David Waltner-Toews writes:

Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the product of reflection, time and experience. A person might achieve wisdom after decades; a community after centuries; a culture after millennia. Modern human beings as a species? We’re getting there, and pandemics can help. If we persist in our curiosity and reflect on what we find, and if we survive the waves of disease to come, the wisdom of pandemics will come to us. Perhaps as soon as a few centuries from now.

Pandemics are both deeply immediate and empirically long-lasting, symbolised by the Greek gods of time, including the unbounded Aion and the temporal Chronos, who ruled over past, present and future. Although we’re improving our abilities to understand each aspect separately, the challenge is bringing them together. Consider, for instance, the protracted history and arc of the 2020 pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

In 1887, as part of its invasion of what is now Eritrea in the Horn of Africa, Italy shipped cattle over from India to feed its troops. Some of those cattle were carrying the virus that causes rinderpest, known historically among Europeans as cattle plague. The virus attacks even-toed ungulates, and is nearly always fatal. Informed by the mythology framing human relationships with disease in terms of war, the British tried to stop the spread of rinderpest with fences and guns. A decade later, the virus had swept through the immunologically naive populations of sub-Saharan Africa, killing almost 90 per cent of all the cattle, as well as oxen, sheep, buffalo, wildebeest and giraffes.

Rinderpest was successfully eradicated, worldwide, in 2011, primarily using that peaceful tool called vaccination. Nevertheless, its impacts continued. [Continue reading…]