Politicians should give up the war rhetoric – we must learn to live with the virus
In Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, set during the Black Death, a group of travelling players performs an absurd dance number to villagers – rudimentary commedia del’arte characters, they prance around, singing and smiling. One of them is made up as a horned very jolly devil. Suddenly, a bout of hymn singing breaks out in the background. A troupe of monks and fanatics plods in and interrupts the players’ little masque. Mass flagellation, kneeling villagers, wailing and gnashing of teeth – and a macabre Christ at the centre, his whole body rent and bloodied with gouging wounds.
It’s a rather brilliant meditation on the public spectacle of death in the Middle Ages, which took place in a culture saturated in its power: Western Christianity, of course, takes the body in pain, the body suspended between life and death, as its central metaphor. If the story of religion unfolds most vividly in the borderlands between things – where I meets you, between man and animal, between my body and my soul, and between earth and sky – then disease has a messy relationship with belief and can, in its wilful blurring of easy definitions (does it fly through the air? Is it in droplets or aerosol? Will a mask protect me?), lead to behaviour tinged by fanaticism. The Greeks saw illness as a curse brought on man by the gods in heaven, with the opposite sex, woman, as their instrument.
In the modern West, we have been largely shielded from the epidemics of the 20th century. Spanish Flu was a special case – it took place in a period of institutionalised warfare. As the historian Hew Strachan put it in his recent contribution to Engelsberg Ideas: “It [the pandemic] was part of everyday life, even if one which overturned the normal rhythms of mortality, picking out the young and fit before their time, and leaving parents bereaved and desolate.”
After the Wars, with the elimination of polio and smallpox, victory over disease was popularly declared. Eradication of infectious pathogens, not accommodation, was desirable and through the wonders of modern science, a near possibility. The Aids epidemic was a stark warning signal, but it unfolded in a community perceived to be “other” in the West and takes huge numbers of lives every year in the developing world.
It is no surprise then that with the return of disease to the West it has felt like we are grasping for certainties in a language we do not quite understand. As a result, the fear of disease, the “heartache” as Boris Johnson described it recently, has become quickly fused with a thinly disguised nationalism.
When David Cameron used to talk about the “Global Race” he meant that nations would no longer compete in the terms of the post-war era – national balance sheets, unemployment and trade flows – but in the architecture of a new economy mapped out in knowledge, technology and infrastructure. In the era of coronavirus, we are encouraged to think in terms of daily deaths and new infections, set within a broader landscape (or seascape?) of waves, peaks and troughs. Leaders are judged on the degree to which they can claim to be making empirical efforts to fight against the virus – close down the economy, wear masks, enforce social distancing all feature strongly.
The imaginative elision of the purity of the body politic with a belief that disease is a foreign agent is remarkably common. In early twentieth century San Francisco, the plague was labelled “an Oriental disease, peculiar to rice eaters,” although it killed Chinese and white workers in comparable numbers. It is this kind of language which underwrites much of the politics of the moment, the politics of lockdown and quarantine – from Australia’s “shock and awe” quarantine to New Zealand’s closed borders to Europe, where Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland has raised the prospect of limiting arrivals from England and the UK government has introduced a quarantine with Spain.
In the long run, politicians must understand that success or failure in soft power terms will not be measured by the success or failure of this “war” against the virus and the way it spreads – namely, through social life and international travel – but by their country’s biomedical contribution to efforts that let us live fruitfully with and alongside the virus.
We may find that by hardening our hearts towards each other and the presence of disease, we are outdoing ourselves to pay tribute to the spectacle of death – the cannier leader knows that you can claim credit in the long run by devising clever stratagems to keep it at bay (treatments or a vaccine in the case of coronavirus). Indeed, in one of Bergman’s most famous images, the central character of The Seventh Seal, the Knight occupies Death with a game of chess. Our leaders should follow his example: act less in a spirit of flagellation and with more care.