… as we knew it:
(1st draft 2014, edited and [c] 2020) Davd
I could state the day i learned of the End of the World as Saturday, July 26th, 2014. At that time, it was not fait accompli but destin en tren: I heard on CBC Radio News, that a highly contagious, lethal disease called Ebola, (with neither a tested vaccine nor a tested and effective treatment) had spread from Sierra Leone to Lagos, Nigeria—by commercial airliner.
In the days that followed, i heard that hospitals had been closed and shortly after, that national borders had been closed, In August, the World Health Organization declared an international emergency, forecasting that the epidemic would continue for months, and stating the death toll and infection rates were far higher than officially reported. Airlines cancelled flights to some affected countries. Some ports refused cargo shipments from affected countries. If September 11, 2001 was a “game changer”, so was the spread of Ebola beyond the wet tropical forests where its outbreaks had previously been confined.
The incubation period between infection and visible Ebola symptoms1 is “three to four weeks”, according to a physician who has practiced in Africa. A carrier of the disease can travel far and come into contact with many, many other people in three to four weeks, as a New York physician did—prompting new mandatory quarantine rules in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Ebola would be far easier to trace and “contain” if its incubation period were short—for instance, it wouldn’t likely be important to restrict cargo ship movement.
Quarantine is not cheap. Exclusion is cheaper—and the disease is frightening. From the WHO news items, i expected further restrictions on travel and cargo movement—and before Ebola became an influence on cargo movement, CBC News had mentioned a consultants’ report predicting less out-sourcing and more manufacturing in Canada. More recently, the Financial Post reported such a trend had begun before this year’s Emergencies were declared.
That 2014 Ebola outbreak was contained. The “novel coronavirus” disease whose Politically Correct name is “COVID-19”, was not. Before the spread of “COVID-19” was declared a pandemic, airline travel had increased (but not become as easy as it was before 1980) and so had cruise ship vacations. “Reshoring” — sourcing important products and commodities near by rather than far away — had become a reported economic trend, but tourism had not followed.
The Canadian, US and European populations were old in 2014 and older in 2019. The fraction of those populations in “care-facilities” had increased. When the pandemic spread out of control, cruise ships became prisons and “care-facilities”, death traps. It seems a safe statistical estimate, that the mean age of the Canadian, US, and European populations today, is slightly lower than it was at the beginning of this year 2020.
Will the mean ages of European, North-American, perhaps Japanese and a few other2 “developed” populations regain their recent highs and go higher? Not without population decline due to low birth rates. Less than six years separate the Ebola emergency from COVID-19. The more crowded the planet, the more easily contagious diseases can spread.
It may no longer be easy, or cheap, to ship “goods” around the world… much less to travel the world in person. The “Global Economy” in which all places could produce for all other places, probably never existed in its ideal form. Ebola could have told us, six yars ago, that that a world already less open to movement than a generation ago, was unlikely to regain even the incomplete freedom of movement it had at the beginning of this century.
Ebola’s first recorded airline trip is one date with which to “mark the end of the world of my student days”; September 11, 2001 is another. There is no single “day things changed” with which to mark the rise of “the Islamic State [of Iraq and the Levant]”3, but concerns over that “Islamic State” and its persecution of non-Muslims4, still threaten the peace which had prevailed between Islam and other faiths early in this century. If not somehow quieted by “mainstream Muslims”, the intolerance of these Sunni extremists will contaminate the reputations of other Sunnis especially and Muslims more generally—to what extent, i will not try to estimate.
The world was not an easy-going place as the summer of 2014 began; and it is far less easy-going in mid-2020. Perhaps it is worth while remembering an earlier decade when, in Canada, Europe, and the USA, the easy-going world still prevailed.
Being an old man, who as a young man traveled by airliner in the 1960s and 1970s, i can recall a world that i doubt anyone living will see again: In the 1970s, i could walk into an airport from the bus, “limo”, or subway, be on board an airplane in less than twenty minutes, and be in the air in twenty more5. I don’t believe any member of the “general public” has done that in this century.
I can recall driving into the United States from Canada with no more identification than my driving license (since i was the prudent sort, i carried my Canadian Citizenship card—but it was not required.)
“Where you from?”
“Thunder Bay, Ontario.”
“Where you going?”
“Stevens Point,. Wisconsin. There’s a conference there on small cities and I have a paper on the
program.”
“Any cigarettes or liquor with you?”
“Nope—you know even better than I do, that they cost less here than up in Canada.”
“OK, go ahead—have a good time.”
I doubt any ordinary Canadian will drive into the U.S.A. that easily in the remaining years of this 21st Century.
Since then, there were the Achille Lauro hijacking, the “airliner as bomb” hijackings of September 11, 2001, several public transit bombings in Europe, the killings of two Canadian soldiers who were going about routine nonviolent business, a gunman walking into Canada’s Parliament building, and consequent “heightened security” impositions on what was once considered ordinary freedom of movement. We were beginning to see the further restrictions implicit in Ebola, the “Islamic State”, the shooting-down of a Malaysian airliner over the Russian-Ukraine border region, (and some readers can name one or two more events that seem portentous to you) when the novel coronavirus triggered some qualitatively greater restrictions.
Between 1970 and now, that easy-going world came to an end, gradually, in ecological terms which I’ve described in a two-book review and my third “jobs” post. The Ebola epidemic was especially ecological in nature: As that physician put it, it is one of a handful of hemorrhagic fevers which have existed for a long time, in wet tropical settings far from civilization. They kill most of the people who contract them; so treatment must include rigorous isolation for safety’s sake; (and there is no reliably effective way to cure them). If not treated, they spread through a local population, kill a majority of that population, and then vanish out of sight for lack of new people to infect.
In 2014, for the first time of which i am aware, such a disease entered civilization… and began to spread by airliner. As the CBC News reported, the efforts to limit Ebola’s spread and then cure as many victims as possible while burying the rest where their corpses could not infect anyone, were drastic; and still it took months to stop that spread. The fact that the World Health Organization declared it an international emergency was one indication that many of those drastic measures were “in readiness” — and applied much earlier in this year’s more contagious but less deadly disease outbreak. By 2014, civilization spread far enough to admit a disease that could possibly kill a majority of the Earth’s human population. Perhaps it had spread far enough earlier, and during one or two previous Ebola outbreaks, civilization was lucky.
One could say the same thing about the Great Plague, also with some uncertainty>6. Duiker and Spielvogel (1994: 488-490) state that The Plague, which took bubonic and pneumonic forms, “reached Europe in October of 1347 when Genoese merchants brought it from the Middle East to the island of Sicily…. Usually, the diffusion of the Black Death followed commercial trade routes.” [488]
They report estimates that “the European population declined by 25 to 50 percent between 1347 and 1351.” [489] The plague recurred several times during the remaining years of the 14th Century and all of the 15th; and “recurrences … did not end until the beginning of the eighteenth century when a new species of brown rat began to replace the black rat.” [489-490] Trade had been active between Europe and Asia for many centuries; perhaps Europe had been lucky during one or more outbreaks of plague to the east of the Mediterranean Sea.
Europe, 700 years ago, could be called a world unto itself; and indeed Europeans called the Americas “the New World” during the centuries when these continents were being explored and colonized. The “high” medieval centuries [1000-13xx] had been a few degrees warmer than the previous three centuries, which were already slightly more friendly to agriculture than those immediately before them. The European population doubled between 1000 and 1300 [p. 300], then fell by 25 to 50 percent between 1347 and 1351. The world that was Europe in the High Middle Ages, came to an end.
Had European medicine been able to identify the cause and transmission patterns of plague, and had European rulers been able and willing to work together to contain it—the world that was Europe in the High Middle Ages, would have come to a different end. The commercial trade routes would have been closed, or strictly controlled, and freedom of movement would have declined sharply for those who had enjoyed it. Many fewer people would have suffered and died—but the Europe of the High Middle Ages would not have persisted in either case.
Ebola and now “COVID 19” confront us with a similar predicament. The easy-going mobility millions of us enjoyed from the 1960s through sometime in the 1980s, was already much degraded from those decades last year. It is now “visibly foolhardy”. Allowing Ebola to spread around the world could repeat the story of the Great Plague, perhaps with even higher death rates—so restrictions should be stricter rather than looser. (It was not until October 25th, the day after a New York physician had been diagnosed with Ebola after riding the New York subways here-and-there, going out bowling … that New York, New Jersey, and Illinois began requiring quarantine of all travelers from West Africa who had plausibly come in contact with the disease.)
It is too soon, for “COVID 19” at least, to say whether it can be extinguished in those parts of civilization it has invaded, nor what travel and commerce can be safely conducted if it persists. For now, the Precautionary Principle tells us to travel very much less and to be very careful about commerce involving the very many places where “COVID 19” is known to be. My expat son in Europe advised me to wash “fresh produce” like I wash dirty dishes, and I do7.
We should also remember that Ebola and “COVID 19” are not the only threats associated with easy mobility: H5N1 influenza has had repeated mention “in the news”, this century. I don’t pretend to know how many other diseases might be capable of reducing the human population of the earth by ten percent or more; the fact that “COVID 19” was not in public awareness six months ago, would seem to imply that other comparably dangerous diseases exist that simply haven’t manifest themselves lately.
In 2014 there was brutal persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims in Arab countries, particularly Northern Iraq and the adjacent part of Syria, Not long ago, Buddhists—who i had thought of as basically pacifist—persecuted Muslims in [Myanmar?]. Palestinian Arabs feel persecuted by the descendants of the Jews who survived the persecutions of Adolf Hitler. Uighur Muslims—and some Christians—feel persecuted by China. Ukraine and Russia are still not reconciled of old grievances; nor Russia and Chechnya. Many of you who read this can add one or more unreconciled conflicts to the list.
The world i enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s, may not have been “for real” in two distinct senses. Rather than having valid, substantial social existence, perhaps that easy-going world enjoyed only the tolerance of various peoples who, for a time, seemed to gain more than they lost by playing along. As the pay-off from raiding the storehouses of the Earth declined, which it did beginning more than a generation ago, so have declined the acceptance which people have given to things as they then were—and no replacement modus vivendi has yet emerged.
Epidemiologically, rather than being a safe planet for such freedom of mobility human and “cargo”, perhaps “Mother Earth” simply didn’t happen to show her deadly side for a while. Or perhaps, civilization has expanded past some ecological tolerance point, sometime since World War II, and “COVID 19” happens to be the latest manifestation of that loss of safety.
Perhaps a recent BBC forecast of drastic population decline is good news, or at least hopeful news. If the tone of the BBC article is negative, that seems to be because BBC’s writer assumed people would either hold full-time jobs or be cared for by others. I have seen some communities of men do better (monasteries specifically) with men as old as their 90s contributing according to their ability. A posting now about eight years old, sketched how a group of men could form a household with roughly the same social efficiencies.
There rather definitely was a belief, a notion widely held, that a global economic system was well along in development, which entailed and supported worldwide freedom of movement. I heard it preached on the radio and read about it on paper and on websites, as recently as last year; and i experienced the easy-going freedom of movement—but in the last century, not in this one.
You could say that global-growth world has died of “COVID 19”, or was already dead of Ebola, if you like metaphorical language; or you could say it was killed in one or many violent conflicts. In fact, it has been dying for decades. To pretend that world still lives, is dangerous folly. To expect that world to be restored, is wishful thinking at best. Ecologically, its successor need be a world with more skilled manual work and less globe-trotting, more prudence and less growth. There is work to do, much of it man’s work… and much of it satisfying. It is a world for frugal, efficient homebodies… like my grandfather and the Brothers i have met in cloister. They were happy men.
References:
Duiker, William J., and Jackson J. Spielvogel, 1994. World History. Minneapolis: West Publishing Co.
Wells, H. G. 1961: The Outline of History Book Club edition, vol, 2. Garden City, NY.
Notes:
