It needs to be said that a pandemic is not just something that invades us from without. A pandemic is a cataclysmic process that reveals what lies within a society. A fire in a public space might seem to be a mainly physical event. But the catastrophe lies not simply in the fire but in the structure of the space, the composition and cohesion of the crowd, and the moral fiber of leadership or cowardice that might transform the single selfish impulse into a self- and all-destructive panic or, conversely, save all at some cost to all or one or none. It’s not the flame and smoke that kill: these merely ignite and activate what is rotten in a society and reactionary in social organization. We might all be saved by courage and collective spirit or killed by our own suicidal egotism. But in any case there will be no individual salvation, as survivalists and certain Christians like to fantasize.
What Rudolph Virchow the founder of social medicine recognized in 1848–and what sent him to the barricades as a revolutionary—applies to our pandemic: in order to save the individual, in order to save ourselves, we have to heal our sick society. A pandemic is more complex than a fire, but the same paradigm applies to both. Like any crisis or threat, the plague reveals what is latent in the individual and the society.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 