As we go about our daily lives, and as I witness India's descent into Covid hell that the government made possible, it is difficult to view the events over a longer time horizon. Even though I teach students to understand the human condition by looking at trend lines, the Covid catastrophe, which Arundhati Roy correctly describes as the modi government's crime against humanity, preempts looking at tomorrow leave alone history.
But, history does offer a little bit of comfort if we look back at the world in 1918, when the Spanish flu killed many.
Imagine you were there at Camp Devens in late 1918, surveying the bodies stacked in a makeshift morgue. Or you were roaming the streets of Bombay, where more than 5 percent of the population died of influenza in a matter of months. Imagine touring the military hospitals of Europe, seeing the bodies of so many young men simultaneously mutilated by the new technologies of warfare — machine guns and tanks and aerial bombers — and the respiratory violence of H1N1. Imagine knowing the toll this carnage would take on global life expectancy, with the entire planet lurching backward to numbers more suited to the 17th century, not the 20th. What forecast would you have made for the next hundred years?
I would have forecast that it was the end times. That we were all going to die. And that it would be a miracle if humanity recovered from such a catastrophe.
I would have been proven wrong!
A hundred years ago, an impoverished resident of Bombay or Delhi would beat the odds simply by surviving into his or her late 20s. Today average life expectancy in India is roughly 70 years.
Sriram in 1918 would never have predicted such a positive transformation.
How did this happen?
Of course scientific breakthroughs helped. But it was not science alone that did it.
Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root.
(I hope the ardent advocates for STEM will read the long read in the NY Times Magazine, which is what I am referring to here.)
Perhaps you don't have the time to read that long essay, and want an example of how science alone didn't deliver progress. In that case, here is an example: Pasteurization. The scientific method led Pasteur to understand the role that bacteria played in spoiling the milk, which then caused sickness in people who drank it. He then figured out that heating milk and then quickly cooling it down did the trick. But, this didn't take effect right away.
In the United States, it would not become standard practice in the milk industry until a half century after Pasteur conceived it. That’s because progress is never a result of scientific discovery alone. It also requires other forces: crusading journalism, activism, politics.
My favorite examples, as I have blogged in plenty, will always be the elimination of small pox, and piped drinking water supply. In both, science alone wasn't enough; it required an army of non-scientists, and sometimes the literal army too.
So, yes, over the long run, the trend lines tell a story that is vastly different from what most would have predicted in 1918.
But, then there is the reality of daily life.
I cannot wait for this pandemic to end.
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