The World’s Reaction to the Wuhan Coronavirus
. . . Plagues and panics, ancient and modern
by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: Most preindustrial mass plagues were bacterial, caused by urban overcrowding and poor-to-nonexistent garbage and sewage disposal. In the disruptive aftermath of pandemics, fundamental social and political change sometimes followed—wars lost, governments ended, wealth and power reversed.
Of course, cheap antibiotics, modern medical care, and sophisticated sewage treatment and refuse collection have mostly ended the epidemic threat of typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague.
Apparently, our trust in modern drugs is such that we arrogantly do not even consider the chance of pandemic danger posed by 500,000 or so homeless Americans, who live outside in harsh weather, amid vermin, excrement, and rodents on our major urban-center sidewalks.
Instead, in the modern age, viruses have mostly replaced bacteria in posing theoretical threats of mass infection, illness, and death. While modern Western medicine, given enough time, can sometimes prevent many pandemic viral infections through mass vaccinations, they are, unlike many bacterial illnesses, often impossible, or at least difficult, to treat.
If bacterial plagues are far more unlikely in our postmodern society, globalization has still made the specter of an epidemic of a viral disease—Ebola, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and, most recently, COVID-19—not impossible. The A and B influenzas, despite mass inoculations, infect about 20–30 million Americans per year. Depending on the particular annual mutating strain, anywhere between 10,000 and 80,000 die from seasonal influenzas, mostly the elderly or chronically sick. In addition, given the easy ability to weaponize diseases in labs, and especially given the recent spread abroad of the sophisticated Western sciences of bacteriology and virology to first-generation high-technological and authoritarian societies—China in particular—the idea of a historic pandemic is not always fanciful.
The great plague at Athens (430–29 b.c.) that broke out in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, according to the historian Thucydides, wiped out as many as 80,000 people (a fourth of the population of Athens), including rural refugees from the Attic countryside. Nothing, the historian claimed, did more damage to Athens.
Some 2,500 years later, it remains a parlor game among classicists to identify the precise infectious culprit. Some form of either typhus or typhoid seems most likely. Most historians agree that the epidemic that killed Pericles was likely a result of his policy of forced evacuation of the Attic rural population from the country to inside the walls of Athens during the Spartan invasion in late May 430 b.c. The busy port at Piraeus was an incubator and force multiplier of the disease.
Thucydides’ contemporary description of the pestilence inaugurated a tradition in Western historiography of envisioning plagues as reflections on the pathologies of contemporary society. He focuses not just on the deaths and the demographic swath of the disease but even more so on the psychological and sociological damage the disease wrought. In his view, such natural and manmade calamities, like war and revolution, by the nature of their illogical violence and unpredictable mayhem, eventually rip off the thin veneer of civilization. They reduce people to their animal essences. In their instinctual and deadly competitive efforts to survive one more day, the mob in extremis will do almost anything—and blame almost anyone and anything.
In the ancient world, then, plagues usually arrived in early summer from the non-west (Egypt or Asia). They entered European ports, usually in the south and east, and accelerated through filthy and densely populated cities. Pandemics triggered debates on the value of the minority scientific method—which focused on symptomology, diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses—versus the majority popular embrace of religion and superstition, which equated plagues with divine wrath or hubris and therefore fixated on particular villains and customs that had provoked such godly wrath.
After the Athenian plague, Athens could still ward off a Spartan victory, but it lacked the resources to vanquish the Spartan empire and its growing number of allies. In some sense, the grandiose visions of imperial Athens ended with the plague—even as a wider Greek interest in both medical science and popular religion increased.
Sophocles’ greatest play, Oedipus Rex, was staged a year after the plague began to wane. Its chief protagonist, Oedipus, a good and wise man whose sin is to believe that his haughty reason can defeat cosmic fate, resembles in his arrogance the recently deceased Pericles, the renaissance man with a worldly consort of philosophers, libertines, and artists.
Again, it was the statesman’s strategy of withdrawing tens of thousands of rural Athenians into the city to ride out the invasion of Spartan hoplites that ensured that the city became the petri dish for the plague. Of course, Pericles’ strategy, in theory, might have worked, had his celebrated reliance on reason included knowledge of the relationship between sanitation and infection. In the end, even the rationalist Pericles was reduced to clutching amulets to ward off the plague.
The lifelong quest of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (c. 482–565) focused on reestablishing the lost Roman Empire in the West under new Byzantine Greek auspices. Over some 30 years of constant campaigning, his brilliant marshals Belisarius and Narses reconquered much of southern Europe, North Africa, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, while Justinian dedicated the monumental church of Hagia Sophia and codified Roman law.
