Spanish Flu and Covid-19: How the Invention of Wings Created a Pandemic World

            Global pandemics are a relatively new phenomenon in human history.  An origin for the common cold cannot easily be traced, however there is good reason to believe that global trade accelerated its prevalence and subsequent mutations.  Likewise, there is no recorded origin of influenza.  The first time it appears in historical literature is from Herodotus and Thucydides in ancient Greece, who each wrote what may have been the first descriptions of its symptoms.  From that point on, influenza outbreaks were regional epidemics up until the 20th century, when mobilization allowed it to spread and mutate continuously like the common cold. 

Few people know that prior to the 20th century, these were not seasonal cycles.  Global transportation was not as fluid since cars and airplanes had not been invented yet.  Viruses and plagues were confined to regions; even the Black Death did not escape Europe.  As the world globalized, so did the potential for lethal viruses and bacteria to spread. 

Covid-19 is the first pandemic with a known origin that does not seem to be going away.  It started severe, much like the Spanish flu from 1918, which saw similar mortality rates.  In the following years, as people built their immunity to Spanish flu in the 1920s, the virus took advantage of our newly globalized world, largely caused by the revolution in transportation.  It mutated with such a frequent subtlety that many thought it had ceased to exist, and most people today still believe it disappeared. 

But alarmingly, immunologists have discovered that it is probably still with us, in the form of mutations that have been occurring for decades.  “Analysis of newly discovered samples from the 1918 influenza pandemic found that every section of the virus' genome could have given rise to seasonal flu.” (Ashworth, 2022).  Thus, it has likely settled into our seasonal social pattern, catalyzed by modern human geographic systems, allowing it to mutate and avoid being permanently destroyed by vaccines.  The seasonal flu as we know it today could be the offspring of the worst influenza pandemic in history, which killed between 17-50 million people.   

We may be seeing a parallel event in modern times with the covid-19 pandemic.  It started strong and seems to be settling into a similar pattern that the Spanish flu adopted.  The good news is that if the pattern holds, our immunity to it will keep building, making it no more severe than the common flu.  The bad news is that it would mean it is here to stay, for as long as our world remains globalized.  And it will stay, even if we take further precautions to quarantine like China has done (which is alarming in itself).  The flu just survived two years of quarantine and social distancing; there is no reason for me to believe covid-19 wouldn’t do the same.

 

A graph illustrating similar global wave patterns between Spanish flu and covid-19.  Image courtesy of the CDC.

It appears the Spanish flu was so powerful that it found ways to survive by killing less people and decreasing its severity, lending it an important evolutionary advantage.  If the virus had kept being as severe as it was, it would not have been able to transmit as effectively.  A similar pattern is happening with covid-19, as the mortality rate has dropped substantially, and the new omicron variant isn't as lethal. These diseases only seem severe at first because it takes time to adapt to a host with maximum efficiency. Regardless, 50 thousand people still die from the flu every year, and we can probably expect a similar number with covid, mostly among the elderly.    

In the coming centuries, there may be more pandemics that survive initial turbulence the way Spanish flu and covid-19 did.  Diseases may compound until we are sick year-round, forcing us to mask up 24/7.  This does not indicate some revolutionary virus is going to wipe out mankind, as it (almost) did in the movie 12 Monkeys and in Stephen King’s The Stand.  It would be impractical for a virus to completely kill off its host the way it did in these stories.  The evolutionary advantage of a low mortality rate means that viruses are more likely to transmit their genes in order to survive. The most severe viruses, like E-coli and Marburg, seem to be hampered by their lethality, thankfully making them harder to globalize. 

It was the very evolution of wings that brought viruses like these with it.  Now that humans are flying, we should expect more of the same. The reason we get so many global viruses from birds and bats is that they are the only truly global class of species.  Each can transmit germs around the world in a short period of time, just like us. Wings, it seems, are the most prominent variable of global pandemics, regardless of the species.

Estimated statistics: 

	Spanish flu	Covid-19
Demographic	impacted all ages	impacted all ages
Mortality rate	2.5%	3.4%
Total deaths	17-50 million dead in one season	6.5 million in 3 years- likely "lower" from more  speedy information and quicker vaccines
Variants	pattern of decreasing severity	pattern of decreasing severity: alpha-delta-omicron-?

