And then came the virus (2/3): Crisis
[Read part 1 here]
Crisis was a medical term before it was applied to the crises of middle-age and Cuban missiles. From krinein, “to separate, decide, judge”, it is the stage of a disease that precedes either recovery or death.
We have lived with crises since before we were human but our capacity to extract meaning from them changed in the Upper Palaeolithic, when humans started thinking figuratively (see part 1). Once we had ‘figured out’ what we were, we could also imagine what we might become.
Judging by cave paintings of flying figures and hybrid human-animals, the drive to move beyond our natural limitations has long worked in our psyches, but disease kept our ambitions in perspective. Up until the mid-20th century, most families could expect to lose at least one child before the age of five.¹ Other ambitions pale into insignificance when your deepest desire is that your newborn won’t succumb to scarlet fever, and without such commonplace tragedies to deal with we invest meaning into trifles that would boggle the mind of someone from earlier eras.²
Disease also clipped the wings of human imagination more directly. Malaria, for example, kept us from developing its rainforest strongholds until the synthesis of antimalarial drugs and industrial insecticides — again in the mid-20th century. Since then half of the Nepalese rainforest has been felled. 20% of the Amazon is gone, and many climatologists believe that tipping points have been passed and the entire biome is doomed.
Having wrested the scythe from the Angel of Death we turned it upon the natural world without the skill to weld it
Having wrested the scythe from the Angel of Death we turned it upon the natural world without the skill to weld it, and now, as the angel’s secretary has come to reclaim the master’s property, we have seen both complacency and panic. On the one hand, leaders of many countries responded sluggishly and followers packed out pubs while Italian patients were dying in hospital corridors. On the other hand we had binge purchasing that lead to rationing (toilet rolls in the UK and ammunition in the USA), and Anti-militarist Sean Penn is calling for the army to enforce lockdown.³ ⁴
The horror is real, of course, with corpses mounting up in unprepared hospitals, but it points to a crisis of meaning in a broken economic system rather than a virulent pathogen.
Racist theories abound regarding what Trump calls ‘Kung Flu’. During the Black Death Jews were accused of poisoning wells, and today one in five British adults believes that C-19 escaped from a Chinese lab.⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ In other ways, however, C-19 is a far cry from a medieval plague. Justinian’s plague carried off a third of Constantinople and the Black Death smote half of Europe. Compared to these, or even the Great Plague that killed a measly (geddit!) 15% of Londoners, a death rate of 1.38% is tiny, and even this figure is likely overblown. C-19 often causes mild symptoms or none at all, and those cases have rarely been reported; a Lancet study that adjusts for this cuts the rate to 0.66%. The horror is real, of course, with corpses mounting up in unprepared hospitals, but it points to a crisis of meaning in a broken economic system rather than a virulent pathogen. With 87% of fatalities in Italy over the age of 70, it is a uniquely modern plague: few people in former generations would have lived long enough to have the privilege of dying from it.⁹
Every death is a tragedy, and the Angel of Death passed far too close for comfort when a family friend breathed his last on a ventilator two weeks after infecting my parents over dinner. They are elderly and my father is asthmatic, and both suffered debilitating fatigue, night sweats and horribly tight chests, but they recovered at home, as do most people even in their age bracket. I’m still smarting from the awkwardness of family get-togethers multiplied by a factor of Zoom; this too shall pass.
My mum commented afterwards that she has already lived her “three score years and ten”, that lockdown sacrifices the young for the old, and that she’d rather her teenage granddaughter took her exams and enjoyed her summer holidays rather than that some very old people lost a few autumn years. She is philosophical, in that sense — or maybe she’s just not selfish.
If the airwaves hiss with the laboured breathing of the relatively unwrinkled, it is because propaganda amplifies incomplete truths. Reports from New York that up to 20% of hospitalisations were under 50 say more about New York than C-19.¹⁰ One in four New Yorkers are obese, which makes them 2.4 times more likely to develop pneumonia, and another co-morbid factor is air pollution which already kills 3,000 New Yorkers per year.¹¹ ¹² ¹³ Residents of the Big Rotten Apple also work the longest hours in the country and rank fifth in terms of work stress.¹⁴ Perhaps many of those patients just needed a break. Perhaps we all do.
The Mail Online falsely informed its 100 million monthly visitors that C-19 had claimed its youngest victim when an 18-year-old died after testing positive, neglecting to mention that the virus “was not linked to their reason for dying”.¹⁵ ¹⁶ The five-year-old who died also had an underlying condition; the poor kid may not have even survived the flu. Young people die from disease — it was ever thus — but very few die of C-19. Including those with serious underlying conditions, around one in every 15,000 infected teenagers will succumb, maybe half that if correcting for unreported infections.¹⁷
These stories loom large in the collective imagination because our relationship with death also radically changed in the mid-20th century. Until this period, when hospices and convalescence homes became common, people generally died in their homes among family, and children observed the process. Today, we are shielded from the most fundamental fact of life, which is death, and the tragic paradox of this self-deception is that we have been going about business as usual during a mass extinction.¹⁸
Today, we are shielded from the most fundamental fact of life, which is death, and the tragic paradox of this self-deception is that we have been going about business as usual during a mass extinction
When many places across the world are reporting the hottest March on record as unprecedented fires rage in the south of Africa and locusts plague the north, are there not larger threats to consider?¹⁹ This year, hundreds of thousands of saplings were grown to meet unprecedented public demand for reforestation, and these are being sacrificed along with our liberty and sanity.²⁰ The nurseries have been shut down as non-essential businesses while the hugely unpopular HS2 rail link construction continues and will degrade 108 ancient woodlands. Apparently it is essential that we shave half an hour off a train ride from Leeds to London.²¹
So let’s be thoughtful when we find ourselves pressuring each other to follow the advice of the people who bought us the politics of austerity and the War on Drugs, the same people who have starved the NHS for years and responded sluggishly to a looming disaster while boasting about shaking hands with including C-19 victims.