But the bubonic plague of 541–42 soon spread from the port capital at Constantinople throughout the empire. The pandemic would go on to kill 500,000 Byzantines and render the military agendas of Justinian—who also got the disease but recovered—inert.
The chatty contemporary historian Procopius, in Thucydidean fashion, blamed the Egyptians for the pandemic’s origins. He went on to describe the disease as the catalyst for the same uncivilized behavior so chillingly described nearly a millennium earlier by Thucydides: the crass treatment of the unburied, the avoidance of the infected, the desperation to live wildly in the expectation of impending death, and an equally pernicious outbreak of nihilism, superstition, and self-pity.
The medieval outbreak in Europe of the Black Plague (1347–51) likely killed more than the Athenian and Justinian plagues combined, perhaps eventually half of the European population, or somewhere around 50–80 million people. Like prior bacterial plagues, it too was believed to have spread from the east and entered Mediterranean ports. It went ballistic in the heavily populated, fetid, and numerous cities of Europe.
In The Decameron, his brilliant collection of novellas, Boccaccio follows the same Western tradition of describing the symptoms, collating the various religious and superstitious exegeses for the sudden arrival of mass death, and for the general breakdown in popular mores. He too notes that the stricken public believed they were shortly to perish and should therefore satisfy their appetites in the time they had left.
As I write, there have been only a few deaths from COVID-19 in the United States and fewer than 100 known cases. No child anywhere in the world under ten is known to have died from the disease. No matter. We are in the midst of a frenzy greater even than the 1976 “pandemic” threat of a new “swine flu” that had supposedly returned in the manner of the lethal 1918 pandemic.
The panicked U.S. stock market in recent weeks suffered its worst days since the 9/11 attacks—before rebounding when profiteers saw the economy stronger than the virus. The entire economy of China, ground zero of the pandemic, has become calcified, despite suffering fewer than 70,000 reported cases and fewer than 3,000 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion. Hundreds of millions of Chinese remain in both voluntary and forced quarantines, amid fuel and food shortages. As a result, China’s trillion-dollar supply chains to foreign importers stagnate. The modern world may be technologically savvy and medically sophisticated, but it has not escaped the rumor, panic, and hysteria that break out when unknown diseases strike, as Thucydides and Procopius so chillingly once detailed.
Global population is nearing 8 billion, and little more than 3,000 worldwide are known to have died from COVID-19. Still, in my rural hometown of Selma, in isolated central California, I conducted an experiment today to see whether disposable medical gloves, face masks, and hand cleansers were still in full supply at the three national chain drug and food stores. All were sold out.
For all our millennia of scientific advancements, we know approximately as much about COVID-19 as Sophocles and Thucydides knew about the effects of the Athenian plague. How exactly does it spread differently from the flu? Are there unknown millions of infected who are not sure when, or even if, they became sick? How did COVID-19 originate—from Chinese bats, snakes, and pangolins in the open-air food markets of Wuhan? Or did the coronavirus strain escape from the oddly proximate Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the only level-four Chinese center that conducts biological-weapons research? The Internet remains fervid with such theories and rumors. It would take a gossipy Procopius to hunt them all down.
Was COVID-19 a mutated virus that jumped to humans from the many known animal viruses in China? Did profit-minded technicians and doctors sell sick lab animals to the open markets? Were Chinese military researchers on the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine or an offensive super-weaponized strain—or both? The variety of these conspiracy theories seem no different from Thucydides’ own speculations in book 2 of his history.
The known unknowns of our pandemic remain endless. Why were there epidemic foci in Iran and Italy, of all places? And why for such a supposedly virulent coronavirus were the ratios of dead to infected still below 2 percent, and like the flu, why was it mostly lethal to the elderly and chronically sick?
Globalization may have lifted billions out of poverty, but open borders and same-day transoceanic jet travel had helped to spread the disease.
Meanwhile, the electronic ability to shut down social media and curtail free use of the Internet, cell phones, and dish and cable TV enabled the Chinese government to downplay the nature of COVID-19 for the first critical weeks of its outbreak.
Certainly, so far China is the world’s great loser in the “pandemic” that is not yet really a pandemic. Beijing’s initial suppression of news of the coronavirus confirmed a continually deteriorating global portrait of Communist China, especially when collated with its losing trade war with the U.S., the Hong Kong democracy protests, the million-person Uighur reeducation camps, and the Orwellian point-system surveillance of Chinese citizens.
In the end, we are left with the irony that the hysterias of a multibillion-person postmodern world in reaction to a rather puny virus are about the same as those of premodern societies that sometimes lost nearly half their populations from horrific plagues.
But moderns—unlike ancients, who were without effective medicines and vaccinations—apparently believe that the good life means that pandemics of any sort belong to another era and have no business daring to pop up in their own.
In terms of hysterias, the more the world changes, the more its people certainly remain the same.
