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Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters
Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID
Lee Trepanier, Lee Trepanier
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eBook - ePub
Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters
Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID
Lee Trepanier, Lee Trepanier
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About This Book
This book examines diseases and disasters from the perspective of social and political theory, exploring the ways in which political leaders, social activists, historians, philosophers, and writers have tried to make sense of the catastrophes that have plagued humankind from Thucydides to the present COVID pandemic. By adopting the perspective of political theory, it sheds light on what these individuals and events can teach us about politics, society, and human nature, as well as the insights and limitations of political theory. Including thinkers such as Thucydides, Sophocles, Augustine, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Publius, Bartolomé de las Casas, Jane Addams, Camus, Saramago, Baudrillard, Weber, Schmitt, Voegelin and Agamben, it considers a diverse range of events including the plagues of Byzantium and 14th century Europe, 9/11, the hurricanes of Fukushima, Boxing Day, and New Orleans, and the current COVID pandemic. An examination of past, present, and future diseases and disasters, and the ways in which individuals and societies react to them, this volume will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy with interests in disaster and the social body.
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Introduction
The Politics of Diseases and Disasters
Lee Trepanier
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197379-1
The COVID pandemic and climate change has drawn our attention back to periods of human history where serious epidemics, natural disasters, and other liminal events are often accompanied by political uncertainty: political priorities are realigned, government legitimacy questioned, and even wars, rebellions, and revolutions can break out. Whether in fifth-century BCE Athens or fifth-century CE Rome, 14th-century Europe or 16-century America, or the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2011or 9/11, these liminal events â significant events that potentially can lead to political collapse and significant social change â demand our reexamination in order to make sense of our current predicament (Szakolczai, 2016, 2021). These events offer us lessons about the nature of political order and illuminate what political theory can offer in our understanding about politics itself.
The worldâs experience with COVID has brought these questions to the forefront, including an examination about the costs and benefits of globalization (Boloori and Soroush, 2020). The unprecedent scale of modern urbanization, particularly in East Asia, and the accompanying fundamental changes in our way of life with the worldwide mobility of goods, service, and labor had led to a perception in the West that it was the âend of historyâ: all the world was converging to the liberal democratic free-market paradigm with everyone benefiting from it (Fukuyama, 1992). Neglected in the study of globalization was the cost that pandemics, natural disasters, and human-made ones could have a cascading effect across the globe (Trepanier, 2011). Just as the world benefited from just-in-time global supply chains, we now know that we are vulnerable to worldwide viruses. In this study of the politics of diseases and disasters, we correct this oversight.
To make sense of our current situation, we have gathered several scholars in their respective disciplines to examine how political societies reacted to liminal events. Do societies steel themselves when confronted or do they collapse into moral panic (Hammond, 2020; Petersen, 2020; Cooper and Navarro-Genie, 2021; Griffiths and Laren, 2021)? Do governments retain and even enhance their legitimacy or does the public rebel, protest, and even revolt? And what constitutes the new priorities of society? What new actors and institutions emerge to reestablish political order?
If moral panic results, confidence in the governmentâs political legitimacy is shaken. While it is the case that political leaders do have the last one word in politics â to cite Carl Schmitt, âthe sovereign is he who decidesâ â political legitimacy can be challenged from many quarters, especially in democracies where a leaderâs legitimacy is rooted in the nationâs votes (Schmitt, 1985: 5). Leaders are challenged when the public senses the state can no longer guarantee security and stability. By their nature, liminal events like pandemics are not susceptible to the usual tools of political control, thereby revealing the limits or failures of the stateâs capacity for action. Thus, state or national emergencies are decreed with the rule of law relaxed and peopleâs behavior closely monitored so the state can act decisively to ensure its continued power and legitimacy.
One unfortunate and common outcome from these declarations of emergencies is that public anger is directed at those who are believed to responsible for the liminal event (Petersen, 2020; Cooper and Navarro-Genie, 2021; Griffiths and Laren, 2021). In democracies where the political leadership is blamed for the situation, they are swept from power as the liminal event subsides. However, if political leaders direct the publicâs anger elsewhere, or when the public itself does, then those held responsible are threaten. It is often difficult to predict to whom exactly popular anger will be targeted during a liminal event and even more difficult, if not impossible, to remedy the situation by political means after a group has been scapegoated and inflicted with violence.
