Conversation

Kinda interesting that the century of American globalization and the century of Chinese globalization both have a pandemic about 25 years in. I’d date the former to the 1893 Chicago world fair, and the latter to the death of Deng Xiaoping, 1997.
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Our time also has climate change, and we’ve already had one climate-related pandemic. It just wasn’t among humans. It was among Saiga deer. Adjacent possible warning. Covid19 has no climate angle that I can see, but the risk of climate change and pandemic risk combing is there.
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Don’t want to overstate/over fit the US origin of Spanish Flu theory. It’s not critical to the pattern. The bigger part is that the waxing global power supplies the new transportation network the disease rides, whatever the origin.
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Replying to @vgr
This is just one narrative amidst the research, and one that tends to be selected not b/c people want truth, but b/c they want a memetically potent take. After looking at the diff studies, my $ is on those that point to China, though it’s unlikely we’ll ever know definitively.
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In fact there’s a strong possibility all 3 big pandemivs (Black Death, Spanish Flu, Covid19) might have originated in China. But this is the first one where China *also* controls half the transportation pathways. Direct airline connectivity to China was the big dispersal factor.
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Replying to
It’s important to be able to talk of origins dispassionately rather than at “your people gave my people cooties” level. Even if we can’t definitively trace origins especially in historic cases. It’s tempting but analytically a dead-end to study causes with an eye on blame.
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Among recent epidemics, sources have been Hong Kong, Misdle East, West Africa. Only weird one I can think of from the west is mad cow disease but that had low crossover threat. Higher standard of living and lower density may lower chances of originating diseases, BUT...
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Keep in mind that western standards of living are sustained by: Asian manufacturing, middle eastern oil, and west African mineral wealth. Everybody is complicit. That’s the essence of globalization.
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If West Africa hadn’t been looted if it’s wealth by local warlords in cahoots with western MNCs, night it perhaps be a wakanda style paradise rather than the origin of AIDS and Ebola in recent decades? We don’t know because history never went down that fork.
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MERS appears to have jumped the human-camel barrier but would that have been as consequential in a non-oil-dependent world?
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So “cooties” approaches to big history thinking around pandemics is just not very enlightening or interesting. But globalization linkages otoh are very interesting. Pandemics as the cost of globalization. Payments due once a century or so.
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Pandemic-aware Big History probably needs the Harare/Sapiens treatment. Maybe even Gladwell or Tom Friedman level. There’s a pop-narrative vacuum here that’s being filled by the least charitable speculations rather than the most enlightening.
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I generally don’t enjoy that band of authors for their shallow/facile theorizing but I have to admit: they provide a valuable service creating Schelling points of understanding founded in curiosity rather than fear.
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And it’s important to reorient around curiosity rather than fear as we come out of this, so the response to the next one — and there will be a next one — is better. Which kind of Big History you entertain now will determine whether you’re part of the problem or solution next time
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This might sound like elliptical apologia for China at a time when Trump is going his usual crude demonizing to create convenient enemies. That’s not my intent.
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China can and should be held to account for its role here. So should the WHO for their failures. But by credible people carefully considering what happened. Not by the kangaroo court if Trumpist opinion.
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Between global scrutiny and China’s own tendency towards acting out of national face-saving, proximal causes like wild animal interfaces will likely get fixed. WHO will probably see some reform. That’s band-aid stuff for the global order.
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But deeper root-cause fixes will come from a deeper intellectual understanding of how waves of globalization happen, what the costs are, how they are paid. These things take time. We’re still not done litigating the costs of the rise of the US a century ago.
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China now joins an elite club of superpowers by virtue of being attributed responsibility for a Big Bad thing. Sinification will join Americanization as a decidedly mixed blessing spreading across the world. We’ll be in this story for a long time. Settle in.
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Reflecting on this stuff is giving me a deeper appreciation of what cosmopolitanism actually is. It’s not jetsetting or invites to Davos or crap like that. It’s about discovering a real humanism by discovering all the real humans. Not armchair values.
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The general parsimonious position I’ll defend is that it is statistics highly unlikely that large populations with a long history have miraculously never produced a pandemic. Every sufficiently populated region has probably produced a few.
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