uidi lecta diu et multo spectata labore
degenerare tamen, ni uis humana quotannis
maxima quaeque manu legeret: sic omnia fatis
in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri,
non aliter quam qui aduerso uix flumine lembum
remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit,
atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alueus amni.
Vergil, Georgics 1.197-203
I have seen seeds, no matter how carefully
selected and with many pains examined
to be best, degenerate nevertheless.
unless, year in, year out, over and over,
Men labor to find the largest seeds again
All things by nature are ready to get worse,
Lapse backward, fall away from what they
were, just as if one who struggles to row his
his little boat upstream against a powerful
current should but for a moment relax his
arms, the current would carry him headlong
back again downstream.
Translation David Ferry
I had been following the events of COVID in China as early as November 2019. I saw reports. I saw images of hospitals being built. I saw people say you better get ready and others who said this was a “nothing burger.” I saw comments on lab leaks and bat soup.
As a Classicist most of my time is spent among the dead. Dead authors writing about dead things in stories and narratives that usually end in death. And there is no shortage of plagues. The Iliad begins with a plague. The plague of Athens is one of the seminal moments of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Sophocles’ Oedipus begins with a plague, performed during the plague of Athens. The plague of Athens in Lucretius’ de rerum naturae or the two plagues in Vergil’s Georgics, one of domesticated animals and another of bees, or plagues in Ovid or Seneca or Antonine plagues or Black Death plagues, all of these plagues came to mind in those early days.
These plagues were not COVID. 20, 30, 40 percent of the population dead. Covid: 1.7 percent population increase of nearly 81,000,0000 people across the globe, each year, both in 2020 and 2021. Plagues in antiquity swept through populations like a buzz-sawed Grim Reaper, decimating humans, whose average life spans already hovered somewhere around 30 years of age.
The ancients were used to death. It was something they understood intimately. They died in a million ways. They washed the corpses of their loved ones by hand. They carried the corpses of their loved onto to pyres and burned them. They lamented and sang. And then they went back home, waiting for the next death. The key difference between gods and humans: mortality. Immortals versus mortals. Undying versus dying. What is a bit more death in plagues among societies who already had their fair share of it?
Now, one thing these plagues all have in common: human death was preceded by animal death. Birds, dogs, cows, horses, and pigs. They die first (at least in the literary trope of the “plague narrative”). And the living animals won’t eat the carcasses of the dead animals. So when I followed the news from China I was looking for one thing in order to situate my fear: are the animals dying? The answer was no. Throughout the entire build up to the pandemic I felt no fear or panic or hysteria until a singular moment:
Two Weeks To Slow the Spread.
As I was following the COVID news in China, such as it was, my daughter became ill. Not a little ill, but ill for almost all of February. Fever, lethargy, a cough. A neverending cough. She went to the Dr. and was given antibiotics. She continued to become ill. We went back to the Dr. who said the antibiotics should have worked, so this seemingly continuing illness must be a different illness than the original one. I remember in January while on the metro together, I half-jokingly whispered into my daughter’s ear, “Make sure to wash your hands when you get to school so you don’t get COVID.” By the end of February my wife (who had become a mother on February 1st) became ill. And by the first week of March I too was sick.
We were told COVID had not yet arrived in Quebec. I assumed that the illness I had was not COVID. There were no tests, and I did not go to the doctor. All I can tell you is I had never experienced an illness like this. The headache was maniacal. Had Satan himself crafted spikes of fire and lava, mixed them with acid and poison and then stabbed my brain a million times over, this would have been a relief. I hallucinated and writhed. After two or three days it stopped, and I was left with this annoyingly mild persistent cough for a month. Had the headache lasted any longer, and I was given a button that could kill me instantly, I would have cuddled with that button for days, and had headache persisted beyond a week, I would have pressed that button a million times.
By mid March the shut down commenced and I was following COVID in Italy. Again, no dead animals. Then an Italian report was released early April with a breakdown of the dead: the average age of death was 82 and associated with a high number of comorbities. I assumed that if I— a Classicist of all things— could read this report in Italian and surmise a proper policy response, surely our leaders too would read this report and they would develop an age stratified response to COVID. Lockdown old folks homes. Build mobile spike hospitals for quick care of the elderly and comorbid. Open back up and allow society to function, using the young and healthy to acquire immunity in order to protect the elderly. Rather the Cuomos and Legaults of the world introduced more COVID into the elder care facilities; they continued the lockdown, following the abysmally pathetic Imperial College Report, and the Two Weeks to Slow the Spread became something else.
