The purpose of science is to make the world suck less despite the fact that humans on average suck exactly the same in 1348, 1918, 2020.
Conversation
Chapter 20, war and peace, is kinda weak and all over the place. Starts with a good account of why Spanish Flu might have swung the war in the allies favor (it hit Central Europe harder due to malnutrition etc), then unravels as it surveys global post-flu geopolitics.
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Wilson got the flu, Gandhi got the flu, dealing with the flu was part off the story of political leadership everywhere obviously. But it’s unclear if it was decisive anywhere. The flu was big but other big stuff was going on too. It probably accelerated slide to WW2 though.
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Chapter 21, melancholy muse, is about why the flu didn’t inspire much art though it did create a huge break from past tradition. No major creative of the lost generation really tackled the subject though all were personally affected by it.
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So in romantic tradition that preceded the modernist tradition (?), disease was a boring everyday reality and mainly used in symbolic ways in literature like in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where it represents Europe’s decay. After the flu/WWI it was a literal central concern.
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Virginia Woolf consciously pioneered this shift. Though the Spanish flu wasn’t a special focus, disease and illness generally took center-stage. She wrote an essay On Being ill in 1925. Hadn’t heard of it 🤔
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This was another rushed, whistle-stop tour chapter. Unsatisfying. Again there’s a vague pattern here globally. A shift away from romanticism to unsentimental realism plus introspective orientation. But it just sort of gestures at Spanish Flu accelerating existing artistic trends.
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I do think we’ll see an equally sharp acceleration of artistic trends and it will be similar in tone, from expansive neoliberal romanticism of 1997-2015 to a post-Covid unsentimental interiority. And an equally studious avoidance of explicit and direct engagement.
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Spinney mainly surveys literary fiction and poetry around the world as indicator species. From T. S. Eliot outwards. Freud thrown in (clever to include him and his death drive theory in art chapter). Plausible case that mood shift was sharpened by flu. Today I’d track memes+TV.
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Interesting insight into Hindi literature of the period (Premchand, Nirala) of the progressive movement of the time as a break from Tagore romanticism. Not something I expected to see in a book by a British writer. She reads it right but again I doubt flu was a decisive driver.
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In general this chapter and the previous one could both be full books. They read like speculative teasers of richer possible treatments that leave you looking for closure/resolution of the hypotheses being casually floated.
Replying to
Finally close to the end of this book. A retrospective from modern view.
2016 report by Commission on Globsl Health Risk Framework (GHRF) estimated 20% chance of >4 pandemics in the next century, 1 being flu.
Well 1 down, 3 to go. Hopefully this is last big one in my lifetime
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The big flu candidates are H5N1 and H7N9. They’re under surveillance. I guess viruses are like terrorist orgs. Gotta monitor them.
One 2013 model estimated if something like Spanish Flu emerged today, there’d be 21-30m dead. Relatively lower, but absolutely higher.
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If the exact same strain of H1N1 emerged today, she says it would likely be mild.
I wonder how you get to that conclusion. Most people exposed to it are now dead. How are the rest of us immune primed? I still don’t get some basics here. 🤔
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This conclusion and afterword is mostly forgettable speculation in light of Covid. Comments on WHO and CDC that seem charmingly simplistic in 2020. Still some interesting thoughts on using social networks for surveillance etc. Just... obsolete.
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Afterword has interesting insight that pandemic memories take longer to develop and stabilize than other historical memories. 80,000 books on WW1 but only 400 on Spanish Flu. But latter are recent/exponential increase.
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Spanish Flu is finally entering popular memory. 3 characters in Diwnton Abbey got it and 1 died.
Black Death wasn’t even called that till the 16th century. It was called the blue death before. First works on it from 19th century.
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That delay effect is over I think. Covid has been live-blogged and tweeted vastly more broadly and deeply than anything in history. I bet there will be a crop of solid books within a decade.
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Alright done. I skimmed the last 5 chapters rather fast because the book was beginning to drag tbh. But it’s overall a very well done heavy lifting that does its global multi-level spiral South African grandmother storytelling shtick well. The diverse anecdotes help a lot.
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This concludes the pandemic reads live-tweeting book club.
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