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[Special content warning: discussion of existential threats to humanity. Highly depressogenic content. This might not be the best thing to read if you're given to despair or if despair is unsafe for you. Maybe give this post a pass if you are not in a place, emotionally, to handle it.]
Previous: Part 4: Climate Change, II
21.
It's begun.
There's an argument to be made that it started – slowly, slowly – in the mid-20th century when HIV first crossed into the human population. Arguably, it started with SARS. Arguably, it started with COVID-19.
Inarguably, it has started. Ed Yong, of the Atlantic, called this dawning age "the ‘Pandemicene’". I call it the Great Age of Plagues.
As I have set forth in the foregoing posts, there are multiple different things unfolding, any one of which suggests we anticipate a higher rate of infectious illness in our species than we are accustomed to, but which are apparently all happening at more or less once:
• Our population and population densities have grown to an extent that any species so numerous and gregarious would be experiencing an increase in infectious illness simply due to network effects;
• Our species has been ravaged by Covid and left even less resilient than before against subsequent infectious illnesses immunologically, psychologically, socially, legally, and logistically; and
• Climate change is going to massively increase human contact with known disease vectors such as mosquitos and ticks, while also increasing the risk of "spill-over" events between other species fleeing the destruction of their habitats, changing the behavior of known infectious agents for the worse, and possibly bringing us into contact with other novel diseases we know nothing of and have no particular evolved defenses against.
• Some of these factors apply not just to our species, but other species we care about, including because we rely on them for food and medicine.
I've been working on this post actively for months – it's been on my desk for years now – and of late I've been trying increasingly urgently to get it out the door as the news headlines make it clearer by the day that it was at risk of being scooped by reality. At this point, what was when I began a daring contention that needed careful marshaling of evidence to argue is now nearly belaboring the obvious.
I was in the midst of writing this when I woke up on the 19th of October to headlines about an outbreak of Vibrio vulnificus infections and death in the literal wake of Hurricane Ian in Florida.
I was in the midst of writing this when I woke up on the 20th of October to find that what I reported as a rumor 22 days previously had erupted into headline news:
2022 Oct 20: CNN: "An ‘unprecedented’ rise in respiratory viruses in children is overwhelming some hospitals"
I was in the midst of writing this when I woke up on the 25th of October to find these headlines:
2022 Oct 24: NBC News: "Nearly half of Virginia high school out sick because of mystery outbreak of flu-like gastrointestinal symptoms" by Marlene Lenthang
2022 Oct 25: Reuters via Yahoo: "Fungal infection list launched by WHO flags global health threat" by Jennifer Rigby
2022 Nov 16: Nature (journal): "Pathogen spillover driven by rapid changes in bat ecology" (Peggy Eby, Alison J. Peel, et al)
2022 Nov 28: BGR.com: "Scientists just revived an ancient virus that was frozen for 48,500 years (Joshua Hawkins)
2022 Nov 30: Washington University School of Medicine (PR via SciTech Daily): "Nationwide Problem: Serious Lung Infections Caused by Soil Fungi":
2022 Nov 30: BBC: "Bird flu: What is it and what's behind the outbreak?" (Helen Briggs & Jeremy Howell) "The world is going through its worst-ever outbreak of bird flu.":
I cannot tell you that any particular disease outbreak is going to happen at any particular time. Nobody can. Outbreaks of disease are fundamentally matters of probability, which makes any one of them somewhere between hard and impossible to predict. They are basically dice throws.
But like every dice thrower knows, the odds matter, and we have a lot of evidence that the odds are changing for the worse. So while I can't tell you when any specific disease outbreak will occur or what it will be like, I can tell you we have more – and more and more and more – reason to believe that more outbreaks are coming, and that they will be more severe, and that the contagious ones will be more likely than ever to attain pandemic status.
Because, unfortunately, while there are many variables that factor into just what the odds are that there will be substantial eruptions of infectious disease among H. sapiens, a lot of those variables are trending in the wrong direction.
22.
This is not the global warming you imagined, I know. On the first anniversary of my 2020 post "Preparing for the Pandemic: Stage 0", I wrote a post "The Very Bad News", in which I said:
"Climate change" has been imagined nigh-exclusively in terms of meteorological events – hurricanes, blizzards, floods, tornadoes, high winds, and so forth – and slowly encroaching seas. That wrecking our planet's ecological homeostasis would unleash plagues of infectious illness on us probably wasn't on your radar.
23.
I wish I could tell you that it will all be okay, that this is manageable if you are cautious and thoughtful. Unfortunately, I don't expect that it will all be okay. I think being cautious and thoughtful will help a lot. But there is only so much it can do.
