Covid-19 crisis puts our egos in check
• No matter how much humanity progresses with new remedies against disease, nature will always find a way to strike back — helped by human hubris
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, Laurie Garrett, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997
The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris, Mark Honigsbaum, Hurst, 2019
On Living in the Atomic Age, CS Lewis, 1948
Pox, Plague and Pandemics: A History of Epidemics in South Africa, Howard Phillips, Jacana, 2012
Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, Frank Snowden, Yale, 2019
In the early days of this pandemic, you might have seen an arresting passage by the children’s author and Christian philosopher CS Lewis, from his 1948 essay, “On Living in the Atomic Age”.
When it popped up on my screen in early March, I found it inspiring. Lewis imagines someone asking him how we are going to live after Hiroshima, and responds: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year.” He then goes on to list all the ways our mortality might manifest in the 20th century, given that we are “already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents”.
In other words, Lewis continues, “do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear Sir or Madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.”
Death itself is “not a chance at all, but a certainty”. And so Lewis urges his anxious postwar readers to pull themselves together: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
“They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
That’s where the Lewismeme ended, but I was intrigued to know where he was going with all this, not least because he was an evangelical Christian. After listening to an online audio recording of his essay on YouTube (I could not find it in print), I heard his true point. Since “nature does not, in the long run, favour life” and this planet is destined to die (sooner than Lewis imagined, it turns out), he urges us to accept our mortality and find meaning elsewhere: in a conception of ourselves as “spirits” inhabiting our bodily biological masses, rather than these mere masses themselves.
As an inveterate materialist and secular humanist, I cannot personally do that. But Lewis’s ideas have helped me immensely, as I have held them in mind while reading books that explain, with eerie prescience, our susceptibility to the Covid-19 pandemic today. For at the heart of the message of these books — even though they are about history and science — is a critique of human hubris and its role in creating the conditions that have caused the coronavirus to spread.
Listen, for example, to the US microbiologist Rene Dubos, immensely popular in the 1950s: “Modern man believes that he has achieved almost complete mastery over the natural forces which molded his evolution in the past and that he can now control his own biological and cultural destiny. But this may be an illusion. Like all other living things, he is part of an immensely complex ecological system and is bound to all its components by innumerable links.”
Dubos continued: “At some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner, nature will strike back.”
So it has.
And, it turns out, not so unpredictable.
In 1989, a key group of scientists convened a high-level meeting in Washington DC to look at infectious diseases in the context of HIV/Aids. One of them, the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, argued that the rapid mass movements of globalisation — from air travel to refugees fleeing war or starvation — was “defining us as a very different species from what we were 100 years ago. We are enabled by a different set of technologies. But despite many potential defences — vaccines, antibiotics, diagnostic tools — we are intrinsically more vulnerable than before ... in terms of pandemic and communicable diseases.”
Our vulnerability stems, in part, from the very benefits of these technologies. By staving off illness, they have permitted our demographic explosion, for example. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari calls the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud”, because it required humans to cluster in settlements where disease thrived and people suffered. In this way, the dangers we face from disease are not unlike those we face from global warming: they are a product of our own success, as a species.
The books I have been reading demonstrate how epidemics arose only once civilisations expanded. Of the indigenous khoekhoen of the Cape, the Dutch governor wrote in 1678 that “no particularly severe sicknesses are known among them, and Death usually contents himself with old wornout people”. But “such pathogenic innocence did not long survive the creation of
Europe’s commercial empires overseas”, writes Howard Phillips. Just as smallpox wiped out Native Americans in the 16th century due to their lack of immunity, so too did it decimate the khoekhoen during three epidemics of the 18th century. Those who survived were forced into farm labour to replace the slaves killed, too, by the epidemics.
Even the very epidemic that gives us the name “plague”, the medieval Black Death, was carried across Asia to Europe along the trade routes established by Marco Polo. It had begun, as zoonotic diseases from bubonic plague to coronavirus do, because of a new proximity of animals to humans that nature had not anticipated. In the case of plague, where people and soldiers (or their fodder) went, rats went too: this is how it came here in 1901, during the South African War.
War, like trade, spreads disease. In 1918, northern France was “a vast biological experiment” where men from all over the world “mingled freely”, writes Mark Honigsbaum in The Pandemic Century. When the war ended, they were all demobilised, taking the “Spanish” flu home with them, and wiping out 50million people in the process, five times as many as those who died fighting in the war.
In Africa, war and trade combined in a particularly lethal cocktail. The HIV probably always existed in isolated communities in the Congo basin who exposed themselves by eating bushmeat, but what seems to have facilitated its spread was “the inauguration of steamship travel and the construction of new roads” in the early 20th century, writes Honigsbaum, as well as “the greed of loggers and timber companies”.
