Plague Mentality

Lance Morrow's 1985 essay, "The Start of a Plague Mentality," captures the essence of the mindset in the opening paragraph:

"An epidemic of yellow fever struck Philadelphia in August 1793. Eyes glazed, flesh yellowed, minds went delirious. People died, not individually, here and there, but in clusters, in alarming patterns. A plague mentality set in. Friends recoiled from one another. If they met by chance, they did not shake hands but nodded distantly and hurried on. The very air felt diseased. People dodged to the windward of those they passed. They sealed themselves in their houses. The deaths went on, great ugly scythings. Many adopted a policy of savage self-preservation, all sentiment heaved overboard like ballast. Husbands deserted stricken wives, parents abandoned children.The corpses of even the wealthy were carted off unattended, to be shoveled under without ceremony or prayer. One-tenth of the population died before cold weather came in the fall and killed the mosquitoes."

The subject of that essay was the then-unfolding AIDS epidemic but the described mindset is not so limited -- maybe first go medieval to capture the Black Death taking out half of Europe, and then to the Spanish influenza of 1918 killing twice as many people as the total number of  casualties of WWI that had just ended, then maybe add all the distinctly American versions like the referenced yellow fever of 1793 Philadelphia (4,000), cholera in 1832 New York City (3,000) and there again in 1848 (5,000) and the same year in New Orleans (4,340), again yellow fever in 1853 New Orleans (7,790) and 1867 (3,093) followed by the 1878 lower Mississippi Valley (13,000), polio 1916 nationwide (7,000), 1918 Spanish influenza (500,000 in the U.S. alone), polio again 1949 nationwide (2,720) and once more in 1952 (3,300), Asian flu 1957 nationwide (70,000), AIDS 1981-2005 nationwide (550,394), Swine Flu 2009 nationwide (3,900 with 98,000 hospitalized). And so on.

But our discussion is not about raw statistics or even speculation on the course of CoVid-19 except, that is, to note this bug has ambitions. What's particularly troubling about the affliction is not so much the daily, or even hourly, body count as it is the apparent latency period of the disease -- the notion that asymptomatic carriers can mingle in the crowd for weeks, this undetectable "fungus among us."

No, our interest here is more general in nature, the exploration of the ways -- from the sacred to the profane -- in which social structures have allowed diseases to flourish, how epidemics have altered the affected societies, and what all that says about where we find ourselves today. Our discussion article (click: How Pandemics Change History) is an interview with Frank M. Snowden, author of his new book, "Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present." The question posed is, What are the major ways in which epidemics have shaped the modern world? The author's take is that epidemics are a category of disease that hold up a mirror to human beings as to who they really are i.e. our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives -- how we are connected to the environment, to one another. 

Certain issues raised are essentially philosophical, religious, and moral in nature. How is it, for instance, that an all-knowing and omniscient divinity would ever allow for the infliction of such immense suffering on the masses, including children? Is this in the category of "working in mysterious ways" or is this the fateful lightning of the terrible swift sword -- perhaps, among the seven last plagues completing God's wrath?

Meanwhile, back on earth, the questions become existential in a different way, such as whether we're experiencing the dark side of globalization. The shrinkage of the global village means, almost by definition, the threats posed by the infected become more proximate. In this era of cheap transcontinental travel it might be time to reconsider the costs of that weekend trip to London and maybe cite that wonderful quote of French philosopher Blaise Pascal, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." One interesting footnote is the way Gunnison Colorado escaped the ravages of the 1918 Spanish Influenza by means of its self-imposed isolation (click: Gunnison Escape).

Our global commercial interconnectedness probably makes such isolation largely infeasible. Yet the current situation reveals the cost of the inter-dependencies. Most of our pharmaceuticals, including an estimated ninety percent of antibiotics, are sourced from China. China's CCP media mouthpiece, Xinhua News, recently published an article pointing out that the CoVid-19 outbreak is much worse than the U.S. authorities are letting on and that, in the event China were to retaliate with strategic restrictions over medical exports, America would be "plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus." The implicit mafia-type message is nice supply chain you got shame if something happened to it.

This entire viral threat might lead to a fundamental question about our commercial posture i.e. the real costs of our post-industrial unfettered growth mindset. We've previously addressed the existential environmental threat posed by such a single-minded mindset (MM 10-08-18/Climate Change Reckoning). At the risk of engaging in doom porn, perhaps we might see this CoVid-19 crisis as an opportunity to reimagine our priorities.