By Dr Costa A Georghiou
We get bombarded with information about the dangers of the pandemic, its possible origin, the dos and don’ts of contracting or spreading it. Little is being said about how a man of my age, under quarantine, scared as hell that I might die, should make sense of this attack on humanity.
I decided to impart some wisdom of a few of my favourite authors and thinkers on what they have to say.
Australian scientist Frank Fenner, in the 1980s, assisted in the eradication of smallpox, one of the world’s deadliest diseases. Just before his death in 2010, he stated that humanity would be gone in the next century and that “there are too many people here”.
Physicist Stephen Hawking, in 2016, echoed Fenner’s warnings and predicted that humanity would have only 100 years to find a new place to live. English scholar Thomas Malthus warned, in 1798, that advances in food production inevitably led to population growth, placing increasing numbers of poor people at greater risk of starvation and disease.
At the turn of the 19th century, the human population was just past one billion. This year, it is estimated at 7.8 billion. Yet, viewed from the developed world, it often looks as though a Malthusian catastrophe has largely been avoided; agricultural advances have kept us one step ahead of disaster.
Viewed globally, though, Malthus’s warnings are a little short of prophetic. About the same number of people who lived on the planet in Malthus’s time go hungry in our time. The combination of production shortfalls and population growth raises the possibility of another “Malthusian nightmare” of too many mouths to feed.
However, one should remember that hunger remains primarily a by-product of inequality and exploitation, rather than a lack of production.
If one looks back at pre-history, we see that the number of Homo sapiens increased slowly over the first few hundred thousand years of our history. Only a few skeletons found by archaeologists were of individuals over the age of 40. Our ancestors bred as fast as biology permitted, which was only slightly faster than the death rate. Today, with each new human life, our planet becomes more congested, racing us toward, or perhaps further beyond what it can sustain.
The uncomfortable question to be asked then is whether Covid-19 is accomplishing what governments have failed to do in addressing the problems of poverty, hunger and overpopulation. It is doing what nature spontaneously does from time to time – finding a way of “culling” a species that has become too abundant.
Recently, I wondered whether South Africans, and other societies across the globe, would be willing to trade a little more privacy and freedom to stop a pandemic. Sadly, probably not – humans are reluctant to change. The tragedy is that humans are not very good at taking personal action to solve communal problems.
To achieve revolutionary change is to discover ways of making egoism align with the common good. For example, for people to accept extensive biometric tracking in a way that could help humanity in forestalling and controlling fast-moving deadly viruses, they will need to be presented with something they see as indispensable. As scientists ponder this, not everyone is ready for global vaccine roll-outs and a bio-tracking world, which makes sense.
For many, it will be a step too far; maybe several steps too far.
Dr Georghiou is a senior lecturer and co-director of the Centre for African Diplomacy and Leadership at the SARCHi chair, African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, University of Johannesburg.