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.
Conversation
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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I last wrote about this in 2016. My cartoon was a Zoom screen!
Still an unrepentant globalist, and will be one even if none of us leave our homes again ever.
You can take the globalist out of the world, but not the world out of the globalist.
breakingsmart.substack.com/p/cosmopolitan
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I am possibly wrong on the specific example of Cholera, though I’m skeptical of any definitive theories of historical cases. We just don’t have enough of a historical record. twitter.com/adish_war/stat
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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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For some reason the virus is used as "slam dunk" evidence for *both* centralization and decentralization/localism.
- centralization: look at China/Singapore! Be efficient!
- decentralization: Federal US so inefficient!
I need a word for this (since its ubiquitous in politics)

