“Western civilization has been extraordinarily expansive in the last five hundred years, creating numerous give-and-take relationships between society and disease, as disease and concepts of it followed in the path of imperialism, diverted its course, and were diverted by it. And while the age of formal imperialism has largely passed, the world is more closely interlinked than ever, thanks to the combined pressures of aggressive commerce, swift transportation, and phenomenal contemporary communication and information technology. Disease history in the twenty-first century will be global.”
The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Responses in Western History by J.N. Hays
Hays was completely right – twenty-first century’s diseases are, just like anything else except the government, global. But as with the presence of global warming, the current pandemic situation reveals our politico-economical system’s incapability to deals with a global problem on a world-wide and thus universally consensual scale. The emergence and re-emergence of microbial pathogens at different places around the globe, at which there weren’t seen before, reveals not just the scale in which neoliberalism exploits nature (through monocultures) and animals (through industrial farming) as many pointed out, but something more. Namely the urgent need for a radical reformulation of our notion of disease and its implications. I don’t pretend to know how, but I’ll try to present a new nuance within the conversation. One thing is certain – we surely need to reevaluate the way we operate within the world with respect to other species and their habitat. This is a long line of argumentation related to ecological problematics. However, in its present pandemic form, it hardly changed at all. My point here, therefore, would be concerned with one additional reevaluation – that of the most basic premise of the modern way of life itself, namely our constant motion. Yes, humanity destroys too much, but some of us also move to much within the ruins of what was destroyed. So what is the connection between motion and diseases from a philosophical perspective?
In a recent article in Critical Inquiry’s blog, N.Katherine Hayles argues that dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic presents us with a conflict between different evolutionary strategies. Both species are doing their job to survive – we, human beings, are developing our epistemological and immunological (both real and virtual) apparatuses and them, viruses, specialising in their mutation (leaving back the unneeded RNA to replicate faster). She suggests that this “simple binary of us-versus-them” isn’t adequate, and even though this radical contrast between distinct evolutionary strives somehow necessitates it, the problem is way more complex and deserves more speculative angle. My suggestion is to add a strict dichotomy within Hayles’ conceptualisation – those strategies are different on a real, biological and thus actual scale, but from the outwards, without diving in the strictly biological, they appear as the same: as embodiments of something quite obvious, namely – motion. Without it, everything which is is doomed. But let’s take a closer look at the overall specifics.
Contextually speaking, while the present strive for a constant economic growth compels forests to shrink, the dependent living species are being pressed into a narrower space. This, in turn, helps the viruses (be they pathogenic or not) to transmits more easily between different hosts. In other words, wild animals are forced (by us) to move because of the habitat destruction, hence the viruses residing in them move too. We, the human beings, also move and inevitably interact with both shrunk forests and animals within them, but similarly with all those products of monocultures and industrial farming that necessitated the shrinking in the first place and consequently – viruses move too. Wherever we look upon this complex tangle of relationships within the planet’s ecosystems, we see movement. However, the sixteenth century marks the advent of what one might call ‘the first great shrink’ of the world itself – the Age of Exploration. The further invention of the steam engine and its offsprings – the steamship and locomotive, was followed by the prompt furrowing of our rivers and seas, and on land by railway lines. After that came the automobile and the aeroplane, which along with the previous technical ingenuities conducted the second great shrink. People began to move on an unprecedented scale. All this led to greater opportunities for a-local and extremely rapid transmission of diverse microbes. Viruses’ famous self-replication and abrupt mutation become even more striking if we consider the abundancy of hosts resulting from the dramatic increase in interspecies (and intragroup within the same species) contacts that those inventions brought.
From our perspective, those two-staged shrinks also opened the door for a radical transformation of the medical science itself. The constant presence of massive epidemics appealed for new ways of mastering the objective world and our place within it. The discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Hermann Koch – to name just the most prominent ones – within the newly formed field of bacteriology had a profound impact over the way we think about medicine’s primal commitment. Pasteur’s aetiology shifted the scientific paradigm of diseases from the inner (our body-organs and their functions) to the outer (the contextual scheme and the things in it). He did for the diseases’ external cause what Andreas Vesalius did for their internal. Further development of vaccination made imperative not the cure of an illness, but its prevention. The immunological era was born. As Georges Canguilhem argues, the “object of medicine was no longer so much disease as health”. From now on body’s communicative flow, its unavoidable interaction with the outside world and its more or less unified contextuality would define our susceptibility to diseases. This is the point at which social sciences began to penetrate the domain of medicine. The questions posited now are where the body moves, what it touches, eats and breaths, and most of all – how to interrupt all that. One might call this the situationist turn in scientific medicine. Overall, what was a determinate factor in the sphere of humanities at least for a few decades finally made its way in the natural sciences.
