(based on this blog post)
One hundred years ago, the greatest and most lethal natural disaster of the twentieth century came for the U.S., alighting at Commonwealth Pier in Boston.
By the time it had run its course, the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 – the Spanish Flu – killed more than three percent of the human species. It had infected about 500 million people world-wide, killing at least 50 million.
In the U.S., more than a quarter of the population contracted it, and over a half a million people died – mostly in a span of about ten weeks.
In 1918, the US – as was most of the rest of the world – was at war. We had taken all our strapping young lads, handed them guns, and bunked them in over-crowded camps. And then shuffled them around the world. Not just us, of course. The militaries engaged in the European theater of war – densely settled populations of healthy young men – proved the most perfect vector for Spanish Flu imaginable.
Not that such a virulent plague needed our assistance to promulgate. It ripped through the civilian population nearly as easily. By the end of October, almost 4,000 people had died of it in Boston.
Not, mind you, in all Massachusetts. Not even in the greater Boston area. That number doesn’t include the dead of Cambridge, or Newton, or Chelsea, or Waltham, or any of the surrounding towns. Just Boston proper. Nearly 4,000 people died in just the city of Boston in ten weeks.
Something like ten times as many people had fallen ill with it in the first place.
Multiply that across the entire state. Across the entire nation.
They closed the schools, they closed the theaters, they forbade people to attend funerals, they ran out of hospital beds so they converted empty schools to hospitals and they ran out of nurses so they told the idle teachers that if they volunteered as medics they would continue to be paid. They set up vast tent-city open-air hospitals just to have somewhere to put all the sick and struggling to survive. They ran out of coffins.
The stories are not hard to find if you chose to seek them out, though they are perhaps harder to find than they should be. Perhaps these are stories everyone who has passed through our public pedagogical-propagandistic complex should have ready on their tongues. If only to know it was a great and grave matter. Surely the greatest mass death in human history was at least as important as any stupid Archduke.
So why isn’t it recognized as such?
A hypothesis:
There is a faction of people, and in the US it has been estimated to be about a third of the population, which is past-oriented: they cherish tradition, quite simply because it is tradition, and see the value in what is old, tried-and-tested, enduring. They tend to mistrust change, and social change most of all.
They are who in our society is concerned with commemoration. It is they who lower the flags and arrange the parades, they who tend the graves and erect the monuments. It is they who teach the children the songs and have them sing them on the appointed days. It is they who are concerned with remembering what should not be forgot, not just as story that is told but in ceremony that is performed.
And there’s a different faction, non-overlapping with the former, that is future-oriented: they are neophilic, intellectually restless, and curious. They even are given to priding themselves in overturning what is old to make way for the new and presumed better. They admire iconoclasts. And it is, to an extent wildly disproportionate to their estimated prevalence in the population, from their ranks that our population of scientists are drawn.
And when I say “they”, here, I mean “we”. Certainly me, and very many of you hearing this.
We future-oriented inventors and discoverers and tinkerers and hackers, we have our technologies: digital and biochemical and all the rest. The past-oriented have their technologies, too; their customs and ceremonies are social technologies. They transmit social values – ideas of what their society collectively considers good and bad – forward through time, to successive generations, so they are not lost to society and society may endure.
And that is what I mean when I say: our society does not remember the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. Yes, the information is available in books, in documentaries, in archives, on web pages, in the knowledge of scholars. But those are an inert, latent form of knowledge, that has little influence on society.
How should any society that has befall it something like the Spanish Flu yet not commemorate it in the solemn way such a grave and ghastly matter deserves, how would it not have anti-vaxxers? How would it fund basic research? How would it ever treat future natural disasters as things worthy of preparing for, preventing, redressing, or remediating, on a societal scale?
This is the gap that must be bridged, that between the future-oriented who would – do! – lay wonders of biomedical invention at the feet of society and the past-oriented who choose what values are propagated by commemoration of the past to future generations.
Strangely, then, part of the solution is that we in the future-oriented faction must realize the enormous value of the past-oriented’s memetic technology, and stop scorning it; and must elicit their cooperation and assistance in commemorating what is important to us – what we realize is important to be remembered.
And, of course, another part of the solution is that we in the future-oriented faction must realize just what it is that is important to be remembered.
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