【Editor's Note】Under the epidemic situation, fudan university general education organization "scholars epidemic thinking" series, Fudan University general education center invited teachers from different disciplines in the university to write articles, starting from their respective professional fields and academic interests, to carry out different angles of discussion on the epidemic, interdisciplinary in-depth interpretation and analysis.
introduction
One illness is enough to pierce the barrier between reality and metaphor. Under the attention of hundreds of millions of people, disease has become a "landscape". Reality overflows the imagination. It can be said that the most unfortunate of this era is the literary scholars. The magic of reality goes far beyond imagination and rhetoric, and the dystopias beloved by literary youth dwarf those that pale in comparison. I happened to see someone ask, how many times is the "crown" of the coronavirus? I can't help but think of several ways to write the word "fennel"... The crowd's reaction turned into a large ketch scene.
Disease can create an exceptional "state of exception." The usual state of exception is that the tyrants and Don Juan love, because they can grab power unscrupulously, or pursue love without scruples—if there is no exception state, they must also create an exception state. However, the "state of exception" of the disease lets everyone know the terrible nature of the exception and the preciousness of the normal, no matter how tedious and mediocre the latter may be.
People often "rehearse" this exceptional state in fictional works. The boundaries between dystopian, sci-fi, and disaster work are inherently blurred. A lot of science fiction has infectious disease settings, such as "Twelve Monkeys", "Prometheus", "Resident Evil" series and so on. Bystanderism is not indifference, but retreating to the second place and trying to calmly "understand" the disease.
Diseases from exotic regions
Susan Sontag argues in The Metaphor of Disease that people always associate infectious diseases with "exoticism." Pathogens in science fiction often appear as "invaders". Probably the most famous biological invasion in human history, the Spanish conquistadors brought smallpox to the Americas, eventually leading to the collapse of the Inca Empire. This also inspired Liu Cixin to conceive of the "dimensionality reduction strike" in "The Three-Body Problem". Hollywood science fiction has introduced even the most distant places and others to the disease science fiction - outer space. In the 1970s hardcore science fiction film The Andromeda Strain (1971) by Robert Wise, the superbug Andromeda strain is actually a crystal that comes from a fortuitous impact in outer space. Some people have reduced the alien invasion in science fiction works to the deep panic of the West and the East during the Cold War. However, when that political confrontation disappeared, this panic not only did not disappear, but intensified.
Tropical climates and species diversity are considered hotbeds for the cultivation of new pathogens. The deadly pig virus in the Japanese film Infecting the Archipelago (2009, directed by Keihisa Setse) and the South Korean film Flu (2013, directed by Kim Sung-so) both come from Southeast Asia. AIDS and Ebola are from Africa. Resorting to the source of the disease to a foreign land naturally reduces the psychological pressure and moral responsibility of "us", but it will not help to control the epidemic. In an era of globalization where information flows is super easy, finding scapegoats is no longer so easy to get away with, because scapegoats are also looking for scapegoats.
In recent years, it seems that Korean directors have begun to challenge this routine, placing the source of the epidemic "here" and "us". The South Korean film Clematis Invasion (2012, directed by Park Jeong-woo) does not resort to the pathogen to a distant source, but blames it on the conspiracy of the domestic medical group. "Busan Trip" (2016, directed by Yeon Sang-ho) and "Seoul Station" (2016, directed by Yeon Sang-ho) both trace the zombie virus back to the laboratory of a biopharmaceutical company in china. After all, it takes a lot of courage to make your people "corpses", even if it only happens in the movie.
Terminally ill people generally ask: Why me? This is a human question, and it is also a heavenly question. And in the gap between one "me" and another "me," the devil laughs out loud. In the 1980s, AIDS was once considered a curse on the "West." But decades later, no country in the world has been "spared.". A high-speed epidemic changes the personal pronouns of the disease from the singular to the plural. The question to be asked now is: Why "us"? Humans, as animals hanging from the web of language, always like to blame "others." However, epidemics have blurred the lines between others and us. "Exotic" originally implied the possibility of geographical and psychological "isolation". But pathogens don't understand ideology and aren't "racists." The virus will inevitably "break the circle", at which point people will see clearly who is "we".
