In Albert Camus’ The Plague, Dr Bernard Rieux believes that we cannot truly grasp the idea of suffering because it is an abstract concept. Bodies are piling up around him in Oran. That’s a lot of suffering as he points out. His argument is, however, predicated on the dialectic between looking at people dying, the macro view, and knowing everyone who is dying or is dead.
In other words, you cannot really comprehend suffering unless you know everyone who has died or is dying. Suffering is personal. Or as Stalin supposedly said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
It’s the difference between history and literature; numbers and feelings. Each morning, as I look at figures for Covid-19, infected, recovered, dead, I feel fear and horror. But it’s still difficult to grasp the suffering involved unless one knows those who have been claimed by the pathogen.
It’s the same when we talk about the plague, the Black Death that ravaged the ancient and medieval worlds and struck again in the 19th Century. Or the 1918 influenza pandemic. We talk about the populations those pandemics decimated: 20 million dead, 50 million, perhaps 100 million. No one knows. But they were all people; humans, who died, sometimes horribly, suffering to the point where death was probably a relief.
Numbers don’t tell those stories. They are meant to give us a broad idea of what happened. But in doing that, they also shield us from what for millions was an immediate reality, the pervading fear. Numbers are our safety valve.
Move from the macro to the micro and the scene changes. Take one person from the 20 or 50 or 100 million; give her a name and follow her life to the point of death. That journey would necessarily involve knowing her feelings, desires, fears; her family, those who loved her as much as those who didn’t; what she liked to eat; how she would dress up; what dreams she had how she reacted to the world outside, her community, the times she was born in; did she suffer when giving birth to her first child; how did she hold the baby; what was it like feeding her, changing the diapers, responding to the baby’s curiosity and perception about the world, the immediate surroundings.
One can go on listing all that defines us but that endeavour is the domain of literature. Literature doesn’t shield us from the bigger reality; while numbers are reductive, the life lived is expansive and it centres round the individual. It pulls the reader in, makes her identify with the person who has just become much more than a number. It also informs the reader of her own desires, feelings, fears, passions. But most of all her own mortality and if she lives during a pandemic, as we do today, that one day she could become a number buried in Friday’s statistical dashboard that will submerge in more numbers as more people die.
History tells us that Black Death eroded the foundations of medieval feudalism. As writer John Feffer noted, “The Black Death depopulated Europe, killing as much as 60 per cent of the population in the middle of the fourteenth century. Feudalism depended on lots of peasants working the land to support the one per cent of that era. By carrying off so many of these workers, the Black Death made a major contribution to eroding the foundations of the dominant economic system of the time.”
This is big picture stuff. It moves away from the individual (the 60 per cent who died) to what it did to the economic system of the time. There’s already much debate — and rightly so — about the impact Covid-19 may have on today’s dominant economic system, pulling down the god of the free market and exposing the invisible corrective hand that market fundamentalists are so fond of.
Feffer calls this the ‘small government canard’. He is right. But he isn’t the first to identify this. Francis Wheen, writing about the October 1987 stock market crash, had this to say: “[T]he world’s dominant financial system had simply curled up and died. What saved it from extinction was not the ‘invisible hand’ but the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, who flooded the market with cheap credit shortly after midday and strong-armed the big banks to do the same, thus preventing Wall Street from dragging the whole US economy into recession.”
As now, then too, market fundamentalists chose to ignore the fact that the financial system was saved by government intervention and regulation, “precisely the kind of ‘interference’ they would usually deplore.”
As we plod through this period, hoping for an end to this pandemic, we do not know how things will shape up. What kind of world we will be entering. Whether we will have learnt any lessons. Whether we will redefine the idea of growth; growth to what end and how; will we think in terms of redistribution? Questions abound. The debate has begun. The rest lies in the future. As Yeats said in Lapis Lazuli, “All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay.”
In the meantime, those that have passed on will become a distant memory. The next pandemic will look at statistics from this one.
