Maria Victoria Salazar
Introduction
“The Human Impact of Pandemics” is a usefully ambiguous phrase, referring both to the way in which humans have impacted pandemics and to the ways in which pandemics have impacted humans. Throughout this guide, I will stress the ambiguity in meaning by exploring the ways in which pandemics have both been shaped by and, in turn, shape human societies, focusing specifically on how pandemics expose, reify, and reject our understanding of ourselves as individual moral and political agents. Of course, the causes and effects of pandemics are many and varied, and a thorough account of the human impacts would require a lifetime of dedication. In most Western nations, our conception of the self as isolated or atomized individuals is buttressed by and, in turn, buttresses the notion that individual human agency has ultimate explanatory power both in political and moral affairs. That is, we tend to view the individual as an ontologically independent locus of moral and political agency. Atomized individualism, which sees the individual human being as the locus of agency, envisions an anthropocentric world, in which value is determined with reference to human beings. Thus, the relationship that humans have with the natural world ought to be understood in light of the conceptual framework of individualism.
So long as an individual human being is the arbiter of value, the natural world is reduced to instrumental value only insofar as it has something to offer human beings alone, and not animals, the environment, or other external factors or beings. Andreas Spahn, for example, considers the tensions between individualism and sustainability, and argues that, in order to achieve true sustainability, we ought to move past these notions of individualism so prevalent in the Western world.
Pandemics in particular offer us a fruitful lens to view the tension between individualism and collectivism is because pandemics are normally understood (though not always) as proliferating with no regard for the moral and political borders we create between ourselves as individuals or between our nations. The following is a sketch of the role of individualism in two pandemics: the plague of Athens around 429 BC and the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first case, I consider how Thucydides portrays individualism as both contributing to and also increasing during and after the plague. In the second case, I present articles addressing the moral and political aspects of the origins, spread, and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In normal—perhaps even prosperous—times, we have special reasons to imagine that our life circumstances are a result of the intentional choices we’ve made, so that the conditions we find ourselves living in are considered conditions that we ourselves have chosen, in some way or other. This line of reasoning is not only critically flawed—as we’ve experienced first-hand during the pandemic, our lives are often controlled by outside forces—it is also deleterious to our future health, both bodily and morally.
I. Morality and Health: A Plagued Relationship
“That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions: is a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere.” Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
While the idea that plagues and pests are retribution for moral wrongdoing might seem archaic, the connection between plagues, morals, and politics seems to be so pervasive as to suggest that we take it seriously. The relationship between morality and plagues has been explored through literature, where plagues and moral contagion are seen as spreading in the same way. In Exodus, for instance, the ten plagues of Egypt are seen as a divine punishment against Egypt for the sins committed against the Israelites. In this way, plagues and morals seem to correspond, to some degree, in the public imaginary. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens understands moral infection in terms of a plague, spreading mercilessly and indiscriminately the way that gossip spreads. In this way, plagues and morals seem to correspond, to some degree, in the public imagination. This relationship belies a common worry— that we are not atomized individuals in any significant sense. We are fully in the world and fully acted upon and shaped by our environment. If moral deficit spreads like a plague, and if morals (or lack thereof) can trigger a plague, then, surely, viewing the individual as a locus of morality and responsibility and as somehow separate from the natural world is flawed. I want to reconsider, then, what moral lessons we can learn from plagues—what moral failings, if any, might contribute to its originating, what to its spread, and what effects pandemics have on our moral life in return.
II. The Plague in Ancient Athens, as Described by Thucydides
The ancient historian Thucydides, often lauded as the first realist political theorist, gives us an account of an ancient plague which he considers in light of moral and political failures on the part of the Athenian citizens. Thucydides tells us that the plague in Ancient Athens shattered the communal spirit of the Athenians, not long before extolled by Pericles in his well-known funeral oration. People began to neglect their roles as citizens, concerning themselves only with their private affairs. Pericles, reprimanding the private Athenians, addressed them; “Cease then to grieve for your private afflictions and address yourselves instead to the safety of the commonwealth” (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley. 2.61.4.).
Nonetheless, Thucydides continues: “What they did was the very contrary, allowing private ambitions and private interests, in matters apparently quite foreign to the war, to lead them into projects unjust both to themselves and to their allies—projects whose success would only conduce to the honor and advantage of private persons, and whose failure entailed certain disaster on the country in the war.”
Thucydides saw Athens’ downfall as a consequence of the moral decay of its citizens who were consumed by private ambitions and desires. Those ambitions were, in turn, heightened during the plague. Thus, Thucydides’ treatment of the Athenian plague is a useful picture of how a pandemic can exacerbate the individualism in a society.