Disenchanted disenchantment
Diseases come not only from exotic regions, but are thought to come from a distant "past.". When we talk about specific diseases, we tend to associate them with the Middle Ages, antiquities, or even antiquity. For example, in the American drama The Last Ship (Season 1-5, 2014-18), ancient viruses found by scientists in the Arctic ice have killed more than half of the world's population. Illuminated by the light of "progress", modern people's memories of disease are dispelled like vampires. However, dispersion is not the same as disappearance.
This is a time of contentment. Westerners used to think that the focus of medical care had shifted from infectious diseases to chronic diseases. Disease also carries "modernity" – severe infectious diseases belong to the 16th century, tuberculosis is a disease of the 18th-19th centuries, only cancer and AIDS belong to the 20th century, and there seems to be no place for disease in the postmodern era. Diseases have been removed like pre-modern witchcraft. In the film Black Death (2010), 14th-century Britons were convinced that witches and pagans were the main culprits of the plague. For this reason, some villages burned all the women overnight. The witch hunters were obsessed with this belief and eventually blackened.
The term "disenchantment" was coined by the German thinker Max Weber in the early 20th century. In Academics he writes: "We know or believe that we can understand whenever we want to know; we know or believe that in principle there is no mysterious, unpredictable force at work; we know or believe that, in principle, we can dominate all things through calculation." But all this refers to the only one: the disenchantment of the world. In the face of the pandemic, people really want to, as Weber said, that we understand, we know, that we dominate the virus. Ironically, however, Weber himself was a victim of that belief. In June 1920, he died of pneumonia. Over time, people forget that Weber subtly juxtaposed uses "know" and "believe." So, is it "knowing" or "believing"? The ancients knew they believed, and today they believe they know—and "in principle."
"Disenchantment" has a dual effect: man becomes the solitary and supreme primate of the universe; man no longer seeks supernatural reasons. Providence, God, the devil, the spirits, the ghosts, the witches, the elves, the sorcerers, cannot be the legitimate justification for the disease. But at the same time, man has become a "species" that appears by chance in the process of natural evolution, it has no one to rely on, no trust, only rely on itself. It came from nowhere, but it didn't know where it was going. Man broke all idols, removed all witchcraft, stopped believing in any god emperor, and turned himself into an "orphan" of the universe. The orphan was more confident than ever, forgetting to admonish: "Skills, knowledge, and organization change, but humanity's vulnerability to disease is unchangeable." Viruses have been around for billions of years, and humans have only been around for millions of years.
The Andromeda Strain (2008) and the previous film, The Andromeda Strain (1971) (directed by Robert Wise), both reflect this illusory arrogance: extraterrestrial crystal life cannot tolerate environments that are too high or too low. Just use a little weak acid or weak alkali to kill it. Science fiction can be given lightly to the "antidote". Luck is not only a fluke, but also a fear. This is reminiscent of Independence Day (1996), when the alien fleet that finally destroyed the invading alien fleet was actually a set of human computer viruses...
We believe in science, we believe in experts. But sometimes the honestest answer is "I don't know." However, the status of a scientist does not allow it. A sentence of "I am afraid" really speaks to the survival anxiety of modern people. Some writers say that a grain of dust of the times falls on everyone's head as a mountain. Every "in principle" of science, falling on every disease, means generations. Socrates' motto, "I know I don't know," is deafening at the moment.
Antiphagic organisms
Functionalism in sociology likes to liken society to an organism. This parable can be traced back to Durkheim, the founder of sociology, and even earlier to Comte. The founders of sociology consciously resisted the expansion of the natural science methods into society and humanity—there were no ironclad "laws" in society. This is also a diagnosis of the characteristics of modern society: how can people coexist with each other when the original bond is broken? Hope is like the organs of living organisms, each performing its own duties and helping each other with the "body". However, this metaphor masks the inherent conflicts of society. "Organic solidarity" in durkheim's sense is not so much a feature of modern society as it is the social ideal of modernity. The lives of ancient people are God's, and the lives of modern people are all other people's.