  

Source: 

Ashworth, James.  Natural History Museum. May 10, 2022.  Retrieved from https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/may/seasonal-flu-could-descend-from-deadly-1918-influenza-pandemic.html

  

The Nature of Truth

     St. Augustine made the grave assumption that humans are the highest beings in a hierarchy of species.  Given what I am reading about the extraordinary abilities of other animals in An Immense World, this is hard to accept.  Each is equally miraculous, having their own manifestation of truth.  As each has its own truth, based on a unique class of perceptions, the truth turns out to be relative.  There are mathematical and logical truths that transcend it, but these seldom exist in the real world; they are only abstractions in our minds.

    The modern findings presented in An Immense World would taint Augustine's proof of God: that since truth stands alone above us on the hierarchy, it must be synonymous with God, and if it is not, then God is above it.  My position is that truth is not static, that God is every variety of truth, even ones that contradict each other, for duality is what sets all things in motion, serving as scales on the fulcrum of all spectra.  There is truth in good and truth in evil, whatever those mean to the observer.  As man is not alone at the top of the living hierarchy, he cannot be the sole interpreter of it.

Beyond Capacity: Cities, the Dunbar Limit, and Social Media

     The city feels alienating to us because it exceeds the threshold of our Dunbar limit- 150 in everyone's social group.  Beyond that, humans feel more detached from communities, and probably more aggressive, less empathic as a result  That is why crime is more common in cities.  We pack millions of people into areas that should only have 10-20 villages at best, each having a population of around 150, as our evolution required.  All the stresses that accompany living in the city got compounded.  The noise we filter.  The strangers we walk by every day, desensitizing us.  The pollution we feel is required to adjust to the unmovable bastions of commerce.  As I write this, the worst wildfire smoke season on record just ended here in Seattle, where nobody will protest because it is the new normal.  And few would reject natural causes, as most of those fires were started by people (we get very few lightning strikes).  Summer droughts are getting longer here, lending evidence to human-caused climate change that some deniers are finally coming to terms with.  We are going to see climate suffering on a scale like never seen before, even factoring for population rates.
    What the city did to us, social media did to the internet.  We can't handle more than 150 followers and friends, yet millions are connected beyond their capacity.  It has resulted in chaotic social movements where facts are brushed aside for comfort.  We latch onto anything that makes us feel secure in our worldview because there is no community anymore, only a jumble of reactionary cattle triggered by algorithms that dismiss togetherness, assign blame, or present another social group as the enemy.  Metaphysically the internet is one community, yet we have pushed its boundaries by being able to engage with anyone in the world; in return, we push the boundaries of what made us feel most secure through our long history through evolution: the community, where everyone felt involved, a cog in the wheel, more in touch with the environment, senses open to what is actually happening around us.

Epicureans, Buddhists, and Maslow: The Fine Line Between Desire and Need

     To my knowledge, the Epicureans never interacted with the Buddhists.  If they had, the conversations might have been interesting.  The Epicureans believed that a good life is a pleasurable one and a bad one is full of pain.  This is not quite as material a philosophy as hedonism, for the Epicureans believed some desires are bad as well.  In fact, they posited a deductive hierarchy of desires that systematizes ones that are healthy and ones that are destructive.  Vain desires that include luxury pursuits, greed, or looking a certain way fell into the latter category, as do merely natural ones like lust, which must be taken in moderation.  Similarly, the necessary desires like food, drink, and even friendship must be taken in moderation or the path to gluttony will be realized as self-destructive.  Thus while the Buddhists believed all desire causes suffering, the Epicureans argued that only too much of it becomes destructive.  Certain desires are useful for a happy life, particularly the ones people need.  Psychologist Abraham Maslow theorized that people could not live a content life unless their basic needs were being met.  In this manner, there's a thin line between desire and need that the Buddhists were more keen on drawing.

Pleading Ignorance of the Law

     Ignorance of the law does not make one wicked.  Imagine traveling to another country or culture, where some of the regular customs in your own are outlawed.  Is it fair then to be punished for them?  Aristotle might argue that you should educate yourself on the law before traveling.  But sometimes that privilege is not acceptable.  Or it seems like such common sense to trust your morality that it isn't necessary.  Or people overestimate their moral intelligence, which is a bad excuse.  However we must remember that because law is relative to location, morality must be as well.  Thus wickedness cannot be determined by another country's judges or priests.
    I am aware this would go against the law in our own country (USA), where not knowing it is no excuse for criminal activity.  I disagreed when I first learned about this, and still do.  Though there are some things so universally wicked, like murder and theft, that at traveler would be foolish to think wasn't the law, there are misdemeanors they wouldn't intuitively know were illegal. For instance, imagine traveling to Singapore and getting arrested for selling gum.  Unless someone had informed you, you wouldn't have known it was illegal there.  You could have tried reading about Singaporean law before traveling, and you would have been wise to do so, but there is always a chance you wouldn't find a particular law, especially when it isn't so easily grouped like that one.

