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Reply to John J. Reilly Here
On a Saturday in 1995, I went to see the film "Outbreak." I liked it. It stars Dustin Hoffman as an Army biological warfare scientist who defeats an epidemic of a terrible new disease from Africa, a virus carried to the U.S. by an infected-but-adorable monkey. Hoffman is getting better as he takes himself less seriously. Donald Sutherland's gleefully villainous portrayal of the general determined to stop the disease by incinerating the people infected is worth the price of admission.
(The attraction of the film is not lessened by the fact it is almost identical in plot to the film adaptation released a year or two previously of Robert Heinlein's novel, "The Puppet Masters." In that film, the part of the plague is taken by mind-controlling extraterrestrial leeches. It too stars Donald Sutherland, and one or two other people in "Outbreak.")
Monkeys and villains aside, the movie contains a number of signs of the times. For instance, a long-running government conspiracy to cover up the disease is revealed. Or maybe the conspiracy was to cover up the fact a cure had been found for a certain strain of the virus. Or the fact there was a department doing this kind of research at all. Anyway, Washington was responsible for it. The writers, no doubt, have been watching the popular FOX series, "The X-Files," most of whose episodes posit some vast, secret malefaction on the part of the U.S. government. The series is made in Canada, which might suggest an anti-American conspiracy right there, since Donald Sutherland is from Newfoundland. But no, that way madness lies. Let's just concentrate on this killer-virus business.
Consider these two television listing for the evening after I saw "Outbreak":
"Earth 2: The colonists discover another group of settlers who have been weakened by a deadly virus."
"Lois and Clark: A deranged scientist plots to release a deadly virus. Lois's attraction to a government agent irks Clark."
As most readers are probably aware, similar examples could be mutiplied. What we have here is a trend. There are, of course, some obvious proximate causes for it. The AIDS epidemic has accustomed us to the idea that modern civilization has not advanced beyond the reach of the microbial world. Stephen King's novel, "The Stand," which dealt with a world-destroying plague and its aftermath, was made into a television mini-series and broadcast last year. There is perhaps a deeper reason for our sudden fascination with this subject, however. We seem to be living in a society in search of a new vision of the end of the world. Before we decide what the phenomenon means, let us first take a look at the thing in itself.
The origin of much of the excitement is the book, "The Hot Zone," (1994) by Richard Preston. (A somewhat more scholarly treatment of the same area is "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garrett (1994)). It is because of "The Hot Zone," or at any rate of some teaser articles published by the author while he was working on the book, that "Outbreak" was made. It is also why we are so well-informed these days about novel diseases from Africa, particularly forms of hemorrhagic fever, a condition in which the internal organs bleed and decay. The types most mentioned are Sabia, Marburg, Lassa and, apparently the most cinematic, Ebola.
An outbreak of the Ebola virus, which appeared from nowhere and spread through over 55 villages in Zaire in 1976, soon died out for lack of living victims. The new popular literature on the subject treats largely of examples of how these diseases have been released in populated areas. The effect of these reports is somewhat diminished, however, by the fact that the scariest ones are tales of false alarms. Just last August, a researcher at Yale was unknowingly infected with the Sabia virus. Though he was ultimately cured with an antiviral drug, it was 12 days before anyone realized just what was wrong with him. The disease does not seem to have been as easily communicable as had been feared. The incident that inspired "Outbreak" occurred in 1986, when some imported monkeys began dying in the suburbs of Washington from what was thought to be the Ebola virus. This incident activated the agencies of the government usually concerned with germ warfare. The disease in question was finally classified as a member of the Ebola family, but one that had no power to infect human beings.
It really is true that epidemic disease remains a threat even to people living in developed countries. The great influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 seems just to have been a new strain of flu originating in the Near East. Its appearance was turned into a disaster by the movement of troops in the final stage of the First World War. Over twenty million people died worldwide because of the disease, sixteen million in India alone. And of course, the 1994 outbreak of bubonic plague in India caused health authorities all over the world to institute special precautions at international airports (there was a report of plague, later disconfirmed, in my own city in New Jersey). The plague itself is unlikely to threaten the survival of civilization, however, since it is easy to cure with antibiotics.
