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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...
Read more

A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
Read more