Alternatively, it is possible that conflict does not result between political leaders and the public (Petersen, 2020; Cooper and Navarro-Genie, 2021; Griffiths and Laren, 2021). It is conceivable that political society will work together to overcome these challenges and share a sense of common responsibility and solidarity. Members of society feel a sense of duty and act accordingly for the common good as directed by their political leaders. The state is perceived as capable of addressing the liminal event by formulating and implementing policies that are effective and by providing a clear communication strategy that the public understands and accepts. The result is that political stability is reasserted and political legitimacy enhanced.
In the first section of this book, âIn the Time of COVID,â we examine what political theory can teach us about politics when we are confronted with this liminal event. Arpad Szakolczai begins this volume by raising the theoretical question about liminality in the context of COVID: what is the way in which sudden emergency situations can lead to or bring about permanent changes in a culture or a civilization? In his chapter, Szakolczai examines tour increased hostility to nature and reliance on experts as consequences of COVID and how these two developments have led to an unprecedent transformation in our lives. He concludes by calling for academics, scholars, and intellectuals to resist a managerial elite to prevent the destruction of our âlived worlds.â
In the next chapter, âWorld War IV and the COVID Apocalypse,â Paul Corey believes that the pandemic is best understood not as the âend of the world,â but rather in the original Greek sense of apokalypsis, of something ârevealed.â What COVID reveals is globalization is âat war with itself.â But this liminal event also demands that we act out of ethical duty to fight the pandemic. Drawing upon the writings of Baudrillard and Camus, Corey portrays two paths of action: abstract aid and concrete compassion as ways to address COVID. By proposing a middle way between prophylactic globalization and reactionary anti-globalism, Corey argues for a politics that can maintain strong international connections for trade and support but also promotes greater self-sufficiency for communities to respond to local suffering.
With regards to the United Statesâ response to COVID, Jordon B. Barkalow adopts the typology of faction as articulated by James Madison and David Hume. According to Barkalow, government efforts to limit the spread of the virus and get Americans vaccinated have been undermined by the presence of personal factions. Unlike partisanship, which often is cited by the media as a cause of anti-vaccination, faction is a better concept to understand the pandemic because it provides a normative criterion that can be used to evaluate the consequences of partisan differences. Moreover, an understanding of faction can help us to understand the constraints of scientifically informed responses to COVID, thereby highlighting the political limitations of science itself.
During the COVID pandemic there has been calls for compassion, self-sacrifice, and love; however, there has been little agreement in the West about what public conduct should be acting on these values, whether visiting family in nursing homes, attending religious services, or sending children to school. Jeremiah H. Russell and Michael E. Promisel point us to Catholic social teaching as a possible guide for the West to address these questions. For Russell and Promisel the Catholic principle of solidarity with its values of interdependence, virtue, and the common good provides a practical framework for citizens to uphold human dignity while at the same time fulfill their civic duty to society.
The final chapter of this section, Lorraine Krall McCraryâs âHull House: âAn Oasis in a Desert of Disease,ââ looks further back in American history to the countryâs first experiences with pandemics. Studying tuberculosis and typhoid in the Nineteenth Ward in late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries Chicago, McCray shows the women of Hull House became acquainted with the political aspects of disease and generated communal political responses. They saw that disease disproportionately impacted the poor, that local knowledge was essential to combating disease, that the disease revealed human interconnectedness, and that public health persuasion was both necessary and limited.
While not Catholic, the women of Hull house embodied the Catholic principle of solidarity that Russell and Promisel describe. These two chapters provide both a theoretical and practical template for the United States to respond to the current pandemic and can prepare us for future ones. It provides a path out of the problem of factions that Barkalow outlines and could potentially be adopted globally to avoid the World War IV that Corey details. And while we will never escape liminal events like pandemics, we can still act to resist experts transforming our lives that Szakolczai narrates.
The second section, âModern Solutions, Modern Problems,â pushes us backward in time to how modern Europe confronted liminal events. What we discover is the establishment of foundational accounts of society, human nature, and science that we have inherited today to combat the current pandemic. In his chapter on Locke, Kevin M. Kearns examines how the 1665â66 London plague impacted John Locke and influenced his Two Treatises of Government. Not only did Locke lived through the plague but saw the moral and political effects it had on society. Kearns investigates the relationship between plagues, modern medicine, and politics in the Two Treatises of Government, and illuminates the important discussions on the advancement of modern medicine in a modern liberal regime. What we discover is that modern liberal politics becomes indistinguishable from the advancement of modern medicine, and both rely on the same foundational view of human nature.
Evan M. Lowe continues this investigation of modern science by looking at Baconâs writings. Baconâs concern with bodily health is pervasive in his works, with the prolongation of life being perhaps chief among the goals of his new, active science. Lowe also discusses how Baconâs new science is to prevent natural disasters because they are knowable and that such knowledge should be extended to the management of the human passions to avoid the âpanic terrorsâ that are especially common in times of anxiety and adversity. Baconâs thought in this regard helps us tie together the natural and human worlds and points the way toward the scientific and political means by which we might prevent or ameliorate not only the negative bodily effects of natural disaster, but also the concomitant psychological ones.
Concerning human nature itself, Benjamin Isaak Gross turns us to Rousseauâs Lettre Ă Voltaire, in which he discusses the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and raises topics about optimism, theodicy, and Providence. Gross argues the Lettre is an application of Rousseauâs thesis concerning the natural goodness of man. When evaluating the source of misery from the earthquake, Rousseau traces it to the whims of the people of Lisbon, a corrupt use of freedom which prevents it from being directed towards perfectibility. Owing to corruption, rational arguments will not motivate society to embrace scientific discoveries, like inoculation against Smallpox. Instead, according to Rousseau, moral arguments that demonstrate how these findings satisfy our corrupt whims can cause society to accept these scientific discoveries.
The plagues that had afflicted Europe were brought over to the New World. In his chapter about BartolomĂ© de Las Casas, Brian Hamm discusses the demographic devastation of the indigenous populations in the sixteenth century by successive waves of epidemic diseases brought by the Spanish. Although some scholars have argued that the famed Protector of the Indians said little or even ignored altogether the impact of European diseases, a closer reading across Las Casasâs voluminous oeuvre reveals a more complicated picture. For example, Las Casasâs use of pestilencia highlighted the causal connection between these deadly diseases and Spanish greed and brutality. In this way, Hamm argues, Las Casas insisted that Spaniards, not just the Indians, were carriers of pestilenceâand moreover, that the pestilences that the Spanish bore did not just cause physical harm but moral and spiritual injury and death.
This section concludes with how plagues changed the meaning of citizenship and political membership in three historical liminal events: ancient Athens, Byzantium, and 14th-century Europe. In his chapter, âPlagues and Globalism,â W. Jason Wallace shows how each of these historical moments brought about new ways of understanding social cohesion. When established cultural and political boundaries dissolve in pursuit of âglobalâ aspirations, the dislocation creates opportunities for disease to spread, âeliteâ groups to prosper while the larger population remains frustrated, and modification of long-standing legal privileges in the name of meeting the crisis.
The problems that Wallace raises remain with us today in this age of globalization and, with COVID, are only amplified. As Las Casas observed, one of the costs of globalization is the transfer of diseases to another people and decimating that population. But unlike Las Casas, the response of the West today is not a religious or spiritual one but rooted in science as understood by Bacon and Locke and based on an account of human nature offered by Rousseau. A science to reduce not only bodily but psychological disease and is so entwined with the liberal regime that they are one and the same.
In the third section of this study, we look at how antiquity understood liminal events in terms of the divine or empire rather than science and liberalism. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Augustine responded in The City of God to his pagan critics that Christians were not to be blame. In his chapter, Paul Krause contrasts Augustineâs response of divine love and charity with the paganâs call for duty and honor in their interpretation of about the rape of Lucretia. Rather than objectifying women and casting them out, Christians comfort and console women in their grief, creating a community of love for the afflicted and a place of healing for the wounded. For Krause, Augustine carves out a politics of love which is inspired by God so it can enter into the civitas terrena.
Avramenko and Rolsma also examine Augustine but with attention to the biblical flood as accounted in Genesis. Of all the variants of disasters, flood has a particular theological, and therefore political, importance for human beings for Augustine. Bound up with the sacrament of baptism, Augustine suggests that flood offers us a way to understand the formation and reformation of the human soul and politics. Augustineâs theodicy is especially poignant in his analysis of flood because water is by nature both destructive and restorative. For Augustine, the image of a flood â and disasters more generally â provides a starting place for meaningful theodicy in the Christian world by distinguishing between destruction and punishment and by forming the soul and political order by extending the temporal horizons of the faithful.
Moving from the Romans to the Greeks, we next look at Sophoclesâ Philoctetes, which retells the story of the Thessalian archer who inherited Heraclesâ bow because he was the only hero willing to end that Panhellenic heroâs mortal suffering. After developing a festering wound, Philoctetes is abandoned by the Greek army on a deserted island. They return for him after a prophecy reveals that Heraclesâs bow is required for victory. It is only the deus ex machina arrival of the now divine Heracles who convinces Philoctetes to accompany the Greeks to Troy. Focusing on how disease and suff...