Germs are living creatures too small to see with the naked eye and yet can make you sick, even kill you. They cause the diseases you can catch from people, animals, insects, soil or water. In 2020 that sounds almost too obvious to say, but as late as the 1880s some Western scientists still believed in Galen’s older miasma theory over the germ theory of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Western medicine is now based on germ theory.
Before the 1900s:
- Germs killed more people than war.
- You were better off not going to the doctor.
- Cities did not grow on their own. They depended on immigration to make up for the numbers killed by disease.
Top killers (10 million deaths or more), listed by year:
- 541-542: plague: 25m-100m
- 1331-1353: plague: 75m-200m
- 1520: smallpox (Americas): 50m
- 1855-1860: plague: > 12m
- 1877-1977: smallpox: 500m
- 1918-1920: influenza (Spanish flu): 17m-100m
- 1981- : HIV: > 32m
The current coronavirus pandemic (2019- ) has killed at least 149,884 as of April 17th 2020. But it is new and unknown. It seems to be contagious and deadly enough that it could wind up killing millions.
Plague, also known as bubonic plague, is an actual disease. But in the English-speaking world it has been made so infamous by its many pandemics that “plague” in English can mean a pandemic – a disease that spreads across cities, countries and continents like wildfire.
Smallpox you might think is millions of years old, but for humans it only goes back to Ancient Egypt when it made the jump from cows to humans, probably in the -1600s. It did not reach Rome till after Rome had conquered Egypt. And it did not reach the Americas till after Columbus arrived.
Living with animals: Most pandemic diseases are from the last 13,000 years. Because before then humans did not live with animals, which is where most of these germs come from. Cows, for example, gave us not just smallpox but tuberculosis and measles too. Influenza comes from pigs and ducks. Plague from rats. And so on.
City life: The rise of big cities, good transport and trade has led to the rise of pandemics.
Race: Before Columbus, people in the Americas and Australia had been cut off from the rest of the world for over 10,000 years. That meant they had little resistance to Eurasian diseases. And since they had little in the way of livestock, they did not have terrible diseases of their own that would kill off outsiders. That is why Europeans could settle the Americas and Australia in large numbers – but not Africa or Asia. And why Europeans needed African slaves and later Asian coolies to work in and near the Caribbean: European workers did not hold up well against tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever.
The Columbian Exchange brought to the Americas smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, diphtheria, malaria, mumps, tuberculosis, yellow fever, plague, whooping cough, etc, killing up to 95% of Native Americans. In “exchange” Europe got syphilis, maybe.
Widowed continent: What White Americans thought was a virgin continent was a widowed continent – mounds without Mound Builders, a post-apocalyptic landscape.
– Abagond, 2020.
Sources: mainly “Guns, Germs & Steel” (2005) by Jared Diamond; Top killers from the Wikipedia and Visual Capitalist.
See also:
- guns, germs and steel
- pandemic
- plague
- smallpox
- malaria
- cholera
- tuberculosis
- yellow fever
- Spanish flu
- HIV/AIDS
- swine flu
- Ebola
- The coronavirus
- The Columbian Exchange
- Mound Builders
- Asian coolies
- US slavery
- Squanto – who lived to see the post-apocalypse of his own people
575
Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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It seems more and more that “civilization” – as we have come to know it as a collection of people with specialization and bureaucratization who are concentrated in cities and supported by intensive agriculture – is a bad idea. Experience shows that in exchange for material plenty, its wages are war, slavery and economic exploitation, infectious and chronic “lifestyle” diseases, and ecological destruction.
Probably we’d be better off much more spread out; taking the necessities of life from the abundant environment in a way similar to “primitive” hunter-gatherers. One wonders whether the supposed master work was just an ill-fated detour after all. Maybe we’ll find out sooner rather than later, lol.
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Global warming may eventually release viruses that go back tens of thousands of years.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up
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And reduced flights (among other things) due to the COVID-19 containment measures could accelerate the warming trend.
https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html
It’s likely a one-way road to the unraveling at this point.
Reduce emissions voluntarily or not. Stop the economy voluntarily for COVID-19 or not. Those actions will probably be forced, in due time, by the circumstances and won’t will help preserve the system anyway. Chess players would call it “zugzwang”.
