they want to save every old man they can, even with such allegedly fascist measures as compulsory hand-washing.

No sensible person I know agrees with Castorf that young theatre people were ever wishing old men dead. I suspect the truth may be more something such as that now and then, some big-mouthed, wise-assed young people have said that they wish that Castorf would retire, and Castorf is blowing that way out of proportion and using this particularly thin excuse to wallow in self-pity, at a particularly bad time and in a particularly destructive way.

This conflict between art and science comes from artists and scientists not appreciating what the other group can do. Some scientists think that science can solve all of humanity's problems, some artists think that art can solve all of humanity's problems, and, of course, they're all mistaken. We need both.

Social distancing, masks and hand-washing will save lives. Science has told us that, and there is no doubt at all that science is correct about that. We still have a problem, though, because many people are not listening to this very simple and important message from science. Scientists know how people should best respond to a pandemic, but they don't know how to convince people to respond in the best way. Convincing people to take scientifically-sound, live-saving advice is something that artists are good at -- or, at least, something they can be good at, if they're not completely infantile self-pitying idiots.