Apocalypse Now, Part 7--A Journal of the Plague Year

“I recommend it to the Charity of all good People to look back, and reflect duly upon the Terrors of the Time; and whoever does so will see, that it is not an ordinary Strength that cou'd support it; it was not like appearing in the Head of an Army, or charging a Body of Horse in the Field; but it was charging Death itself on his pale Horse; to stay indeed was to die, and it could be esteemed nothing less.”

--Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

I have about 75 pages written of a science fiction novel.  It is set about 50 years in the future, in the aftermath of a plague.  The plague killed off around half of the Earth's population.  But what the novel is really about is the ways in which that event changed our political and social life.  The origin of the book is in a thought experiment--what it really take to get people to do the work necessary to reverse climate change?  What would it take to allow for conditions of truly significant, radical economic reform?  As I pondered those questions, the only thing I could come up with was a plague.

It may be that I am in a particular dark place of mind right now.  It may be that I am being alarmist.  But as I read the reports of the coronavirus and its spread across the world, it has definitely occurred to me that perhaps events are catching up to the hypothetical on which I based my draft.

But, watching the response to the coronavirus that has occurred, and thinking about the trajectory of where things seem to be going, I've realized that I made a fundamental mistake in how I was conceptualizing plagues.  When I was designing the plague for purposes of the novel, my core question was "how many people would it have to kill in order to radically change the political and social landscape?"  I now see that this is the wrong question; the right question is "how many people would it have to kill before the fear of the plague radically changed the political and social landscape?"  And that second number is orders of magnitude smaller than the first number.  A plague doesn't need to kill half of the world's population to have massive impact.

Indeed, we are already seeing this in action.  As of this writing, there have been approximately 2,800 world-wide fatalities--a tragedy, to be certain, but ultimately a modest number compared to the 7.7. billion people in the world.  Nevertheless, those 2,800 deaths have resulted in the loss of $1.7 trillion in value from the U.S. stock market.  In two days.  And this isn't even close to the bottom, especially as we haven't really begun to feel the effects of the supply-chain disruptions as a result of the lock-down of China. 

That's the thing about plagues.  Plagues, as we all understand, kill lots of people.  But that's not all they kill.  They also kill the things that people build.  Not the physical things people build, but the institutions and structures that organize the ways we live and interact with each other.  Those institutions and structures are far more fragile than wood and stone and steel and silicon, and they are every bit as vulnerable to a virus or a bacteria as human cells are.  And it seems to me that plagues attack the points of weakness, whether in the human biological system or in the human social system.

So, the question to ask now is "what are our points of weakness in the human system?"  Allow me to suggest three--(1) a economic system grounded in complex (and, thus, fragile) financial speculation and global trade, (2) in the U.S. a totally dysfunctional and inhuman health care system, and (3) political leadership that is both idiotic, wholly self-interested, and inclines toward authoritarianism.  Well, we are already seeing the pressure being put on #1 by the coronavirus.  As to #2:
I cannot think of a clearer example of the moral and conceptual failure of the U.S. healthcare system than the idea that the first priority of the U.S. government is to insure that drug companies will be free to profit to the maximum possible extent on any vaccine developed to treat the disease.  And, when the effects of #1 and #2 start to build and grow, we very well might find ourselves staring down the barrel in a fulsome way of problem #3--the continued functioning of our economic and social life is, in a real sense, in the hands of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.  I found the press conference that Trump gave us last night, after days of saying that there was Nothing to See Here, to be existentially terrifying--it was like a flashback clip played at the beginning of a movie where the bulk of the action involves harvesting bugs to eat and fighting off Immortan Joe in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. 

Again, maybe I'm being Chicken Little here.  Or maybe I'm Cassandra.  Because I think that the very chaotic last three-and-change years are about to get far, far more chaotic in the next couple of months.  I think 2020 is going to be a Plague Year.  God help us all.

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