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@ Origin,
Yes, intensifying urbanization, industrialized agriculture, global supply chains and unbridled consumption of non-renewable “dirty” energy is making the world uninhabitable, gutting out the planet’s biodiversity with constant war, labour exploitation and disease and threat of nuclear fallout for the human survivors.
Sustainable?
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@ Origin
(emphasis added)
Maybe. Maybe not.
From a purely Darwinist point of view it is winning… until now!
See the older societies in the periphery of Europe seeing the Europeans coming and a few centuries later taking control of their lands and lives and ask yourself who or what was/is winning. Not from a moral or idealistic point of view but from a practical point of view.
Crisis like the current one – ecological crisis already ongoing for a while and recently the worldwide health crisis – are good, anyway, because they force us to rethink a lot of assumptions we normally have for granted.
My guess is that the health crisis will be over in relative short period of time. Probably it will not take many years to be solved.
Civilization, as we know it, the one that facilitated the worldwide spread of the new coronavirus, with its developed transport infrastructure, this same civilization created the basis to “see” this enemy (microscopes and other technological paraphernalia as well as the set of concepts and ideas – we call them Science – that guides its understanding) and will surely be able to defeat it.
We have been there, remember? A few decades ago the “virus” invaded our lives. I mean the HIV-virus which pulled our attention to the microscopic world. We were so hit by surprise, that developments in another totally unrelated domain – computer technology – borrowed that term amply to designated entities in their realm (Think a little bit why computer malware is oft called viruses and not, for example, bacteria or fungi. Yes, it is because our minds were impacted, for many years by the HIV-virus and its apparently, in the begin, unstoppable destructive capability). And HIV ended, if not defeated, at least controlled. In its spread and in its destructive capabilities.
So, I bet that this novel intruder will be defeated. Not without making many causalities in the rows of the homo sapiens sapiens ranks.
But the war we are waging against the ecology of the planet Earth is a different history. That one we will not win. No way.
Unless we learn to change our current ways of life, demographic trends, etc and try to control our hubris and humbly re-learn to live in peace with mother Earth.
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ERRATA:
Instead of “amply to designated entities” should be “amply to designate entities” (without the “d”).
Also instead “rows of the homo sapiens sapiens ranks” should be “homo sapiens sapiens ranks” (without “rows of the”)
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@ munubantu
“Unless we learn to change our current ways of life, demographic trends, etc and try to control our hubris and humbly re-learn to live in peace with mother Earth.”
So. Very. True.
Either we do it voluntarily or the Earth will do it for us.
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@munubantu
Darwinism is a concept created by this civilization. It unsurprisingly created the criteria under which it can be viewed as superior. So the fact that it psychopathically eliminated others becomes proof of its perfection as if that’s the primary goal a collective should have. Its innate acquisitiveness combined with its mass mobilization and, later, its industrial base certainly allowed it to become extremely effective at destruction of others and, indeed, the planet. That cannot be denied. However a gun is no use when you’re styling hair. We wouldn’t declare guns the most perfect instrument without regard for the task at hand. Only guns would anoint themselves in that way by exaggerating the value of their role. It also seems likely that civilized people would overestimate the value of the civilization they know by attaching excessive weight to its particular achievements.
It is also true that civilization has ameliorated many of the problems it created, so that it can continue. Close interaction with large numbers of animals, due to agriculture, as well as close living arrangements in cities triggered epidemics of infectious diseases. Vaccines and antibiotics in later centuries helped to reduce the impact of those germs which, enabled civilization to intensify industrial farming and push cities to previously unimaginable population densities. In other words, civilization did not learn. It conquered the enemy – or so it thought – then continued full steam ahead in the direction is was being pushed by its internal priorities [i.e greed]. However, microbes are adaptable. Overuse of antibiotics, even on farm animals, selected for resistant strains of bacteria. Viruses continued to evolve to evade existing vaccines. So a new pandemic is upon us and the lack of resilience has been exposed since civilization had intensified all the underlying conditions that would’ve made us particularly susceptible to germs in the absence of treatments. And lo, there are no treatments for SARS-Cov-2!