------------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. H/T McIntosh Enterprises.
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, The World’s Reaction, to Wuhan Coronavirus To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
Of course, cheap antibiotics, modern medical care, and sophisticated sewage treatment and refuse collection have mostly ended the epidemic threat of typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague.
Apparently, our trust in modern drugs is such that we arrogantly do not even consider the chance of pandemic danger posed by 500,000 or so homeless Americans, who live outside in harsh weather, amid vermin, excrement, and rodents on our major urban-center sidewalks.
Instead, in the modern age, viruses have mostly replaced bacteria in posing theoretical threats of mass infection, illness, and death. While modern Western medicine, given enough time, can sometimes prevent many pandemic viral infections through mass vaccinations, they are, unlike many bacterial illnesses, often impossible, or at least difficult, to treat.
If bacterial plagues are far more unlikely in our postmodern society, globalization has still made the specter of an epidemic of a viral disease—Ebola, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and, most recently, COVID-19—not impossible. The A and B influenzas, despite mass inoculations, infect about 20–30 million Americans per year. Depending on the particular annual mutating strain, anywhere between 10,000 and 80,000 die from seasonal influenzas, mostly the elderly or chronically sick. In addition, given the easy ability to weaponize diseases in labs, and especially given the recent spread abroad of the sophisticated Western sciences of bacteriology and virology to first-generation high-technological and authoritarian societies—China in particular—the idea of a historic pandemic is not always fanciful.
The great plague at Athens (430–29 b.c.) that broke out in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, according to the historian Thucydides, wiped out as many as 80,000 people (a fourth of the population of Athens), including rural refugees from the Attic countryside. Nothing, the historian claimed, did more damage to Athens.
Some 2,500 years later, it remains a parlor game among classicists to identify the precise infectious culprit. Some form of either typhus or typhoid seems most likely. Most historians agree that the epidemic that killed Pericles was likely a result of his policy of forced evacuation of the Attic rural population from the country to inside the walls of Athens during the Spartan invasion in late May 430 b.c. The busy port at Piraeus was an incubator and force multiplier of the disease.
Thucydides’ contemporary description of the pestilence inaugurated a tradition in Western historiography of envisioning plagues as reflections on the pathologies of contemporary society. He focuses not just on the deaths and the demographic swath of the disease but even more so on the psychological and sociological damage the disease wrought. In his view, such natural and manmade calamities, like war and revolution, by the nature of their illogical violence and unpredictable mayhem, eventually rip off the thin veneer of civilization. They reduce people to their animal essences. In their instinctual and deadly competitive efforts to survive one more day, the mob in extremis will do almost anything—and blame almost anyone and anything.
In the ancient world, then, plagues usually arrived in early summer from the non-west (Egypt or Asia). They entered European ports, usually in the south and east, and accelerated through filthy and densely populated cities. Pandemics triggered debates on the value of the minority scientific method—which focused on symptomology, diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses—versus the majority popular embrace of religion and superstition, which equated plagues with divine wrath or hubris and therefore fixated on particular villains and customs that had provoked such godly wrath.
After the Athenian plague, Athens could still ward off a Spartan victory, but it lacked the resources to vanquish the Spartan empire and its growing number of allies. In some sense, the grandiose visions of imperial Athens ended with the plague—even as a wider Greek interest in both medical science and popular religion increased.
Sophocles’ greatest play, Oedipus Rex, was staged a year after the plague began to wane. Its chief protagonist, Oedipus, a good and wise man whose sin is to believe that his haughty reason can defeat cosmic fate, resembles in his arrogance the recently deceased Pericles, the renaissance man with a worldly consort of philosophers, libertines, and artists.
Again, it was the statesman’s strategy of withdrawing tens of thousands of rural Athenians into the city to ride out the invasion of Spartan hoplites that ensured that the city became the petri dish for the plague. Of course, Pericles’ strategy, in theory, might have worked, had his celebrated reliance on reason included knowledge of the relationship between sanitation and infection. In the end, even the rationalist Pericles was reduced to clutching amulets to ward off the plague.
The lifelong quest of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (c. 482–565) focused on reestablishing the lost Roman Empire in the West under new Byzantine Greek auspices. Over some 30 years of constant campaigning, his brilliant marshals Belisarius and Narses reconquered much of southern Europe, North Africa, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, while Justinian dedicated the monumental church of Hagia Sophia and codified Roman law.
But the bubonic plague of 541–42 soon spread from the port capital at Constantinople throughout the empire. The pandemic would go on to kill 500,000 Byzantines and render the military agendas of Justinian—who also got the disease but recovered—inert.
