Pandemics and global politics in the 21st century

Some Christian fundamentalists once portrayed AIDS as a plague visited upon gays for their sinful forms of sexuality. In moments of despair about the current state of world affairs, I have been tempted to adopt an analogous perspective on severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Perhaps the disease is the ultimate commentary or final curse upon the hubris of global capitalism. Yet visions of apocalypse, whether left or right, fundamentalist Christian or fundamentalist green, are disturbingly similar. They can be breathtaking in the vindictiveness they encourage and seldom contribute to alleviating the problems they purport to address.

SARS surely does raise alarms about the increasingly rapid and intense globalization of products and peoples. By March, an unusual and virulent strain of a poorly understood virus that apparently originated in China in November 2002 had not only brought business to a virtual standstill in Hong Kong but had even led to the closing of two hospitals in Toronto. The travel and tourism industries world wide, already reeling from fears of political terrorism, now brace themselves for the backwash from public alarm about nature’s terrorism.

Is this the Third World’s revenge on the First? Lord Jeffery Amherst, after whom Amherst College is named, once held an esteemed place in Western lore for his skillful deployment of weapons of mass destruction, He knowingly gave smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans, who subsequently died in large numbers from the disease.

Today, our high-tech factories migrate endlessly in search of cheap labor, driving wages of Third World labor ever lower. Western financial institutions impose stark debt repayment terms on fiscally strapped Asian and African governments. Is a mysterious, contagious and virulent disease emanating from the one of the world’s poorest areas and now spreading toward the penthouse of global capitalism a fitting payback to Lord Amherst? Some of Hong Kong’s elite have seen the irony. As one Hong Kong lawyer, quoted recently in the London based Guardian, put it, “I know Hong Kong is supposed to be positioning itself as the entrance to China, but this is working the other way around.”

Or does SARS illustrate a caveat that John Maynard Keynes issued near the end of his life, that ideas should be free to move easily and rapidly across borders, but much greater care should be extended to the movement of people and capital?

Both ideas resonate with me, but each offers its problems. Globe circling jets surely have something to do with the exceedingly rapid spread of pandemics, but late Medieval Europe, where travel was exceedingly restricted, was decimated by such horrific pandemics as the Black Plague. And if public health authorities and the medical profession do manage to keep SARS reasonably well contained, global travel by public health personnel and the export of sophisticated technologies may make a major contribution. And on reflection I am as bothered and unconvinced by the idea of a God who would torture even the greedy capitalists among us as by one who would destroy some for their sexual orientation. In any case, if SARS is as dangerous as many now fear, it will claim many lives from all socio-economic classes in both the so-called West and the Third World.

If SARS is a cautionary tale with larger moral implications, it suggests greater humility even for some of global capitalism’s harshest economic and ecological opponents. We don’t know how serious this disease is or how serious it will become. Global capitalism has expanded in ways that do considerable injustice to workers everywhere and pose potential ecological risks. Nonetheless, there may be no law inscribed in the cosmos that global capitalism’s overreach must call down on itself medical or demographic catastrophe.

But neither can modern medicine bask in triumph. Modern medicine has made some progress against major epidemics – especially through public sanitation measures. Yet diseases seem to have their own natural histories that defy perfect predictability.

In the face of uncertainty, one aspect of Keynes’ wisdom may bear re-emphasis, the need for exchange of ideas both domestically and internationally. Secretiveness about this disease may have contributed to its spread. Old-fashioned approaches of quarantine and public health precautions may do more good than all the most sophisticated microbiology.

One hopes that China will now follow through on recent promises to become more forthcoming about the spread of the disease within its borders. But secretiveness itself knows no boundaries today. Closed councils of trade and finance that control the fate of whole continents invite their dependents always to put the best face on any contingency. More than ever we need a world order willing to acknowledge and discuss the risks and contingencies that seem to be inevitable in human life.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.