Category: covid-19

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

Perhaps the main question for those of us who are baffled by how we got stuck in the mess that is the corona event was asked by the German Professor Bhakdi: how could a society of educated people get it so wrong?

There is no single answer to this question but I sketched out my primary answer in post 10 which is that in late February-early March there was a battle in the public discourse between two competing narratives: the plague story or the flu story. For a variety of reasons, the plague story won. But that only changes the question to: how could a society of educated people convince themselves they were in a plague story when it should have been obvious they were in a flu story?

No doubt most people would reject the whole idea of a story. They would say their belief is ‘scientific’. Ironically, this is just another story and is, in fact, one of the founding myths of modern society: we are above stories; we are scientific.

This myth is no accident. We are still heirs to The Enlightenment which was in large part the battle between science and story in the form of the revolt against religion. It is no small irony that this movement began in the person of Isaac Newton who spent more time (apparently about a decade) trying to fix the inconsistencies in the Bible than he did working on science. Nevertheless, it was his work on planetary orbits that started a revolution. Newton’s genius is probably understood by fewer people nowadays than it was in his time. It was what we can call reductionist science. Specifically, in relation to calculating the motions of the planets, Newton was able to achieve this by simplifying the number of calculations involved through a series of brilliant assumptions. The method was reductionist because of all the things it explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) left out of consideration. It was only by reducing the number of variables that the calculations could be solved.

To say that this approach was revolutionary is possibly an understatement. All serious thinkers from that time on wanted to be reductionists. Philosophers such as Kant were inspired to create great systems of philosophy while scientists got to work creating powerful generalisations that were testable and reproducible. The idea was to simplify everything down to what could be calculated. This allowed predictions to be made and rules to be generated. Those rules that could be relied on to produce results. One of those results was the creation of society as we know it, a society based on what I will call, using the title from the final episode of Kenneth Clark’s wonderful 1969 TV series Civilisation – Heroic Materialism.

Heroic Materialism implies reductionist science but is mostly about the industrial revolution which, although predicated on that science, also had its own momentum in the development of technology and the relentless ramping up of capitalism as the organising principle of society. This eventually led to the radical re-shaping of our world in railways, tunnels, roads, cars, bridges and skyscrapers. In science, it culminated in a giddy period toward the end of the 19^th century where scientists firmly believed that before long the whole world would be explicable in terms of generalisations and calculations. Everything would be predictable. Everything would be within the control of man.

It was around this time when the breakthroughs in infectious disease also started to be made. As with the increasing control man had over his environment, it seemed that for the first-time real inroads could be made in relation to disease which, until then, had been seen as simply an inevitable part of life. Improvements in water quality, sewerage, general sanitation and, of course, vaccines led to a massive reduction in mortality from infectious disease. These gains continued up until around the late 1960s when the US Surgeon General in 1967 declared it time to close the book on infectious disease and to start to address the growing issue with chronic illness.

No wonder then that people at the time were optimistic. We now look back on that enthusiasm and optimism with gentle mockery because we know all too well what came next. The world wars, where the machines of the industrial revolution were used to create human misery on an almost unimaginable scale. The atomic bomb where for the first-time man appeared to have the power to destroy not just himself but the whole planet. And the environmental degradation which had always gone hand in glove with the industrial revolution but which became an immediate fact of daily life.

It’s astonishing to think that, in some of the largest cities in the world, smog used to cause mass death. In a four day period in London in 1952, somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people died from a ‘killer fog’. In Los Angeles around the same time, the smog was so bad that schools were closed for a whole month. New York and other cities had similar incidents. As with the health crises of the 19^th century, this led to push back, this time in the form of the nascent environmentalist movement which played the same role that the romantics played in relation to the beginning of bourgeois ascendancy at the start of the industrial revolution i.e. a kind of fairly common sense critique to things that seemed absurdly bad and yet nobody really paid attention to. This seeming indifference to suffering had been a part of heroic materialism since the start as witnessed by the large numbers of deaths on big projects and the general misery and squalor in which working class people lived during much of the 19^th century in Britain and elsewhere.

It was around the middle of the 20^th century that the era of great progress started to come to an end. There was still the moon landing to come and some last strains of optimism, including the statement in 1954 that the rolling out of nuclear power would produce electricity that was ‘too cheap to meter’. Unfortunately, that cheap power never showed up. Neither did our flying cars or our hoverboards. Those failures, usually covered up in the form of jokes and light cynicism, have become ever more pressing in recent times. Let’s take the issue of health. In the last several decades, there has been essentially no further reduction in infectious disease mortality despite more money being spent on the issue. The US Surgeon General in 1967 was right. All the easy gains had been made. He was also right in saying that we should focus on combating lifestyle disease but that hasn’t happened. In recent decades there has been a relentless rise in cases of diabetes and other lifestyle illnesses leading to the fact that, for the first time in generations, average life expectancy has declined in the West.

On the economic front, things have also been going backwards. In the 1970s, the average family could live fairly comfortably on a single wage. Nowadays that would be impossible in most western nations. I addressed these economic issues in post 6 so I won’t repeat them here except to say that they have now become a political reality in many western nations as evidenced by both Trump and Brexit.

Those who still want to talk up heroic materialism nowadays usually do so in relation to what we can call globalisation. For example, the increased expenditure on western medicine in Africa and, of course, the big one: China. If ever there was a poster child for heroic materialism, it would be modern China. We’ve heard all about the number of people pulled out of poverty there. We’ve also heard about the environmental degradation too. As usual, the two go hand-in-hand. Nevertheless, China is the big example to show that heroic materialism can still deliver the goods.

I wonder if the corona event isn’t partly driven by a desire to see heroic materialism once again deliver the goods here in the west. I touched on this in post 9 of this series but I think I’ve now realised that there is something larger at stake. The reason we needed heroics and heroism was precisely because heroic materialism has been failing to deliver for quite some time. Thus, no sooner had the phrase ‘flatten the curve’ become known than we heard about how we had to ‘smash the curve’; a call to heroism. What if we needed a ‘win’? What if the stagnation of the last several decades has created a kind of spiritual malaise that needed an outlet? Simple pragmatism wasn’t going to cut it in this case. We needed something more. In fact, pragmatism in general has been cast aside and we are in a weird kind of twilight zone where nothing else matters but the virus. Economic considerations, psychological issues, even the business of sending children to school has all become subservient to that one end. This obsessive focus is a prime feature of both scientific reductionism and heroic materialism. It is also a feature of James C. Scott’s high modernist intervention; a type of intervention predicated on bureaucracy.

It is probably hard for us to believe nowadays, but the organisational type of bureaucracy was once seen as a big advance and also came to the fore during the optimism of the end of the 19^th century. Bureaucracy was seen as a kind of machine that ran on rules rather than the old systems of cronyism and nepotism. Just like reductionist science, corporations and bureaucracies owe their power and efficacy to focus. In the case of a corporation, it means reducing all discussion down to profit and loss. Whatever else can be said about that, it gives a clear and somewhat objective way to resolve issues within the organisation. The same goes for bureaucracies. Of course, we’ve all had the experience of having to deal with a bureaucracy that’s too busy focusing on the thing that it thinks matters and is unable to focus on the thing that we think matters. And we all know the stories of corporations so focused on the bottom line that they pollute the environment or even sacrifice human life as a consequence. There are drawbacks to focus. The big bureaucratic interventions described by Scott featured bureaucracies focused on simplistic metrics who were unable to respond to real world feedback.

The corona event represents just that kind of old-fashioned, bureaucratic intervention that we’ve seen fail time and again. Just like those interventions, it focuses relentlessly and exclusively on a single metric: infections. No surprise, of course, that it has been run out of the public health bureaucracies which are just the kind of organisations to fall into that kind of error. In the public and in the media, the underlying story is the naïve germ theory which is a reductionist story in the old-fashioned sense. It reduces everything down to the virus. Nothing else matters.

So, another way to frame the question about the corona event is: why have we lapsed back into the kind of high modernist, reductionist, bureaucratic mindset that almost the entire 20^th century showed us does not work?

I think part of the reason is that our governments are still constructed in that way. They still operate through bureaucracy and so they must translate the world into terms that a bureaucracy can handle. In this case, infections. But I think it’s also true that the public reverted back to the thing that we think constitutes our civilisation i.e. heroic materialism seen in the form of reductive science. We still believe in heroic materialism. We still need to believe in it. We have to because we have no other story about what our civilisation is. This was a point that Clark made back in 1969. Heroic materialism is the only story we have about what we are. The whole point of our civilisation is that we can smash a virus. So, that’s what we must do.

If I’m right, then we are in for an interesting period because, to use a well-known meme: one does not simply smash a virus. Just like the high modernist interventions of the past, the simplifying model does not work in the real world and we are about to find that out again the hard way.

I expect governments will try everything they can to get the vaccine because that’s the only way to end this story properly. However, a vaccine is highly unlikely to the provide the closure that will so desperately be desired. There are all kinds of ways this can go wrong. For starters, we may never get a vaccine or the vaccine may take years. If the vaccine gets rushed through, there may be side effects. Professor Bhakdi has warned of possible auto-immune diseases as one possible outcome. Then there is the question of whether the vaccine will even work at all. Then there is the fact that the amount of attention placed on this vaccine will be enormous, especially if governments try to make it mandatory. As a result, any negative side effects are likely to be well publicised. If pharmaceutical companies get legal waivers for those side effects, the blowback will go straight to government.