The chatty contemporary historian Procopius, in Thucydidean fashion, blamed the Egyptians for the pandemic’s origins. He went on to describe the disease as the catalyst for the same uncivilized behavior so chillingly described nearly a millennium earlier by Thucydides: the crass treatment of the unburied, the avoidance of the infected, the desperation to live wildly in the expectation of impending death, and an equally pernicious outbreak of nihilism, superstition, and self-pity.
The medieval outbreak in Europe of the Black Plague (1347–51) likely killed more than the Athenian and Justinian plagues combined, perhaps eventually half of the European population, or somewhere around 50–80 million people. Like prior bacterial plagues, it too was believed to have spread from the east and entered Mediterranean ports. It went ballistic in the heavily populated, fetid, and numerous cities of Europe.
In The Decameron, his brilliant collection of novellas, Boccaccio follows the same Western tradition of describing the symptoms, collating the various religious and superstitious exegeses for the sudden arrival of mass death, and for the general breakdown in popular mores. He too notes that the stricken public believed they were shortly to perish and should therefore satisfy their appetites in the time they had left.
As I write, there have been only a few deaths from COVID-19 in the United States and fewer than 100 known cases. No child anywhere in the world under ten is known to have died from the disease. No matter. We are in the midst of a frenzy greater even than the 1976 “pandemic” threat of a new “swine flu” that had supposedly returned in the manner of the lethal 1918 pandemic.
The panicked U.S. stock market in recent weeks suffered its worst days since the 9/11 attacks—before rebounding when profiteers saw the economy stronger than the virus. The entire economy of China, ground zero of the pandemic, has become calcified, despite suffering fewer than 70,000 reported cases and fewer than 3,000 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion. Hundreds of millions of Chinese remain in both voluntary and forced quarantines, amid fuel and food shortages. As a result, China’s trillion-dollar supply chains to foreign importers stagnate. The modern world may be technologically savvy and medically sophisticated, but it has not escaped the rumor, panic, and hysteria that break out when unknown diseases strike, as Thucydides and Procopius so chillingly once detailed.
Global population is nearing 8 billion, and little more than 3,000 worldwide are known to have died from COVID-19. Still, in my rural hometown of Selma, in isolated central California, I conducted an experiment today to see whether disposable medical gloves, face masks, and hand cleansers were still in full supply at the three national chain drug and food stores. All were sold out.
For all our millennia of scientific advancements, we know approximately as much about COVID-19 as Sophocles and Thucydides knew about the effects of the Athenian plague. How exactly does it spread differently from the flu? Are there unknown millions of infected who are not sure when, or even if, they became sick? How did COVID-19 originate—from Chinese bats, snakes, and pangolins in the open-air food markets of Wuhan? Or did the coronavirus strain escape from the oddly proximate Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the only level-four Chinese center that conducts biological-weapons research? The Internet remains fervid with such theories and rumors. It would take a gossipy Procopius to hunt them all down.
Was COVID-19 a mutated virus that jumped to humans from the many known animal viruses in China? Did profit-minded technicians and doctors sell sick lab animals to the open markets? Were Chinese military researchers on the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine or an offensive super-weaponized strain—or both? The variety of these conspiracy theories seem no different from Thucydides’ own speculations in book 2 of his history.
The known unknowns of our pandemic remain endless. Why were there epidemic foci in Iran and Italy, of all places? And why for such a supposedly virulent coronavirus were the ratios of dead to infected still below 2 percent, and like the flu, why was it mostly lethal to the elderly and chronically sick?
Globalization may have lifted billions out of poverty, but open borders and same-day transoceanic jet travel had helped to spread the disease.
Meanwhile, the electronic ability to shut down social media and curtail free use of the Internet, cell phones, and dish and cable TV enabled the Chinese government to downplay the nature of COVID-19 for the first critical weeks of its outbreak.
Certainly, so far China is the world’s great loser in the “pandemic” that is not yet really a pandemic. Beijing’s initial suppression of news of the coronavirus confirmed a continually deteriorating global portrait of Communist China, especially when collated with its losing trade war with the U.S., the Hong Kong democracy protests, the million-person Uighur reeducation camps, and the Orwellian point-system surveillance of Chinese citizens.
In the end, we are left with the irony that the hysterias of a multibillion-person postmodern world in reaction to a rather puny virus are about the same as those of premodern societies that sometimes lost nearly half their populations from horrific plagues.
But moderns—unlike ancients, who were without effective medicines and vaccinations—apparently believe that the good life means that pandemics of any sort belong to another era and have no business daring to pop up in their own.
In terms of hysterias, the more the world changes, the more its people certainly remain the same.
------------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. H/T McIntosh Enterprises.
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, The World’s Reaction, to Wuhan Coronavirus To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
Posted by Bill Smith at 4:00 PM - Post Link
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home