It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758)

by Roberts, Adam

  * Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: a Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015), pp. 7–8.

  * Michael Newton, ‘The Thrill of It All: Zombies’, London Review of Books, 18 February 2016, p. 27.

  * Eugene Thacker, ‘Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: a review of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie’, B20: an Online Journal, June 2017: http://www.boundary2.org/2017/07/

  * Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Contemporary Zombies’, in Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (eds) Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 90.

  * In the movie Love and Death (1975), Woody Allen’s Boris sums up the movie in his final monologue: ‘The question is: have I learned anything about life? Only that human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy. But the body has all the fun.’

  BRING OUT YOUR DEAD: WORLD-ENDING PLAGUES

  In Homer’s Iliad, set in the twelfth century BCE, the Greek army laying siege to Troy unwisely disrespects one of Apollo’s priests. In response, the god shows his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp: ‘the mules he assailed first and the swift dogs, but then he let fly his stinging shafts on the men themselves, and struck; and constantly the pyres of the dead burned thick’. The plague lasts for nine days – brief by modern standards. After the Greeks make amends to the priest and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.

  Seven centuries later, a real-life plague struck Athens, killing a quarter of the city’s population and setting the city state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Greeks of the time had a simple explanation for the pandemic: Apollo. The Spartans had supplicated to the god, and he had promised them victory; soon afterwards, their enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens was under siege and its population swollen with refugees; as a result, everyone was living in unsanitary conditions and at risk of contagion in a way that the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, was not. However, this thought didn’t occur to the Ancient Greeks and they blamed the god.

  Stories of plague-driven apocalypse abound, in movies such as Outbreak (1995) and Contagion (2011), but unlike the gods and monsters of our previous chapters, disease has always been a very real feature in human life, as well as in our stories. We understand contagion vastly better now, and have a greater arsenal of medicine and hygiene to fight it, but we are all susceptible still. This is both a bad and a good thing: bad because disease can cripple or kill; but good because our bodies respond to disease by developing antibodies. Every parent knows that the seemingly endless parade of snotty noses and various lurgies that define their kids’ early years are necessary for those kids to build healthy immune systems, however distressing the process can be for all concerned.

  What is true on an individual level is also true on a civilisational level; and just as the body sometimes succumbs to disease, so whole communities can be – and have been – devastated. In his influential study Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond considers the defining role disease has played in human history. In Europe, argues Diamond, because people moved around extensively, to trade for example, disease spread easily between different regions. This looks like a bad thing, and it’s true that a series of ghastly plagues afflicted medieval and Renaissance Europe: 75 million Europeans died of the Black Death in the fourteenth century – almost half the entire population of the continent. But there was a hard-won advantage: the survivors of these plagues carried antibodies to the germs that caused them.

  When Europeans began spreading around the world they were able to use their superior technology and weapons of war to conquer other continents. But even more importantly for the trajectory of human history, these Europeans brought with them diseases to which populations in other parts of the globe had no immunity. European settlers in North America and Australia killed vastly greater numbers of natives with their diseases than with their guns. Chickenpox and measles, which Europeans might survive, tended to be deadly to such populations, and resulted in human suffering and death on a staggering scale.

  This was the point in history where disease moved from being a local affliction to being a way in which the world ends. Many epidemics have had a catastrophic effect on populations. The Wampanoag population of Native Americans, mostly located in modern-day New England, suffered up to 90 per cent loss of population as a European disease, now thought to be leptospirosis, spread through their tribes. In the cocoliztli epidemic of 1545–48, in what is now Mexico, 12 million people – a staggering 80 per cent of the native population – died of a disease brought by European settlers that was either a variant smallpox or a gastroenteritic sickness. A further two and a half million people, half the remaining population, died in a second outbreak of the sickness in 1576. In 1803, prior to British colonisation, the island of ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, modern-day Tasmania, had a population of roughly 10,000 native Palawa, but by 1847 European disease and murder had reduced this population to fewer than fifty people. Aspects of their heredity have survived in Australia to the present day, but the last person of solely native Tasmanian descent died in 1905. These are figures that numb the brain with the sheer scale of their horror.