That’s just the vaccine part of the story. The economic effects, still yet to really be felt, would have to be enormous at this point. Once again, it seems the only option governments are going to have is to print money to try and get spending back to where it was. Will that work? How are borders going to be re-opened again? How is international travel going to happen? There are stories of vaccine passports and similar measures but they represent a tax on all travel and economics 101 says that when the price goes up the demand goes down. What does globalisation look like if people can’t travel around?

There is an idea popular among certain groups that we can simply detach globalisation and return to national heroic materialism. That might be possible in some places although I think people underestimate how complex global manufacturing has become and how hard it would be to unwind. There is talk of massive infrastructure spending to get the economy going. And no doubt there will be other schemes. Even if we were to achieve this to some level of success, is it something that people could be optimistic about? Is what we really need more roads, more bridges, more tunnels? Here in Melbourne I can say quite categorically we do not. We’ve been building plenty of those for the last two decades and it hasn’t made things any better.

It’s hard to see how the corona event ends well and keeps the belief in heroic materialism going. Maybe it’s time once again to try a re-evaluation of the whole concept.

Reductive science, bureaucracy, corporations get their power mostly from focus. You ignore ‘non-essential’ factors and concentrate only on what produces the result you are looking for. But focus has drawbacks among which are the possibility that you don’t really want the result you are looking for and that you might get some other results you didn’t think about. Once again, I refer to Richard Feynman because he told one of the most poignant stories about the problems with focus, specifically in relation to the development of the H Bomb at Los Alamos.

The initial reason given to the scientists for the development of the bomb was to beat the Germans to it. But, after the Germans surrendered in May 1945, the scientists kept working on the bomb even though that initial reason was no longer valid. It simply didn’t occur to anybody to stop. They were too close to the finish line and everybody wanted to get the result. They got a result, of course: the bomb got dropped on Japan. Feynman, like many others at that time, went into a deep depression for a couple of years afterwards firmly convinced that humans would destroy themselves with the bomb. He told of how he lamented that they didn’t cancel the project when the Germans surrendered. That they didn’t de-focus and re-evaluate what they were doing.

This kind of error is exactly what James C. Scott talked about in relation to high modernism. It is the same error committed by corporations which focus exclusively on profit at the expense of everything else. We are committing exactly the same error right now with an obsessive focus on ‘infections’ at the expense of every other consideration.

I have already mentioned one body of work which dealt with these kinds of errors, Gerald Weinberg’s General Systems Thinking. Weinberg’s solution to excessive focus is quite straightforward: you must allow multiple perspectives to be heard. You must be able to de-focus as well as focus. To step back and see the bigger picture. Indeed, you must force yourself to do so in order that you don’t fall into just these kind of traps. You must also be aware of what you are simplifying by stating your assumptions and doing what Feynman suggested: trying to prove yourself wrong or at least thinking about if you could be wrong. Ideally, a functioning civil society in a democracy should achieve these outcomes through public discourse.

Weinberg’s work was practical in nature but around the same time there were also more philosophical challenges to heroic materialism and these came from within science itself.

In her wonderful book, The Myths we Live By, Mary Midgley talks about how the Enlightenment ideal of the social contract was influenced by the physics of that time. The notion of solitary, self-contained, even selfish individuals in the political realm was an analogue to the focus on atoms as the basic particles of existence. These ideas continued right through Darwin with his emphasis of competition in nature and into works like Dawkins with his selfish gene. Is it a coincidence that with the lockdowns during the corona event we have all been reduced back down to solitary, self-contained, atomistic creatures in our own homes? Our Enlightenment social contract has been suspended on the basis that we are all now potential disease carriers. Is it also a coincidence that our naïve germ theory has the exact attitude to viruses and bacteria that Dawkins has about genes i.e. as ruthless gangsters; selfish, brutish, pernicious.

Of course, physics hasn’t been concerned with atoms or particles for over a hundred years. The idea that individual particles are fundamental is no longer valid there. It looks like microbiology will eventually get to a similar place. We now know that viruses and bacteria are not necessarily the enemy and that we are in fact reliant on some of them for our health and well-being. Modern science is showing us that connections and relationships are at least as fundamental as ‘objects’ and, in fact, the whole idea of an object independent of an observer doesn’t make much sense. If Enlightenment physics influenced Enlightenment political thought, modern science should be able to prompt for a re-evaluation of our own politics and our own world view. However, that may not be so easy because it’s not just heroic materialism that is at stake.

As I discussed in post 8, modern findings in microbiology challenge longstanding beliefs in the west over the separation of man from nature. Midgley notes that this antipathy to nature has roots in Christianity and specifically in the battle fought between the church and nature religions at different points in its history. It’s also the case that for much of western history, nature has been the equivalent to chaos. It was, by definition, the thing which could not be understood. That’s why we spent so much time star gazing because at least the sky offered a regularity and objectivity that was reassuring. The earth did not and, in any case, the idea of the earth as inherently degraded or sinful also has deep roots in Christianity.

It wasn’t until breakthroughs in geology and then the Darwinian revolution that our perspective started to change and we could try and make sense of nature from within science. By explicitly positing the relation between humans and animals, Darwin also began to breakdown the longstanding belief in humans as something apart from nature. This was, indeed, what the romantics had already been getting at, in particular Rousseau. But the romantics lost the argument and we chose heroic materialism instead. It wasn’t until the mid-20^th century, when the drawbacks of heroic materialism had become unavoidable, that there was another re-evaluation and I have mentioned one exponent of that, Gregory Bateson.

Bateson, with his work Mind and Nature, was trying to find the pattern which connects us back to the nature in a philosophical sense, an idea that had already found popularity among the hippie movement and which was a deliberate attempt to address some of the problems of heroic materialism. Similarly, there were works such as the Gaia hypothesis formulated by James Lovelock and (microbiologist!) Lynn Margulis which also put man within ‘nature’ as a complex system rather than apart from it. It’s strange to think that our reliance on nature had to be deliberately recognised but it seems that for most of history humans had spent so long struggling just to survive that we had viewed nature as at least without inherent value and even as an enemy. This idea still persists and it’s not going to be easy to get over it.

“We need to get rid of the notion that all natural things are valueless in themselves, merely pretty extras, expendable, either secondary to human purposes or actually pernicious. That notion is so fearfully misleading that we must ditch it somehow, even though we don’t yet have a perfectly clear map of the ideals that we shall need to put in its place.” (The Myths We Live By, p. 174)

Of course, this doesn’t mean over-romanticising nature which was arguably one of the reasons the romantics and the hippies failed to provide a viable alternative. Somewhere between the blind domination of heroic materialism and an excessive worship for nature there should be a pragmatic place to recognise that we are a part of the planet and not separate from it. In theory, the environmentalist movement of the 20th century was aiming at something like that but it was bought out by financial interests and what counts for the environmental movement these days is nothing more than heroic materialism in disguise.

So, that’s where we are. We still don’t have anything to put in place of heroic materialism. The lessons of the 20^th century still haven’t seeped through into the general culture. In fact, I would argue that globalisation was the re-assertion of heroic materialism as our cultural paradigm. In truth, it was at least partly a way to get around the awkward fact that heroic materialism had stopped delivering in the west. I spoke in post 6 of what has been happening in Melbourne for the last couple of decades. It is, in fact, a kind of resurgence of heroic materialism. We have built skyscrapers, highways, tunnels, bridges, desalinisation plants and roads. Nothing fundamentally different from what we were doing a hundred years ago. When viewed this way, the corona event is not that surprising. It’s the continuation, perhaps even the re-assertion of heroic materialism as the dominant paradigm. If, as I suspect, the story of the corona event is not brought to a satisfactory close, we may just see the desire for alternative stories once again.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

In post 7 in this series I showed that words are important and that, especially when dealing with the difference between scientific and folk language, they can make all the difference between a correct understanding and an incorrect one. In this post, I want to talk about how our stories affect our understanding of events.

This is what I was hinting at in the last post around the difference between the germ theory and the terrain theory. Those function as explanations in a scientific sense, but they are also stories whose different structures lead to different understandings of what is going on. Stories, and language in general, have these underlying structures that determine functional roles. That is why sometimes you know what somebody is going to say before they’ve even said it. You have intuited the structure of the sentence or story and this structure limits the possible options available. With enough knowledge of your conversation partner and their worldview or habits of speech it is not that hard to guess what they are going to say.

An example of how story structure can guide understanding can be seen from how segments of the Christian community have had a discussion of whether the corona event represents the “end times” plague that is predicted in the Bible. That might sound ridiculous to us who don’t share the underlying assumptions of that community. Nevertheless, for them it is a real issue and the reason it is an issue is because, within their interpretation of the Bible, there is a part about an end times plague. There is a gap in the story waiting to be filled.

This filling in the gaps is not limited to stories. It goes to very fundamental levels of human perception. For example, in the visual field, the amount the eye is actually ‘seeing’ at any one time is very small. The brain fills in the rest. Same with audio perception where bass frequencies can be completely removed from a signal but the listener can still intuit the bass from the overall audio pattern. The job of philosophy and science is to make you be explicit about your thinking so that you don’t automatically fill in the gaps but inevitably even science and philosophy get stuck in patterns and structures that solidify over time.

