[Essay] Plagues; or, Humans without Control

Plagues offer a peculiar light on the ways human deal with being helpless. Many other types of disasters happen more suddenly: when there is a devastating earthquake, hurricane, or volcanic eruption, catastrophe often arrives so quickly and forcefully that there is very little time to do more than the instinctual response, and only in retrospect do people find themselves with time to contemplate how they might have prepared and responded. These events involve forces which a human cannot hope to control, even if they can be understood. In war, situations are often much more protracted for the majority of participants, and there is a very real sense that one’s survival depends on one’s capacity and actions. Events usually move slowly enough that there is plenty of room to contemplate death and suffer in anticipation of death. A serious plague combines some of the worst aspects of either of these kinds of tragedies: it moves slowly enough to give a person time to think about the future, even after becoming sick, which prolongs the acute mental emotional suffering like experienced in war. However, although controlling the situation may be theoretically possible, it often goes beyond any of the physical intuition that people have learned.

            This combination of unpredictability and contemplation produces a societal response unlike what follows a massacre or a tsunami: people have had time to ponder what may have been the cause of events, as in war, and yet there is no clear group to blame. This mixture leaves people with a sense of powerlessness, combined with the feeling that they ought to have been able to respond to the situation. A plague, therefore, shines a light on what exactly it is that people and nations do when they feel helpless in a way that is prolonged enough to attempt to respond to the situation.

            Some of the earliest Western writings we have show this response in detail: the events of the Iliad begin with a plague among the Greeks in their war camp. When the plague strikes, Achilles ask Calchas, a prophet, to divine the will of the gods, and he responds earnestly: the Danaans have offended Apollo by spurning his priest’s request for his daughter. Upon learning that the blame can be traced to a specific source, they commit to remedying the situation, even at the cost of Achilles losing the honor of his war-prize and becoming enraged with Agamemnon (Homer 3). The Greek leaders were willing to pay a heavy price, socially and personally, to regain some amount of control over the situation. Writing about a similar culture, Sophocles depicts a plague in Thebes. In similar fashion, the agonized Thebans wonder why the plague has struck the city, and turn to an oracle to understand why the plague has come to the city (Sophocles 11-13). Oedipus, as king, is asked (and expected) to determine the root of the problem when the oracle leaves some uncertainty. And as king, he takes responsibility for the situation as best he can; when the truth comes out that he killed his biological father, he follows through on his own curse of exile. The tragedy of fulfilling prophecy accompanies a great personal cost to Oedipus, but rather than stay in the city and be the cause of a continuing plague, he chooses to leave, maintaining some amount of control over his life. And although the people loved him as a king, they let him go—forces greater than themselves are at work, and rather than fight Fate and the plague, they allow their king to leave in disgrace so that they might regain some amount of normal control over their lives.

            The Athenians, who had been accustomed to an even greater amount of control over personal destiny than many previous Greek cultures, felt this lack very sorely when a plague arrived, as described by Thucydides. Unlike the Danaan war party and the Thebans, however, they did not have a central authority to turn to, either spiritually or politically (XXX Thucydides XXX). They found an oracle which, for some, provided a religious reasoning for the plague they experienced, but the populace as a whole found no solace, and so responded very differently from Achilles and Oedipus. Without a clear problem to resolve, the people saw no way of controlling their situation, and so they abandoned all of the moral and social constraints under which they lived before the plague, compensating in a sense for the lack of control they felt by taking individual, absolute control over their actions.

            Millennia later, Boccaccio describes a similar situation among the Florentines, when the Black Death swept through Europe. He describes in intimate detail how, early on, the people did their best to take care of their friends and loved ones suffering the disease, but as it became apparent that all in contact with the afflicted contracted the same symptoms, societal structure broke down. Those who sought guidance through prayer and the Church suffered fates no better than anyone else, and so no spiritual authority made itself known by which the people could find a reason for their suffering. As the plague progressed, “li ministri e essecutori … erano tutti o morti o infermi o sì di famiglie rimasi stremi, che uficio alcuno non potean fare” (Boccaccio, 23), and so any sense of a political authority who might resolve the problem dissolved. Thus the Florentines responded in a manner similar to the Athenians: “era a ciascun licito quanto a grado gli era d’adoperare” (Boccaccio, 23). Amid this complete abandon, the common people found ways to have a small amount of control over their lives; some carried sweet-scented things with which to drown out the stink of death and feel a little better while others fled the city (Boccaccio 24-25).

            The world today is very different from what Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, or Boccaccio experienced. But the ways in which people respond to the COVID-19 pandemic now aren’t qualitatively all that different from what those in the past witnessed. We look to authorities to explain to us why the plague is happening: the WHO, CDC, and other organizations which had very little to do with day-to-day life become very important sources of information about how to avoid catching the new coronavirus (Google Trends, “cdc” and “WHO”). Rather than look to an oracle or spiritual authority, people look to the scientific community, but they ask in much the same way Achilles and Oedipus asked: wanting to know how to regain control as an unknown threat to life seems to be spreading uncontrollably (NIH, coronavirus.gov).

 Political authorities have cooperated with medical recommendations, ordering quarantines in many countries; most US states have put in place some sort of measure, even if not a full quarantine (Gershman). And on an individual basis, many people push for their own sort of control over life: I have seen some argue that the current response is an overreaction, while others insist that stricter measures need to be put in place. Toilet paper, along with staples like pasta and flour, became very scarce on store shelves nearly overnight, visible at my local Walmart and across the country (Zagorsky).

Viewed in comparison to the Athenian plague and the Black Death, the coronavirus pandemic is being handled quite well, at least so far—governments are still operating, and in the place of religious authority the medical community has handed down instructions on how to take control of the situation. Although individual responses vary, by and large the world has rallied around these instructions, even if the situation has not shown immediate improvement. So, even if we do not know what the future will bring, we can at least say that the world now seems not be en route to as bad a situation as Thucydides and Boccaccio describe: although families may not be visiting each other like before, they certainly still care stay in contact and about each other.

Works Cited

Boccaccio. “Prima Giornata: Introduzione”. Numbers refer to sentence numbering. Decameron. Accessed 9 April 2020 at www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/DecShowText.php?myID=d01intro&lang=it

Gershman, Jacob. “A Guide to State Coronavirus Lockdowns.” Wall Street Journal, updated 9 April 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/a-state-by-state-guide-to-coronavirus-lockdowns-11584749351

Google Trends. “cdc”. trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&tz=360&geo=US&q=cdc&sni=3

Google Trends. “World Health Organization”. trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/1586486400?hl=en-US&tz=360&q=%2Fm%2F0840w&sni=3

Homer. The Iliad. Translated and edited by Stanley Lombardo, The Essential Homer, Hackett Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 1-240.

NIH. “Coronavirus Information”. www.nih.gov/health-information/coronavirus

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Translated by J. E. Thomas, Prestwick House, 2017 ed.

Thucydides. “The Plague in Athens”. Finley, Moses I., editor. The Portable Greek Historians. Viking Penguin, 1977, p. 265-273.

US Coronavirus Guidelines. coronavirus.gov

Zagorsky, Jay L. “We have plenty of toilet paper in the US – so why are people hoarding it? An economist weighs in.” Business Insider, 12 March 2020. www.businessinsider.com/america-has-toilet-paper-why-are-we-hoarding-it-2020-3