Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID

Abstract

MAKING SENSE OF DISEASES AND DISASTERS: Reflections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID by Lee Trepanier, ed. New York: Routledge, 2022. 248 pages. Hardcover; $170.00. ISBN: 9781032053950. E-book; $47.65. ISBN: 9781003197379. *Political theorist Lee Trepanier has assembled a collection of scholars to address the political--and human--questions that arise from what he describes as "liminal events" such as pandemics, natural disasters, and the like. In this book, "disaster" includes not only natural but humanly generated disasters, such as the Sack of Rome. Such liminal events can generate considerable political uncertainty, significant social change, and even political collapse. Trepanier states that "These events offer us lessons about the nature of political order and illuminate what political theory can offer in our understanding about politics itself" (p. 1). How do societies respond to these events? Do these events create (or reveal) solidarity or the lack of it? Do governments gain or lose legitimacy based on how they handle these events? More deeply, what do these events reveal about human nature and human behavior when political structures are under strain or broken? Trepanier and contributors work with an expansive, more classical conception of politics; in this conception political theory explores the broad questions of how we live together and how the political order both reflects and shapes our human nature. *The book is organized into Trepanier's introduction and four sections. Section I, "In the Time of COVID," engages the recent pandemic. Section II, "Modern Solutions, Modern Problems," moves to the early modern period with studies of key figures such as John Locke and Francis Bacon. Section III, "God, Plagues, and Empires in Antiquity," moves to the ancient world engaging authors such as Augustine, Thucydides, and Sophocles. The final section, "Reflections on Surviving Disasters," brings us forward again to the present day with studies of how contemporary authors grapple with early twenty-first century disasters such as the Fukushima Earthquake of 2011 or Hurricane Katrina. *Aside from the introduction, there are twenty chapters. Some chapters are densely written, while others are quite accessible. The authors come at their topics from a variety of methodological angles, such as historical analysis, literature, and post-modernist theory. All chapters are quite short, rendering them as tasters for exploring the ideas in greater depth. A particular point of interest is the extensive use of works of literature as a lens for exploring these liminal events; several chapters use this lens. *One takeaway of the book is that dealing with diseases and disasters is not just a matter of "following the science"--we need to understand the political, social, cultural, and intellectual context of the society in question. Disease and disaster reveal human interconnectedness in its physical, social, and spiritual aspects. *A recurrent theme in the collection is the ambiguity of globalization: not only does globalization enable the spread of ideas, people, goods, and services, but it also enables the spread of disease and the movement of terrorists. Furthermore, given that this is so, how should polities deal with these problems? Are they best dealt with at a more local level or more at the national level? *Arpad Szakolczai's lead-off chapter, "The Permanentisation of Emergencies: COVID Understood through Liminality," may be the most challenging for readers, both in the sense of the difficulty of its prose and in its challenge to what he sees as a pernicious attempt at rule by technocratic "experts." By "experts," Szakolczai does not simply mean those who are knowledgeable about a particular topic, but additionally those who have been intellectually shaped by a problematic conception of nature, a conception that does not adequately grasp what capital-N Nature truly is: a gift. He notes that this does not rule out a God who is doing the giving, but he doesn't explicitly affirm one either. Either way, we receive Nature, but, he claims, the experts fail to respect Nature as a gift; they are actually hostile to Nature and the natural. Szakolczai seems to be gesturing at "technology-as-idolatry" critiques of contemporary society: our experts have been detached from a true notion of the natural. Because of this, the experts see the COVID epidemic as an opportunity to expand their influence. His argument is provocative but extremely compressed and hence to me unclear. *Jordon Barkalow uses James Madison's concept of faction to analyze the varied reactions to government efforts to respond to COVID. A faction as Madison defines it is a group that has an interest or passion adverse to the interests of the whole political community. In "Federalist No. 10," Madison famously argues that a large republic will dilute the power of factions by way of multiplying them.1 However, Barkalow suggests, "The ability of personal factions to negatively affect national efforts to combat the spread of COVID suggests that the benefits Madison associates with the extended size of a republic might no longer apply to a technologically advanced 21st century" (p. 41). Factions have become national in scope. *Another common theme is that of apocalypse, in the sense of unveiling; diseases and disasters rip away veils and expose aspects of human nature and behavior that ordinarily lie under the surface. The chapters involving literature do a particularly good job of exploring this area. For example, Catherine Craig discusses James Lee Burke's 2007 novel The Tin Roof Blowdown, set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.2 Craig contends that "the novel shows hope for the possibility of redemption and the presence of goodness even when all established order is brought to chaos. This possibility depends on human freedom to choose and pursue a transcendent good. While this freedom can be fostered or neglected by political institutions, it ultimately precedes and transcends them (p. 198)." *The hardcover edition of this book is unfortunately ludicrously expensive, apparently priced only for library collections. (The e-book version is less expensive.) That being said, I would recommend this book as a source book for beginning to explore the political and social implications of disease and disaster. *Notes *1James Madison, "Federalist No. 10," in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 42-49. *2James Lee Burke, The Tin Roof Blowdown (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). *Reviewed by Daniel Edward Young, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern College, Orange City, IA 51041