As a story writer myself (one my novels should be showing on the right on your screen right now if you want to have a look at my work) I am well acquainted with the structure of stories within the western tradition. Coming up with a story that isn’t cliched is a difficult task and one that is failed by many writers. We’ve all had the dreary experience of knowing in advance what is coming in a movie or book. The job of a good storyteller is to hide the underlying structure from the listener or reader so that they don’t know what’s coming.

In real life, the stories that guide our understanding of the world are mostly subconscious and this leads to a great deal of useless disagreement between people who think they are arguing about the details of such and such a thing when in reality they are both using different stories to explain what is going on. Most of us would be familiar with the experience of having a romantic relationship or close friendship break up and how we marvel at the fact that we could have been so blind about the other person. We assumed we were sharing the same story about what was happening but it turned out that was not the case. We were bickering over details without getting to the root of the problem. The same is true of the corona event. Much of the disagreement over details just hides a deeper underlying disagreement about what sort of story we are in. That story is the story of plague.

The plague story is quite literally one of the oldest known to man. Plague stories are also as good as universal and so will cut across cultures to a large extent. That is why the corona event could truly be a global story because citizens all around the world can understand such a story. A comparative analysis of the differences between such stories across cultures would be a fascinating read. But for our purposes here, I’m just going to take a few well-known plague stories from western culture and tease out the underlying structure. We’ll then use that same structure to analyse the corona event.

Let’s begin with the story I mentioned in the last post: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Note, that although I present the story elements in a fairly linear fashion that corresponds to the way the story was told, the order is not exact. This shouldn’t really matter for our purposes. Here are the main elements of the story:-

Role in the story	Journal of the Plague Year
The forewarning or pretense of trouble	Rumours of plague in Holland
The purported origin of the disease	Italy, The Levant, Cyprus, Turkey (nobody really knew)
The disease arrives nearby	Long Acre
Ignoring the potential risk	The rumours spread but are not taken too seriously. People went about their lives
Numbers start to go up	Bills of mortality from each parish show increased deaths some of which are put down to plague. This was a hot topic of conversation among the public
Authorities take some measures but downplay the overall threat	Shutting down of public performances, various other small measures
Some people flee	A lot of people flee. Mostly the rich. Defoe can’t decide whether to get out or stay to defend his business. His brother leaves
Predictions of complete ruin	Defoe goes into some detail about astrologers and shamans and priests telling the public the end is nigh
Distrust of government/statistics	Rumours that the bills of mortality were being doctored and the number of deaths miscounted
The government finally takes stronger measures	Officials to visit houses to inspect the sick, watchmen put on duty, various other measures announced
Sick people quarantined	In their homes
The disease spreads and people become desperate	Many stories of people escaping their houses, bribing guards, threatening them with violence etc.
Government ups the ante in response	It’s not clear whether London on the whole was closed, but each borough in London had closed its gates to travel and it seems the residents of each borough were policing their own borders
People breaking the rules are denounced	Defoe refers to this offhand although he has compassion for those trying to flee
Everyday life is changed	Defoe tells the story of him visiting one of the mass burial pits out of curiosity. Various other stories of people dying en masse and the effects on civilians
People endure passively (or not)?	Not in this case. It seems people tried anything and government was mostly powerless to stop them
Medical/Expert response	Quacks selling fake cures
The Plague ends	The plague retreats and people are jubilant. Even though the risk is not completely gone nobody cares any more and parties and celebration ensue. People who left come back to London.

This story seem to me to capture the basic elements in the plague story and this is probably very close to the most basic story of pandemic throughout history and across cultures. We will see how the other stories start with this template and add elements. Let’s move to the next which is Albert Camus’ The Plague, published in 1947. This story is close enough to modern times to be a kind of bridge between the old world and ours but still belonging more to the old. Let’s have a look:-

Role in the story	The Plague
The forewarning or pretense of trouble	Rats dying in the streets en masse
The purported origin of the disease	Not really discussed except in the surprise that bubonic plague should appear in the modern world
The disease arrives nearby	The porter in Dr Rieux’s apartment block dies. Several other people die with similar symptoms
Ignoring the potential risk	Rumours of an epidemic spread among the people. Dr Rieux plays them down as it’s too early to know. Life goes on as normal
Numbers start to go up	Hospital beds are full. Death statistics start to be compiled by town clerk. They are increasing
Authorities take some measures but downplay the overall threat	Dr Rieux goes to the authorities but they are wary of panicking the public. Announcements with some basic advice are made
What to call the disease?	They talk of calling it ‘plague’ but that is considered a big move that will startle the public. Other ideas are mentioned and eventually no specific disease is named in public at this time
Some people flee	A criminal in the story sets up a people smuggling business once the town gates are closed
Predictions of complete ruin	Doctor Rieux predicts up to half the town could die. A priest starts to tell the people they are getting what they deserve. Local printing firms start printing prophecies which are eagerly consumed by the public
Distrust of government/statistics	Not that evident. The town is locked down and the disease hits before any real discussion
The government cracks down	Town is closed off by official order (this happens relatively early in this story)
Sick people quarantined	Within the town, sick people are isolated in camps
The sickness grows and people become desperate	People shot trying to escape town. Violence and looting. People smugglers do good business
Government ups the ante in response	A curfew is imposed and martial law declared
People breaking the rules are denounced	The people smuggler is eventually captured
Everyday life is changed	Funerals rushed. Normal life overturned
People endure passively	The feelings of separation and despondency are a big theme
Medical/Expert response	A serum is produced but it doesn’t work. Some PPE is brought in for the medics
The Plague ends	The plague retreats and people are jubilant. The town is reopened

There are two primary differences between Camus and Defoe that I think are worth highlighting. Whereas, Defoe is telling the story from the point of view of a citizen, Camus is telling it from the point of view of a doctor and it is this which gives us a slightly different insight because we see the politics of the plague directly. We see that local authorities don’t want to startle people and create public panic. This is key in the debate about what to call the disease as everybody knows that calling it plague will set off associations of great danger. The doctor wants to call it plague because he wants to err on the side of caution and take extreme measures. The authorities decide against it initially in the hope that some small measures will help. As nobody really knows how bad things will get, this seems prudent. Eventually, they are overruled by the central government who orders the town to be closed off and at that point the public is in no doubt about the severity of the situation.

In this story we also see the first strands of modern medicine at play in the development of a serum. However, this serum doesn’t prove effective and this theme doesn’t play much of a role in the story.

Camus presents what I would call a humanist version of medicine. The powerlessness of the doctors is foregrounded and specifically their powerlessness to ease suffering and prevent death. The doctor becomes simply a witness to death and suffering and such stories are therefore really about the human condition in a broader sense. The doctor is not a hero in the sense that he can save his patients.

As we are about to see, that changes in the modern stories around plague as told in Hollywood movies. Let’s look first at the movie – Outbreak. This is not really a plague story but a ‘save the world from the plague’ story so not all the structural elements are met but it’s worth looking at as it features a virologist as hero.

Role in the story	Outbreak
The forewarning or pretense of trouble	A virus is discovered in the Congo thirty years ago. The US army tries to cover it up by destroying the camp where it is found
The purported origin of the disease	Monkey
The disease arrives nearby	People die in Boston. A CDC official investigates
Ignoring the potential risk	A brigadier earlier dismisses the risk of the virus spreading
Numbers start to go up	A number of people in a movie theatre in California are infected
Authorities take some measures but downplay the overall threat
Some people flee
Predictions of complete ruin
Distrust of government/statistics
The government cracks down	The army quarantines the town in California and imposes martial law
Sick people quarantined	The whole town is quarantined
The sickness grows and people become desperate
People breaking the rules are denounced
Government ups the ante in response	The army is planning to bomb the town and kill all the citizens!
Everyday life is changed
People endure passively
Medical/Expert response	The virologist comes up with a cure but is arrested by a corrupt army officer who wants the disease as a bio-weapon
The Plague ends	The virologist stops the army from bombing the town, has the corrupt army officer arrested and saves the day with the cure

In this story the public is entirely backgrounded and the main battle is between the virologist and a crooked army officer. This is not a humanist story but an action hero story where the virologist is fighting against corrupt power in the form of the army. The virus itself is a source of power in that it can be used as a weapon which, of course, was one of the alternative origin stories of the corona event (the virus escaped from the lab in Wuhan).

Now we move to the 2011 movie – Contagion. Full disclosure, I have not seen the movie. I tried to watch it but turned it off after ten minutes. It is clearly a piece of propaganda and I don’t like to be so blatantly manipulated while watching a movie. I try to avoid conspiracy theories but it’s very difficult in this case given that the movie was funded by billionaire Jeff Skoll who has been doing pandemic prevention even longer than Bill Gates. Anyway, I have pieced this together from the plot summary on Wikipedia. Let’s have a look:

Role	Contagion
The forewarning or pretense of trouble	After a Hong Kong business trip, an American woman travelling back to Minneapolis gets sick. We also see people getting sick in Hong Kong, London and other places. Somehow, the WHO already knows the cases are linked right from the start
The purported origin of the disease	Bat via pig
The disease arrives nearby	Protagonist’s wife and son die in Minneapolis
Ignoring the potential risk	The protagonist demands to know how his wife died. The doctor says it could be any number of things and they’ll never know
Numbers start to go up	We see other deaths not just in the US but around the world
Authorities take some measures but downplay the overall threat	A CDC officer struggles to get resources from Minneapolis authorities
Some people flee	A CDC official advises his wife to leave a city that is about to be quarantined
Predictions of complete ruin	Scientists predict global infection with a 25% mortality rate
Distrust of government/statistics	Conspiracy theorist blogger
The government cracks down	Cities quarantined
Sick people quarantined	Entire cities are quarantined
The sickness grows and people become desperate	Looting and violence
People breaking the rules are denounced	The conspiracy theorist blogger is arrested
Everyday life is changed	Yes
People endure passively	Sort of. Violence and looting too.
Medical/Expert response	Various experts involved in the story. The WHO and CDC coordinate the response of epidemiologists, virologists etc. A CDC scientist creates the vaccine.
The Plague ends	Based apparently on a single test, a vaccine is shown to “work” and rolled into mass production by the CDC. (This is no doubt a tip of the hat to the story of Louis Pasteur saving the boy from rabies which was also just a single test)

Contagion follows on from Outbreak in foregrounding the role of the experts as heroes. In fact, it goes a step further and explicitly draws the everyday citizen as not having enough understanding of the science to know what is going on. A number of elements in the story are so spookily like what has happened with the corona event that you can easily see why conspiracy theorists have had a field day with it eg. the bat origin element. And, of course, the conspiracy theorist character in the story is also a peddler of a ‘fake’ cure (hydroxychloroquine anyone?).