The epidemic is blunt and raises the question: Do we need to pay such a heavy price to save a few? Utilitarians may not hesitate to abandon the "minority" to save the "majority." The "few" of the trains infected in The Cassandra Crossing (1976) were the ones that the American Colonel decided to sacrifice. In Outbreak (1995), the president and the military use air-fueled bombs to "suffocate" living creatures throughout the town. A strong man's broken wrist is never a decision of the wrist. The strong man is not an octopus, and there are many wrists to break. Every "epidemic area" may become a "minority" to be sacrificed, and no one wants to be a "price". Standing in the shadows, Kant whispered that man is an end, not a means.
Netflix's series Kingdom (season one, 2019) raises a question of political philosophy: When the king has become a zombie, does he still have the right to rule? Although the king had two bodies, it was not a broken wrist at this time, but a question of the head of the owl. If the parts of certain organisms fail to perform their duties faithfully, they are not only useless to the whole body, but even willing to eat other healthy tissues and organs. This is a feature that functionalism does not want to see. In this sense, the disease needs to be treated. Treatment must come from the outside. Treatment is not self-healing.
The dystopia of epidemic prevention
Many fictional works begin with the words "If there is a similarity, it is purely coincidental". In fact, for disaster films, it is more appropriate to use "don't say it is unpredictable". The 2011 film "Contagion" after SARS gave a textbook "god prophecy" - patient zero on international travel, intermediate host bat, aerosol transmission, R0 (basic infection number), people snapped up double yellow lian, square cabin and so on all appeared... Although many big stars (Marion Cordia, Matt Damon, Lawrence Fishburn, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet) have formed an ultra-luxury cast, it has become an underdog because of the subject matter. The film is full of irony, even if the vaccine is finally developed and distributed to the public, it is still mixed with some placebo.
Fiction itself has an anti-epidemic effect. I read a passage on Weibo: Someone once protested to Tolkien that there was too much evil in his book. Tolkien replied, "A book that does not deal with evil is a book of evil." "Because it makes the reader misunderstand the whole world." Although people hate medical troubles, they are also secretive about fictional disease disasters. A society probably won't disintegrate because of dystopia. Over and over again dystopia presents unimaginable and unacceptable possibilities, creating an uncomfortable future. Dystopia is a warning, a prophecy, a warning. Instead, a society that lacks a dystopian imagination is a Titanic that lifts the alarm. For dystopians, positive energy is the medicine of sweat.
Illness became a mirror. Blindness (2008) envisions a blinding flu — mild and self-healing over time— but recoverers find that society is more likely to collapse than the body. Plague Inc., a strategy game based on infectious diseases, is an entire epidemiological textbook, despite its absurd setting—to infect all of humanity. The South Korean film "Flu" reached its peak in visual impact - in the city where the deadly flu was circulating, because it was too late to screen, the army used large machinery to burn corpses in the stadium, including the seriously ill living... Dystopia puts the terrible "hell on earth" in front of you, just to avoid hell on earth.
Modern science fiction and disaster movies have partially replaced the ancient prophets of bitterness – knowing that it is useless to say it, or to say it, to have to say. If we can't face the difficulties we have created ourselves and find solutions. Then "the means of solution must be in the hands of one or all of mankind's ancient enemies, with famine, plague and war..."
At the end of The Hot Zone (2019), scientists say that only fools think the battle is over. ...... We didn't escape the disaster, and that catastrophe befell us. We should plan ahead... We can choose to ignore it or look directly into the future. This monster (virus) will come back... And at the end of "The Great Apocalypse on Earth," the congressman asks the scientists: What can we do? The scientist replied, yes, the question is exactly what we can do.
Citations:
Friedrich Cartwright and Michael Bidis, Disease Changes History, translated by Chen Zhongdan and Zhou Xiaozheng, Shandong Pictorial Publishing House, 2004, p. 235.
Weber: Weber's Collected Works I. Academics and Politics, translated by Qian Yongxiang et al., Guangxi Normal University Press, 2004, p. 168.
William H. H. McNeil, Plague and Man, China Environmental Science Press, translated by Yu Xinzhong and Bi Huicheng, 2010, p. 175.
The content of this article was provided by the Center for General Education of Fudan University, and was originally titled "Disease, Disaster and Science Fiction: A Philosophical Reflection on the Epidemic".