BTW, in comparison to HIV, civilization will need a more comprehensive victory over this virus in order to get back to business as usual. HIV has not been defeated. Testing has allowed people to make informed choices and a cocktail of drugs can interrupt the virus’ replication and stave off full blown AIDS. However there is no effective vaccine or cure so it’s really a stroke of luck – HIV does not spread without very intimate contact – that has enabled a kind of truce. COVID-19 spreads efficiently and the severe form of the disease is terrible enough to cause considerable consternation among populations. In the absence of a a vaccine or drug which completely defeats it, a change of way of life may be forced.
Finally, to quote you:
“Unless we learn to change our current ways of life, demographic trends, etc and try to control our hubris and humbly re-learn to live in peace with mother Earth.”
Right. This is why I thought civilization may very well be bad. Our way of life is that which is dictated by civilization. If we are to change our way of life only a collapse of civilization would allow it. When banks can create money through debt obligations and others must create actual value to repay those debts we will always be forced to ravage the planet for tribute and at an ever increasing rate to cover the compounding interest. Population growth will also be encouraged in order to decrease labor costs and increase consumption. Humans can conceivably live in peace with Earth, it is likely that civilization cannot.
Ecologically, it is likely circling the drain it created through its own activity. Once caught in a vortex the route may be circuitous but the hapless object ultimately ends up in the hole. For example, there are reports that 2020 is likely to be particularly hot because of the lowered pollution levels thanks to COVID-19’s interruption of industrial activity. Anecdotally, I think Cuba already broke its temperature record. So environmentalists got what they wanted and it doesn’t help! Civilization is running out of caulk to plug the holes of its own making.
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@munubantu
I responded but I’m in moderation. I’m wonder what profanity the software found embedded in my post, lol. It’s a mystery sometimes.
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I do appreciate the potential counterpoints, though, despite my forceful argument against. It made me think, and thinking about it pushed me further in the “bad idea” direction. It seems as if most of civilization’s good aspects are basically insignificant distractions compared to its bad aspects, such as pandemics, ecological destruction and nuclear war, which literally threaten continued life on Earth.
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@ Origin
“people… overestimate the value of the civilization they know by attaching excessive weight to its particular achievements.”
That comment brings to mind a book I read when I was ten or eleven. In the book, the author attempted to define civilization.
The author listed things like:
➨ Domestication of horses
➨ The invention of the wheel
➨ Written language
➨ Laws and Courts
as definitive criteria of “civilization”.
It is funny that even at that age, I realized the author was defining European civilization. I already knew that horses were not present in pre-Contact Americas, yet those societies were civilized.
Most societies in Africa and Southeast Asia never developed written language, lacked horses and wheels, yet developed remarkable civilizations.
Every society from hunter-gatherers to the technologically complex has some form of law and courts just like they all have music, dancing and poetry. Plus hunter-gathers do a better job of keeping the sociopaths among them under control.
There has indeed been a gross overestimation of “the civilization they know” by certain members of humanity.
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@Afrofem
Yeah. What you said reminded me of an article which said humans of the future will be darker with bigger eyes etc. The accompanying artist conception showed a humanoid figure fairer skinned than many people who already exist today. The notion of the European as default human is so strong (while the committed race warriors ironically worry about their minority status constantly).
@Afrofem
“Most societies in Africa and Southeast Asia never developed written language, lacked horses and wheels, yet developed remarkable civilizations.”
Furthermore, when they had written communication (like Meroitic script, Hieroglyphs or Nsibidi) a hierarchy was created in which the today’s Latin alphabet is the apex of “development”. They’re all interpreted as “primitive” steps on the way to what is the norm in modern civilization. (This is more common in older books.)
Generally, the current system has an implicit belief that it was inevitable and therefore represents the goal to which all were striving. To the extent to which others were different, those differences are retrospectively seen as a failure to “advance”. It’s not uncommon for everyone to accept such assumptions without realizing that they are subjective viewpoints upheld by a particular cultural environment rather than “objective” facts.
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Correction: The most dominant societies in SE Asia did develop written language and have used it for thousands of years.
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