The best book on the role of disease in history may still be William MacNeill's "Plagues and Peoples" (1976). It explains, among other things, why the population explosion began in many places in Eurasia in the 18th century. The great population centers in Europe, India and China finally came into sufficiently regular contact that their disease pools became a single system. This greatly diminished the danger of strange, new epidemics, though of course it also served to spread endemic killers like influenza and tuberculosis. McNeill discussed at length the possibility of new epidemics appearing, made possible especially by the growing ease of travel. Today's headlines are simply illustrations of his speculations. (See also his remarkable collection of essays, "The Human Condition" (1980), one of the world's more persuasive theories of history.)
Public health experts are chiefly concerned not with new diseases from Africa, but with old diseases that are acquiring immunity to the traditional antibiotics. Microorganisms live in a fiercely Darwinian world, and for half a century the fittest have been those strains that happened to be able to survive exposure to substances like penicillin. Tuberculosis, so easy to spread and so slow to kill its infectious victims, may well be the chief biological terror of the great cities of the 21st century. Today, of course, anyone who works in a hospital can tell you how difficult it is becoming to control staph and other infections on the wards. Other immediate concerns are created by the fact that when people move into new areas, it is quite likely that they will encounter new diseases. Lyme disease and, perhaps, the Hanta viruses that recently killed dozens of people in the Southwest are examples. Hot Zone author Preston actually points to a specific highway in Africa as the cause of AIDS, on the grounds that building it put the small populations who were chronically infected with the HIV virus into contact with the outside world.
This is all extremely interesting, of course, but why is it suddenly the topic for popular literature and film? Why is it making Stephen King even richer? We may find the key, perhaps, in the sort of sentiments expressed in this excerpt from "The Hot Zone":
"[The earth] is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot out in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions."
John of Patmos put it better, perhaps, but he did not put it more clearly: this world is doomed by reason of its corruption, and the end of the age is at hand. Now, not every civilization is very interested in the end of the world, but certainly the West in general is, and within the West the United States has sometimes been described as a "millennial" society. While doubtless our interest in this sort of thing is heightened by the approach of the new millennium, books such as Paul Boyer's "When Time Shall Be No More" (1992) attest that one of the continuing themes in American history has been the hope and the fear of a (sometimes violent) end of this age and the beginning of a new one. The chief expression of this theme has, from Cotton Mather's millenarian interpretation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to today's growing suspicion that the European Union is Antichrist's kingdom, always been some form or other of Christian eschatology. (That is, the study of the last things, including the end of the world.)
As the medievalist Bernard McGinn noted with sadness in his book, "Antichrist" (1994), theological eschatology has been of less and less interest to the learned in the West since the end of the wars of religion. In the United States after the Civil War, there was a precipitous drop in the number of first rate minds willing to think about the end of the age as a proposition in systematic theology. This was true, despite the growth of Bible colleges and other religiously affiliated institutions of higher learning. Christian eschatology in this century has become almost exclusively an element of folk religion. McGinn regretfully notes its repetitive and threadbare quality, compared to the great days of the twelfth century.
This sad assessment applies only to Christian eschatology, of course. Considered more broadly, the twentieth century has been one of the great centuries for speculation about the end of the world. Much of this has been based on shaky science rather than theology, but the people who believe in these visions of destruction and resurrection usually do not know the science is shaky; their simple faith in what they imagine to be science gives their ideas a disarmingly naive quality. As is the case with popular eschatology in every age, certain themes are repeated and repeated throughout the great mass of apocalyptic speculation. Looking at the literature from around the turn of the century, it is easy to detect the three main classes of secular apocalypse that have influenced so much of twentieth century thought. These are the Air War, the Great Plague, and the Rising Tide of Color.
The Air War has by far been the most successful. Beginning in the nineteenth century, and sometimes promoted by real geniuses like H.G. Wells, it is a vision of how civilization could come to an end in the matter of a few hours. Its common features include a war using weapons of mass destruction delivered from great distances at lightening speed by mysteriously unstoppable flying machines. This was the inspiration not just for the zeppelin raids of World War I and the strategic bombing of World War II, but the intercontinental ballistic missiles of the Cold War era and for the atomic bomb itself. The principle of Mutual Assured Destruction is continuous with the strategic theory of the RAF in the 1930s, which held that "the bomber will always get through." Pre-World War II air strategists sought to deter potential aggressors with threats of retaliation, rather than to defend against the attacks themselves.
