A little perspective is always a valuable thing.
One thing that troubles us at SoL during this crisis is that we hardly hear any references at all to similar past crises and what was learned from them. Apparently history, even recent history, is very unpopular these days. Truth is, viruses and diseases (even plagues) are not something new, even highly contagious and deadly ones. Human history is full of them. Daily life is full of them. We find it strange that we have not heard that this is the worse virus that has ever existed, and yet we are supposed to be acting as if it is. We were jauntily walking toward the park the other day and a family with young children we passed as they were leaving the park acted like we were poisonous in every way. They not only gave us an exaggeratedly wide berth but quickly called their children close and looked at us with frightened suspicion. And no, it didn't look at all like they were concerned about us senior citizens. We called out a cheerful hello that got no response.
Here's the thing. Well people used to rush to help sick people, contagious or not. "I must go to them," is the immediate reaction of heroines in Victorian novels. Today people are running away or hiding away from people whom they merely suspect might maybe be sick but who have no symptoms like coughing that would spread it any distance. If a person isn't coughing or sneezing they are not projecting germs into the air around them. Oh the lack of humanity!
The drastic global, national, state, local, and even individual responses to the China virus, especially in how to deal with this thing nobody knows very much about because of skewed and missing data, are astonishingly destructive and unprecedented. From the dust Herodotus reminds us, "Do not try to cure one evil by another." From today's world, see this great article by a Standford professor.
We were reminded of this wonderful passage from C. S. Lewis in an essay, "On Living in an Atomic Age."
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are
we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would
have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London
almost every year, or as you would have lived in
a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your
throat any night; or indeed, as you 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, 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. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our
ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly
ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the
scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature
death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which
death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is
to pull ourselves 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.
Tennis anyone?
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