Are there certain epidemics where the response has shown something inspiring about humanity?
Oh, I certainly think that. I think when I said it shows a mirror to ourselves, it doesn’t show just the dark side of humanity. It also shows the heroic side. A really good example is Doctors Without Borders in the Ebola crisis, and the way in which they put their lives and their futures knowingly, directly on the line for no self-interest whatsoever and no reward, but purely because they were committed to defending the lives and health of the weakest people in the world. And Doctors Without Borders is doing that every day in many parts of the world, and they’re even now in China confronting this.
I believe that this is something that also does bring out the highest qualities. Indeed, novels are also written about these major events. It affects our literature and our culture. I’m thinking of the great plague novel, which is “The Betrothed,” by the Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni. He talks about the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Borromeo, who went into the pest houses and was willing to lay down his life to look after the poorest and most unwell people in his flock.
What about in terms of world leaders or regimes responding positively, or positive political changes arising after an epidemic?
Absolutely. I’m thinking about the end of chattel slavery in the New World. That and the success of the Haitian rebellion and Toussaint Louverture was determined, above all, by yellow fever. When Napoleon sent the great armada to restore slavery in Haiti, the slave rebellion succeeded because the slaves from Africa had immunity that white Europeans who were in Napoleon’s army didn’t have. It led to Haitian independence. Also, if one thinks from the American point of view, this was what led to Napoleon’s decision to abandon projecting French power in the New World and therefore to agree, with Thomas Jefferson, in 1803, to the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States.
To flip it around, how often has the existence of these diseases gone hand in hand with political oppression or been used as an excuse for political oppression?
I think it has always been also seen as part of political oppression. I’m persuaded that the nineteenth century was a terrible time, not only of rebellion but also of political oppression. For example, the slaughter of people after the 1848 revolution in France, in Paris in particular, or after the Paris Commune. Part of the reason that this was so violent and sanguinary was that people who were in command saw that the working classes were dangerous politically, but they were also very dangerous medically. They had the very possibility of unleashing disasters on the full of society. I think that was really a part of this metaphor of the dangerous classes, and I think that led to, say, the inhumanity of the slaughter of 1871 after the Paris Commune had been put down.