The reader should note that I am just a blogger and so must be a conspiracy theorist. May I also take this opportunity to announce Dr Simon’s Patented Cough Syrup which makes corona go away for just $19.95. Buy now!

In any case, we can see that Contagion is a true plague story in the structural sense.

Ok. Let’s now take a look at the corona event as plague story.

Role	Corona event
The forewarning or pretense of trouble	News stories from Wuhan
The purported origin of the disease	People eating bats, seafood market with exotic animals
The disease arrives nearby	Local infection statistics based on PCR tests run by public health bureaucrats around the world. As a result you knew exactly when the first ‘case’ came to your country/city/town.
Ignoring the potential risk	The relative lack of interest in the West about what was going on in China. Very little actual news in January and early-mid February
Numbers start to go up	I think it’s fair to say the most detailed numbers ever shown to the public in history (but note that ‘detailed’ is not the same as ‘informative’)
Authorities take some measures but downplay the overall threat	The period in late Feb-early March where politicians were trying to talk the public out of a lockdown. Borders with China and other countries were closed
Some people flee	This happened in Wuhan most obviously. Also, stories from Italy and other western European countries where workers from Eastern Europe went home before the borders were closed. Stories of rich people going to their holiday homes circulated in many different places including here in Melbourne
Predictions of complete ruin	Neil Ferguson’s doomsday model, references to the Spanish flu of 1918
Distrust of government/statistics	Has been ongoing throughout. Depending on which side you’re on, the numbers have either been over-inflated or under-reported
The government cracks down	Lockdowns implemented in almost all countries in the West. China locked down Wuhan earlier. Other governments elsewhere took various measures
Sick People quarantined	This varied from country to country but most places saw general quarantine of the sick and the healthy
The sickness grows and people become desperate	Again, depends on where you are. Outside of the hotspots, it seemed nothing much was happening. Whatever sickness there was took place in hospital and was not visible to the general public except through news reports. To the extent that desperation was felt it would have been on a person-by-person basis. There was no general desperation. No violence and looting or social breakdown, even in the hotspots
People breaking the rules are denounced	Social media and normal media has been full of such denunciation since day one
Government ups the ante in response	Again, this will vary from place to place. It’s certainly been true here in Melbourne where we are now likely to have the longest and hardest lockdown of any city in the world (although not because the public is out of control)
Everyday life is changed	To state the bleeding obvious. Interestingly, we heard stories of mass burial pits in China and Iran and, of course, the New York pits where the homeless are buried which hark back to Defoe’s story
People endure passively	Yes. There was nowhere to flee to in this case
Medical/Expert response	Makeshift hospitals constructed, big deal about PPE gear, stories of intubation gone wrong, stories of overflowing hospitals of various degrees of veracity, quarantine measures, various cures and treatments suggested, epidemiological models, endless streams of articles in scientific journals, experts appearing in media, blogs, podcasts, public health bureaucrats giving daily briefings, the ongoing story of a search for vaccine etc etc etc
The Plague ends	??

Remember here that the scientific accuracy of any of the elements of the story is not relevant. All that is relevant is whether the story seems to be a plague story in the public discourse. The battle for control of the story happened in late February and early March. It was centered around the debate over whether corona was ‘just the flu’ or not. I still recall President Trump, for example, tweeting that it was just the flu and there was no cause for alarm. There was similar pushback from other politicians in Western countries. Ultimately, they lost that battle. By then, the ICTV had named a ‘new’ virus and the WHO had named a ‘new’ disease. The media used these new names so by definition it wasn’t the flu, it was ‘covid-19’. The media was also full of the infection statistics. Neil Ferguson’s doomsday model was doing the rounds. In short, too many elements of the plague story had been fulfilled and even the canniest politician would have known that the battle was over. Ironically, government trying to play down the plague is actually a key element of the plague story so even the pushback from government was evidence that we were in a plague story! In any case, once governments went to lockdown the matter was resolved beyond doubt.

Once we were officially in a plague story, people would use the structure of that story to interpret events. This doesn’t need to be done consciously and in fact would mostly be done subconsciously. It doesn’t matter whether you believe the story is ‘true’ in itself or you think it’s wise to take the plague story path because it’s better to be safe than sorry. Once the plague story is activated, it has the structural elements outlined above and people expect those to be fulfilled. Quarantines needed to happen. People breaking the rules needed to be denounced. The experts need to come to the rescue. All these things became necessary because they are implied by the structure of the story. It is for this reason that we must now have a vaccine because that is a very important part of the modern plague story. Currently, we have a vaccine-shaped hole that must be filled. To leave that hole empty would be like writing a sentence without

Conclusion

If, like me, you’ve had some very unusual conversations with people over the corona event, it’s almost certainly because you disagree over the application of the plague story. Arguing over details is not going to change minds at this point because what’s up for grabs is not this or that opinion but an entire explanatory framework. For those of us that think this is an incorrect application of the plague story, the measures taken seem radically and dangerously authoritarian. However, authoritarian actions are normal during a plague story and that is why people who are viewing events through that story don’t have a problem with such actions.

We can also now see which elements of the corona event separate it from other plague stories.

Firstly, it is the first truly global plague story to play out in real time (in real life, not in the movies). That was only possible by way of the internet and organisations like the WHO who were coordinating the matter. It was therefore also the first time we had simultaneous, coordinated quarantines around the world (mostly among Western countries). Given the global nature of the media nowadays, the MSM could fill in elements of the plague story that were missing from certain locations. Here in Melbourne in March and April there was really nothing happening so we were shown scenes from Italy and New York. Even in July, the 6 o’clock news on one of the major stations got busted using footage from Italy in March and pretending it current news from a local hospital.

Secondly, government and public health bureaucrats and also the media and most of the public have been using ‘infections’ as a proxy for actual illness even though statistics of actual illness show that 99% of people ‘infected’ are either asymptomatic or only mildly ill.

It is this element of the story that is truly novel and also absolutely crucial for how the rest of the corona event plays out. Even in the movie Contagion, it was disease that was foregrounded and, in fact, a big deal was made about showing death in the most grizzly fashion possible. With the corona event, the disease is backgrounded and all we hear about is the infection statistics even though the PCR test itself does not even prove an active infection. In Victoria, the Chief Health Officer has been misleading the public about issues such as false positives with the tests.

This has given conspiracy theorists fodder for their explanations. My take is that the PCR test machine was rolled out by the WHO over the last couple of decades and nobody really paid any attention to it. As the corona event ramped up, that machine went into action and nobody could stop it. The politicians could have pointed out that the tests were dodgy but that would raise the question why anybody allowed the machine to be built in the first place. Plus, as signatories to the WHO, each country was legally required to follow the process. Now that literally billions of dollars have been spent on those tests, there is no way that politicians can allow the truth about the tests to come out.

But the main problem with concentrating on infections instead of disease is that we cannot get out of the plague story that we are in. Infections will never get to zero due to false positives. The only way to ‘end the plague’ is to stop testing or have the public lose interest in the test results. Another way to look at it is to say that the plague can be extended indefinitely until a vaccine is produced (which is very convenient for the financial interests behind vaccine production).

How are we going to get out of the plague story that is the corona event? This mostly rests on the vaccine question. Politicians need the vaccine to exit the story ‘properly’. However, both the US and Europe may get to herd immunity before that happens. The question then is will the public lose interest in the infection statistics before the vaccine can be distributed? Here in Australia and New Zealand, the problem is very different. We can no longer get to herd immunity for political reasons. We are therefore reliant on the vaccine as the only way out.

Every good story needs an end. What will the end be for the corona event?

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

I mentioned in the last post how the government’s response to the corona event is a prime example of what James C. Scott calls a high modernist, top down, bureaucratic intervention. However, it is also my contention that governments did not want to go down that path. Rather, they were pressured into it by public sentiment that was stoked by the media and the financial interests that use the media to pursue their agenda. Some people have gone down the conspiracy theory route with the corona event and I can see why that seems true. My take is that a system had already been set in place through the WHO and the public bureaucracy. That system necessarily serves certain financial interests given the enormous sums of money involved. When the panic set in, governments were forced to use that system as it was the only game in town.