Obviously, I can't tell you precisely how bad this will get, or for how long, or what it will ultimately do to human civilization – change it? Extinguish it? Eradicate our species entirely? This latter seems unlikely, but humans once thought that it unthinkable that the passenger pigeon, the most numerous bird species on a continent, would be wholly extirpated. That surprising outcome, as per the research I cited above, was apparently because they were so evolved to living in large groups they couldn't survive in small ones, or as individuals. Well we're awfully evolved to live in large groups, and aren't so hot at surviving on our own or in small bands. What happened to the passenger pigeon could happen to us, too.
But I can tell you one thing that lies in our future.
Our past.
From a certain vantage the last one hundred or so years have been pretty singular in human history. Three human generations have got to live out their lives in the sheltering shadow of a monument of medical science and social organization. We got to believe that pestilence had been conquered once and for all, save some mopping-up operations. We got to believe that humanity being wracked by disease against which it is largely helpless was a phenomenon relegated to history books.
All of us who are alive today, even in the developing world, have enjoyed a level of human health and freedom from infectious illness that, while not total, has been unprecedented in human history.
We have never personally known otherwise, and if some of us knew our history, well, many chose to believe that history was over, infection was done, and, as Gaiman and Pratchett put it in Good Omens, "Pestilence had retired".
What we have known of human life through the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is not how the human condition has been for the great mass of human history. It is a strange lacuna of healthfulness.
Until about a hundred years ago, people routinely died of infectious illnesses. That was a normal, common way to die, and to die young. That was just how it was. That was the human condition. That humans – loved ones, whole families, villages, countries – could be seized up by sudden illness with no warning at any time and then sometimes abruptly be gone was just something that humans lived with for the vast majority of all the eons humanity has existed.
For the vast, vast spread of human history, the human condition has been that people die of disease a lot. Sometimes en masse, in huge waves of incidence, like the wrath of a god; sometimes as they passed through periods of vulnerability – infancy, childbirth, injury, senescence; sometimes individuals just up and out of nowhere died.
Disease did not just kill, it maimed. It left bodies broken – paralyzed, blind, deaf, weak. That, too, was part of the human condition.
Where we are going is back to that, back to that history. We are going back to the days of high infant and maternal mortality, of foreshortened lifespans, of random health calamities striking people down in their primes, with nothing much to be done for it but prayer.
You know those time-travel stories, the ones about what if you took an individual, or group of people, from the 20th century and sent them back in time with all their modern knowledge to, say, the Middle Ages? That speculate on what a skilled modern person could do with all their knowledge back in those days?
Well, to a first approximation, we're taking an entire planet, with its full complement of scientists and medical professionals, and the internet, and modern industries, and sending the whole thing back in time to the Middle Ages.
Or worse. There's no guarantee that what's waiting for us in the coming years is no worse than the 1300s. What is coming may well have no comparison in our species' past, and be considerably worse for us, epidemiologically speaking. After all, the total human population in the Middle Ages was (it has been estimated) less than half a billion.
I am not saying that disease will reduce our tech level to pre-industrialism (though that is not impossible) and make corsets and pointy shoes fashionable again. I'm saying we're going back to a level of sorrow and routine loss of human life and a lack of control of one's fate that was once normal. Psychologically, we're going back to pre-modern history, to the days when it was just universally understood that life was capricious and fragile and short.
The days when people wrote things like
(You've heard this. Lyrics ~12th cen, music 20th cen. Translation: various + me.)
And:
(Bertran de Born, on the death of The Young King, Henry of England, 1183 AD, while in the field waging war. Dysentery. Translation: Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan.)
And:
(English, anonymous, 13th century. You may not have heard this. Translation: various.)
I recently observed to someone, I forget whom, that back when I was involved in the SCA, from time to time I'd encounter someone who wasn't in the Society who would say something to me indicative that they believed, sometimes in as many words, we medieval recreationists and re-enactors wanted to go back in time and live in the Middle Ages. Quite to the contrary: if I learned anything from my decade in the Society, it was that I wanted nothing less. I no more wanted to live in the Middle Ages than horror movie fans want to live in a slasher flick or Stephen King vehicle.
And consequently, I am not pleased that it seems we are, all of us, being dragged back to the Middle Ages by our hair.
24.
The consequences in grief and sorrow of a future of escalating infectious disease acting directly on individual human health are obvious. But there are, it seems to me, likely other tragic consequences for society. What follows is my educated speculation and observation.
There is no context in which religion – or at least old Western religion – makes more sense than pestilence. It is not any more or less factually true nor its moral instruction (as generally supposed) any more or less good. It's just that the Angel of Death invisibly stalking the streets striking people down is pretty much the circumstances our religious traditions have been made to function in, emotionally. When there is nothing to do but pray, people will pray – and find scapegoats – sinners, cats, Jews, immigrants – and kill them in hopes that will appease the angry god afflicting them with disease.
