In his unashamedly secularist first book, ‘Homo Sapiens’, Yuval Harari states that humanity has historically faced three key threats: war, disease and famine. In our decadent west, the latter is rarely an issue, toilet paper notwithstanding. Wars continue, but they are typically fought long distances from home, rarely approaching our mental doorstep. That leaves disease as our final faithful provider of headlines throughout the ages.
It is rare to see historic plagues compared to any current challenge. Politicians were in no rush to counter Millennium Bug fears in 2000 with great anecdotes of Samuel Pepys gallantly strolling through London during the Plague, despite the very real threat to hospitals that the computer bug posed. Even when the concerns are directly focused on disease, we are strangely silent. When SARS, the close relative of the COVID-19 we know and love, threatened our shores, we weren’t keen to draw comparisons with our management of the Black Death or even Spanish Flu.
There are three main reasons for this shyness. The first is the lack of theatrics involved in disease. As much as we are not keen to admit it, the drama of disease is at best non-existent. Pictures of successful research in laboratories and clinical trials simply do not grab our fickle minds in the same way as a dozen soldiers raising a flagpole on a captured beach.
The second is the stark pointlessness of the deaths involved. In war, however devastating the loss, it is relatively easy to reconcile the fallen as worthy of a cause (real or imagined). With disease, death can rarely be justified by preaching an ideology. With the exception of a precious handful of researchers who truly died for what they believed, the loss is as pointless as it is unmarred by a gun salute or poppy wreath.
The third reason is perhaps the one we are least keen to admit: between antiquity and today, humanity’s history of handling disease has been simply godawful. Whilst governments have occasionally been ready to understand disease vectors and control spread, most have relied on haphazard, ill-conceived strategies whose rationale is rooted in politics, folklore or a nationalistic garbage mix of the two, interspersed with a canned statement to the effect of ‘We are strong’.
Recent war victories form a much more attractive storyline for any current crisis. It is small wonder, then, that Britain has carefully selected Battle of Britain and D-Day imagery as its stock comparison device whenever troubled times loom. The enemy threatened, but it was Us Plucky Brits Wot Won It. That’s a narrative we understand. More importantly, it’s one we like.
On VE day, it is only natural that these parallels are all the stronger. Union Jacks sit next to rainbows. Medals of servicemen and women are displayed in bay windows alongside ‘Thank you NHS’. And ‘We’ll Meet Again’, playing through an Amazon Echo taped behind a six foot Vera Lynn cardboard cutout, beckons to NHS workers as much as it does to distant troops. More broadly, we keenly discuss healthcare ‘front lines’ in intensive care wards, and images of army units setting up temporary testing units only serve to strengthen the sense that we are all fighting an invisible enemy. The slick verbal imagery machine that is our Prime Minister, armed to the teeth with a haystack on his head, wakes up every morning begging for a comparison to Churchill. Our coping mechanism for this emergency is to see it as a conflict, because it’s easier to imagine winning that way.
Yet we are not fighting a war. The parallels are there in terms of careful planning and execution, but a war-fighting mentality is not merely inaccurate, but positively dangerous. Wars are, more often than not, over borders; Covid is not bothered about our political or nationalistic divides. Wars are fought with propaganda and morale; Covid can only be fought by hard data and material facts. This is something that even a seasoned showman like Boris realises. Isolation notwithstanding, he makes his speeches flanked by experts in the field. His latest lockdown policy overview contains technical details and terminology (‘keep R below 1’ being a key example) that would seem starkly out of character mere days ago. Other leaders seem to have taken the propaganda aspect to heart. A few politicians who have put forward ‘COVID cures’, ranging from the herbal to mere faith, that would make the most self-respecting homeopathic witchdoctor cringe. Many more advocate the wearing of facemasks in situations where the WHO says there is absolutely no evidence to do so.
Declaring war on non-battlefield-related matters has tripped up many a leader in the past. Poverty, education and terrorism spring to mind. In all cases, strategies are laid out with varying degrees of detail and thought, but when the end goal is as intangible and omnipresent as the air around you, the only guaranteed outcome is defeat. And whereas our wartime government was a coalition, the opposition leaders are in no hurry to rally behind Johnson and declare him their hero. Our situation is bad, but it’s not that bad.
As the celebrations draw to a close and Boris’ woolly advice gets tested, it’s time to be realistic about what we are facing. Respecting what the NHS are doing does not require glorifying the organisation beyond reasonable expectation. The phrase ‘Fighting the fight’ is in danger of advocating the incoherent mutterings of ‘Dunkirk spirit’ and putting on a brave face in the shape of the same designer facemask worn, unwashed, for an entire week.
Disease control means just that; it is hardly total warfare. Enemies can outwit you; a non-sentient virus will struggle. Wars divide countries; Covid threatens all of us. In doing so, it presents us with a unique opportunity to unite for a common cause. If we can grasp that, then the other side of a flattened curve may truly be downhill all the way.