The fact that the system is a high modernist one is no coincidence because the modern medical and pharma industries are predicated on the naïve germ theory model, a simplified version of the science that is completely out of date with the findings of modern microbiology. High modernist interventions require simplified science because the bureaucratic organisational structure cannot handle complexity. Thus, such interventions will either try to re-shape the world according to the simplified model or simply ignore anything outside that model. The stubborn refusal of governments to allow any criticism of the measures undertaken during the corona event and the wilful exclusion of dissenting voices from the official public discourse are no coincidence. They are part of the pattern of a high modernist intervention.

It is also the case that much of the business model of the modern medical industry is predicated on naïve germ theory. This makes sense for a variety of reasons. One of the main ones is that the germ theory puts the problem outside of you and in the germ while the terrain theory looks for the problem inside of you. If you are sick and you go to a terrain theorist for a diagnosis, they will look for a problem with you. Are you not eating correctly? Are you not exercising? Do you drink too much? Smoke too much? Are you overweight? Are you stressed from too much work? Having found such problems, they will tell you to fix them. You’ll have to exercise. You’ll have to stop eating so much. You’ll have to stop drinking. That’s going to take effort and willpower on your part and this effort and willpower is not trivial. It is easy to see why people would seek a different solution.

The germ theorist doesn’t look for the problem in you. They look for it in the virus or the bacteria. The germ theorist will have a ready-made solution that doesn’t require anything on your part except a trip to the chemist. Of course, sometimes medicine really is the best option, especially for acute illness. However, the modern medical industry now offers a pill even for illnesses such as high blood pressure which are clearly caused by lifestyle and whose obvious solution should be to change that lifestyle rather than take medication.

Another way to look at the difference between the germ theorists and the terrain theorists is that the terrain theorist gives you the power. They’ll tell you that your health is in your hands. With naïve germ theory, the power is in the hands of the doctor and the enormous medical and pharmaceutical industries that stand behind them. Taking care of your own health doesn’t make anybody any money but enormous sums of money are spent on visits to doctors and hospitals. How many of those doctor and hospital trips could be avoided if people were in better health? It’s probably not insubstantial. About 50% of people in our society have a chronic illness and it seems about half of those are related to lifestyle illnesses.

So, there’s an obvious business element to all this. But there is also a moral element to it and it’s this moral element that I want to talk about in this post. The moral element of germ theory involves at least a trust in the medical and pharma industries. But this trust expanded into something more during the corona event.

To my mind, one of the strangest things that happened early on was the spontaneous adulation heaped on the medical profession. In particular, the scenes in Britain were deeply weird. It became the custom at a certain time of day to go out your front door and join your neighbours in applauding the NHS. Doctors and nurses had apparently become the new football players or rock stars. We were told they were heroes.

Interestingly, a kind of hero worship has been part of germ theory right from the start and nowhere more pronounced than in the person of Louis Pasteur. It was not uncommon for Pasteur to also receive applause and standing ovations when he spoke at various conferences. Whatever his scientific merits, there is no doubt Pasteur sought to heighten that fame and adulation.

Antoine Bechamp, his terrain theory rival, did not. As a result, it was Pasteur who was favoured among the political class and was given various assignments funded by the state. This mostly involved going in to solve problems that farmers were having. For example, issues with the grape harvest or problems with disease among livestock. It seems most of Pasteur’s solutions failed and in particular his early attempts at vaccines killed many more animals than they saved. These failures look a lot to me like the failures described by James C. Scott and, indeed, Scott also spoke of the heroic and utopian elements in the high modernist schemes. Here was Pasteur as hero sent in to save the floundering farmers.

With the corona event, it seems that the public wanted a similar heroism.

This desire for heroism wasn’t just limited in the applause for the NHS in Britain. It manifested elsewhere too. Where I live in Melbourne, a mini cult has sprung up around the State premier who has repeatedly taken decisive action including locking down the city on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, I still remember the early days back at the start of March where he, like most political leaders, was accused of dragging his feet. He eventually got the message: the public wanted action. It wanted heroic measures. That’s exactly what he has given them since: firm, decisive action. The fact that the decisions made today are completely at odds with the decisions made a month or two ago doesn’t seem to matter. Consistency is not required. Just decisiveness.

This desire for authorities to intervene might sound so obvious to a modern reader that we forget that it’s still a relatively new thing that really took off after world war two with the massive expansion of the public bureaucracy. Prior to that there was a much more self sufficient ethic among the general public.

In his book, Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel DeFoe (the same guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe) describes the events of 1665 in London during the Great Plague. It is a fascinating read in light of the corona event. In particular, the first quarter of the book is relevant because it details the lead up to the London plague and the response of the public in anticipation of what was to come. That response was stunningly similar to what we saw in the early days of the corona event. With just a little effort to translate the actors of that time into their modern counterparts, you can see that very little has changed in the three and half centuries since Defoe’s day. Of course, back then, the panic was set off by death statistics and not by infection statistics and the geographical area was a London borough rather than a nation state. But the underlying psychology on the part of the public was incredibly similar.

There is, however, at least one striking difference: the people back then expected nothing from the authorities. The King left London at the first sight of trouble. He moved to Oxford and apparently paid no attention whatsoever to the plague or how it affected his people. This was seemingly not a problem among the public who did not expect that his majesty would lift a finger to help them. They had to help themselves. Where the local authorities intervened, the people would simply try and get around those interventions as best they could. In short, there is no heroism nor any expectation of heroism in Defoe’s account.

Of course, back in De Foe’s day there was no public health system and nobody who really could help you. The so-called doctors of the time were mostly quacks and you were better off spending your money trying to get supernatural help which at least didn’t make you any physically sicker than you already were. We, on the other hand, have a sophisticated medical system to come to your aid in the event of illness. The word ‘system’ is the key point here. A system is a collective. A system functions by itself. It is in some sense the opposite of heroism which is about an individual.

In early the days of the corona event, we were told the lockdown measures were in place to protect this system and prevent it from collapsing under a sudden spike in admissions. This was the ‘flatten the curve’ mantra. Politicians initially told us we could flatten the curve by basic measures that wouldn’t require a shutdown of society but there was a revolt against this idea and a demand for tougher and tougher measures. It wasn’t enough to just protect the hospital system. We had to do something more. We needed heroism to save the system.

This example of systems vs heroes is something I have seen in my professional life of building IT systems. Within the parts of IT where I have worked there is an active distrust of the hero mentality because the hero constructs a kind of system where they make themselves indispensable. There are good reasons for companies to not want to have heroes simply because it gives the hero too much power. If you are the only one who knows how a system works you can use that your advantage. It also makes the system that is the company unstable. If something happens to that person the system can grind to a halt.

I remember once sitting in a job interview where the candidate was a hero. He was asked the usual cheesy interview question of what he liked about his job and he said something like waking up in the middle of the night and getting the system back up and running. What he might have said was ‘I like building systems where I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night.’ He wasn’t offered the job. In that company we didn’t want heroes. We wanted system builders.

It’s probably because of this background that I always get a little suspicious when heroics are concerned. No doubt sometimes in life genuine heroics are required. The rest of the time, it seems to me that heroics are a cover for a poorly designed system.

Were our hospital systems poorly designed or, at least, not designed to handle the corona event? Did they need heroes to come and save the day? Obviously this will differ from country to country, but it seems that in most places the answer was a firm ‘no’. Almost everywhere that makeshift hospitals were constructed, they weren’t used. Apart from a couple of hotspots, most places have not seen hospitals overwhelmed. The models used to justify the construction of those makeshift hospitals were not the epidemiological models that I have spoken of earlier in this series. Rather, it was the models of Neil Ferguson and the like. The doomsday models. According to those models we needed action. According to those models, we needed heroism.

We got that heroism in a never before imagined lockdown of society that was supposed to flatten the curve. But that message quickly morphed into something else. It was no longer about saving the hospital system, it was about eliminating the virus and heroic efforts to get a vaccine. I haven’t heard any coherent explanation of why that has to happen. It’s certainly nothing to do with systems anymore. It appears to be pure heroics or pure theatrics. With this we return right back to Louis Pasteur only now he takes the form of Bill Gates. We are told society itself can no longer function as a system without a vaccine. Once again, germ theory and heroism fit together like hand and glove. Once again, we look all set for a high modernist grand plan.

Recall that one of the elements of James C. Scott’s high modernist intervention was that civil society must be made or kept prostrate. I can think of no better way to do that than locking people in their houses. Perhaps the high modernist dreamers saw their opportunity and took it. As society went into lockdown the heroes came out of the woodwork with their grand plans. Perhaps that was always part of the grand plan as the conspiracy theorists would point out. Either way we are now looking at just such a grand intervention. A vaccine for everybody in the world according to Mr Gates.

If a prostrate civil society is required for the enactment of such high modernist plans, one of the more interesting dynamics during the corona event is how civil society became self prostrating. Of course, the army and the police were used to keep people physically in their homes. But there has also been social pressure exerted on dissenters and this pressure took the form of a strange kind of call for anti-heroism. This call focused particularly on quelling dissent around the lockdown itself and also around the wearing of masks.

The reader can search the internet for many different examples of the memes that went into circulation. But the common underlying thread in many of those memes was to juxtapose the ‘hero’ against you, the lowly everyday citizen.

Here’s just one of countless examples where Mr T (the hero) puts you in your place courtesy of a bad bit of photoshop.

One of the memes that aimed to quell dissent around staying at home stood out to me. It went along the lines of: “Your grandfather had to fight a war. All you’ve got to do is stay home on the couch and watch television. Think you can handle that?”

Once again, we have the hero (your grandfather at war) and you who are simply asked to do, well, nothing. The irony in this is the fact that so many young soldiers back in the day couldn’t wait to go to war precisely because they wanted to leave home and go and have a heroic adventure.

The underlying message in all these examples is the same. What was required of you during the corona event was precisely not to be a hero. You just had to sit back and let the real heroes do the work. Is it a coincidence that this is exactly the form of the germ theory patient just doing what their doctor says? Is it a coincidence that a terrain theorist would say exactly the opposite: of course, you shouldn’t stay at home. You should go outside and get fresh air and vitamin D and stay active. You should mix with other people and keep your spirits up.

The fact that this clearing out of opposition from civil society apparently took place quite spontaneously via everyday people on social media is just another deeply weird component of the corona event. Just like the people clapping for the NHS in Britain, it seems everyday citizens needed no prompting. They knew the script already. In my opinion, the germ theory has actually become part of our modern collective subconscious. I don’t see any other way to explain the uniformity of action from disparate actors. The germ theory implies a hero doctor and a passive patient. So, we needed the public to play their role and be passive. In the meantime, the real heroes, the real high modernist schemers had moved into position.

At time of writing, we are looking right down the barrel of an epic high modernist ‘heroic’ intervention in our lives. It’s captured in that dreary bit of alliteration ‘the new normal’. Other wannabe heroes have come out of the woodwork with all kinds of ideas of how to re-shape society in accordance with whatever utopian ideal is in their heads. No doubt a lot it is just talk. But with civil society prostrate, now is the time to try your luck. To come back to my heroes vs systems distinction, we are no longer worried about the system. Society as a system now lies helpless on the operating table just waiting for the surgeon’s scalpel. It’s apparently time to operate.

Against the backdrop of this kind of heroism and anti-heroism that has played out during the corona event I would like to give my version of heroism as seen from the vantage point conveyed by this series of posts. The heroes that I see are the ones that have spoken out against the stifling consensus and at least given people some alternative framework by which to understand what has happened. To elucidate this heroism, I’m going to draw on what’s probably my favourite era of film: the film noir of the late 40s and early 50s.

The big, dumb, blunt interventions of James C. Scott’s bureaucrat high modernists remind me a lot of 80s action movies with their big, dumb, muscle-bound heroes running around with bazookas blowing the enemy to smithereens. That works OK in the movies where the bad guys are 100% bad and get exactly what they deserve. It doesn’t work in the real world. In the real world there is ambiguity and complexity. That ambiguity and complexity is far better captured by film noir. Unlike the 80s action hero, the classic film noir hero is a conflicted person with his own inner demons that are exacerbated by the social context in which he or she finds himself.

That hero is often juxtaposed against a rabid mob out to enact ‘justice’. This was a favourite trope of the German director Fritz Lang who had, after all, witnessed that exact dynamic play out as Hitler came to power. Naturally, mobs are not easy to reason with and it’s up to the protagonist to fight back against them.

One of the greatest of the film noirs is the movie Boomerang directed by Elia Kazan. It features exactly this dynamic of a conflicted protagonist trying to neutralise an irrational mob.

In the movie, a callous and cowardly murder has taken place in a small city in America. The townsfolk are horrified and demand the murderer be brought to justice immediately. However, the police have no good leads and results are not forthcoming. Frustration grows and political pressure is exerted on the chief of police to get results quickly. Still no good leads are found but eventually they come across a suspect whose alibi is weak and, although he maintains his innocence, they force a confession out of him.

The case goes to the district attorney who is a handsome, competent and popular man with a beautiful wife and a wonderful life ahead of him. The matter is as straightforward as can be. A suspect has confessed. Everybody in town wants him to be found guilty. All the district attorney has to do is run through the motions. But the district attorney is a man of honour. He checks the evidence and sees that it doesn’t add up. In a dramatic twist he declares that he believes the man innocent at which point he is taken aside by the powers that be and presented with a series of carrots and eventually sticks to get him to do what is wanted. His final choice is clear: he can pursue justice and have his life ruined or he can try the defendant, who will definitely be found guilty, and continue his rise through the ranks of the elite.

The heroism presented in this case is the heroism to pursue what you know to be right even though the society around you will forsake you. Anybody can follow along with what the mob wants especially when it calls you a hero. But the deeper heroism is to do what is right though you will be condemned for it.

The reason why this is specifically relevant in the case of the corona event is because most of the people working in the medical and scientific fields are compromised by the fact that they make their living mostly from government money. Indeed, the corona event has seen a flood of new money go into the biomedical fields. Money for vaccines, the money for the PCR tests, more money for hospitals and all the rest. This gives the people who work in those areas a very strong incentive not to speak out against what is happening. To speak out requires exactly the kind of bravery and heroism presented in the movie Boomerang. It’s to do what is right even though it will hurt your life chances.

One of the surprising and disappointing factors in the corona event has been the failure of the institutions in our society to provide at least one alternative viewpoint on what is happening. In Australia there has been absolutely nothing from opposition political parties, the mainstream media or the scientific and medical establishment. Apparently, we have a complete consensus here on the path forward even though it’s obvious that path forward has changed almost daily and our politicians are making it up as they go. We could barely muster a single dissenting voice that mattered. Lesser voices were of course quickly put down via the usual social media mob mentality that Fritz Lang would recognise.

Fortunately, in this age of the internet we are not restricted by national boundaries and so dissenting voices from other countries are available to us. One particular dissenting voice from overseas captured my attention: Professor Sucharit Bhakti, a professor of medical microbiology and apparently one of the foremost in Germany. Bhakti went public because he saw what was happening made no sense from a scientific point of view let alone a moral point of view. Why Bhakti is even more interesting though is because he was born in Thailand and only recently became a citizen of Germany because he wanted to live in a democracy. Unlike the rest of us who take democracy so much for granted that we are happy to put it on hold, apparently indefinitely, Bhakti reacted with horror as he watched democracy be thrown out the window. The fact that it was done on the pretense of science that didn’t make sense to him was just the icing on the cake.

That is my kind of heroism. The heroism to speak against a stifling consensus. Incidentally, it’s also the job of the true scientist. Where have been the other scientists to speak out? Even Bhakti lamented that his own students (of which there are apparently many thousands) have remained silent. No doubt they are worried for their careers. No doubt many of them are happy to play the role of doctor-as-hero or scientist-as-hero that our society has created for them. But the true scientific hero is the kind of person like Professor Bhakti.

Is it just a coincidence that Germany seems to be one of the few countries where some citizens are protesting against the measures being put in place? At least there they have somebody to give an alternative view based on science.

To return to the movie Boomerang, the district attorney does save the day and he does so in a dramatic gimmick in the courtroom that proves beyond a doubt that the defendant is innocent. Unfortunately, we are not going to get such a certain proof with the corona event. This is the real world and not the movies. There is no smoking gun evidence that is going to change people’s minds. It seems to me that the naive germ theory and the kind of heroism that seems to go with it has now morphed into a high modernist, 80s action movie hero dynamic. Just like an 80s action movie, there’s going to be collateral damage all over the place. The only question at the moment seems to be, how much?

Postscript: the victory of the bourgeoisie

There is one final riff on the hero theme I would like to throw in. It’s related to the modern dynamic between what can broadly be called the romantics and the bourgeoisie that’s been going on western culture for a couple of hundred years. The romantic hero is perhaps best defined by Nietzsche as having a cheerful fatalism. Goethe was Nietzsche’s favourite exemplar: somebody who could accept nature for all it is both the good and the bad. The romantics did not reject nature, they celebrated it in all its power and all its terrifying ambivalence to human life. By contrast, the bourgeoisie was the one who thought they had ‘conquered’ nature but all that had really happened was they removed themselves from it.

When viewed this way, the government mandate to stay at home represents a symbolic victory of the bourgeoisie. Stay home and watch tv. How hard is that? All you’ve got to do is exactly what you’re told.

One imagines the scene from A Clockwork Orange where Alex is hooked up to the Ludovico apparatus and is flashed the hashtags #staythefuckhome and #wearafuckingmask over and over again.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

When it became clear that the corona event was going to get serious, I started looking into the science behind viral disease. Like most of us, I had been taught about germ theory in high school and hadn’t given it much thought since. What I had heard about, for example, new findings around our microbiome, made me suspicious of the official narrative that was taking shape around corona. However, given that it looked like we were about to shut our society down, I assumed there must have been some big breakthroughs in the science that had given us new certainty in relation to viruses.

I was right about the big breakthroughs in the science but wrong about the certainties. In fact, the scientific breakthroughs in microbiology of the last few decades have made the whole field far less certain and this uncertainty stands in direct contrast to our single-minded response to corona. In post 2 of this series, I made the claim that the corona event could never have happened without the PCR test. In this post, we’ll see that the PCR test and other technological advancements have completely upended the naive version of germ theory which has been the primary mode of explanation in the public discourse around corona and we’ll see that it’s not just germ theory that gets brought into question but our entire conception of selfhood.

Right from the start of the corona event, the focus has been all about ‘infection’. I began my investigations into the science by trying to find out how we tested for infections. I learned about the PCR technology and that it was a form of genetic detection. A virologist finds what they think is the virus causing the infection, they analyse its genome and come up with a segment of the genome that they think uniquely identifies just that virus and nothing else. The PCR test, an incredibly complex bit of technology involving all kinds of chemical processes and fluorescent probes, looks for that segment of genome. It is a calibrated test, which means that you have to find the right number of cycles for it to give the most accurate results. Like all biological tests, there will be an error rate and it is up to the technician and others to ensure the error rate is as low as possible. The error rate exists in the test itself (which chemicals are used etc), in the collection of the sample (contamination, invalid sample capture), and in the laboratory processing (technician error, temperature, contamination etc).

There are 99 potential problems with the PCR test and it seemed to me that you’d want some very strict quality control measures to ensure that the system as a whole was not producing excessive errors. In the rush to respond to corona, we actually threw those quality control measures overboard. We allowed ‘emergency approval’ of the test kits, bypassing the usual quality control measures. We heard stories of whole batches of test kits being invalid. In Melbourne, we had run out of qualified people to take samples so we had non-specialists going door-to-door to test people. We even had ‘self service’ test kits where people could sample themselves. And it seemed that nobody was testing the labs to ensure they were producing accurate results. In short, we had set up a system that seemed guaranteed to produce error. When the President of Tanzania produced his famous speech about test results coming back positive for various fruits and farm animals, those of us who knew how the system worked were not at all surprised.

Setting aside the logistical issues with the tests, the main problem from a theoretical point of view is that we were using the PCR test as the ‘gold standard’. In Australia, the government considered you to be a ‘confirmed’ case on the basis of a single positive test. This is a problem because the PCR test does not ‘prove’ causality. It is not a ‘gold standard’ test in the sense in which I understood the term. The gold standard test as I understood it was based on Koch’s postulates but it seemed that nobody had run that test. Until that had been done, how could you know that the PCR test was valid at all?

Opponents of the measures undertaken during the corona event were using this failure to fulfil Koch’s postulates to argue that our response was invalid. As it happens, most of the people I came across making that argument were also advocates of a little-known theory of disease called terrain theory. In listening to their objections to the PCR test, I also heard about their alternative take on what was happening. In our society, the terrain theory is supposedly discredited while the germ theory is the accepted and yet it seemed to me without looking into it further that modern microbiology had as much support for terrain theory as for germ theory. We will see exactly how much as we progress.

For now, let’s do a very quick summary of the two positions. Everybody knows germ theory as it is the default in our culture. A pathogenic germ comes from outside the body, gets inside and makes us sick. Louis Pasteur was one of the foremost exponents in his day and he had the idea that a single germ should cause a single illness. Robert Koch came up with his postulates as an attempt to put the germ theory, which at the time was not yet in the ascendant, on firm scientific footing.

Some version of the terrain theory was actually the default position of most scientists in the 19^th century but the version that comes down to us today is mostly attributed to Antoine Bechamp. Leaving aside the specific mechanics of how it might happen, the theory states that illness comes first and then germs are attracted to the illness. That is, the body first becomes weakened and in that weakened state germs are able to gain a foothold.

Exponents of the terrain theory like to invoke Koch’s postulates because those postulates have never worked for viruses and for many other pathogens as well. Even in Koch’s day, it was known that the postulates did not apply across the board. Later there would be the technical problem that viruses cannot be propagated in pure culture which was a requirement of Koch’s third postulate. But more importantly there was the problem of asymptomatic cases and this is where the link to the corona event becomes clearest.

When I first heard about all the asymptomatic corona ‘cases’ my first impression was that it was great news. Here’s a virus that’s so weak that it doesn’t even make most people sick. Surely that was cause for celebration. The media response was the opposite. We heard horror stories about asymptomatic ‘carriers’ and how this was terrible because it meant that you couldn’t know who was spreading the virus from symptoms alone. This reveals a key pattern with corona event and one that driven both the public’s understanding and also the public health bureaucracy’s understanding. With the corona event, we have focused almost entirely on ‘infection’ and very little on ‘disease’. The strange thing about that is that it is a repetition of the very beginning of the germ theory vs terrain theory debate that was going on back when Pasteur and Koch and Bechamp were discussing the matter. The early opponents to germ theory pointed to asymptomatic cases as evidence against germ theory. The germ theorists pointed out that it was awful because it meant we had invisible carriers of a virus.

Let’s return to Koch’s postulates.

The germ theorists wanted to be able to prove a causal relation between a virus and an illness. But if you have asymptomatic cases, then there is no fixed causal relation. All you can say is that the virus ‘might’ cause illness. In fact, Koch had to make exactly this modification to his postulates. Where he wanted to say the virus ‘must’ cause illness he could only say it ‘may’ cause illness. This seemingly small alteration in language has been everywhere during the corona event. We have heard endlessly about what ‘could’ happen and what ‘might’ happen. These horror stories go right to the heart of the uncertainty caused by the fact that Koch’s postulates cannot be fulfilled. Terrain theorists point to this uncertainty as evidence that they are right. According to them, the difference between the asymptomatic person and the symptomatic one is the terrain: the person’s own body. The epidemiological evidence around corona provides justification for this. Statistically, the people who have gotten sick were overwhelming the elderly and immuno-compromised. The germ theory exponents fought back by highlighting stories of otherwise healthy people who got sick but these were rare individual cases many of which were found to be of dubious veracity.

The question of asymptomatic cases has thus been at the core of the germ theory vs terrain theory debate right from the start. That it should rear its head with the corona event is no surprise. There are all kinds of statistics floating around about the asymptomatic rate of sars-cov-2 infections. I’ve seen everything from 40%-80%. The fact that the public debate has turned what should be good news into cause for alarm is not a coincidence. It reveals that the germ theory interpretation has been foregrounded at the expense of the terrain theory.

This is no surprise. Our public health bureaucrats, through their counterparts in the WHO and other such bodies, chose a pandemic response strategy that implies a simplified version of the germ theory of disease. It is no coincidence that this strategy, like the naïve version of germ theory that it uses, is straight out of the 19^th century. From the beginning of the lockdown and even before, there has been a political imperative to completely disallow public debate that could call the strategy into question. We will look at this issue in the last part of this post.

For now, let’s look at what modern microbiology has to tell us about viruses and viral illness. We will see that our public health response to the corona event is completely out of date with modern microbiology. Ironically, it is the very technology that we have used to detect infections – the PCR test – alongside other technological advances that has blown open the question of germ theory vs terrain theory.

The Microbiome and the Virome

The naïve version of germ theory, the one that is part of our collective cultural subconscious, is that our body is ourselves and the world is outside of us. The germs ‘live’ in the world outside and they try to get into our body where they cause trouble. This notion goes right back to Pasteur and Koch. The truth is this idea hasn’t corresponded to scientific understanding for many many decades. As far back as 1950s and probably earlier, we knew about chronic infections; viruses that exist in the body indefinitely. At that time, just as now, there was an explosion of technological advancement in the identification of viruses. That led, just as now, to all kinds of spurious correlations with vaguely defined illness. Huebner wrote in 1957:

In addition to many opportunities for spurious etiologic associations provided by the simple chance occurrence of numerous ubiquitous and prevalent viruses, some representatives of these agents are demonstrably persistent in the human host for weeks or months . . . and simultaneous multiple viral infections are extremely common.

In the last twenty or thirty years, we have seen a repeat of what happened back around the 1950s i.e. a huge explosion in viral identification due to technological breakthroughs. We have seen a repeat of the surge in spurious etiological associations calling into question once again the problem of Koch’s postulates. But this time, the technological breakthroughs are not just a problem for microbiology. This time we have a whole new paradigm shift in what we thought we knew about the human body. The PCR test and other gene-based tools of analysis have opened up a new world but this new world challenges not just the germ theory of disease but our entire conception of our self.

We now know that viruses are literally everywhere in the world. The oceans in particular are a melting pot of viruses but viruses are on land, in the air and all other places. It is said there are possibly 10³¹ viruses in the world. In every human body, there could be 380 trillion viruses.

Most people would have heard about the microbiome in particular in relation to gut health. It turns out each of us also has a virome and the virome appears to be larger than the microbiome. There are more viruses inside us than bacteria. They appear to be in all places on and inside us: our blood, our mouths, our gut, our skin. Those facts are hard enough to wrap your head around but it also turns out that a very large number of those viruses are from exogenous sources. That is, they originated in the outside world. Even in human blood, researchers have found all kinds of viruses, fungi and bacteria that originated outside the body which raises all kinds of questions of how they got there. Presumably it must be through the intestinal tract.

This is, of course, a huge problem for naive germ theory. We are not self-contained entities just minding our own business and waiting for a nasty virus to come along. We are more like an ecosystem of micro-organisms (including viruses) most of which are in a symbiotic relationship with us:

Perhaps the most radical change is the realization that most of the microbes that inhabit our body supply crucial ecosystem services that benefit the entire host-microbe system. These services include the production of important resources, bioconversion of nutrients, and protection against pathogenic microbes.” (Young, 2017)

That’s right: viruses can protect us from other pathogenic microbes. We are even now starting to research using viruses as a form of disease prevention or mitigation thus completely turning the germ theory of disease on its ear.

Of course, most of these viruses are bacteriophages and the like. What about the viruses that are typically associated with illness? Well, we already know from the corona event, that we can be infected by such viruses without getting sick but the research is only beginning to show how prevalent that is. During the corona event we still assumed that asymptomatic people had been newly infected but it’s starting to look like asymptomatic infection by potentially disease-causing viruses is the norm. Studies that test asymptomatic people for infection are relatively new but are showing that it is perfectly normal to be infected by a virus that could make you sick but doesn’t.