Contagious disease outbreaks tend to provoke outbreaks of religious and supernatural extremism which can be quite violent, simply out of the desperation to be spared turning into magical thinking. But there are more rational reasons that disease burden can lead to increased violence in a society.
I strongly suspect that living in conditions of elevated risk of death by largely untreatable, unpreventable disease leads to a society-wide rise of a kind of fatalism, and that leads to a cheapening of human life. One of the responses one can have to an increase in existential perilousness and lack of control of one's outcomes is an increased willingness to gamble one's life in a bid to wrest some control away from fate: after all, if one cannot control whether one will die, at least one can control how one will die. Deaths of greater meaning are more appealing than waiting passively for the Grim Reaper.
I propose that if history teaches us anything, it's that generally people – "ardent for some desperate glory" – look for existential meaning in violence. It's strange to think that fragility of human life does not make it more precious, but that, it seems, is so: why else would anyone voluntarily ride off to war before penicillin was invented? Or fight a duel before the invention of anaesthesia and aseptic surgery? It is when survival itself is uncertain that dying on one's feet with a sword in one's hand starts having especial appeal; it is when one cannot reckon one's life being long that dicing with it looks like good odds.
In this way, it makes the lives of others cheap, as well, and leads to a coarsening of sympathy. It is very easy to rationalize inflicting loss and harm and grief on others, because one can just argue it was all our lot anyways. This could be at any scale, from individual aggression to national imperialism. It is somewhat obvious how war can lead to pestilence – the trenches of WWI were the incubator of the Spanish Flu – but it may also be that pestilence leads to war.
25.
My primary purpose in writing all this is to convince you of the reality of what is really happening around you and to you before it becomes inarguable, because once its inarguable, it's too late to do much about it.
I have written all the above in the belief that it is better to know than not to know, because foreknowledge allows one to make decisions one otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to.
Before us is the challenge of deciding how to deal with the future bearing down on us, both specifically and generally, as individuals, as families, as communities, and as societies. There are questions to be addressed pragmatic, political, emotional, and spiritual, about how one wants to head into what lies before us.
I have a theory that all that is befalling us is a consequence of our civilization forgetting that suffering is bad, and thus ceasing to attempt to prevent it. A civilization that forgets that suffering is bad is, I propose, a civilization that in for a horrendous reminder. Suffering is the natural effect on conscious beings of entropy: suffering proliferates with disorder and decay and the falling apart of things. The prevention of suffering thus rests in the constant building out and maintenance of the sheltering structures and systems of order that protect, nurture, and cherish living beings. When not actively maintained, those sheltering structures and systems fall to entropy.
Ours is not a society that actively maintains that which protects us from suffering, so we are going to suffer.
As terrible as this is, dealing with suffering, including levels of suffering largely unknown to those of us in the present developed world, is something humans have a long history of.
I'm not saying that therefore we've got this, it will be okay because we know how to do this. Nothing is going to make this okay. And many of the solutions in history to the problems of suffering are terrible, and, indeed, may have been what's gotten us into this situation to begin with. Further, I cannot guarantee that what is ahead of us is within the scope of past tools to manage.
But humans have a deep history of managing to bear up under staggering suffering, and to find ways to put one foot in front of the other while suffering, to make art and raise children, to think rationally and to act compassionately, to engage in philosophy and to pursue justice. Humans have some experience with holding on to their humanity, retaining their faculties, and remaining morally continent in the face of an existence turned inimical. We have much to draw on from the past in confronting this bleak future.
And we are, of course, above all an inventive species – something else that may have gotten us into this fix in the first place – and it remains to be seen what we come up with in the face of necessity. I am not speaking of remedies from the epidemiological situation, or even specific remedies for specific diseases, but responses to the deteriorating condition of human life in the Great Age of Plagues that allow us to function.
We will have our work cut out for us, that is solely sure. We'd best start thinking of these thing now. Because Great Age of Plagues has already begun.
The Great Age of Plagues
Table of Contents
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[Special content warning: discussion of existential threats to humanity. Highly depressogenic content. This might not be the best thing to read if you're given to despair or if despair is unsafe for you. Maybe give this post a pass if you are not in a place, emotionally, to handle it.]
Previous: Part 4: Climate Change, II
21.
It's begun.
There's an argument to be made that it started – slowly, slowly – in the mid-20th century when HIV first crossed into the human population. Arguably, it started with SARS. Arguably, it started with COVID-19.
Inarguably, it has started. Ed Yong, of the Atlantic, called this dawning age "the ‘Pandemicene’". I call it the Great Age of Plagues.
