Coronavirus crisis: Where’s Prometheus when you need him most?
Our oldest myths are intimately concerned with disease and its consequences – coronavirus is a new chapter in an ancient story, a restatement of the power of the natural world to upend our “best-laid plans.”
It begins with Epimetheus and Prometheus (they were Titans were a lower class of divine beings, but above humans), who were charged by the gods to give each animal its own special quality. Epimetheus persuades Prometheus to let him take charge. Wings to the birds, strength to the predator, speed to the hunted, hides for the beasts in winter – each of the animals has its proper place in the balance of nature. But Epimetheus, who is forgetful, turns to Man last and finds that he has no qualities left.
This is what Plato calls “the fault of Epimetheus”. To remedy it, Prometheus steals fire from Hephaestus and gives it to Man. A major theme of Greek creation myths is Man’s fundamental estrangement from the natural order and his status as a technical being.
In Hesiod’s Works and Days, in retribution for Prometheus’s thieving, Zeus offers a gift to Epimetheus, which he (absentminded to a fault) dutifully accepts. The gift is Pandora, whom Zeus had instructed Hephaestus to mould out of earth and water into a “sweet, lovely maiden-shape”. She is infused with divine capriciousness, “a shameless mind and a deceitful nature”.
This is the second fault of Epimetheus – to allow Pandora to come to Earth rather than send her straight back to Olympus. She opens up a jar (the box is a modern invention) in which all sorrows and mischiefs are kept. Among them are “diseases” which “come upon men continually by day and by night”. They are described as “automatoi”, moving among the peoples of the earth spontaneously as if of their own diabolic will.
The first of Epimetheus’s faults elevates Man above the beast; the second shows how Woman, who is an amalgam of chaotic nature and divine power, ensures Man is restrained by the natural order – by its sheer randomness and its constant evolution. The ever-present threat of disease is felt, not just in flesh and bone, but in the metaphysical challenge it poses to the Western mind, which, millennia ago, found itself uneasily at odds with the natural world.
Hesiod articulates the profound sense of alienation in his misogynistic treatment of Woman, who is portrayed both as the host of contamination and physical want and as Man’s redeemer – his closest link with the world of the Gods.
The link to gender relations or, more appropriately, the warring of the sexes, shows how closely our primordial fascination with disease sits beside the murmuring of our deeper selves, our unconscious drives and needs.
The much-documented Plague of Athens in the 5th century was documented by the historian Thucydides. Experts are divided as to what the Plague actually was: some argue typhus, others cholera, or influenza. It was the arbitrariness that struck Thucydides most keenly. The illness struck down “strong and weak constitutions” alike. As a result, “men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything”. Law and order broke down – men no longer expected to face retribution for committing crimes, because the death rate was so high.
The Athenian populace sought explanations in folk sayings and oracles from the distant past. Rough estimates put the death toll at around 25% of the population. Disease is the great leveller – it was said to have wiped out Pericles, the great general and hero.
The “automatoi” that fly through the air by day and night have, time and time again, undone human societies, or at least reshaped our deepest assumptions about social life, and about the character of justice and power. In the everyday world, it is felt in the twinge you experience when you see someone coughing without covering their mouth, or an “eurgh, that’s icky” tremor.
It is thought that the latest coronavirus, Covid-19, spreads at such a terrific rate because it can be infectious in individuals who do not show any prior symptoms. However, it is currently thought to be one of the least deadly epidemic-style illnesses that humans can catch which has a source among animals. By contrast, H5N1, or avian flu, is close to mutating into a disease that can be passed from human to human rather than just from animal to human: unlike the new coronavirus, H5N1 can kills roughly 60% of those it infects.
Although WHO estimates the fatality rate for Covid-19 at 3.4%, based on the figures available so far, we should expect that to be revised down significantly. Testing also distorts the picture – it’s very simple: the more testing you do, the more cases you will find. How many people catch seasonal flu every year? Current estimates are wildly imprecise, because there is no systematic testing for it. This rigmarole where, every day, more cases are “revealed” is only useful insofar as it reminds the populace to follow basic hygiene advice (which should be par for the course in day-to-day life – wash your hands when you get into the house, wash before eating, don’t clutch public handrails liberally, etc.).
In human terms, the pandemic scares of the 21st century – SARS, MERS and swine flu – are small fry: the Justinian plague of 541 AD is estimated to have killed 25 million people; the Spanish flu of 1918 around 50 million. The Black Death, lasting from 1348 to 1350, may have killed up to 200 million people worldwide and half the population of England.
But coronavirus still makes a persuasive case that we should get our house in order. There will be pandemics in this century of the kind that left indelible marks on the 20th. The central question of our politics relates to how far and how quickly we should retreat from the hyper-globalised world of the early 21st century. We live in an era of existential risk, and we must now add to nuclear proliferation and climate change the threat of a serious pandemic, which is clearly exacerbated by the scale of international travel.
Disease always accelerates or magnifies tensions that are constitutive of our deepest conflicts. For Hesiod, disease brought the warring of the sexes into focus; for Thucydides, the Plague exposed the fragility of Athens’s law-bound society and its waning military might.
In the here and now, our era of pandemics (and climate change) is likely to provoke a reassertion of the proximate, and the self-sufficient. In the near term, it may accelerate a change in working habits, result in greater flexibility around home working, a safety net for freelancers or workers on zero hours contracts who simply cannot afford to get sick, and broader cultural shifts in travel habits (which could, for example, play a significant role in revitalising England’s wasted coastal towns and resorts).
But we should be alive to the risks this pandemic will pose to our already fragile and atomised human realm – self-isolating as a species as much as individuals, and losing our connections with each other as much as with our environment. Where’s Prometheus when you need him most?