Although malaria, most Leptospira spp., influenza, and dengue were identified more frequently among the febrile [feverish] patients, the detection of these same pathogens in the afebrile control group at a nontrivial rate was striking…

We now know that potentially pathogenic viruses can be inside us without causing illness. We know we can have multiple infections of ostensibly pathogenic viruses at the same time. Another study found that you were more likely to get sick with a single infection than with multiple. Another study found that some viruses require coinfection to cause illness. This all raises the question: what is it that causes the illness. It can’t just be the virus. Maybe it is something in the terrain too?

All these new findings exacerbate the uncertainty that already existed around Koch’s postulates and causality of viral illness. We can’t assume there is a one to one relationship between a virus and an illness. This leads to all kinds of computational difficulties if you were to approach the matter in a purely statistical fashion. Furthermore, in order to get reliable statistics, you would need mass testing of the population to try and figure out how many asymptomatic infections are there. But that would be just the start of the problem because now you need to try and figure out which variable differentiates the asymptomatic from the symptomatic.

For example, let’s say we have 50% of people infected with sars-cov-2 who are asymptomatic. We want to know what is the difference between them and symptomatic people? It could be the presence of another virus. It could be the absence of another virus! It could be a general state of health or lifestyle matters or geographic factors like air pollution. How do you reduce the number of variables down to a manageable size?

That the PCR and other technological advancements have made these problems more pronounced is well known within mainstream microbiology:

As with traditional culture techniques, nucleic acid amplification technology has the ability to detect microbes that may behave as ‘‘true’’ or frequent pathogens, transient or permanent commensals, opportunists that take advantage of pre-existing pathology or altered host defences. The difficulty in making these distinctions is made more challenging by the extreme sensitivity of the amplification technology. (Fredricks and Relman, 1996)

It is one of history’s ironies that the corona event and the naïve interpretation of the germ theory implied by it should come at exactly the time that microbiology is showing how outdated that germ theory is. What’s more, all this new information is actually shifting the focus back towards the terrain theory as an explanatory framework because in an ecosystem perspective you can’t worry about simplistic cause and effect. There are too many variables to calculate to find cause and effect. You have to fall back to observation of the system as a whole and that is exactly what terrain theory implies. This observation of the system as a whole is exactly what epidemiology does. I mentioned in earlier posts how we relegated epidemiology in our response to corona and this has been a big mistake in my opinion.

There have been and still are ongoing attempts within microbiology to save the underlying notion of Koch’s postulates. One of the more recent ones is from Fredericks and Relman who suggested a new set of postulates that aimed to account for the technological advances of recent times and put microbiology on a more secure footing. Let’s look at just the first two of those postulates as they relate to the corona event:-

A nucleic acid sequence belonging to a putative pathogen should be present in most cases of an infectious disease.

Straight off the bat we have a problem in relation to the corona event. As I pointed out in earlier posts, the disease ‘covid-19’ doesn’t have unique symptoms. Thus, it’s not clear what ‘disease’ means here. You can say the disease is covid-19 but the only way to know that is from the PCR test which leads to circularity. On the other hand, if you say the disease is pneumonia or Influenza Like Illness, then we still have a problem. In Australia, for example, the overall test positive rate last time I checked was about 0.5%. That is certainly not ‘most cases’ and would therefore fail this criterion.

Fewer, or no, copy numbers of pathogen-associated nucleic acid sequences should occur in hosts or tissues without disease.

I read this to mean, the number of asymptomatic ‘cases’ should be less than symptomatic ones. As stated earlier, the asymptomatic rate for sars-cov-2 is said to be somewhere between 40%-80%. This would seem to be a negative on this criterion.

Based on what, in my opinion, are the two most important criteria of their list, I would say that sars-cov-2 does not cause covid-19. The problem is that Fredericks and Relman say that not all of their criteria need to be fulfilled and that there must be scientific ‘concordance’ on these matters. But where does that leave us except in a position that we have to trust the experts. The whole point of Koch’s postulates was to fix objective criteria by which these things could be discussed. Such criteria are also implied by the reproducibility criteria of science. If I can’t reproduce your work because we cannot agree on the interpretation of the rules then we can argue endlessly about semantics with no result.

Whilst I have no dog in the fight (at least I didn’t until the corona event), it seems to me that we have more than a hundred years now of germ theorists coming up with criteria that never get satisfied. At what point do we say the germ theory as a whole is on the wrong path?

There is an idea that seems prevalent in microbiology that all these new technologies are going to open up opportunities for new understanding. I see the exact opposite. There are going to be way too many variables to calculate. It’s going to be the three-body problem on steroids. False positives are going to be the norm even by researchers who are doing good work let alone sloppy speculators such as the ones I mentioned in post 7 who spent five years scrounging around in bat caves with nothing to show for it.

These questions have now become matters of urgent political importance. Virologists have tools to find new viruses and they are going to keep finding them. Without firm criteria to establish causality, the public is helpless at the hands of the ‘experts’. There can no point in arguing on the basis of facts because the interpretation of those facts is what is at stake and essentially it comes down to who has the power to enforce their interpretation. With the corona event we have seen ICTV appoint a working group to officially announce a ‘new’ virus. Their decision is final. There’s no point in arguing with it because there are no criteria by which to argue against. Similarly, the WHO officially declared a new disease. They broke their own standards to do that but who can argue against them?

This is not the way that science as we traditionally understand it is supposed to work. It seems that analytical problems in both virology and microbiology are leading us in the direction of having to accept expert opinion. Why not just address those analytical problem? Could it be that the entire fields of virology and microbiology are on the wrong path? The underlying problem in both cases seems to stem from the requirement in western philosophy to assign ‘essential’ attributes to things. As this debate is right at the core of corona event, I will devote a future post to it and in particular to how the philosopher Wittgenstein could point the way forward out of this conundrum.

Conclusion: legibility and infection

A number of microbiologists and doctors have spoken out against the public health measures taken during the corona event including two doctors from California who explicitly discuss the modern ideas around ‘microbial health’ and how the lockdown and mask wearing are decidedly unhealthy given what we now know about the human microbiome and virome. Of course, none of them made it into mainstream discourse.

Against this backdrop of developments in microbiology, the political and public health response during the corona event seems absurdly simplistic. But it was following a pattern that I recognised from one of my favourite books: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. It is no coincidence that our public health response has been about a hundred years out of date because the type of response we launched is straight out of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an example of what Scott calls high modernism: the attempt to re-work society according to scientific laws. These attempts were run out of the public bureaucracy and involved re-structuring society for legibility so that bureaucrats could understand what was going on. It is all about top-down schemes and top down governance. Such schemes require a simplification of reality in order to work. Usually this involves re-structuring reality to be simple enough to do your scheme but it can also occur by simply ignoring anything that doesn’t fit your categories, like doctors and microbiologists who point out that your science is wrong.

The corona event ticks the box on all of Scott’s conception of such high-modernist schemes. There is the administrative re-ordering and simplification of society seen in lockdowns, compulsory masks, curfews and restricted movement. There is the overconfidence in science to address the problem, a confidence that can only occur by putting your faith in a version of germ theory that’s a hundred years out of date. There is the use of authoritarian state power seen in the police and the army. And there is a prostrate civil society that cannot resist state power seen in possibly its ultimate form of people literally being confined to their homes.

I encourage the reader to check out Scott’s book although I warn that a terrifying glimpse will open up about what possibly lies ahead of us. Such high modernist schemes brought misery and destruction on a grand scale but those schemes were mostly at the national level and mostly occurred outside of the West. The West now appears set to embark on a similar Quixotic adventure which it will try to enforce at the global level. The results could be devastating.

The fact is, our public health response has been the opposite of what modern microbiology would advise. Things in nature need to flow and that goes also for germs and our exposure to them. The forced wearing of masks, the locking of people in their homes, the shutting down of civil society stops that flow at the microbial level. It removes us from nature. Apart from the obvious damage it does economically, psychologically and socially, it also doesn’t work for our health. The mainstream debate and the entire focus of the public health bureaucracy has been on ‘infections’ and ensuring there is maximal legibility around this so that bureaucrats can stamp out said infections. We know from modern microbiology that such infections are a normal part of everyday life and so the public health response has essentially become a war on that everyday life.

As with so many of the things around the corona event, this should have been a non-starter. It seems so self-evidently wrong that we marvel that it even got done. But perhaps there is something else going on and perhaps that something else is actually part of the recent developments in microbiology.

Maybe the reason we cling to the germ theory of disease is because it preserves a deeper web of meaning around ourselves as individuals. The vista that microbiology is opening up for us is one where our own body is radically unseparated from ‘nature’. This challenges all kinds of notions around selfhood and touches on deep issues in morality. What is at stake here is the question of whether we have any control at all and what sort of control we have. Microbiology is giving us a glimpse into how little we control and we don’t like it one bit. Maybe the massive over-reaction has been an attempt to regain the appearance of control at all costs. In this the politicians and public health bureaucracy have, in my opinion, only been doing what the public wanted. The public health response was a cover for deeper philosophical and psychological problems.

In the final post in this series I will return to this theme of the philosophical issues that underlie the corona event. In the next post I want to talk about the concept of heroism. As the corona event unfolded the public cried out for ‘heroes’. This cry was in direct response to the existential crisis that corona afforded, not the public health requirements. The concept of heroism and heroic effort has come out in some very strange ways during the corona event. We’ll unpack them next.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona