Disclaimer: I hope you will find charming when I occasionally spill over the limits of my English as a second language.
Although this
generation faces an unprecedented sanitary crisis (COVID-19), unfortunately
pandemics are part and parcel of human history. We all remember the devastating
sanitary crises causes by the bubonic plague or cholera that decimated Europe
during Middle Ages. And now, that we face a somehow similar situation, we can
imagined how different were both the context and the available instruments for
solving such problems. Then as now pandemics also spread from the planet’s
busiest places: then the naval harbors. Sick people and contaminated animals
casually descended from various ships and smilingly entered deep into the city
life, unaware of their behaviors terrible results. But speed remains an
important difference. On the one hand, pandemics were traveling then with the
speed of horses or were driven by the wind on sailboats; they couldn’t just
„fly” from China and be hosted by the Airbnb all over the globe in a matter of
weeks. On the other hand, a really modern mass communication then was the
messenger sent by city officials in the main square to shout out a call, using
a cone to make himself heard. As no serious study on Fake news were left from
the Middle Ages, we can only imagine how fast and romanticized news were spreading
at the time, or how the thirteenth person conveyed the message to the
fourteenths listener, not to mention the 27th interpretation. In this context,
it is not surprising that explanations were dispersed without passport from one
city to the next, and abounded in apocalyptic fears organized by an ahead of
its time Baroque design. In the absence of medical models able to provide sound
explanations rooted in the cold reality of biology and medicine, the emotional
derails, motivated by people's hunger to understand and colored by their
religious demons, took the most unexpected turns. And yet ... and yet ... as a
result of these capricious hectically-chaotic efforts and despite the massive
registered losses, humanity somehow managed to overcome each crisis and to find
a viable solution. I am equally bewildered and fascinated by this adventurous
journey which, with different actors and scenarios, seems an inexorable part of
our Planet’s cycles. For passionate readers interested in apocalyptic scenarios
and modern vertical histories of old concepts, for those who anyway want to
read a few books in their CORONA isolation time, my reading suggestion would be
one of Jean Delumeau’s books called The Fear in the West:
A besieged fortress (complete French title La peur en
Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe siècles: Une cité assiégée) of which I
have read the Romanian edition. You can find there the history of our
fears masterfully described, and by taking a detached look at people’s
reactions when confronted with various crises throughout history you might just
became half a breath more detached.
This
intro was just a brief and humble attempt to put pandemics in a historical
perspective and to raise a flag - red as the blood of wild animals served as
high end food at Asian wet markets - regarding the partial failure of our
generation to wisely use the mass media; regarding the failure of many to check,
using credible sources, the flow of panic that constantly assaults us in the
last few weeks. What would have been the reaction of individuals form the
Middle Ages facing the bubonic plague if they could have accessed the World
Health Organization (WHO) website? How blessed would they have felt if they saw
on CNN or Fox News that people from around the world are asking the same
questions and come together to look for feasible solutions? What price would
they have paid for accessing scientific data, for exploring the evidence, for
speeding up the process that could potentially lead to a medical understanding
of the pandemic? However, some of us act as if the only credible information
streams from the Facebook horseman who shouts in a cone his messages cogitated
with his drunken conspiracy friends. But the wise men and women from the Middle
Ages managed to solve the problems of their generation because they were
willing to make the extra searches on their stone tablets in order to find the
true medical model and eventually to implement it successfully.
Note:
If you happen to be a journalist and think that every now and then I could
contribute to the success of your publication, be bold and came up with a good
offer. However, bear in mind that I only write about topics I deeply care, so
let me drive the roller-coaster.
Email: bogdan.tulbure@e-uvt.ro
0 comments:
Post a Comment