  That said, and without ignoring the ghastliness of these cases, disease never wipes out literally everyone on its own. Even in the case of the Palawans it required war, killing, starvation and colonial oppression to finish that terrible job. The biggest epidemic of the twentieth century was Spanish flu in 1918–20. As many as 100 million people died globally; but grievous though this certainly was, it represented less than 5 per cent of the world’s population. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, because of course 100 million is a horrific and devastating figure, but it didn’t come anywhere near ending the world.

  In reality, the risk that the white horseman of Revelation, wielding his deadly plague, will destroy the whole world has been receding for a long time. As the global population increases, and as globalisation mixes up populations, epidemics have less bite, thanks to a better understanding of how to prevent the spread of disease, and the twinned healthcare countermeasures of immunisation and the improved treatment of those who fall sick. But the perceived risk keeps rising, because we are more aware of the specificities of disease and how devastating they can be. Global life is interconnected nowadays to an unprecedented degree, and ‘interconnectedness’ is a shorthand for ‘possible pathways of contagion’. Popular culture and contemporary social commentary are subject to repeated bouts of ‘pandemic anxiety’. The BBC TV show Survivors (1975–77) vividly realised this in its opening credits: one man, infected with a terrible new plague but as yet unaware, is shown flying from airport to airport, getting his passport stamped. The actual show, set after the plague had killed 4,999 out of every 5,000 people, dealt with the consequences. The virus in that show was fictional, but the hit 1995 movie Outbreak imagined an Ebola-like virus spreading from Africa to America. The movie perks up its storyline with fights, chases, military conspiracies to develop the virus as a bioweapon and a plan to bomb an American town to contain it, to melodramatic effect; but it opens with real-life molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg informing the audience: ‘the single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus’.

  These fictions inform our reality. Fear of H5N1 avian flu caused widespread panic in the early 2000s, and the mere prospect of an outbreak of Ebola or the Zika virus terrifies us today. Sometimes those fears prove grounded – as we all found out with the outbreak of Covid-19. But despite the global disruption and the devastation caused by individual fatalities, it was not heralding the apocalypse. Of course it makes sense to take precautions where any disease is concerned, but panic and overreaction is neither sensible nor precautionary.

  My point is that disease plays an actual as well as a fantastical role in our lives, and it is the latter that is often apocalyptic. While the individual experience
of disease can be horrible and may be fatal, it is in the nature of apocalyptic imagining to extrapolate individuality onto the global canvas.

  Besides the scale of imagined devastation, the other fictional element we ascribe to our pandemics is agency – a sense that they have purpose, that they are not merely random. When the Peloponnesian plague targeted only Athenians, contemporaries concluded that the gods were angry with Athens, and when HIV first appeared in gay communities, some concluded that God was angry with homosexuals. Neither statement was true; HIV spreads wherever it can and doesn’t care about your sexual orientation. Nonetheless, when it comes to our suffering, we want it to mean something. We dislike arbitrariness. We want to understand why it’s happening, so we can fix it, or try to, but also for the less rational reasons that we prefer an enemy with a face to a faceless one. We want to feel we can fight back, even if the fight is impossible, like homeowners shooting their guns at the hurricane they know is rolling in to destroy their houses. We can see this desire to assign ‘agency’ to the virus in those who insist that the coronavirus is a Chinese experimental bioweapon gone rogue, or supporters of Donald Trump who see a shadowy conspiracy of ‘deep state’ actors happy to sacrifice millions of lives in a plot to scupper their president’s re-election prospects. To them, even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance; angry gods are better than no gods at all.

  However, it is not true – disease has no agency. Bacteria and viruses spread wherever they can, their paths facilitated by our massively globalised world, and we bring our ever-improving drugs and hygiene to the struggle. One lesson we have all learned from the coronavirus pandemic, repeated over and over again by the experts, is that the best advice is to wash your hands often, avoid touching your face and keep as much distance between yourself and others as possible. But people do not warm to the arbitrary nature of this. People prefer a plan. ‘You know what I’ve noticed?’ says the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight (2008). ‘Nobody panics when things go “according to plan” . . . even if the plan is horrifying.’ It doesn’t reflect very well on us, but it’s true. Because what’s the alternative? A Jokerish anarchy?

  This need to attribute agency to the disease is clearest in the many plagues that writers of science fiction have inflicted on humanity. In Alice Sheldon’s chilling and brilliant short story ‘The Screwfly Solution’ (1977) a new disease provokes men to murder women en masse. At the end of the story we discover that an alien species had introduced a brain infection to make the human race destroy itself, so they can inherit the planet – apocalypse by targeted disease. In H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927) an alien infection arrives via a meteorite and drives people mad. In other stories the world-threatening plague has been caused by that other science fiction stalwart: the ‘mad scientist’. The scientist in the movie The Satan Bug (1965), having inoculated himself, hopes that the rest of the world will die of his germ, for reasons of environmental fundamentalism. In Frank Herbert’s novel The White Plague (1982) a geneticist who has been driven to insanity by the murder of his family creates a pathogen that kills only females. On the other side of the gender divide is Joanna Russ’s feminist masterpiece, The Female Man (1975), where in one of the alternative versions of earth’s future it portrays, a gender-specific virus has wiped out the men. By the novel’s end it is hinted that the man-destroying plague was engineered by a female scientist irked by the patriarchy. Likewise, dozens of zombie franchises start with a rogue scientist infecting the population with a genetically engineered virus.

  So characteristic is assigning agency to pandemics in modern culture that the video game Plague Inc. (2012) styles its players not as doctors who are attempting to stop the spread of a pandemic, but as the sickness itself. The player’s mission is to help their plagues spread and exterminate the human race. The game’s algorithm uses a complex and realistic set of variables to simulate the spread of the plague, and models a convincing version of today’s interconnected globe. If you make your sickness too virulent, people will die before it can be passed on; if you make it too mild, people will develop resistance or medical science will create a cure. The game has sold over 85 million copies, which suggests there are plenty of people interested in adding smallpox to The Sims or introducing syphilis into Sid Meier’s Civilization.

  Another twist in a slew of science fiction tales, from H. G. Wells’s seminal The War of the Worlds (1898) through to various modern retellings such as Independence Day, is that the virus is on our side, destroying alien invaders that lack our acquired immunity.

  Perhaps the best portrayal of this conceit is Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985). A mad scientist, angry at being sacked from his job, smuggles an experimental virus out of his lab. It infects everybody, becomes self-aware and then assimilates everybody to itself: not only human beings but their houses, cities and landscapes melt down into a planet-wide sea of hyperintelligent grey goo. It sounds unpleasant, but it is actually a liberation: the accumulation of concentrated consciousness causes a transcendent new realm. Bear’s plague is responsible for a kind of secular Rapture.

  Is it odd that we sometimes take the side of the pandemic in our storytelling? Maybe not. The theory of the contagion being God’s anger implies that we are guilty and deserve what we are getting. When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver reinvigorated the Planet of the Apes franchise, they assumed that the same agent that raises the apes’ level of intelligence, a neuro-enhancing compound spliced into simian flu, would prove fatal to humans. The resulting trilogy (2011–17) was more than just a commercial hit; it was also an eloquent, if sometimes rather unsubtle, articulation of environmental anxiety. The few surviving humans on the planet move through the movies’ lush forestscapes, encountering newly intelligent apes who have become avatars of humanity’s contempt for the natural world. The plague that has destroyed us has given these animals wisdom, and they are angry with us. Hard to blame them, really.

  Our fascination with plague has something to do with our fear that we are the offenders and that these diseases are furies that have been aroused by our guilt. Think of the artificial intelligence Mr Smith in The Matrix (1999), played with sneering panache by Hugo Weaving. Humans, he tells Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, are incapable of developing a natural equilibrium with their environment:

  You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.

  The third Matrix film contains my favourite scene, what to me is a visually inventive and extraordinarily eloquent critique on the subject of plague within the story of machines. Inside the Matrix, Smith has copied himself over every other human being alive. The world’s cities throng with reduplicated Smiths wearing black suits and dark glasses, glowering malevolently and preparing to destroy Neo, who walks down a storm-lashed street past ranks upon ranks of Smiths. Everybody is Smith now, evil and destructive, and Neo’s fight with one of these myriad Smiths, on the ground, in the air, through buildings and finally into a terminal crater in which his inevitable defeat is enacted, is wonderful cinema. The two men fight like gods and Neo is cast down. ‘This is my world!’ yells a gloating Smith as he hovers in the sky with lightning bolts behind him – and he’s right.

  As a visual representation of the way in which the spreading of plague symbolises the proliferation of the human race, I don’t believe these scenes have been bettered. This is world-ending disease personified, and rendered with all the melodramatic dash and special effects that modern film-making can bring to bear. The crucial thing about the plague here is that it wears our face. We are disease. What is wrecking the planet, while bubonic plague, smallpox, typhus, Spanish flu and AIDS do nothing more than eat away at the edge of our continuing expansion, is our population itself.

>   The way we portray disease in our stories is always changing as our societies grapple with the different diseases that afflict them, and their after-effects. Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), the celebrated medieval collection of stories, is a plague book – its tales were assembled as diversions for quarantined nobles during the Black Death – but its emphasis is resolutely not on the disease itself. The stories it collects are overwhelmingly light-hearted, satirical contes, comic tales and love stories, intermixed with the occasional tragedy. This conceivably reflects the fact that the Black Death was so horrible that the last thing people wanted was to be reminded of it. Hans Holbein’s famous Danse Macabre woodcuts from the early sixteenth century are grisly, but they are also witty and even hilarious. Across dozens of woodcuts, Holbein portrays death as a grinning skeleton interrupting all manner of people in the middle of their day-to-day lives: a ploughman, an abbot, a fine lady prettifying herself, a pedlar, a king. It’s ghastly, but the look of astonishment – the ‘who? me?’-ness of it all – is grimly comic too.

  The plagues of modernity, while still awful (TB, cholera, typhus and typhoid killed hundreds of millions across nineteenth-century Europe), are more diluted by a larger population and less concentrated in specific bursts. Perhaps that is why we see such a shift in tone from the comic and light-hearted to the gothic and ghastly of the nineteenth century, encapsulated perfectly by some of the stories that writers Byron, Shelley, Polidori and Mary Godwin (who later became Mary Shelley) came up with while socially isolating in the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816.

  Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826), for example, is ponderously gloomy, its dramatis personae all poseurs, its plotting an improbable mixture of aristo soap opera and war. The story is set in a late-twenty-first-century England more or less indistinguishable from England in 1800. Shelley’s three main characters are cyphers for herself and her friends: Lionel Verney, the eponymous Last Man, is a gender-swapped Mary; Adrian, Earl of Windsor (son of the last king of England) is Percy Bysshe Shelley; and the charismatic and passionate young nobleman Lord Raymond (who becomes Lord Protector of England, as the plague continues to cull the population) is Lord Byron. As the population thins, Verney and his friends flee Britain in the hope of escaping contagion. This is a vain hope: they die on the way or drown in a shipwreck, except Verney, who swims ashore at Ravenna with the knowledge that he is the last human being alive. The novel ends with him walking to Rome, his only company a sheepdog he picks up on the way. There he contemplates spending the rest of his life roaming the now empty world: