This does seem unusually bad, so would qualify. Strongly upvoted. This makes me more sympathetic to people who were claiming that anti-Chinese xenophobia was the biggest problem with the novel coronavirus, even though I still think they made the wrong call even ex ante.
I’m fine with examples from relatively early historical pandemics, because the current situation is an unusually large upheaval compared to say the Hong Kong flu, so to get a historical sense of what could happen we need more examples of “unusually fast+large upheavals in history”, and I think earlier on maybe people (including myself) are over-indexing a bit on “recent epidemics that are less lethal” (so less good as a reference class) as well as the Spanish flu (which is only one data point).
Though that said when I searched for “pogroms during epidemics,” this paper claims that after the first Black Death, there wasn’t much evidence for plague-based pogroms and other outgroup violence, even during subsequent plagues.
That is interesting. My general model is that pre-modern Europeans didn’t need much of an excuse to start killing Jews, so if true this would be a substantial update for me.
There are various things I could come up with that might start explaining the difference, but I’d want to actually read the paper first.
Okay, here’s the conclusion of the paper (emphasis mine):
To date, studies on social violence, hate and disease have focused on less than a handful of pandemics – drawing parallels at times between the Black Death and cholera, in other places between syphilis and A.I.D.S.,and on occasion two or three other diseases. No one has gone beyond these few pandemics to chart comparatively the patterns of disease and hate. No one has compared the levels of violence or intensity of hate with different pandemics in different places and periods; instead, epidemics’ potential for hate has been levelled, so that blaming, perhaps but not necessarily implicit in popular names given to diseases, is placed on the same plane as the genocide of Jews across vast regions of Europe during the Black Death and again of Eastern Jews with twentieth-century typhus. Furthermore, no one has factored to what extent certain characteristics of diseases – rates of mortality, rates of fatality, quickness of death, newness of a disease, mysterious causes, degrees of contagion, gruesomeness and horror of signs and symptoms – determine whether a wave of collective hate and violence is likely to ensue. Instead, both in the popular imagination and the scholarly literature, violent hatred and even pogroms are held to have been pandemics’ normal course, supposedly engrained in timeless mental structures – to use René Baehrel’s words again, ‘certaines structures mentales, certaines constantes psychologiques’.123 Further examples of such scholarly opinion can easily be provided,124 but were these the constant consequences of epidemics? According to my survey thus far, they were not: the Black Death, typhus in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Europe, plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (although only in some areas), cholera in places in the eighteen-thirties, in Italy as late as 1911, in Peru andVenezuela to the nineteen-nineties, in Haiti to today, sometimes smallpox, sometimes Yersina pestis, and perhaps to some extent A.I.D.S. in our own time were exceptions but hardly the rule. No matter how contentious the underlying social and political circumstances,how high the body counts, how gruesome the signs and symptoms, how fast or slow the spread or course of a disease, pandemics did not inevitably give rise to violence and hatred. In striking cases they in fact did the opposite, as witnessed with epidemics of unknown causes in antiquity, the Great Influenza of 1918–19 and yellow fever across numerous cities and regions in America and Europe. These epidemic crises unified communities, healing wounds cut deep by previous social, political, religious, racial and ethnic tensions and anxieties. On occasion, it is true, pandemics did split societies with accusations and violence. Historians, doctors and psychologists have yet to map when and where they happened, to measure their intensities, or to examine the complex interaction of factors to explain why some diseases were more or less persistently the exceptions. They have yet to raise the questions within a comparative framework of world epidemics.125 It is now time to construct the databases of disease and hate.
The rest of the paper documents many epidemics he looked at (going back to before common era Athens and Rome) which did not end up in the expected violence. I think I have a more balanced view of whether it’s possible for excess panic to cause major problems during a pandemic now, and I’m still surprised that there isn’t more.
I’d like to see
a) a study of how much those incidences of outgroup violence were primarily a result of panic (as opposed to eg. opportunists, since during the Black Death Christians appeared at least as invested in confiscating a lot of possessions from Jewish people) and
b) a similarly comprehensive study of how many epidemics/pandemics resulted in bad things happening from insufficient worry or officials hiding information.
I also weakly suspect that some cases of a) and b) are tied together, eg. excess panic/panic synchronization happening because officials have lied about the situation earlier on.
I only came to this thread by accident and saw that I’m apparently the culprit (it showed a weak downvote). I don’t even remember reading this comment nor the thread and I rarely downvote people anyway. Maybe I misclicked while I scrolled through random comments yesterday. I hope that doesn’t happen too often. :)
This does seem unusually bad, so would qualify. Strongly upvoted. This makes me more sympathetic to people who were claiming that anti-Chinese xenophobia was the biggest problem with the novel coronavirus, even though I still think they made the wrong call even ex ante.
I’m fine with examples from relatively early historical pandemics, because the current situation is an unusually large upheaval compared to say the Hong Kong flu, so to get a historical sense of what could happen we need more examples of “unusually fast+large upheavals in history”, and I think earlier on maybe people (including myself) are over-indexing a bit on “recent epidemics that are less lethal” (so less good as a reference class) as well as the Spanish flu (which is only one data point).
Though that said when I searched for “pogroms during epidemics,” this paper claims that after the first Black Death, there wasn’t much evidence for plague-based pogroms and other outgroup violence, even during subsequent plagues.
That is interesting. My general model is that pre-modern Europeans didn’t need much of an excuse to start killing Jews, so if true this would be a substantial update for me.
There are various things I could come up with that might start explaining the difference, but I’d want to actually read the paper first.
Okay, here’s the conclusion of the paper (emphasis mine):
The rest of the paper documents many epidemics he looked at (going back to before common era Athens and Rome) which did not end up in the expected violence. I think I have a more balanced view of whether it’s possible for excess panic to cause major problems during a pandemic now, and I’m still surprised that there isn’t more.
I’d like to see
a) a study of how much those incidences of outgroup violence were primarily a result of panic (as opposed to eg. opportunists, since during the Black Death Christians appeared at least as invested in confiscating a lot of possessions from Jewish people) and
b) a similarly comprehensive study of how many epidemics/pandemics resulted in bad things happening from insufficient worry or officials hiding information.
I also weakly suspect that some cases of a) and b) are tied together, eg. excess panic/panic synchronization happening because officials have lied about the situation earlier on.
Why was this comment downvoted? :O
I only came to this thread by accident and saw that I’m apparently the culprit (it showed a weak downvote). I don’t even remember reading this comment nor the thread and I rarely downvote people anyway. Maybe I misclicked while I scrolled through random comments yesterday. I hope that doesn’t happen too often. :)
No worries! :)
Yeah perhaps I should be less credulous?