It is the year of the coronavirus. Increasing numbers of sick people in more countries indicating it has become a pandemic. Starting in China, or so its alleged, it is now in a number of European countries, the U.S. and Canada, as well as Brazil. No news yet from the African continent (uh, where is that?). Debates over the utility of face masks and gloves, shortage of gloves because most of the world’ supply is made in the Wuhan region, epi-center of the outbreak, abound. Ah, how we are discovering the fragility of globalization and the vaunted Ricardian specialization of labor. The integrated world is indeed integrated.
Living out in the English countryside feels somewhat isolated and innocent of the contagion, but that is most likely illusory. However the rise of racist fear of the Chinese or Iranians does made me think of a much earlier period in human history: when the Europeans went to the Americas. According to Charles Mann’s magisterial scouring of archeological evidence in his 1412, disease brought over by the Europeans most likely wiped out 90 – 95% of the populations of these two continents. And what has been the historical memory of this? Its like it never happened. Who, us? What? The places were unpopulated, or scantily so! Only because most people had died of terrible causes, disease carried through populations up and down the land masses. We know that the vulnerability to disease was largely because there were no domesticated pigs and cows in the New World, to which (or whose, since they are sentient?) maladies much of the rest of the world had largely developed immunity.
Today, indigenous peoples from the Americas don’t point fingers at the European invaders as disease vectors, though they were. The spread of disease is still quite mysterious, and measures to prevent it remain, it seems to me, primitive and artisanal. Most likely, like in China, everyone entering any country should be subject to a temperature reading. Most likely all public and other transportation (planes), should be disinfected. Not much has been said about how transportation sector employees might be protected – the flight attendants, bus drivers and others who are expected to be of service through thick and thin. But all that is costly, just like the impact of the disease itself. Most likely, as is happening, large gatherings should be cancelled. Who pays is the issue, as usual.
Coronavirus is nothing like small pox, fortunately. Most people are either mildly affected or survive. The old and vulnerable may not, the poor on the street, most likely not. A form of triage one could say, that, again reflect the priorities of at least, US society, and probably that of the UK too. Under austerity in the UK around 150,000 beds in hospitals were cut to save money. And that is the tip of the iceberg. At least there remains an NHS, while in the US we are undergoing contortions to preserve private health care to make sure corporate providers continue to make profits on illness and only those who can afford care, receive it. Perhaps coronavirus will provide the right shock to the system?
One thing I can say about the British is that they know courtesy. It is quite remarkable that, generally, drivers respect each other’s existence. The proliferation of one-track and narrow roads made narrower by all the people needing to put their cars somewhere, has led to a kind of implicit rules of the road where people routinely pull over for one another volitionally. So reassuring, so nice. Of course one exercises caution as there might be an outlier! A surprising social activity was Veganuary, no meat eating in January to mitigate impacts on the climate. Veganuary was advertised at restaurants and in stores. I was invited to dinner and alerted it would be vegetarian, and what is more, dry. Apparently many people are dry in January as a compensation for over drinking during the holidays (though it is said there is a rebound in drinking in early Feb to make up for Jan). These habit changes show the enormous potential of how people’s behaviors can change, that much of our activities are driven by habit, by context, by expectations. But how do profound shifts occur? They can, they do, and coupled with other substantial changes, such as pricing fossil energy at its true cost, a lot could happen toward reducing human impacts on the planet, but this would have to happen in ways that don’t punish the least well off. . . and that are adopted by those who have the biggest footprints.
Another characteristic of the British is a huge culture of volunteering. It was the basis of the book by Richard Titmuss so long ago, The Gift Relationship (1970) which argued against paying for blood. His premise was that altruistic blood donation was superior to a commercial provision of blood on the grounds that donated blood is superior in blood quality, economic efficiency and moral value. Many medical articles supported this position. But beyond the specific issue of blood, he raised the question of ‘the gift’. This has been a subject of academic writing and much debate. Marcel Mauss, a cultural anthropologist wrote The Gift in 1925, where he showed the importance of relationships of reciprocity for social solidarity. Gift giving is an important part of building relationships. Even today, when heads of state visit one another, they bring gifts. Sadly, neoclassical economics with its deeply Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, can only think of gifts as ways to maximize one’s self interest. Maggie Thatcher did, famously say, there is no such thing as society, just individuals (or something to that effect). This despite an abundance of examples of the deeply embedded (dare I say) instinct of generosity that permeates sentient beings from birds, to insects, mammals, and humans. How we came to undermine this fundamental part of life’s success on the planet is rather astonishing. And, of course, the paradox of the volunteering altruism of the British and the UK being the birth-place of neo-classical economics is quite fascinating! To that extent, the UK may handle its coronavirus epidemic with some grace. But who knows.