I didn’t take my kids out of school because my government told me to. I took them out a week before the deadline in order to limit transmission. I’m not saying we should go out, not yet anyway. I’m saying that while we are home we should be sharpening pitchforks, preparing for the real battle of our lives.
In many traditional medical systems, a symptom points to an imbalance particular to the patient. The symptomology of our pandemic seems to point to imbalances afflicting all the people (pan demos) of our globalised world. That is not to say we all deserve to suffer, no more than a baby deserves to be born with bone cancer — nature shares neither our sentiments nor our ethics, but it is not without order and poetry. From a traditional perspective lung problems are often rooted in grief, and we have a lot to grieve about. The first stage of grief is denial.
Almost exactly a year before C-19 first arrived in Europe, Greta Thunberg was at the World Economic Forum in Davos eyeballing world leaders and saying, “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”²² ²³ Could it be that we are all feeling it, deeply, viscerally and unconsciously, as we go about business as usual? This isn’t exactly the panic she had in mind, but perhaps C-19 is the focus for a catharsis to release pressure that has been building as we’ve come to realise that our ecological and social systems are collapsing.
Like any number of political ideologies, COVID-19 is generally just irritating, and only becomes dangerous when we swallow it all the way down
A poorly-directed overreaction seems to be the signature of this disease, at least in the final and fatal stage where an overzealous immune response causes inflammation and puts further pressure on the lungs.²⁴ C-19 mirrors many facets of a deeper economic pathology at work on a macro scale. The virus seemingly finds a host in whoever it comes into contact with. Some people don’t notice it, for some it offends the eyes, for others it leaves a bad taste in the mouth — but nothing that would keep us from business as usual. At this point the advice is to drink plenty of tea, to keep the throat moist. Like any number of political ideologies, COVID-19 is generally just irritating, and only becomes dangerous when we swallow it all the way down.
The pains are generalised and widespread but bearable, but suppressing the symptoms at this point (with ibuprofen, for example) can be a fatal error. If the immune system responds quickly and aggressively, recognising and then destroying the targets, the infection passes soon enough. In severe cases, however:
(C-19 patients) say, ‘Hey, you know, I think I’m getting over this,’ and then within 20 to 24 hours, they’ve got fevers, severe fatigue, worsening cough and shortness of breath… Then they get hospitalized.²⁵
Right from the start, people noted that there was a bright side to coronavirus, but perhaps the fever must continue to rise before we hit a real crisis point. 53 countries have called for a global ceasefire, but four of the UN’s Big Five have not — the US, the UK, Russia and China.²⁶ Sanctions against Iran have been ramped up and the blockade of Cuba continues even though that country has developed advanced anti-virals and is exporting doctors to fourteen countries including Italy.²⁷ Russia’s beef with Saudi moved from Syria to the oil market, taking the downturn into a crash that has already pushed smaller producers out of production. With turmoil and unpredictability in an already hugely unpopular sector, some analysts are hoping the crisis will lead to recovery while others are calling it the beginning of the end.²⁸ There is talk of a bailout for this and other major industries, but the bank bailout of 2008 was followed by a decade of crippling austerity. Perhaps the memory cells of the body politic will recognise the threat and respond faster this time — especially given that unemployment in the US spiked by 10 million in two weeks.
Veils are falling in this apocalyptic moment revealing cracks in the brickwork of the structures of power, revealing grown men and women at computers trading futures that offer us nothing. The suppressed and the marginalised are empowered in such moments. Established dogmas are abandoned. In a few short weeks, C-19 has forced parliament to guarantee universal basic income, find shelter for homeless people and invest generously in public health merely just to maintain a façade of decency — policies that socialists have been energetically failing to achieve for decades.
Outside the towers people are reorganizing at a local level to look after their neighbours. Several gin distilleries in the UK have already shifted production to hand-sanitizer, which makes far more sense than shipping it in from Chinese sweatshops.²⁹ This is just the beginning of what could be a truly regenerative economy. Whatever happens, the world economy that has been choking us for decades isn’t going back to what it was. One Federal Reserve estimate is that 47 million Americans might lose their jobs, many of which are what anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’ anyway, and #GeneralStrike is trending on Twitter.³⁰ The system is tending towards chaos as tornados approach and butterflies flap their wings.
If this really is a crisis, in the etymological sense, by definition it must lead to permanent changes. Which way the oil industry goes, and which way the whole economy goes, may be a function of the speed and aggression of a targeted response from the rest of society. Now is the moment to develop new templates, as a T-cell endlessly recombines lengths of code into configurations ready for any pathogen it might encounter. As with COVID-19, this could be a matter of survival. Shorter supply chains, local solidarity and an economy geared towards resilience rather than profit margins might help us endure whatever the Angel of Death sends next — as there is every chance that COVID-19 is the first of many challenges creeping over the horizon.
Part 3: All over with a vaccine?
References on my website here
