Book Review: Never beyond good and evil

Exquisitely illustrated by Sarnath Banerjee, the central question which motivates Julia Hauser’s book The Moral Contagion is: “how would COVID change societies at large, and close relationships on a micro level—and how, indeed, would it change morality?”

She does not answer this question. This is not a book that tells us of the consequences of COVID-19. She raises the question and gives us the tools to look for answers ourselves. Hauser takes us through a historical journey of plagues, “from sixth-century Constantinople and fourteenth-century Europe, Islamic Spain, seventeenth-century London and Aleppo in the eighteenth century, to Hong Kong, Bombay, San Francisco and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

She shows us how different societies for the last two millennia have encountered the plague as an event and changed in response to it, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. A plague is never met as a purely biological fact. Like the title suggests, the contagion is always dealt with on moral terms. It challenges existing systems of belief, knowledge and political power and remoulds them.

When COVID-19 erupted into our lives, one of the first things said about it was that here finally was a thing that does not differentiate between the rich and the poor, between a Hindu and a Muslim. Here, finally, was a great leveller.

Soon, we found, like those in Italy of the 1300s, that the contagion may indeed be agnostic, but its real-world effects most certainly are not. “Then, as now,” Hauser writes, “class distinctions aggravated people’s fate in a pandemic, although in principle, the plague had no class prejudice.” For those of us who remember the Tablighi Jamaat episode in which Muslim minorities were targeted for wilfully spreading COVID-19, it will come as a sad surprise that this game has also been on for way too long.

There is not just an increase in communal suspicion due to requirements of reduced contact but a strategic othering of minorities to distract from our powerlessness in the face of the disease. While Jews in Christian Europe were accused of poisoning wells so that an answer (however inadequate) could be given to why so many people were dying of plague in the 14th century, the Chinese in San Francisco were persecuted in the name of developing better medicine during the early 19th century bubonic plague.

Just like the migrants and slum-dwellers were blamed in 21st century India during COVID-19, they were also blamed at the beginning of the 20th century for the plague outbreak in Bombay. Then, as now, lack of hygiene and crowded living conditions became excuses to bulldoze slums and invade their privacy.

During COVID-19, one of the forms that public hysteria took was prescription of endless home remedies from drinking copious amounts of kadha to ingesting dangerous amounts of turmeric. Hauser assures us that dietary recommendations based on half-baked knowledge have always been popular among the moralists of the day.

Like many who interpreted COVID-19 as a punishment for our sins, as a comeuppance that humanity deserved for having become too lazy and complacent, the plague was interpreted as a lifestyle disease in Islamic Spain in 14th century as well. For the foul air, water and food of the city, for the sloth and gluttony of city-dwellers, the recommendations were to go back to the countryside and engage in physical activities to not only strengthen the body but also the soul.

Hauser tells us that plagues never end biologically, just politically, when other things become more important. The same could be said about COVID-19. Or, put in other terms, when the political objectives of COVID-19 were realised and its benefits started being outweighed by its costs, we decided to move on from it.

We also cannot escape the conclusion that COVID-19 was a watershed moment in both the increase in digital technology and its acceptance. It provided the justification to completely disregard all precautions against digital technology. In a way, it can be said that if COVID-19 did not exist, governments and media companies would have to create it. This exponential rise in digital technology that COVID-19 made way for came with a heavy price, that will probably be realised for generations to come.

Our concept of privacy has changed. Our interactions with each other have become so mediated that we do not even notice it anymore. We have accepted the presence of media into our homes without understanding its implications.

The book tells us that societal changes in response to contagion take hundreds of years to materialise. It reminds us that the only way to understand our life is through history. We are facing nothing new under the sun and if we do not learn from our past, then we are bound to repeat it as farce.

Finally, while the illustrations are very well done and make the reading easier on the eye, they do not add substance to the book. Their sole role seems to be to make an image-addicted public read some text. And in that, they indeed are useful.

This was first published in the 16-31 August, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth