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The mentality was most evident last week in other quarters, among the mothers of New York schoolchildren, for example. A plague mentality results from ignorance and fear, but not in the way that is usually meant. When medicine is ignorant about a lethal disease, then the only intelligent approach, by mothers or anyone else, is to be fearful and intensely cautious. But, like a plague itself, a plague mentality seems an anachronism in the elaborately doctored postindustrial U.S. The discussion in recent years has gone in the other direction: Has medicine got so good that it is keeping people alive past their natural time? At a moment when rock fans of the First World undertake to cure a biblical scourge like the Ethiopian famine with 24 hours of music bounced off a satellite, AIDS, implacable and thus far incurable, comes as a shock. It arrives like a cannibal at the picnic and calmly starts eating the children.
Cancer used to be the most dreaded word to be uttered in a doctor's office. But cancer no longer means a virtual sentence of death. AIDS does. AIDS therefore sounds with a peculiar and absolute resonance in our minds. It catches echoes of the voice of God and of nuclear doom. AIDS carries significances that go beyond the numbers of those afflicted.
In many minds, AIDS is a kind of validation of Judeo-Christian morality. The virus is a terrible swift sword in the hand of God, a punishment for transgressions against his order. Thus the disease partakes, so to speak, of the prestige of the infinite. AIDS becomes a dramatically targeted refinement of the doctrine that all disease is a form of God's retribution upon fallen and sinful man. "Sickness is in fact the whip of God for the sins of many," said Cotton Mather. AIDS renews in many minds, sometimes in an almost unconscious way, questions of the problem of sin: Is there sin? Against whom? Against what? Is sex sometimes a sin? Why? And what kind of sex? And so on.
The psychological reaction to AIDS, apart from the real fears it engenders, represents a collision between the ordered world of religious faith--God presiding, Commandments in force--and a universe that appears indifferent to the Decalogue or the strictures of St. Paul, one in which a disease like AIDS, a "syndrome," is as morally indifferent as a hurricane: an event of nature. Beyond that argument, which itself now seems ancient, it is probable that in most minds a vague dread of the disease is accompanied by a sympathy for those afflicted. Sympathy, alas, is usually directly proportional to one's distance from the problem, and the sentiment will recede if the virus spreads and the sympathetic become the threatened.