When the Black
Death was raging in Elizabethan London, some terrified citizens sought to
assuage the Plague. The Queen herself ordered that anyone leaving London would
be hanged. As in times past, some offered penitence to God in the form of
self-flagellation, but to no avail. The Plague continued to rage even as the
flagellants beat themselves to a bloody pulp.
Some frightened but resolute groups resorted
to boarding up houses inhabited by anyone who exhibited symptoms of the
disease. Armed watchmen saw to it that no one could go in or out, regardless of
how much those trapped inside begged for mercy. The victims were given bare
sustenance by means of baskets filled with provisions, which were lowered
through upper windows. If any
unfortunates in the plague houses survived the quarantine, which was rare, they
were eventually let out.
History repeats itself.
Apparently, a family exposed to Ebola is
being quarantined in their home under armed guard. No one can enter and no one
can exit until health officials are assured there is no danger of contagion.
Despite the family’s strong objections to the loss of their liberty to freely
roam about, the action is perhaps one of the first sensible precautions yet
taken to quarantine the Ebola virus.
It’s about time scientific sensibilities
rather than ideological purity takes the measure of a pestilence with the
capacity to wipe out entire populations. Let’s hope the politically-correct
response aimed at protecting the sensitivities of gays that characterized the first
reactions to appearance of AIDS in the 1980s does not once again prevail. Let’s
hope Ebola does not become the vanguard of a campaign conferring civil rights
on a disease because any rigorous response to a deadly virus is considered
racist by the likes of Louis Farrakhan. Let’s hope sane medical practices for
limiting exposure and stopping the spread throughout the entire population are
actually followed.
In brief, let’s hope ideological faith does
not trump science.
How ironic incidents of faith trumping sound
scientific and medical are repeating themselves.
The Left has long pointed to the idiocies of
the past as reasons that faith means nothing and that religion gets everything
wrong because it does not bow to science.
The examples abound, be they Galileo’s discoveries disputed by the
Church or ignorant pastors resisting the administration of chloroform ( “a
decoy of Satan”) to women in labor because God had supposedly decreed women had
to suffer in giving birth.
Even among the scientists themselves, horrendous
disputes over orthodox practices resulted in deaths of innocent people. Louis
Pasteur’s discoveries (1862) about the transmission of disease via invisible
microbes were ignored by many doctors who continued to deliver babies with
unwashed hands only to see women continue to die of childbed fever. Joseph
Lister’s prescription for sanitizing the hospital and surgical environment was
scorned because Leeuwenhoeck’s “wee little beasties” were still not regarded as
a particularly potent threat centuries after he peered into his microscope, as
Thomas Eakins’ “The Gross Clinic” illustrates. Today’s viewers of the painting
are less inclined to admire the composition of the piece than they are to not
the horribly unsanitary practices still in place as late as 1875.
“Terrible, terrible,” is what just about any
liberal would say; adding that those poor deluded people should have listened
to science.
But here we are again facing resistance to
science because of prevailing ideology, but this time the onus is on the Left,
whose paradigm of thought is now so tightly structured nothing considered alien
to it, including proven science,
can intrude. Contagion of thought is
evidently considered worse than actual contagion.
Ironically, the Ebola scare in the U.S. is
following the pattern outlined by Albert Camus in his novel The Plague. The
first stage is denial:
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way
of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that
crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as
wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by
surprise. In this respect our townsfolk
were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were
humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. […]Pestilence is a mere bogy of the
mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and,
from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first
of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.
In other words, since pestilences were
impossible, everyone went on with business as usual. After all, a pestilence
would interfere with their freedom to live life as they saw fit.
Camus writes the second stage was the
disseminating of “information” in order to keep the public calm: Read
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