In the classic period of the Cold War, the theory of the Air War reached a level of elaboration comparable to systematic theology. However, the most elegant products of the human mind are likely to be the most ephemeral. The Air War today is losing its hold on popular culture because of the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more subtly, because the notion is gaining currency that perhaps the unstopablility of nuclear missiles might not be an unalterable fact of nature. The troublesome thing is that this loss of faith is happening precisely at the time when people are rather in the market for apocalyptic ideas.
The Great Plague seems to be making a comeback so as to fill this void. The notion of a universal pandemic that almost destroys the human race was readily available to any early twentieth century author in need of a "scientific" way to end the world. Jack London's 1912 story, "The Scarlet Plague," describes how a new infection travels like wildfire across a 21st century world closely interconnected by airship and railroad. Stephen King did it at greater length for a contemporary setting, but London's story is at least as plausible. (London also displayed a rare understanding of just how large the population of the world in the 21st century was likely to be.) A great plague also plays a role in H.G. Wells's 1933 novel, "Things to Come," which anticipated among many other disasters that a plague would kill half the human race in the aftermath of a decade of war in the 1940s. (Wells's description was, of course, influenced by the actual influenza pandemic of 1918.)
The Great Plague never achieved the popularity of the Air War because, in its earlier incarnations, it could not be fit into a story about how the world is punished for its misdeeds. It was a natural disaster, the stories using it were cautionary tales about the hubris of modern civilization. G.K. Chesterton once remarked that the Black Death was not the product of poor medieval sanitation, which actually was pretty good, and suggested there was no reason why it could not return to modern (Edwardian) England. He did not, however, suggest that modern England particularly merited the plague. Today, the moralistic element has been added by the environmental movement. In the moral universe of "Outbreak" and "The Hot Zone," the human race is being justly punished by the appearance of these new diseases because it has interfered with the balance of nature. Plague is what we get for cutting down rain forests and kidnapping adorable monkeys. The plague as nature's revenge is an expression of the same motif as popular treatments of the Greenhouse Effect, which proclaim that the deterioration of the weather is the biosphere's punishment for two centuries of industrial civilization.
The Rising Tide of Color, however, could well outdistance both of its chief competitors in the coming decade or so. If so, we will only be returning to the state of things that existed at the beginning of the century. There is a character in one of Robertson Davies' novels, an upper class woman whose life was devoted to the cultivation of fashionable anxieties. In her youth, she dreaded the Yellow Peril. As she advanced in years, she dreaded foreigners and the Red menace. Late in life, however, she returned to her first dread, having come to the conclusion the Red Menace was only a part of the larger Yellow Peril. This, perhaps, is not a bad description of the evolution of population anxiety through the twentieth century. To everyone's unhappy surprise, the end of the Cold War has made the world safe again for politics cast in ethnic terms.
We should remember that there has always been a racist element in modern malthusianism. Early twentieth century concerns about the need for eugenic hygiene and the control of the immigration of unsatisfactory races belonged to much the same mindset as worry about the Yellow Peril. This kind of subtext was well expressed in later population anxiety literature by the passage in Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" (1968), in which a mere ride through the crowded streets of Dehli on a warm night is enough to summon up visions of universal catastrophe. Ehrlich was (and is) mostly worried about human overpopulation making the biosphere uninhabitable. The growth of immigration from the Third World and the rise of strong Asian exporting economies have in the meanwhile given population anxiety a less impersonal cast. We seem to be moving into a situation in which "population anxiety" is less a fear of the end of the world than worry that the West (or just the United States) might be overwhelmed.
These apocalypses are not really mutually exclusive. The population explosion naturally dovetails into the great plague, as conceived under the latter's ecological aspect, while both naturally give rise to thoughts of universal war as the age moves to its close. (Jack London wrote another an even creepier story in 1910, entitled "The Unparalleled Invasion," describing how the West collectively ends the rapidly growing demographic preeminence of late twentieth century China by attacking that country with germ bombs delivered by airplanes. If ecology had been invented, I am sure he would have thought of a way to work it in). A novel or a film that wove them all together in a convincing fashion could lay claim to being the true summation of the twentieth century imagination. This is not the sort of synthesis to which one looks forward eagerly, either in art or in life.