As I have set forth in the foregoing posts, there are multiple different things unfolding, any one of which suggests we anticipate a higher rate of infectious illness in our species than we are accustomed to, but which are apparently all happening at more or less once:
• Our population and population densities have grown to an extent that any species so numerous and gregarious would be experiencing an increase in infectious illness simply due to network effects;
• Our species has been ravaged by Covid and left even less resilient than before against subsequent infectious illnesses immunologically, psychologically, socially, legally, and logistically; and
• Climate change is going to massively increase human contact with known disease vectors such as mosquitos and ticks, while also increasing the risk of "spill-over" events between other species fleeing the destruction of their habitats, changing the behavior of known infectious agents for the worse, and possibly bringing us into contact with other novel diseases we know nothing of and have no particular evolved defenses against.
• Some of these factors apply not just to our species, but other species we care about, including because we rely on them for food and medicine.
I've been working on this post actively for months – it's been on my desk for years now – and of late I've been trying increasingly urgently to get it out the door as the news headlines make it clearer by the day that it was at risk of being scooped by reality. At this point, what was when I began a daring contention that needed careful marshaling of evidence to argue is now nearly belaboring the obvious.
I was in the midst of writing this when I woke up on the 19th of October to headlines about an outbreak of Vibrio vulnificus infections and death in the literal wake of Hurricane Ian in Florida.
I was in the midst of writing this when I woke up on the 20th of October to find that what I reported as a rumor 22 days previously had erupted into headline news:
2022 Oct 20: CNN: "An ‘unprecedented’ rise in respiratory viruses in children is overwhelming some hospitals"
In particular, hospitals are seeing a rise in cases of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a common cold virus that can be associated with severe disease in young children and older adults. Cases are rising in multiple US regions, with some already nearing seasonal peak levels, according to the latest real-time surveillance data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The same day, headlines also brought to my attention the research article about the likelihood of arctic spill-over events, published only two days previous.
[...]
Buchanan said hospital leaders have met with the Connecticut Department of Public Health and the National Guard to begin logistic review of putting a mobile field hospital in the front lawn and more work is planned Thursday to determine a final decision and get approval.
I was in the midst of writing this when I woke up on the 25th of October to find these headlines:
2022 Oct 24: NBC News: "Nearly half of Virginia high school out sick because of mystery outbreak of flu-like gastrointestinal symptoms" by Marlene Lenthang
2022 Oct 25: Reuters via Yahoo: "Fungal infection list launched by WHO flags global health threat" by Jennifer Rigby
LONDON (Reuters) - The World Health Organization has drawn up the first ever list of fungal pathogens posing the greatest threat to human health, warning that some strains are increasingly drug-resistant and becoming more widespread.I was delayed in finishing this by, ironically enough, contracting a life-threatening bacterial infection. It continued:
The U.N. body, which has similar lists for viruses and bacteria, said fungal infections and their increasing resistance to treatment were a growing risk. However, a historic lack of focus on the danger meant there were huge gaps in knowledge, as well as a lack of surveillance, treatments and diagnostics.
The list divides the pathogens into three categories based on their potential impact and data on their resistance risk: critical, high and medium priority.
The critical group includes Candida auris, which is highly drug resistant and has caused a number of outbreaks in hospitals worldwide, as well as Cryptococcus neoformans, Aspergillus fumigatus, and Candida albicans.
2022 Nov 16: Nature (journal): "Pathogen spillover driven by rapid changes in bat ecology" (Peggy Eby, Alison J. Peel, et al)
2022 Nov 28: BGR.com: "Scientists just revived an ancient virus that was frozen for 48,500 years (Joshua Hawkins)
2022 Nov 30: Washington University School of Medicine (PR via SciTech Daily): "Nationwide Problem: Serious Lung Infections Caused by Soil Fungi":
Studies from the 1950s and 60s indicated that fungal lung infections were a problem only in certain parts of the country. That is no longer the case, shows a new study, which was published on November 11 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Doctors who rely on outdated maps of disease-causing fungi may miss the signs of a fungal lung infection, resulting in delayed or incorrect diagnoses, the researchers said.2022 Nov 30: Telethon Kids Institute (PR via Phys.org): "Researchers discover new form of antimicrobial resistance"
“Every few weeks I get a call from a doctor in the Boston area – a different doctor every time – about a case they can’t solve,” said senior author Andrej Spec, MD, an associate professor of medicine and a specialist in fungal infections. “They always start by saying, ‘We don’t have histo here, but it really kind of looks like histo.’ I say, ‘You guys call me all the time about this. You do have histo.’”
2022 Nov 30: BBC: "Bird flu: What is it and what's behind the outbreak?" (Helen Briggs & Jeremy Howell) "The world is going through its worst-ever outbreak of bird flu.":
The current wave of bird flu is the worst one ever in Europe, and in the US.The trickle becomes a stream, and will become a torrent.
"A hundred and sixty million domestic birds worldwide have been killed by this virus, or have had to be culled by farmers to contain it," says Professor Munir Iqbal of the UK's Pirbright Institute, which specialises in animal welfare.