It became the greatest policy disaster in human history.
My fear recommenced.
That I saw no dead animals and that COVID mortality matched perfectly normative rates of death, at only a slightly increased level, caused me ease. I assumed that COVID would be here forever. It would be a disease that will cause another kind of death among our beloved elderly, who themselves stand at the gaping maw of mortality each and every day their lives continue. And like all other respiratory diseases a few among the young may too succumb, sad as that may be. I assumed we would all get it, and that one day when I am old it may be the cause of my own death (though I will likely die of a heart attack: 17,000,0000 a year die of heart disease globally or a 1/8 chance).
But a radical solution had been devised by individuals who had no right to devise such a radical solution:
Shut It Down.
The quote by Vergil above framed my understanding of the policy. This quote snapped into my mind the moment I heard the phrase “two weeks to slow the spread.” This old Roman poet, writing during one of the great periods of social and cultural transformation, beset by war, violence and death, saw something amidst the chaos of his times; he saw that culture and civilization are fragile. They are mortal. As Vergil posits: because it is the natural state of reality to degenerate and decline, humana vis, human force, year after year after year, tries to slow the unceasing onslaught of the atomization and degradation of the world through labor (a key word in the Georgics). Civilization is like a man attempting to row his boat upstream. The moment he stops, the river seizes (rapit) him in praeceps or into extreme danger or crisis (deviating from Ferry above). It is only through unceasing work and hardship that societies can continue their slow and arduous trek into progress. Every gain achieved through this labor can be lost in an instant.
I was not afraid of COVID then and I still am not afraid of COVID now, just like I am not afraid of the flu or cancer or a broken arm or a broken heart; I am afraid of the current state of civilization’s bio-medically induced coma. I am afraid to witness global civilization become swept up and along through the churning swirl of systemic collapse and failure, as each foundational institution, one by one by one, loses its kinetic friction to become static, and then is carried away into something horrible and disturbing.
Never forget: our societies are filled with wolves. They will feast on the corpse of our collapsed world.
We see them now, foaming at the mouth, licking their chops, salivating over the carcass. You see them on TV smiling.
You see their bank accounts growing.
Our “experts” clearly had never read Vergil (or much else of use, really). Frankly, many of our experts are some of the most uneducated individuals with respect to the Liberal Arts and the Humanities. And even if they had been educated in the Humanities at one point, they certainly forgot every lesson they should have learned.
At the present moment we are in a state of cascading institutional failure. Everyone can feel it. Some of us can see it.
One does not stop civilization, culture and society as a mechanism by which to halt a disease that will simply do what diseases do: move from person to person to person forever. The technocratic hubris—truly of Senecan Tragic proportions—that a Fauci or a Trudeau (I know, it is that bad!) exhibit on a day to day basis—is one of the great lessons of Covidiocy: these people lack the essential wisdom to understand that a policy of a bio-medically induced social and cultural coma will have a cataclysmic impact on society and culture. And the true madness and insanity that those, who crafted such a profoundly stupid solution to a virus two years ago, are still in positions of authority now—showing no awareness of lessons learned!— will be considered one of the great tragedies of this pandemic in years to come. Not only have they decided that arbitrary lockdowns—without any nuance with respect to age stratification and comorbidity or without any real effort to expand critical care during times of increased transmission—are the tools of brilliance and sublime wisdom, but also they in their profound sense of omniscience—their $cientism— have deemed medical apartheid, discrimination, and social division as the key mechanisms to stop the virus.
They say, “Those dirty, evil unvaxxed—those monstrous antivaxxers—THEY are the cause of the disease and its continued existence! THEY are the reason civilization has ground to a halt. It is not US! It is not OUR policies! It is not the infantile trust that WE had in a Big Pharma marketing campaign! Trust the $cience! WHO is to blame? It is the INDIVIDUAL, who performed INFORMED CONSENT, that horrendous notion of FREEDOM and BODILY AUTONOMY! Burn THEM at the stake! Do not look at US.”
The Legaults, the Faucis, the Trudeaus. They are at fault. Your government is at fault. Your media is at fault. Your institutions are failing because of their poor policies. They will continue to fail so long as they are in power.
Failure comes in many faces, just ask Justin Trudeau. He is its poster child.