An enlightening lesson from nature is what we’re getting

Today’s ill wind has blown in something good, a renewed interest in a neglected novel by a gifted writer. Albert Camus’ “The Plague” (1947) was allegorical: Europe’s political plague had been Nazism, which Camus had actively resisted in occupied Paris. But he had been born in French Algeria and surely knew of the 1849 cholera epidemic that ravaged the city of Oran, where “The Plague” is set.

At the novel’s conclusion, as crowds celebrate the infestation’s end, Camus’ protagonist, Dr. Rieux, “remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know ... that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come

FROM THE RIGHT

when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

For Camus, “enlightening” was a double-edged word. Nature can be brutally didactic, as it was with the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. This was a chastening reminder, during the Enlightenment’s high tide of confident aspiration, that nature always has something to say about what human beings always prematurely call “the conquest of nature.”

Humanity, which is given to optimism and amnesia (the latter contributing to the former), was nudged toward theological skepticism by the felt contradiction between the fact of Lisbon and the theory that a benevolent God has ordained Earth as a commodious habitat in a congenial universe. Besides, the idea that Earth is miraculously designed to enable human life to thrive disregards many inconveniences, from saber-tooth tigers, meteor strikes and typhoons, to volcanoes and mutating viruses.

In 1900, about when medicine at last began to do more good than harm, 37% of all American deaths were from infectious diseases. Today the figure is 2%. By 1940 and the arrival of penicillin, medicine seemed on the verge of conquering infectious diseases, especially smallpox. No human achievement has done as much to lessen human suffering.

In the early 1950s, the Salk vaccine seemed to complete the conquest by banishing childhood polio, which fostered the misconception that pharmacological silver bullets are the key to large improvements in public health. This distracted attention from the staggering costs of lung cancer, coronary artery disease, AIDS, violence, substance abuse, Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity and other consequences of knownto-be-risky behaviors.

Modern medicine has brought Americans blessings beyond their grandparents’ dreams. Nevertheless, a sour aroma of disappointment surrounds health care, which is the most important policy issue in a nation gripped by political, social and actual hypochondria. Medicine’s limitations, made more conspicuous by medicine’s successes, are disturbing reminders of the skull beneath the skin of life.

Because epidemics are invisible during their incubation and swift in their trajectories, they could be devastating terror weapons — except that, as the coronavirus is vividly demonstrating, no intentional perpetrator could be confident of remaining immune. The connectedness of the modern world deters the weaponization of epidemics that the connectedness facilitates. For now, this must suffice as good news.