Rieux was right. We just can’t grasp suffering. The dialectic between the personal and the statistical remains unresolved.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times. He reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider
In other words, you cannot really comprehend suffering unless you know everyone who has died or is dying. Suffering is personal. Or as Stalin supposedly said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
It’s the difference between history and literature; numbers and feelings. Each morning, as I look at figures for Covid-19, infected, recovered, dead, I feel fear and horror. But it’s still difficult to grasp the suffering involved unless one knows those who have been claimed by the pathogen.
It’s the same when we talk about the plague, the Black Death that ravaged the ancient and medieval worlds and struck again in the 19th Century. Or the 1918 influenza pandemic. We talk about the populations those pandemics decimated: 20 million dead, 50 million, perhaps 100 million. No one knows. But they were all people; humans, who died, sometimes horribly, suffering to the point where death was probably a relief.
Numbers don’t tell those stories. They are meant to give us a broad idea of what happened. But in doing that, they also shield us from what for millions was an immediate reality, the pervading fear. Numbers are our safety valve.
Move from the macro to the micro and the scene changes. Take one person from the 20 or 50 or 100 million; give her a name and follow her life to the point of death. That journey would necessarily involve knowing her feelings, desires, fears; her family, those who loved her as much as those who didn’t; what she liked to eat; how she would dress up; what dreams she had how she reacted to the world outside, her community, the times she was born in; did she suffer when giving birth to her first child; how did she hold the baby; what was it like feeding her, changing the diapers, responding to the baby’s curiosity and perception about the world, the immediate surroundings.
One can go on listing all that defines us but that endeavour is the domain of literature. Literature doesn’t shield us from the bigger reality; while numbers are reductive, the life lived is expansive and it centres round the individual. It pulls the reader in, makes her identify with the person who has just become much more than a number. It also informs the reader of her own desires, feelings, fears, passions. But most of all her own mortality and if she lives during a pandemic, as we do today, that one day she could become a number buried in Friday’s statistical dashboard that will submerge in more numbers as more people die.
History tells us that Black Death eroded the foundations of medieval feudalism. As writer John Feffer noted, “The Black Death depopulated Europe, killing as much as 60 per cent of the population in the middle of the fourteenth century. Feudalism depended on lots of peasants working the land to support the one per cent of that era. By carrying off so many of these workers, the Black Death made a major contribution to eroding the foundations of the dominant economic system of the time.”
This is big picture stuff. It moves away from the individual (the 60 per cent who died) to what it did to the economic system of the time. There’s already much debate — and rightly so — about the impact Covid-19 may have on today’s dominant economic system, pulling down the god of the free market and exposing the invisible corrective hand that market fundamentalists are so fond of.
Feffer calls this the ‘small government canard’. He is right. But he isn’t the first to identify this. Francis Wheen, writing about the October 1987 stock market crash, had this to say: “[T]he world’s dominant financial system had simply curled up and died. What saved it from extinction was not the ‘invisible hand’ but the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, who flooded the market with cheap credit shortly after midday and strong-armed the big banks to do the same, thus preventing Wall Street from dragging the whole US economy into recession.”
As now, then too, market fundamentalists chose to ignore the fact that the financial system was saved by government intervention and regulation, “precisely the kind of ‘interference’ they would usually deplore.”
As we plod through this period, hoping for an end to this pandemic, we do not know how things will shape up. What kind of world we will be entering. Whether we will have learnt any lessons. Whether we will redefine the idea of growth; growth to what end and how; will we think in terms of redistribution? Questions abound. The debate has begun. The rest lies in the future. As Yeats said in Lapis Lazuli, “All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay.”
In the meantime, those that have passed on will become a distant memory. The next pandemic will look at statistics from this one.
Rieux was right. We just can’t grasp suffering. The dialectic between the personal and the statistical remains unresolved.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times. He reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider