Origin Stories and COVID-19: The Value of Stories of the Lab Created Origins of COVID-19

Origin stories (here, here, here, and here) have always been important in the organization and disciplining of human society.  In many cases they serve to construct and differentiate one community form another.  They also tend to embed the core founding ideological premises that define a society as autonomous and distinguishable from another.  In periods of great convergence--which was the essential marker of globalization in its first phase (1945-2016)--such origin stories diminish in importance as a border of autonomy and serve more as a distinguishing element of "voice" by a community participating in the greater communities of peoples all engaged in the development of common positions and consensus. 

Conversely, where fracture becomes a political or cultural ideal, origin stories become a critical element in enhancing detachment.  That detachment is inherent in a political project that is grounded on enhancing the identity between communal autonomy (peoplehood) and the erection of borders. This is the positive and normative objective of origin stories. These are almost always bound up in stories of the creation of the world--with world understood as the space within which a self referencing community comes to know itself and its place within the space allotted to it. 

As important, origin stories might also serve as part of a moral project,   or they serve to develop not just the identity of the community (as the "other" in a world of communities) but to situate that "otherness" within a spectrum of moral values in which the community itself is identified with the incarnation of the"good" the goodness of which can be measured against the incarnation of its opposite. The remnants of post Temple Jewish communities as the bad end of the moral spectrum in which the community of Christians occupied the idealized space of the good at the time both were competing around the Mediterranean for control of the narrative of the "true" post-Temple Jewish faith, is an excellent example.

Origin stories of both types continue to serve politics in the 21st century (though the stakes are far more pathetic and they tend to resemble the court intrigues of Ming era eunuch politics, or those of the Ancien Regime aristocratic court). Especially potent are those origin stories that serve a moral purpose--that is that reinforce the notion of the "goodness" of a community measured against the "evil" of another. It appears that the officials who occupy middling positions within the self reflexive bureaucracies of powerful states appear unable to resist the temptation to use origin stories--especially origin stories with a moral element--in the hurley burley of political competition in the middle of a global crisis.

The recent distraction, coming in equal measure form Beijing and Washington, and fanned by the hangers on (academic, press, and others) who seek personal advantage through the deployment of these cultural tropes irrespective of the greater damage they may do to their respective governments and without a care for the way they betray the fundamental political principles of their respective systems, have taken up a certain substantial amount of time from the primary task of meeting the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

I do not refer to the childish diversion of the origins name of the disease (here, here, and here) with respect to which I will waste no more space than this.  Rather I speak to the much more potent, and derivative, battle that followed the conflict over "names" and evolving as if taken from the text of a third rate novella, of the assertion that COVID-19  was manufactured either in a Chinese or a US lab, and from there released onto the world (here, here, here, and here, but see here).  Here one has a powerful example of a morally driven origin story, the object of which is to buttress the unstated but underlying notion that two distinct communities exist, and that in nice Manichean style, one represents (and defines the "good" and the other--not so much. Here one references the origins of COVID-19 as a metaphor for the moral condition of the two societies.

That battle and its political ramifications (for geo-politics, for the control of the narrative of the pandemic, for the use of the pandemic as affirmation of political or cultural legitimacy, etc. e.g., here,  here) if fairly uninteresting, except for those in the business of managing story lines for specific objectives.  But their is neither subtlety nor deep value in that exercise--except among technicians.  It is not for nothing, then, that the Press and social media, apparently with little other news to report, has been cultivating this tempest in a teapot in a sort of ironic complicity with the propaganda departments of the combatants.

This post, instead considers an eddy in these politics that ought to be of more interest and greater value.  I refer the extraordinary efforts, by the American press to manufacture a rift within the Chinese administrator class respecting either the value of pressing the "US labs created COVID-19" line or its validity. As reported by Bloomberg:

An unusual public spat between two top Chinese diplomats points to an internal split in Beijing over how to handle rising tensions with a combative U.S. president. The differences spilled into public view Monday after China’s ambassador to the U.S. reaffirmed his opposition to promoting theories that the virus that causes Covid-19 originated in an American military lab. Ambassador Cui Tiankai said in an interview with “Axios on HBO” that he stood by his Feb. 9 statement that it would be “crazy” to spread such theories, even though a foreign ministry spokesman has repeatedly floated the idea on Twitter in recent weeks. (Spat Between China Diplomats Signals Internal Split Over Trump)

What makes this story interesting--at least from the context of the West where it is getting some play--centers on the way in which an origin story can be used to invert the trajectory of morality.  What is attempted here is to manufacture conflict within the story-telling community, and then to turn that into a story of the origin of weakness in the storytelling country.   That is, in this case, the origin story coming from certain sectors of the Chinese bureaucracy (e.g., that the US produced and released COVD-19 (e.g., here))  because it is publicly contested either evidences a rift within the ruling collective (e.g., here) or suggests contention over the forms and manifestation of foreign policy (here) that evidences the weakness of the ruling collective and immorality of the story.

And yet it is not entirely clear that their either is a rift, or that the disagreement is merely a quite elegant effort to manage response among the masses int he US. The origin story in China remains as vibrant as ever for the consumption of Chinese mass opinion.  But that is its function as a moral value origin story. On the other hand, its utility when projected toward the object of constructed evil is more problematic.  Thus, the decision for the Chinese Ambassador to the US to grant an interview, and to grant it to Axios ("we’ve engineered Axios around a simple proposition — deliver the clearest, smartest, most efficient and trustworthy experience for audience and advertisers alike"), takes on a quite distinct hue.

In a rare interview, China's ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, told "Axios on HBO" that he stands by his belief that it's "crazy" to spread rumors about the coronavirus originating from a military laboratory in the United States. Why it matters: Cui called this exact conspiracy theory "crazy" more than a month ago on CBS' "Face the Nation." But that was before the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian, began publicly promoting the conspiracy. (Top Chinese official disowns U.S. military lab coronavirus conspiracy)

 But you decide for yourselves. . . . and not by reading the manipulative "highlights" version of the encounter. The entire CBS-Axios interview may be accessed here .