THE coronavirus has a wickedly dark sense of humour, and a taste for rather biting irony and symbolism. When it comes to comedy, our budding pandemic – newly arrived in Scotland – has very modern sensibilities. Of course, anthropomorphism is one of humanity’s dumbest tendencies. We can’t help but see human traits in objects and things which aren’t human. We ascribe emotions to animals, we see moods in weather and landscape. Nevertheless, it’s hard to shake the notion that coronavirus has something to say about life in 2020.
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How about this for a lesson from the coronavirus: a British film crew travels to Italy to make a movie version of The Decameron. Giovanni Boccaccio’s book was written immediately after the Black Death wiped out almost half the population of Europe in the 14th century. In The Decameron a group of wealthy, beautiful, young nobles lock themselves up in a stately home in northern Italy, and tell stories to one another to pass the time while the plague ravages the countryside outside. It’s like an apocalyptic forerunner of The Canterbury Tales.
Not long after the British crew gets to northern Italy to film The Decameron, with the set a real-life stately home, they find they have to ‘self-isolate’ as coronavirus is on the warpath beyond the walls. That bizarre little incident was real – it’s just happened. Rest assured that when the film comes out the behind-the-scenes DVD extras will be quite something. You can’t help but think coronavirus is having a laugh at us. It’s chuckling to itself as it points out that life is just as fragile in 2020 as it was in 1350.
Of course, the coronavirus isn’t Samuel Beckett. The idea that a disease has some bleakly comic point to make is nonsense, but you can’t deny that there’s something neatly perfect about the film crew story – even down to the fact that Italy was the epicentre in Europe for the Black Death, and now Italy is the European epicentre for coronavirus … or Chinese Cough, as America’s Saturday Night Live crew called it a few days ago.
So far coronavirus has made a lot of darkly sophisticated points about modern life. Forgive the terrible pun, but if coronavirus was on social media, its posts would be so clever and zeitgeisty that they’d go viral in minutes.
The disease likes sticking its finger in the wounds where humanity is psychologically most tender. Each of us knows in our heart that globalisation is a cursed gift. I can holiday in Bali, but I can also buy cheap clothes made by child slaves. We’re all connected, but jobs are going overseas. In a globalised world, only wealth matters. The rich win, the poor lose.
Coronavirus is the ultimate manifestation of globalisation. It’s taken our cheap travel, and cheap labour, our endless movement of capital and people, and it’s ridden them like a championship jockey around the world. Will wealth protect the global elite?
Coronavirus isn’t politically correct either. It could soon start making some otherwise decent people think about immigration in very frightening ways. Racism stands in the wings right now, but it could quickly march on stage. It won’t take much for some among us to start looking for scapegoats.
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The disease began in China – a totalitarian dictatorship. Then coronavirus hopped on its horse called Globalisation and made its way west. But how will the free West cope? Could a secretive, authoritarian regime end up handling the outbreak better than open democracies? Will democracy self-harm if leaders begin to lie and cover-up?
What will all this mean for belief in democracy at a time when democracy is at its most threatened since the 1930s?
Have people in the West got what it takes to endure the constraints that would be put upon us in the event of a Wuhan-style level of infection? Could we, would we, tolerate being confined to our homes in ghost town cities? We all fear that community no longer really exists – that we don’t know our neighbours well enough, that family units are getting smaller and smaller – so are we socially robust enough to get through something as demanding as a full scale pandemic? People need people in times of trouble. We’ve created a society where other people aren’t really that important any more.
In a way, we’ve all been self-isolating for years – hiding behind screens instead of living in the world. The sane among us loathe this new isolated, digital world. Coronavirus must love it. It’ll be able to heap isolation upon isolation. An already atomised society like the West will atomise even more if we have to hide out in our homes in self-quarantine.
Across the West, healthcare is the chief priority, along with schools, jobs and security.
What will the coronavirus do to our idolised NHS? Will it rip it apart? If the virus does really get going and starts taking a few percentage points off the population count, then how are hospitals going to function?
Come to think of it, how will schools function? The workplace? How will police function if they’re overwhelmed by sickness and panic? We think of ourselves as a great scientific, technological species – are we? We can’t even cure the common cold.
However, it’s our culture which allows coronavirus to really get inside our heads. We’ve saturated ourselves in apocalyptic art for decades. Our greatest writers, like Cormac McCarthy, meditate on the end of the world in books like The Road. With fittingly grim irony, the zombie movie has emerged as a defining cinema genre. End Times is everywhere.
Now the coronavirus can play with our deepest obsessions and fears. Pandemics change everything. Modern Europe would never have emerged without the Black Death.
The one saving grace of coronavirus is that it’s offered us a glimpse of our faults before it hits hard. If coronavirus blows over, like the Bird Flu and Swine Flu catastrophes which never came to pass, then we should take that as the universe telling us to clean up our messes before another pandemic bubbles up.
If we dodge a bullet, then shrug our shoulders and ask, ‘what was all the fuss about’ that really would be a dark joke, and we’d have written the punchline ourselves.
Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year
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