President Obama has declared the swine flu outbreak to be a national emergency. I'm not sure that's all that bad of a measure, given that it lifts some governmental rules for hospitals that probably weren't a good idea in the first place. But as Susan McWilliams points out in this Front Porch Republic post, our media-hyped fears seem 'way out of line. It's hard not to quote her entire post.
What Thucydides helps us to see [in his description of a plague in Athens during the Pelopponesian War], as George Kateb has written, is “the ways in which fear of death through contagion disorganizes all human relations”:
It is the peculiar power of contagious disease to isolate people from each other; normal communal ties give way before the desire of every man to avoid contact which could bring on the disease and with it, death. The wish to remain free of sickness overrides all duty and all affection.
The plague resulted in what Kateb calls “a kind of negative state of nature: instead of the war of all against all, there was the avoidance of all by all.” What is ultimately most horrifying about the plague is how it exposes the fragility of civilization. You might not be able to build Rome in a day, but you can destroy Athens in a few weeks.
[F]ears of the swine flu have curbed many of life’s rituals in the United States. Employers are forcing employees to stop sharing candy. Colleges are forcing students—heaven forfend!—to stop playing beer pong. People are cancelling holiday parties, or serving hand sanitizer instead of punch.
Religious institutions have seemed especially willing to change generations-old rituals on the chance that they might spread contagion. Churches are instructing congregants not to shake hands at the sign of peace, emptying the holy water fonts, and putting away hymnals. Many churches have stopped offering a shared sacrament, thereby taking a lot of the communing out of communion.
The North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation’s largest Protestant group, has raised the possibility of cancelling all mass gatherings: weekly services, weekday events at church, weddings, and funerals.
Keep in mind a few things here: 1) although swine flu is not pretty, most people recover from it within a week, without needing any medical care; 2) Americans who do get sick with the swine flu may be treated with antiviral medication; 3) there is a vaccine available to protect against this flu; and 3) according to epidemiologists, there isn’t even that much of a swine flu resurgence in American cities this year to begin with.
When even our religious institutions—the places that in theory are devoted to the primacy of spiritual health (and the attendant conviction that the health of the spirit might be more important than the health of the body)—are willing to dismantle themselves at the idea of what is for the most part a transient and nonfatal illness, I think we should be getting more than a little nervous about the spiritual health of the country.
The greatest horror of the Athenian plague, as Thucydides says, is not the number of the dead but the degradation of the terms of life for the living.
That understanding—which sees death as something that you must risk in the name of a good life—has in the past been central to American thought and practice, evidenced by homestead wives and warriors alike.
In all this fear about exposure to the H1N1 virus, our willingness to abandon core rituals and community life might be the most frightening thing out there.