Aristotle's Ethics

    The most potent contribution of Aristotle's to philosophy, I believe, are his insights on ethics. The moderate response is necessary in any given situation, which is relative to the person and the place. Reason is the tool by which the right choices are made, which is often replaced by gut instinct or listening to one's heart. This is a mistake because the heart tends to only steer us in the direction of desire, upsetting the balance that moderation possesses. The two extremes at either end of the moral mean are the two vices that any situation has the potential to reveal. For instance, wrath and subservience are at the ends separating good temper, a state when anger is only expressed when it is justified and in the right moment. The vices are fueled by passionate desires to saturate anger and settle for peace, respectively. All vices are fueled by desires like these that become a virtue on the fulcrum. The wise person understands that the appropriate reaction is a balance between the vices, not necessarily the most noble or holy one. The situations and scales he uses are elaborated in "The Nicomachean Ethics".

Urban Apocrypha

We disemboweled the village,
Castrated the community,
Flocked to the cities
Once the rivers ran dry,
Tasting emptiness on a concrete meridian.
The village was our mother,
Protecting our children,
Justifying belongingness,
Enhancing our ethics,
An inheritance the city transformed
With desensitized codes of law,
Morphing empathy into morality,
Community into individuality.
The city is a mass of me's,
Competing for the eternal
In boxes of bits, cubes of cults,

Social groups that tie commercial knots,

Bleeding purpose, breeding inequality.

Primitive as we were,

We'd reached a fine balance

Between nature and our unnatural needs,

Lost to madness after insectivization,

The city compounding our broken dreams.

Men became the specialists

Who erected its systems,

Trade networks and minarets,

Phallic symbols of power

The village hunters inherited,

The killing of other men in place of beasts.

Womb of the earth severed,

We disconnected from the soil.

Built monuments to new sky gods,

Future towers reaching for their psalms,

Blessing of tyrants who imitated terror.

Urban revolution the garden surrendered,
All her plants theirs for the taking,

To exploit, capitalize, feed their children,

Safer now from the threats abroad,

Primed for learning, educated by bureaucrats,

Documentation segregating the ritual.

From the center imploded kingship,

A gravitational mandate

Forged from the elements of productivity

That shaped expediencies engineered,

Leadership inevitably necessary

From the colony's first pulse.

God and king became one,

The peasantry inverted skyward,

Raising temples to mimic serenity,

Only possible through the allowance of surplus,

Magnificent architecture fed by awe.

In turn, the god-thing-figment

Carried the burden of nature,

Sacrifice an original sin

To appease the affronted magicians,

Wielding divine tricks on the powerful,

Normalizing violence in regions sparse,

Whence came the rolling thunder of war.

New vices were cast,

Mistaken for the original, of the noble savage,

Whom we assumed more barbaric

To disconnect from an irony

Separating municipal freedom from restrictive castes,

Collective interest from communal bloodlust,

Mantras of invasion when monopolies crumble.

We burned our brothers,

The bridges that connected us,

Disdain of writers beseeched

In iconographies of cataclysm,

Flood, fire, destruction, drought,

The anxious masses turned to stone,

Rural redeemers taking their place.

The Hierarchy of Souls

    I accept Aristotle's hierarchy of souls, but not in the manner he intended. I have been reading in Ed Young's book An Immense World about all the astounding abilities of sensation animals have that humans don't. Such as the catfish being able to taste things over its whole body, or the mantis shrimp being able to detect 12 dimensions of color, or the fly perceiving things in slow motion. How can we even imagine the souls creatures like these possess? They are not mere beasts limited by sensations, but advanced perceivers of nature no less miraculous than our ability to reason. Therefore, I elevate the souls of species with advanced perception to our own level, each having their own dimension of active perception that exists separately from the body. Aristotle could not have known about these astounding abilities of animals, so it's no fault of his. Though I do wonder if he'd modify his beliefs if he could read a book like the one I am reading.