"This includes 100 million domestic birds in the US and Europe."
In western European countries, it has led to egg shortages in the shops and fears of a turkey shortage at Christmas.
In the UK, about half of the 1.3m free range turkeys produced for Christmas have died or been culled due to bird flu.
[...]
More wild birds than ever before have been killed by bird flu this year - with sea birds being especially hard hit.
The current virus has affected 80 different bird species," says Professor Iqbal. "For example, it has killed 40% of the skua population in Scotland, and 2,000 Dalmatian pelicans in Greece."
This "huge outbreak" has also spread into species such as seals and foxes, says veterinary expert Dr Louise Moncla of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US.
"These outbreaks began in Europe, then spread to North America, and unlike past outbreaks, have not died out," she says.
We are in the middle of an "unprecedented wildlife disease outbreak, the breadth and scope of which is staggering", says Dr Rebecca Poulson of the University of Georgia, US.
Scientists are unsure why this outbreak is so much worse than others. It may be that the virus has mutated to enable it to spread more readily from bird to bird, or to hang around longer in the environment.
I cannot tell you that any particular disease outbreak is going to happen at any particular time. Nobody can. Outbreaks of disease are fundamentally matters of probability, which makes any one of them somewhere between hard and impossible to predict. They are basically dice throws.
But like every dice thrower knows, the odds matter, and we have a lot of evidence that the odds are changing for the worse. So while I can't tell you when any specific disease outbreak will occur or what it will be like, I can tell you we have more – and more and more and more – reason to believe that more outbreaks are coming, and that they will be more severe, and that the contagious ones will be more likely than ever to attain pandemic status.
Because, unfortunately, while there are many variables that factor into just what the odds are that there will be substantial eruptions of infectious disease among H. sapiens, a lot of those variables are trending in the wrong direction.
22.
This is not the global warming you imagined, I know. On the first anniversary of my 2020 post "Preparing for the Pandemic: Stage 0", I wrote a post "The Very Bad News", in which I said:
[...] the public imagination about climate change has been pretty much exclusively trained to entertain meteorological calamities – storms, mostly – but there are whole other categories.Well the actual quote, it turns out, is, as I quoted above, "Zoonosis. [...] It's a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century." And this is that later discussion. (Or, alas, one part of it – there are other parts. Unfortunately. Later.)
Such as the epidemiological.
See, even if this pandemic wasn't caused by the Climate Catastrophe, it seems the epidemiologists are expecting the Climate Catastrophe to cause other pandemics and epidemics. There's a variety of reasons why – I had found a prescient essay from, IIRC, 2015 or so, which I have subsequently lost, which had a sentence to the effect of, "In the future, 'zoonosis' is going to be a word everyone knows." – but we can discuss those later.
"Climate change" has been imagined nigh-exclusively in terms of meteorological events – hurricanes, blizzards, floods, tornadoes, high winds, and so forth – and slowly encroaching seas. That wrecking our planet's ecological homeostasis would unleash plagues of infectious illness on us probably wasn't on your radar.
23.
I wish I could tell you that it will all be okay, that this is manageable if you are cautious and thoughtful. Unfortunately, I don't expect that it will all be okay. I think being cautious and thoughtful will help a lot. But there is only so much it can do.
Obviously, I can't tell you precisely how bad this will get, or for how long, or what it will ultimately do to human civilization – change it? Extinguish it? Eradicate our species entirely? This latter seems unlikely, but humans once thought that it unthinkable that the passenger pigeon, the most numerous bird species on a continent, would be wholly extirpated. That surprising outcome, as per the research I cited above, was apparently because they were so evolved to living in large groups they couldn't survive in small ones, or as individuals. Well we're awfully evolved to live in large groups, and aren't so hot at surviving on our own or in small bands. What happened to the passenger pigeon could happen to us, too.
But I can tell you one thing that lies in our future.
Our past.
From a certain vantage the last one hundred or so years have been pretty singular in human history. Three human generations have got to live out their lives in the sheltering shadow of a monument of medical science and social organization. We got to believe that pestilence had been conquered once and for all, save some mopping-up operations. We got to believe that humanity being wracked by disease against which it is largely helpless was a phenomenon relegated to history books.
All of us who are alive today, even in the developing world, have enjoyed a level of human health and freedom from infectious illness that, while not total, has been unprecedented in human history.
We have never personally known otherwise, and if some of us knew our history, well, many chose to believe that history was over, infection was done, and, as Gaiman and Pratchett put it in Good Omens, "Pestilence had retired".
What we have known of human life through the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is not how the human condition has been for the great mass of human history. It is a strange lacuna of healthfulness.
Until about a hundred years ago, people routinely died of infectious illnesses. That was a normal, common way to die, and to die young. That was just how it was. That was the human condition. That humans – loved ones, whole families, villages, countries – could be seized up by sudden illness with no warning at any time and then sometimes abruptly be gone was just something that humans lived with for the vast majority of all the eons humanity has existed.
For the vast, vast spread of human history, the human condition has been that people die of disease a lot. Sometimes en masse, in huge waves of incidence, like the wrath of a god; sometimes as they passed through periods of vulnerability – infancy, childbirth, injury, senescence; sometimes individuals just up and out of nowhere died.
Disease did not just kill, it maimed. It left bodies broken – paralyzed, blind, deaf, weak. That, too, was part of the human condition.
Where we are going is back to that, back to that history. We are going back to the days of high infant and maternal mortality, of foreshortened lifespans, of random health calamities striking people down in their primes, with nothing much to be done for it but prayer.
You know those time-travel stories, the ones about what if you took an individual, or group of people, from the 20th century and sent them back in time with all their modern knowledge to, say, the Middle Ages? That speculate on what a skilled modern person could do with all their knowledge back in those days?
Well, to a first approximation, we're taking an entire planet, with its full complement of scientists and medical professionals, and the internet, and modern industries, and sending the whole thing back in time to the Middle Ages.
Or worse. There's no guarantee that what's waiting for us in the coming years is no worse than the 1300s. What is coming may well have no comparison in our species' past, and be considerably worse for us, epidemiologically speaking. After all, the total human population in the Middle Ages was (it has been estimated) less than half a billion.
I am not saying that disease will reduce our tech level to pre-industrialism (though that is not impossible) and make corsets and pointy shoes fashionable again. I'm saying we're going back to a level of sorrow and routine loss of human life and a lack of control of one's fate that was once normal. Psychologically, we're going back to pre-modern history, to the days when it was just universally understood that life was capricious and fragile and short.
The days when people wrote things like
| Sors salutis et virtutis michi nunc contraria, est affectus et defectus semper in angaria. Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite. Quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite! | Fate, in health and fortitude, is now against me, having been weakened and exhausted always in servitude. So at this hour without delay strike the pulsing strings. Since fate strikes down the strong, everyone weep with me! |
And:
| Mon chan fenis ab dol et ab maltraire Per totz temps mais e·l tenc per romazut, Car ma rason e mon gaug ai perdut El meillor rei que anc nasques de maire, [...] Tant cre que·m destreingna Lo dols que m'esteingna, Car en vauc parlan. A Dieu lo coman, Qe·l met'en loc san Joan. [....] | I end my song in grief and suffering forever more and think it finished, for I have lost my subject and my joy and the best king that was ever born of mother [...] I believe grief torments me so much that it will kill me for I go about talking about it. I commend him to God, may He put him in the place of St. John. [....] |
And:
| Worldes blis ne last no throwe; It went and wit awey anon. The langer that ich hit iknowe The lass ich finde pris tharon; For al it is imeind mid care Mid serwen and mid evel fare And atte laste povre and bare It lat man, wan it ginth agon Al the blis this heer and thare Bilucth at ende weep and mon [....] | The joy of the world lasts not even a moment; It wanes and goes away anon. The longer that I know it, the less I find worth thereon; For all of it is a-mixed with fear, with sorrows and with evil fare, and at the last, poor and bare it leaves man, when it begins to be gone. All the bliss that is here and there seems at the end weeps and moans. [....] |
I recently observed to someone, I forget whom, that back when I was involved in the SCA, from time to time I'd encounter someone who wasn't in the Society who would say something to me indicative that they believed, sometimes in as many words, we medieval recreationists and re-enactors wanted to go back in time and live in the Middle Ages. Quite to the contrary: if I learned anything from my decade in the Society, it was that I wanted nothing less. I no more wanted to live in the Middle Ages than horror movie fans want to live in a slasher flick or Stephen King vehicle.
And consequently, I am not pleased that it seems we are, all of us, being dragged back to the Middle Ages by our hair.
24.
The consequences in grief and sorrow of a future of escalating infectious disease acting directly on individual human health are obvious. But there are, it seems to me, likely other tragic consequences for society. What follows is my educated speculation and observation.
There is no context in which religion – or at least old Western religion – makes more sense than pestilence. It is not any more or less factually true nor its moral instruction (as generally supposed) any more or less good. It's just that the Angel of Death invisibly stalking the streets striking people down is pretty much the circumstances our religious traditions have been made to function in, emotionally. When there is nothing to do but pray, people will pray – and find scapegoats – sinners, cats, Jews, immigrants – and kill them in hopes that will appease the angry god afflicting them with disease.
Contagious disease outbreaks tend to provoke outbreaks of religious and supernatural extremism which can be quite violent, simply out of the desperation to be spared turning into magical thinking. But there are more rational reasons that disease burden can lead to increased violence in a society.
I strongly suspect that living in conditions of elevated risk of death by largely untreatable, unpreventable disease leads to a society-wide rise of a kind of fatalism, and that leads to a cheapening of human life. One of the responses one can have to an increase in existential perilousness and lack of control of one's outcomes is an increased willingness to gamble one's life in a bid to wrest some control away from fate: after all, if one cannot control whether one will die, at least one can control how one will die. Deaths of greater meaning are more appealing than waiting passively for the Grim Reaper.
I propose that if history teaches us anything, it's that generally people – "ardent for some desperate glory" – look for existential meaning in violence. It's strange to think that fragility of human life does not make it more precious, but that, it seems, is so: why else would anyone voluntarily ride off to war before penicillin was invented? Or fight a duel before the invention of anaesthesia and aseptic surgery? It is when survival itself is uncertain that dying on one's feet with a sword in one's hand starts having especial appeal; it is when one cannot reckon one's life being long that dicing with it looks like good odds.
In this way, it makes the lives of others cheap, as well, and leads to a coarsening of sympathy. It is very easy to rationalize inflicting loss and harm and grief on others, because one can just argue it was all our lot anyways. This could be at any scale, from individual aggression to national imperialism. It is somewhat obvious how war can lead to pestilence – the trenches of WWI were the incubator of the Spanish Flu – but it may also be that pestilence leads to war.
25.
My primary purpose in writing all this is to convince you of the reality of what is really happening around you and to you before it becomes inarguable, because once its inarguable, it's too late to do much about it.
I have written all the above in the belief that it is better to know than not to know, because foreknowledge allows one to make decisions one otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to.
Before us is the challenge of deciding how to deal with the future bearing down on us, both specifically and generally, as individuals, as families, as communities, and as societies. There are questions to be addressed pragmatic, political, emotional, and spiritual, about how one wants to head into what lies before us.
I have a theory that all that is befalling us is a consequence of our civilization forgetting that suffering is bad, and thus ceasing to attempt to prevent it. A civilization that forgets that suffering is bad is, I propose, a civilization that in for a horrendous reminder. Suffering is the natural effect on conscious beings of entropy: suffering proliferates with disorder and decay and the falling apart of things. The prevention of suffering thus rests in the constant building out and maintenance of the sheltering structures and systems of order that protect, nurture, and cherish living beings. When not actively maintained, those sheltering structures and systems fall to entropy.
Ours is not a society that actively maintains that which protects us from suffering, so we are going to suffer.
As terrible as this is, dealing with suffering, including levels of suffering largely unknown to those of us in the present developed world, is something humans have a long history of.
I'm not saying that therefore we've got this, it will be okay because we know how to do this. Nothing is going to make this okay. And many of the solutions in history to the problems of suffering are terrible, and, indeed, may have been what's gotten us into this situation to begin with. Further, I cannot guarantee that what is ahead of us is within the scope of past tools to manage.
But humans have a deep history of managing to bear up under staggering suffering, and to find ways to put one foot in front of the other while suffering, to make art and raise children, to think rationally and to act compassionately, to engage in philosophy and to pursue justice. Humans have some experience with holding on to their humanity, retaining their faculties, and remaining morally continent in the face of an existence turned inimical. We have much to draw on from the past in confronting this bleak future.
And we are, of course, above all an inventive species – something else that may have gotten us into this fix in the first place – and it remains to be seen what we come up with in the face of necessity. I am not speaking of remedies from the epidemiological situation, or even specific remedies for specific diseases, but responses to the deteriorating condition of human life in the Great Age of Plagues that allow us to function.
We will have our work cut out for us, that is solely sure. We'd best start thinking of these thing now. Because Great Age of Plagues has already begun.
The Great Age of Plagues
Table of Contents
- 0. Intro
- 1. Population
- 2. COVID-19
- 3. Climate Change
- 4. Climate Change, II
- 5. Conclusion – You are here
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The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 07:28 am (UTC)Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 09:05 am (UTC)I've certainly seen something of this attitude in people putting pressure on me to "get back to normal after covid" (as if the old normal were possible; as if covid were over). It frustrates me, because the mitigations that would help reduce COVID transmission (ventilation, filtration of air when ventilation isn't possible, wearing masks in crowded environments, proper support for isolation when infected) would also reduce transmission of many other diseases. Would it entirely wipe them out? No, probably not, but a reduction is still worthwhile.
I know we are likely to be caught off guard by various zoonotic pathogens, but I remain concerned about the combination of immune damage from COVID and under-vaccination against measles.
Regarding violence, I also wonder about actual brain damage from COVID and other infections, potentially leading to problems with emotional regulation and impulsiveness.
On a societal level, I wonder if a sort of toxic optimism (maybe this is the wrong term) is also not helping us deal. I saw a rant on Twitter a couple of months (or years?) ago that I cannot now find, which posited that the "mustn't grumble, could be worse, stiff upper lip" culture in the UK contributed to ignoring a lot of practical problems instead of doing something about them. (One of my own personal pet peeves: even new houses here don't have screens on the windows, even in the countryside. I live in London and cannot open a window at some times of year without bugs coming into the house -- flies, wasps, mosquitoes, moths, whatever. I don't know why *anyone* thinks this is okay. Yes, we have fitted temporary screens to some windows in response, after significant searching for the appropriate product rather than things like bead curtains, but most people don't bother, because "you can't keep bugs out".) And I wonder whether our modern Western attitudes to grief and sorrow are somewhat maladaptive in a similar way. Perhaps this is part of what you mean when you say we have forgotten that suffering is bad.
Brain Damage and Its Consequences
Date: 2022-12-31 01:35 pm (UTC)We should do a lot more than grumble about this, because we know there are efforts afoot to ensure it all becomes much worse. Some of it because the brain damage to others is seen as Desireable in certain political quarters.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 08:25 am (UTC)I am suddenly reminded of "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree Jr.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 09:20 am (UTC)Ooh, screens on the windows is an idea I haven't seen much about. It's very rare here, as you say, but could be useful.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 09:14 pm (UTC)Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 11:39 pm (UTC)Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 11:50 am (UTC)I'd be interested to know if other societies that *aren't* the USA have the rather Calvinist social construct that people who are suffering medical issues brought it upon themselves, and thus deserve the suffering.
I expect a large part of this is our regressive health "system," but it's also a strong mental-protectionist reaction*, ie, I won't get X because I'm better than/mentally-physically "stronger" than those people. This outlook practically encourages lack of compassion.
*as you've covered in other posts
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 08:30 pm (UTC)I gather the most extreme form of this is in Asian cultures that believe in reincarnation, who regard the disabled as self-evidently being a wicked person in their immediately previous life and no doubt presently. A very slightly less virulent form is found in traditional Jewish and Catholic communities, where ill health is a punishment from God, and you must have done something to deserve it. In my own family, my father was born with a visible disability, and this was taken by his father's family members as obviously a punishment on my father's father from God for marrying a non-Jew.
ie, I won't get X because I'm better than/mentally-physically "stronger" than those people. This outlook practically encourages lack of compassion.
The term for it is a belief in "immanent justice", which is breathtakingly toxic in so very many ways, of which becoming hostile to those less fortunate is but one.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 11:04 pm (UTC)*shrug* Maybe that's because you're the kind of person who says things like what you say in this comment, so they don't express their thoughts to you?
I practiced as a psychotherapist for seven years in a community that is 98% Catholic, treating a very large number of people who were raised Catholic and at least nominally still were Catholics, and picking the shards of immanent justice out of their minds was a very large part of my trade.
My observation of treating people in a blue-collar Catholic community was that the Catholic Church does an astoundingly poor job at communicating its actual doctrine to its adherents, at least here, much less inculcating those beliefs in them, something for which there is ubiquitous evidence.
Meanwhile, I have to periodically deal with well-educated white-collar Catholics leaping down my throat with arguments of the form, "No! That's not what Catholics believe because that's not official Catholic Church doctrine!" You all need to pipe down and go spend some time with your less fortunate brethren humbly listening to them instead of reactively freaking out when outsiders point out any evidence that what Catholics actually believe is not coterminous with what the Church teaches.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 01:08 pm (UTC)It's plausible that even if improved healing is possible, we're going to have hard times until its discovered and made cheap, and that will be for particular diseases rather than an improvement in general.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 04:21 pm (UTC)Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 03:52 pm (UTC)I have noted two or three excess deaths, this year and last, of heart disease. This was normal in the nineteen-seventies and I think that we're returning to it because delayed heart failure is a known consequence of Covid.
I think that falling life-expectancy in countries without socialised medicine is going to accelerate sharply.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2022-12-31 06:56 pm (UTC)Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 12:55 am (UTC)I don't think that anyone around me has any understanding of the depth of the institutional damage and loss-of-knowledge, and loss-of-culture.
The visible and invisible structures have disintegrated and no-one seems to realise.
Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 02:42 am (UTC)(frozen) Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 02:32 pm (UTC)Or since "are" might be too strong a word here, does anyone have any ideas of how to prepare for this (the whole or specific aspects) and mitigate as best as possible, considering that "governments acting in a rational manner to protect their populations" is not something we can count on?
Like, ok, that's where we're at, and now?
I am not asking because I think anyone is obliged to have an answer to this question, I am just asking because in case any one _has_ any ideas _at all_ I would like to hear about them.
(frozen) Re: The Great Age of Plagues: Conclusion (Part 5) [pestilence, sci/bio, Patreon]
Date: 2023-01-01 10:52 pm (UTC)