Standing on the Shoulders of History
There is a very famous phrase that is going around in the air these days. I had always thought that this was a quote by Goethe, but after some research I concluded that this was in fact written by George Santayana, a great essayist, ironically forgotten by new generations. “Those who cannot remember the past are bound to repeat it.”
In the midst of the global pandemic we are facing, I can’t help but thinking about the past, both the very recent one, which I lived through when I was a teenager, and the very remote past, which is but a shadow, a footnote in my formal education. And I conclude that this is something we have
never actually experienced -consciously- as a species. This is the first time in which we are making a deliberate effort to spare as many lives as possible, in which most countries have enough power to make their citizens withdraw as much as possible from public activities, and most importantly, this is the first time in which a pandemic can be tackled with the full power of science. If we think about the 1918 flu pandemic, for example, we
had almost no knowledge of virology, and an aggravating factor of the illness, for example, was the fact that doctors -good doctors- all over the world prescribed aspirin in large doses, which contributed to pulmonary edema. In this case, and thanks to the combined efforts of doctors all
over the world, they realized that ibuprofen was not an option within the first 90 days.
And that is the great difference in this pandemic: we are all connected, in every sense, in levels never before seen in human history. The 1918 flu required at least 10 days to cross the Atlantic aboard a steamship; in 2019, the next meal for a person who had been in Wuhan for breakfast
could have easily been dinner in London or lunch in Los Angeles. A personal short, two line message from war-torn Brussels to Washington could have taken hours in a queue before being relayed; in these days, I have been able to video chat with my friends in three continents.
Lastly, quarantines. As the poseur I can be at times I didn’t have to think twice to choose a bedside book: Boccaccio’s Decameron. The isolation time for the ten Florentines secluded in a beautiful country house can be described as nothing else but a ten-night bender. Wouldn’t we all love that?
But we are enclosed within our houses, and if we’re following the instructions carefully, our only contacts with the outside world are to get food and other essential goods. And while we avoid partying because of the constraints placed by governments, it might also have to do with the fact
that our friends can easily see us in the internet, and so, we would be doing something in bad taste. To sum it up, the sole thought of being watched makes us stop doing things as they were.
I could go on rambling about what the future might look like. But three of the greatest “cultural critics” alive (in strict alphabetic order, the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and the enfant terrible of philosophy, the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek) have already speculated (let us remember any attempt to predict history in times of changes is inevitably a failure) on the subject, and I highly recommend you read their points of view, if you are so inclined. The point I failed to make in this article is precisely that while history offers some hindsight on what the future might look like, there is enough chaos in the air to really know what the future looks like.
So our only choice is to keep on rowing through these turbulent times and hoping for the best. My personal take? Let us care for those close to us, who will in turn care for those close to them, until, like the dying man in César Vallejo’s poem “Masa,” the whole humanity is by the bedside of those in need of caring.
