Covid and Society

 The dictionary definition of the term pathogenesis is “the origination and development of a disease.  Jonathan Kennedy used the term to describe how infectious diseases and their consequences have altered our human civilization in his book Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues.  Epidemics have occurred frequently throughout history, with the major ones having significant consequences.  He provides this perspective.

“Outbreaks of infectious diseases have destroyed millions of lives and decimated whole civilizations, but the devastation has created opportunities for new societies and ideas to emerge and thrive.  In this way, pathogens have been the protagonists in many of the most important social, political and economic transformations in history: the transition from a planet inhabited by multiple species of human to one in which Homo sapiens reigned supreme; the replacement of nomadic hunter-gatherer society with sedentary agriculture; the demise of the great empires of antiquity; the transformation of Christianity and Islam from small sects in Palestine and Hijaz to world religions; the shift from feudalism to capitalism; the devastation wrought by European colonialism; the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; and the creation of the modern welfare state.”

Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book involved the role of the Black Death in causing the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, and the depiction of industrialization as a form of plague in which crowded conditions led to massive deaths from infectious diseases.

Plagues tend to produce the most pain for those most vulnerable: the poor.  The Black Death hit medieval societies repeatedly over a period of a few hundred years.  Loss of life was so great, fifty percent or more, that the supply of serfs to produce the necessary food and other products that emanated from a feudal society disappeared.  Feudalism was never a very efficient way to produce things.  A transformation occurred, initiated either by former serfs or by landowners, that initiated the practice of leasing land to the agricultural laborers.  This gave the former serfs the motivation to produce as much as possible.  The laborers would perform better when they formed groups to negotiate and work together.  Eventually the formed groups would compete with each other for land and workers and the equivalent of companies would be formed.  This transformation took place over several centuries, beginning first in England and gradually spreading to other European countries.

Industrialization in England produced conditions where fewer agricultural workers were needed, and more were required in factories being built in towns and cities.  This drove rural people to arrive in crowded living and working conditions where hygiene and diseases were poorly understood.  Infections would propagate easily leading life expectancies to plummet.

“The new provincial towns and cities really dragged down the national life-expectancy figures.  They were not only considerably lower than the figure for England and Wales, they also fell markedly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.  The numbers are skewed by very high infant mortality rates, with one in five babies dying before their first birthday.  In the central areas of Manchester and Liverpool, you could expect to live about twenty-five years—a shorter lifespan than at any time since the Black Death.  The figures are worse when we focus on just the poor.  Life expectancy for factory laborers was seventeen in Manchester and fifteen in Liverpool.  Death rates were so high among urban working classes that the population was only able to sustain itself because of the continual inflow of people from the surrounding countryside, and increasingly from Ireland.” 

If the Industrial Revolution was to proceed, an interventionist government must arise and provide improved welfare for all the citizens.  And that is what happened.

If one finds Kennedy’s picture compelling, it is inevitable to ponder what, if any, are the consequences for societies from the recent Covid pandemic.  Clearly, there have been many changes, but only time will tell if they will be permanent.  Children may have effectively lost about a year of education.  The trend towards remote work has proved difficult for those providing office space and those supporting the office-space workers.  Those with valuable assets thrived during the pandemic, those without suffered, increasing economic inequality.

Unfortunately, the pandemic seems to have generated responses that threaten the very nature of our society.  Responses to Covid required governments to take actions.  People were told to accept restrictions on their activities.  In effect, they were expected to behave like members of a community, willing to try to protect each other from harm.  In too many cases, people responded to such requests with not only a “no,” but rather a “hell no.”  This attitude is one long popular with the political right, reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s dismissal of society.

“There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

This sort of thinking seems so unnatural.  Humans evolved needing the society of a group to survive.  Sharing resources was necessary for food, shelter, security, and the survival of infants.  Evidence exists that even Neanderthals had acquired the tendency to protect and nurture the weak and disabled among the group.  Our religions taught us to aid the unfortunate among us. Such instincts are likely millions of years old, permanently residing in our genes. They have been the basis for social democracies that formed after the last world war, including our own.

Thatcherism flows inevitably from the inequalities inherent in capitalism.  The wealthy feel comfortable assuming that their wealth was the result of their hard work and intelligence, but the misleading corollary of that assumption is that the poor must not be working hard, or they are not very smart.  A religious equivalent has arisen in which the fortunate are viewed as worthy of God’s grace, while the unfortunate are deemed unworthy.  These attitudes appear to be dragging society back to a harsher, less stable—perhaps less survivable—era.

One could make the argument that we emerged from the Covid pandemic with Democrats being the conservative party representing traditional social values, while Republicans have become progressives, anxious to burn the house down so they can build a new one. 

Covid did not create these trends, but it did accelerate them.

 

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.

Source: http://letstalkbooksandpolitics.blogspot.com/2025/02/covid-and-society.html