The Apocalypse Came Early

Some years ago on this blog I speculated about the outcomes we might expect from a deadly global pandemic, a category of disaster popular with authors of post-apocalyptic fiction. Basing my conclusions upon reading in my own professional bailiwick (history), I suggested that a future post-Plague world would see:

 

1 - Advances in medical science

2 - New developments in superstition and racial scapegoating

3 - Possible improvement in the conditions of working people

4 - A probable increase in political and economic repression.

 

Nine years on, our pandemical future has at last arrived. It is too early to speak of a post-Covid world. The disease may be contained in the United States (maybe), but we are unlikely to see global death rates taper off this year. Still, with a year’s worth of social and epidemiological data at our disposal, we can make some tentative observations about the pandemic, and I can see if the generalizations I made in 2012 apply to the very specific 2020-21 disaster.

 

1 - The new mRNA vaccines that have been going into arms since late last year are a promising medical advance, and one unforeseen (AFAIK) a couple of years ago.

2 - In the United States, our own president spent a good part of 2020 flogging snake-oil solutions like chloroquine and bleach injections (these didn’t catch on), and trying, with more success, to scapegoat East Asians for the “China virus.”  

3 - This seems to have occurred in the United States, much to my surprise. An emergency expansion of unemployment insurance and child-welfare benefits last year gave breathing room to impoverished working-class people, and the label “essential worker” has begun to supplant “low-skilled laborer,” which may help to bring up people’s wages.

 4 - Political repression has increased in some parts of the world, like East Asia, but mostly as a consequence of coups or popular uprisings. Quarantine measures have made North Korea and Cambodia more repressive, but they were not previously democracies.

 

There is room for cautious optimism here, but no cause to say “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Three million people have already died of COVID-19 and the disease is still making its death march through India and Brazil, on its way to who-knows-what levels of destruction in the global South. Optimism, in any case, is always difficult for those of us of a certain age. It’s a lot easier to imagine how ghastly the world could become than to realize that many, perhaps most people in the industrialized world already live in a crapsack future and want its social arrangements to die with the pandemic.