As with the fossil-fuel frenzy that has caused the climate crisis, a hunger for energy and resources plays its part in the spread of pandemics too. It was no accident that the three countries most affected by Ebola were Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, “subject to a frenetic pace of deforestation and land clearance to meet international demand for resources from the woods”, writes Frank Snowden in Epidemics and Society. It was this dramatic deforestation —
75% of the three countries’ land — that brought Ebola-carrying bats into contact with humans.
A different kind of greed seems to have prompted the zoonotic leap of two coronaviruses — SARS and Covid-19 — from animals to humans: the hunger for exotic meats, which signifies prosperity, in a China rampant with newfound wealth and urban growth. In the early 2000s, chefs in Guangdong, where SARS began, started offering the city’s “newly affluent entrepreneurial classes ... ever more exotic fare”, writes Honigsbaum, and this led to a trade in wild animals from across the region and “the mixing of multiple species in animal markets that would rarely, if ever, encounter one another in nature, and certainly not in such crowded conditions”.
One of these species was us, of course. We got SARS from a civet and Covid-19, perhaps, from a pangolin. SARS spread rapidly due to air travel, and was dubbed the “millennium’s first jet-set disease”.
Covid-19 was the next. Writing about medicine, one of his favourite themes, the playwright George Bernard Shaw noted that “the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a symptom instead of a cause”. Updating Shaw for the present day, writes Honigsbaum, “we might say that infectious diseases nearly always have wider environmental and social causes”.
If HIV made its first leap into human civilisation at the turn of the century, then the next great leap was during the 1960s, thanks to the intense violent conflict before and after Congolese independence. The French epidemiologist Jacques Pepin makes the informed speculation that HIV was then carried to the Americas by Haitian medics and teachers working for the UN in Zaire.
Reading about this in The Pandemic Century, I thought of Donald Trump’s words when still just a rude huckster, during the 2014 Ebola crisis: “Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the US,” he tweeted. “The US cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great — but must suffer the consequences!”
Trump’s isolationist misanthropy is a chilling reminder of how epidemics can be used to promote ideologies of nationalism and selfishness. But, read with Pepin’s theory, it also reveals how epidemics challenge our very best intentions too. Through both the climate crisis and the Covid19 pandemic, we are being called to re-examine our civilisation: how we move, how we meet, how we grow.
“Ultimately, humanity will have to change its perspective on its place in Earth’s ecology if the species hopes to stave off or survive the next plague,” writes Laurie Garrett in The Coming Plague, published presciently in 1997. While isolationists such as Trump deploy the coronavirus to build even higher walls, Garrett gives us the science: “Microbes, and their vectors, recognise none of the artificial boundaries erected by human beings. Theirs is the world of natural limitations: temperature, pH, ultraviolet light, the presence of vulnerable hosts, and mobile vectors.”
Given the speed at which we move, we Sapiens are pushing the boundaries of these “natural limitations”: we have become the most mobile of vectors. But Garrett asks us to look at this reality in a different way to the Trumps of this world: “Rapid globalisation of human niches requires that human beings everywhere on the planet go beyond viewing their neighborhoods, provinces, countries, or hemispheres as the sum total of their personal ecospheres.”
Garrett, an acclaimed science writer, showed how pollution and global warming have made us more susceptible to pandemics. She tracks, for example, the way a 1991 cholera epidemic originating in Bangladesh landed up in Peru: it was carried across the Pacific in algae blooms thanks to an El Niño event. She cites Patricia Tester, an oceanographer: “The oceans have become nothing but giant cesspools, and you know what happens when you heat up a cesspool.”
Garrett was also one of the first to warn of the dangers of jet travel: she exposed, for example, the way airlines cut their fuel costs by circulating stale air. Honigsbaum takes up the theme: “Herded into airline waiting rooms, then crammed into economy row seats, we resemble nothing so much as the captive Amazonian parakeets who introduced psittacosis to Baltimore and other US cities in 1929.
“The difference is that the parakeets had no choice about our accommodation, whereas we do.”
Do we?
There has been much written, in the last weeks, about Covid-19 as some form of corrective: the globe has reduced its carbon footprint; the skies above Beijing and Delhi are blue again. We know they won’t stay that way, but we don’t yet know how to do things differently, to stave off both pandemics and the climate crisis.
Of the 1918 “Spanish” flu epidemic, Phillips writes that it whipped through SA — and the world — with such speed because of the way survivors developed what has become a buzzword of our times: “herd immunity”. In simple evolutionary terms: the weak died, the strong survived.
A century later, we have become too clever for nature. We safeguard our weak and our elderly, as animals do not. We have the cultural ability to lock ourselves down, to screen and quarantine, to cheat our mortal destiny.
This is humanity’s great gift, but could it also be our hubris?
Harari coined the term “Homo Deus” to capture this: “The animal that became a God,” as he puts it: “Having reduced mortality from starvation, disease and violence, we will now aim to overcome old age and even death itself.”
Good luck with that.
THE DANGERS WE FACE FROM DISEASE ARE NOT UNLIKE THOSE FROM GLOBAL WARMING: PRODUCT OF OUR OWN SUCCESS AS SPECIES