Tomáš Hříbek

1. 6. 2021

A Journal of the Plague Year

During the covid-19pandemic we have seen, among other things, the reading lists geared precisely to this period. They featured Albert Camus‘s The Plague, G. G. Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Margaret Atwood‘s Oryx and Crake and other books that highlight some epidemic or another. Every list I’ve seen also included Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. I read it only a few months ago, precisely because I was curious aboutits topicality with respect to the current pandemic. I have found out it isstill worth reading. Among other things, it is a testimony to a zeitgeist change between the mid-1600s, when the book was written, and our present.

               We are currently confronted with agrowing pessimism about human rationality, specifically about our ability to accept the scientific view of the world. The ongoing pandemic provided the pessimists with new ammunition in the form of the hordes of antivaccinists andconspiracy theorists who spread the views that are in flagrant contradiction with empirical evidence and logic. In his book, which describes the course of the plague in London during the year 1665, i.e. at the beginning of the era ofthe Scientific Revolution, Defoe provides ample testimony to a similar madness. Multitudes fell for various fraudsters, alarmists, astrologers and other impostors.

               At the same time, there are important differences between the world described by Defoe and our present. These differences provide us with some grounds for optimism, Ithink. Defoe—or, rather, the narrator of the book, identified by the initials H.F., who is clearly Defoe’s alter-ego—is a man at the crossroads of two epochs. In the old, pre-scientific world, everything that happens is filled with a moral meaning, everything is a sign from God, every misfortune is God’s punishment. Defoe’s H.F. agrees with his contemporaries that the plague that struck London needs to be seen within this framework. However, unlike most of these contemporaries, H.F. is an educated man familiar with the budding scientific theories that began to provide a mechanical explanation of all events. For instance, the appearance of a comet which was interpreted by the ignorant folks as a foreboding of the coming plague, was understood by H.F. to be a mere natural phenomenon governed by a mathematically predictable regularity with no connection to the plague. In the conclusion of the book, however, H.F. slips back to the pre-scientific, supernatural style of thinking when he notes that “it pleased God” to end the plague.

               Unlike the current pessimists, I believe that we have made a tremendous progress since the 17th century. It’s not just that our scientists identified, inthe course of few months, the origin, nature and crucial properties of the newdisease, and that they produced, in less than a year, a whole range of efficientvaccines. This is certainly a phenomenal progress, compared to the situation merelya few centuries ago, when even the scientific elite was in the dark about the nature of the plague and its mode of transmission, let alone its cure. What I have in mind is rather the fact that at least in the part of the world which gave birth to, and was fundamentally transformed by, the Scientific Revolution I have not during the past year heard any significant voices that would ascribe the origin of covid-19 to supernatural agents. Even the rapidly diminishing group of religious believers have apparently absorbed the essential features of the scientific worldview, since even they don’t wonder about a spiritual cause or meaning of the pandemic, nor do they seem to ask God for a forgiveness. Instead, like the rest of us, they simply call for an efficient cure. Of course, conspiracy theorists think that the vaccines against covid were developed suspiciously quickly, because these people revel in being constantly duped. Yet it’s easy to find out that the rapid progress in dealing with the new disease was made possible by the fact that scientists were actually able to recycle much of the information previously gathered about SARS. Despite the fact that even today we come across the representatives of magical thinking, it appears that the opposition to the mainstream scientific approach to the pandemic is usually pseudoscientific—i.e., imitating the external features of scientific thought—rather than openly antiscientific (animistic, supernaturalisticetc.).

               Science is exceedingly demanding and it offers a picture of reality which is ever more foreign to our mammalian common sense. And yet, the latest events indicate that the crisis of confidence in science is perhaps less serious than it’s often cracked out to be.