In times of crisis, there’s one thing you can rely on: stuff that’s made up, by which I mean stories, and novels, and films. For some reason, when the facts are terrible, there is comfort, and truth, to be found in fiction.

Having said that, the lessons of some of the novels I’ve read in the last few weeks have not been reassuring. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: Don’t trust men! By The Pricking of my Thumbs by Agatha Christie: Don’t trust old women! And Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel: Don’t trust anybody!

Station Eleven, as it happens, is set in a world that has been devastated by a virus, but in the end it has a hopeful message, which is that humanity will always transcend chaos and crisis thanks partly to the fact we need to create and consume culture and art even when things are bad – in fact, especially when things are bad. As one of the characters in the novel puts it: survival is insufficient (although I think we could all do with less of the crap coronavirus poetry, don’t you?)

One of the other lockdown novels I’ve been enjoying is also set during a catastrophe – in fact, it was written by the master of catastrophe John Wyndham. Wyndham is most famous for Day of the Triffids, but The Kraken Wakes is just as good and, like all good science fiction, it has something to say about the present – specifically, the divisions in society that crises like coronavirus expose. The divisions were there when Wyndham wrote his novel in the 1950s and they are still with us now.

One of the deepest is the division between the superstitious and the scientific, the irrational and the rational, and even in 2020 it still exists. In the last few weeks, I’ve heard otherwise reasonable people speculate on whether Covid-19 is spread by 5G; they’ve also wondered whether the virus might have been created in a lab as a weapon of mass destruction. And, hard though it is to believe, even of him, the President of the United States suggested the other day, in public, out loud, that the virus might be treated by injecting detergent into its victims. Irrationality is on the rampage even as rationality is trying to save us.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump is also central to another of the divisions that’s been exposed by this crisis: the division between exceptionalism and realism. In The Kraken Wakes, humanity is faced with a terrible threat: a race of alien creatures has colonised the depths of the Earth’s oceans and now they are emerging on to dry land to scoop up humans for food, much as humans do the other way round with fish in the sea.

However, here’s the point: the attacks in The Kraken Wakes happen initially in the Far East and, in the book, some people in Britain and the US act like it’s a foreign problem. “This is unfortunate and regrettable,” says one of the characters, “but scarcely grounds for the suggestion that we, thousands of miles from the nearest incident of the kind, should, at the taxpayer’s expense, proceed to beset our whole shoreline with weapons. This is a line of argument which would have us erect shockproof buildings in London on account of an earthquake in Tokyo.”

You may think some of this sounds familiar and you’d be right because there was the same kind of exceptionalism on show in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak. Donald Trump dismissed it as the “Chinese virus” and some British commentators and politicians also appeared to proceed on the basis that it wouldn’t affect us in the same way and that we were, in fact, exceptional. Sadly, a few weeks on, the folly of that approach has been exposed – the countries that thought they might be exceptional have high death rates while others, like South Korea, have fared much better.

Which takes us to the third and final division which in some ways has been hidden by coronavirus but in others has been exposed by the way politicians have behaved. Nicola Sturgeon has said we’re all thinking less about the issues that normally divide us, and she’s right to an extent, but not even coronavirus can disguise the division between the reasonable and the ideological. Even in a crisis, people struggle to put their prejudices aside.

Take, for example, the furore over the Downing Street advisor Dominic Cummings attending meetings of SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. Lots of people have ideological objections to Cummings and that’s fine – he’s a hard man to like. But it’s perfectly reasonable for the PM’s chief advisor to attend meetings about the biggest crisis of the day.

The same clash of ideology and reason has happened over who did and didn’t attend meetings of Cobra. When Boris Johnson was accused of missing five Cobra meetings, the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford said the PM was guilty of jaw-dropping negligence. And yet at the weekend we had reports that Nicola Sturgeon missed six Cobra meetings, which presumably did not cause Mr Blackford’s jaw to drop in the same way. The point is that it was perfectly reasonable for both the PM and the FM to send representatives to Cobra but our reaction is often guided not by what’s reasonable but by what’s ideological.

None of this is going to change any time soon – we are far too human for that to happen. But for those who do still cling to their petty political differences, and for those who thought that the “Chinese virus” would somehow never affect them, and for those who are tempted to believe the theories about 5G and all the rest of it, I refer you back to The Kraken Wakes and a moment in the book when a scientist talks about human arrogance and complacency in the face of something new.

Human beings think they are so clever, says the scientist, with their atom-splitting and microbe-conquering, but there have been lords of the Earth before us, he says, and some of them in a sounder position too, like the dinosaurs, and look what happened to them. You think humans rule the world? Very well: here’s something entirely new for you to face. Let’s see how your conceit stands up to it, shall we?

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