Civilización o barbarie? La peste de Atenas o el retorno de la historia a la naturaleza
(Civilization or Barbarism? The Plague of Athens or the Return of History to Nature)
Antonio Hermosa Andújar
This article, written in Spanish with a corresponding abstract in English, discusses the moral nature and consequences of the Athenian Plague. Andújar metaphorically characterizes the plague as imperialistic, monotheistic, subversive, and barbaric. In this way, the Athenian plague was invasive, all-defining, anti-moral, and anti-human. In the end, the surviving human beings are motivated by their individualistic desires and by bare necessity. This is reflected in the new morality which emerges after the Plague ends.
The Athenian Plague, a Cautionary Tale of Democracy’s Fragility
Gary Bass
In this piece, Gary Bass reflects on Thucydides’ analysis of the Athenian plague as contributing the Athens’ eventual demise. Gary Bass wonders if the same lessons can be learned today, and whether the COVID-19 pandemic might have the same moral and political effects as the Athenian Plague in promoting the kind of individualism which leads to democracy’s downfall.
What the Great Plague of Athens Can Teach Us Now
Katherine Kelaidis
Kelaidis begins by comparing the political and moral conditions in which the Athenian Plague originated and the political and moral conditions in which COVID-19 originated. Both are, to her mind, particularly bad times for a plague. She compares the political crises of both pandemics, explains the lessons learned from the Athenian plague, and points towards lessons we might learn both from history and from our own experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pandemics, Protocols, and the Plague of Athens: Insights from Thucydides
Joseph J. Fins
Joseph J. Fins helped to write the guidelines for the allocation of medical resources which were issued in 2015 by the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. During the deliberation, he and his colleagues concluded that it would be most just not to give medical priority to healthcare workers during a pandemic. During the pandemic, however, his opinion on the matter changed, and he began critically reflecting on how the pandemic changed his own view of morality and justice. He sees many interesting parallels between the decay of nomos, or law, in Thucydides’ account of the Plague and his own fear of the erosion of his own moral code. Fins’ engagement with Thucydides is particularly illuminating in its transparency; he himself wonders how much he might still learn from Thucydides’ account.
For Thucydides, the causes and effects of the Plague were politically and morally salient because the Plague exacerbated the individualism which he believed to have been a primary factor of the fall of Athens. This individualism did not only manifest itself in Athenian imperialism but also manifested itself in the Athenian response to the Plague itself, namely, in a doubling-down of individualism and a rejection of the laws and customs which had bound the society together. It’s fruitful to consider to what extent Thucydides’ account of the Plague might parallel or diverge from other writers’ treatments of COVID-19 and other pandemics, especially with regard to how human beings related to one another directly and how they related to one another mediated through law and custom.
III. COVID-19: A Contemporary Pandemic
When considering the causes of the COVID-19 pandemic, some people considered a disturbance in the natural balance between human society and nature to be a primary cause of the pandemic. This CBS article reprinted by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, for instance, warns that climate change may contribute to more frequent pandemics in the future.
Viewing pandemics as an effect of human caused climate change ascribes an additional moral weight to pandemics because they can be understood as being caused by a moral wrongdoing, i.e., policies and practices which contribute to climate change. In this way, pandemics take on a moral character—if we continue to participate in or support a culture of overconsumption which results in climate change which in turn results in an increase in pandemics, we become, in effect, morally responsible for pandemics. Moreover, we can see how the spread of the pandemic might have been influenced by political norms and moral emotions associated with different political systems. In many studies, the effectiveness of mask mandates and social distancing measures correlated with cultural norms surrounding individualism and collectivism. In this paper by Travalgino and Moon, we see just one way in which cultural norms affected public trust in government mandated measures.
COVID-19 and Climate Change: A Tale of Two Global Problems
In this article, Fuentes et al. track the emergence and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic to the problem of climate change, beginning with the microeconomic similarities shared in both crises. They argue that the pandemic should serve not only as a warning of what will happen as climate change accelerates, but also that the human response during COVID which lead to a significant reduction in emissions shows that humans have the capacity to change the ways in which we interact with our climate in a positive way.
Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on human–nature interactions: Pathways, evidence and implications
Along the same vein, Soga et al. show what the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us about the interaction between human beings and nature, which they call human-nature interaction. They propose a three-pronged conceptual framework through which to analyze the ways in which this interaction has been altered by the pandemic, namely: a) opportunity, b) capability, and c) motivation.
Giorgio Agamben on Health Scare and the Religion of Science
Giorgio Agamben was among the first scholars to sharply critique the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. His first piece was published very early on in the pandemic, on March 17, 2020, which makes it all the more interesting to consider his point of view. His writings on COVID-19 have been very sharply criticized and even ridiculed, even by philosophers who would otherwise consider him an ally. However, his perspective is interesting in its boldness, and perhaps interesting for the reasons we might think it is wrong. He argues against what he deems “the religion of science” and the reduction of human life to “bare life.” What bare life means, here, is the life of bare biological necessity. This critique mirrors the critique offered by Andújar of the Athenian Plague; both pandemics, then, reduce the richness of human life to a life of bare necessity. The moral consequences, for Agamben, is that human beings will be further isolated from themselves and further entrenched in their individualism.