Famines are man-made. So are pandemics.
There’s an important idea from the humanitarian sector that famines are not natural disasters. They’re not caused by crop loss or droughts or even a lack of food. There’s always enough food in this world: it’s just not reaching the people who need it.
Famines are caused by market failures, and government inability or unwillingness to respond. A drought may be natural, but a famine is man-made.
It’s slowly dawning on folks that the same is true of pandemics. There are lots of nasty bugs in the world. But it takes a special cluster of institutional failures to get us where we are today.
As Malka Older writes: “The virus itself is natural, but our human interaction with it — the way the response is being managed by various governments and institutions — can become a self-inflicted disaster.”
This idea has implications for the story we tell ourselves about how we got here, and for what happens next. Was this a circumstance beyond anyone’s control? An unavoidable outgrowth of globalization? The failure of government in general?
There’s little to suggest that authoritarian-leaning regimes (China, Iran) are any better or worse at containing pandemics than democratic-leaning ones (Italy, South Korea, USA). But while both have failed, they’ve failed differently.
The weakness of authoritarianism is the need to maintain the illusion of strength, which manifested in China censoring early reports while the epidemic spread. Once the government acknowledged the problem, their response got kudos from the World Health Organization, even as it enacted draconian measures that may not have been necessary if they’d responded sooner.
In contrast, the United States is plagued by censorship-via-noise, a hollowed-out administrative state, and a lack of positive leadership from the top. These have become core features of our besieged form of democracy, especially in the last three years. Now that state and local officials are starting to respond, we see some gritted determination and maybe even anxious optimism about the road ahead.
In the social change sectors, the question for our long-term response is: do we treat pandemics as merely global health problems, requiring better early warning systems and medical supply stockpiles? Or are they (also) institutional and governance problems — requiring greater investments in democracy, civil service, independent media, anti-disinformation, and collective action?
Originally posted on the OPEN CoLAB newsletter: Social change in a time of social distance.
