The Blog

2020-

2020-12-13 b
WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG II
"We are hurling ourselves in fits and starts toward a new system of castes, created in the name of disease mitigation. "

Lockdowns Recreated a Pre-Modern Caste System

f you test positive or refuse to be tested at all in New Zealand, prepare to be shipped out to a quarantine camp recently established by the government. Shocking, yes, but we have an analogous system in the US. If you test positive (which is not the same as actually being sick), you will be removed from school or forbidden from coming into the office. You could lose your job – or refused the opportunity to earn money. In many places in the country and the world where you travel today, you are subject to quarantine unless you can present a clean Covid test, regardless of profound questions that still surround the accuracy of such testing.

All these policies that stigmatize the sick, excluding them from society, follow directly from a strange twist in Covid policies. We started presuming that many or even most people will get the disease but seeking only to slow the pace at which it spread. Over time, we began to attempt the impossible, namely to stop the spread altogether. In the course of it, we’ve set up systems that punish and exclude the sick, or at least relegate them to a second-class status (a Scarlet Letter C on their chest, as it were) while the rest of us wait for the virus to go away either through a vaccine or some mysterious process by which the bug goes into retirement.

What really is going on here? It is resurrecting what amounts to a pre-modern ethos of how society deals with the presence of infectious disease. It’s not clear whether this is by accident or not. That it is in fact happening is indisputable. We are hurling ourselves in fits and starts toward a new system of castes, created in the name of disease mitigation.

Every pre-modern society assigned to some group the task of bearing the burden of new pathogens. Usually, the designation of the unclean was assigned based on race, language, religion, or class. There was no mobility out of this caste. They were the dirty, the diseased, the untouchables. Depending on the time and place, they were segregated geographically, and the designation followed from generation to generation. This system was sometimes codified in religion or law; more commonly this caste system was baked into social convention.

In the ancient world, the burden of disease was assigned to people not born as “free;” that is, as part of the class permitted to participate in public affairs. The burden was borne by the workers, merchants, and slaves who mostly lived away from the city – unless the rich fled the cities during a pandemic. Then the poor suffered while the feudal lords went to their manors in the country for the duration, forcing the burden of burning out the virus on others. From a biological perspective, they served the purpose of operating like sandbags to keep those in city free of disease. Pathogens were something to be carried and absorbed by them and not us. The elites were invited to look down on them, even though it was these people – the lower castes – who were operating as the biological benefactors of everyone else. (read more)

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