If therefore, technology helped us to conquer distances, then scientific medicine made possible the relative conquering of diseases. Wherever there’s movement and thus interaction, there’s the possibility of contact with viruses, be they pathogenic or not. And there’s always movement, according to physics. Everything is always in motion. Viruses, the Schrodingerian’s cats par excellence – neither death nor alive – don’t think in order to move. They just move and by moving they replicate and mutate. Wherever there are viruses present – and they’re always present – there’s a possibility for their mutation, governed by the ever-changing surroundings of the moving host itself. There’s a strict correlation in the humanity discourse on viruses – technology and movement on the one side, diseases and medicine on the other. However, one might argue that the massive scientific staff sweeping across every continent in search of a novel mutations of well-known or completely new pathogens, deals mostly with the consequences of our contemporary way of life. As I’ve already pointed out, it isn’t just about the forms of food production – it’s also about the constant human flux. This scientists task is entirely in the spirit of the 19th-century covenant, namely prevention. The sooner the changes occurring in these microscopic beasts are discovered, the fewer their casualties will be. Unprecedented budgets are delegated in this war on pathogens, like in any other war. But a new pathogen just found, might get to the other part of the world in a matter of days. This wasn’t possible before the second great shrink. One way or another, however, it necessitated the third one. The digital revolution comes from the scientific community not because of some spontaneous spark of ingenuity, but because of its long-lasting need for faster communication. Thus the viral research data became quickly transmittable, following the lines of flight of diseases themselves.
But just as Hayles noted in her article, a synoptic and evolutionary view brings another picture to the fore. Namely, that viruses aren’t bad by definition but, as Michael G. Cordingley argues, might be the very agent of evolution process itself. The case is the same on a socio-cultural as well as politico-economical level. Or in other words on what we might call virtual level (by which I don’t aim to undermine its meaning, but only to distinguish it from the strictly physiological). As we see in respect of the present pandemic situation, viruses have evolutionary, as well as revolutionary potential.
Firstly, the pandemics reveal before us the immediate consequences of our conceptual incapability to grasp life in motion. When it came to viruses, this couldn’t be more wrong. From the never-ceasing flux around us, especially when scientific explorations is concerned, we create fixed and definite entities. Freezing the world is our major scientific method for a long time now. Before few days, David Wallace-Wells noted that:
“In the space of a few months, we’ve gone from thinking there was no “asymptomatic transmission” to believing it accounts for perhaps half or more of all cases, from thinking the young were invulnerable to thinking they were just somewhat less vulnerable, from believing masks were unnecessary to require their use at all times outside the house, from panicking about ventilator shortages to deploying pregnancy massage pillows instead. Six months since patient zero, we still have no drugs proven to even help treat the disease.”
This doesn’t just uncover the inadequacy of our present scientific instrumentarium, but also our incapability to act relevantly because of it. Secondly and directly related to the first, is that we are faced with the need to grasp diseases as a result of a whole string of incessantly caused (including by ourselves) and causing dynamics. They don’t come out of nowhere but are part of the constant flux of becomings surrounding us as well as within ourselves. Thirdly, we know that viruses reterritorialization and, hence, decontextualisation, desiderate their mutation. Thus just as we need to know which social strata pollutes the most when comes to carbon footprint, when comes to diseases we need to know who moves the most. Surprisingly, the answer is the same in both cases. Those who are forced to move to secure their life and/or livelihood, doing it so infrequently that they can hardly be called dangerous – war migrants, working people searching for a decent standard of living and so on, or those incapable to move at all, even if needed, aren’t the one to blame. On the other hand, those so-called “tourists” who constantly cross the world back and forth in an attempt to cure the boredom, resulted from their conspicuous affluence, should be our target again. Some benefits from the world great shrinks, others – just suffer it.
So the problem isn’t that the human population is too big, as many from the right (and even from the left) suggested. Thomas Nail is completely right saying that the laws of physics make the abundance of biomass imperative. The problem is that we destroy too much as well as that some of us, benefiting from what was destroyed, move too much.
To summarize, let me attach a few additional and somehow preventative notes. I’m not suggesting the need for a massive restriction over movement in a long-term here. Nevertheless, I think that by exercising movement consciously and carefully, reducing all those conditions that force countless people around the world to leave their centres of existence so that they can seek a better place elsewhere, we can reverse this dangerous pathogen boom of the last few decades. On the other hand, I do not aim for the traditional reactionary position, exhorting how important it is for a person to remain in his or her home forever. Rather, by elevating proximity as the guiding principle of any spatial initiative, my purpose is to inaugurate thinking concerned with the Other, the affected animal species and our planet as such.