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I am writing this entry as spring emerges with an almost taunting beauty in the midst of a horrific pandemic. The word contagion rings daily in its most gruesome meaning. It means “to touch together,” and that has become something at once dangerous and deeply longed for in this moment of—for many—enforced isolation.
The precarity of being human is never more poignantly visible than in such moments of crisis. We are social beings, which means both that we have profound need for one another and that we put each other at risk. During a pandemic, those needs and risks are evident in their most literal manifestations, but to be human is to live with that knowledge and the accompanying sense of precarity, even if not always consciously. Communicable disease displays our connections; it lights up the routes we travel and the contacts—known and unrecognized—we have along the way. It displays our most sacred intimacies and our most secret liaisons. It tells the story of human connection in all of its manifestations.
Communicable disease shows us how we live not only with each other, but in constant communication with a myriad of living organisms, including microbes, which far outnumber us. As the human population grows and becomes ever more interconnected, microbes circulate with us, with increasing frequency, speed, and distance. Some sustain us; some endanger us. Some are familiar; some we newly encounter. Most humans do not think often of these fellow travelers, but a pandemic reminds us of our ecological existence: a world populated by organisms in a delicate dance of mutual sustenance and danger.
Communicable disease happens when we disrupt a balance. It broadcasts social, political, and economic inequities and environmental, structural and systemic failures. In the words of the health activist Paul Farmer, “diseases themselves make a preferential option for the poor” (Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor). Inadequate nutrition, clothing, and shelter, and lack of access to clean water and primary health care—as well as the daily stresses all of these things entail—increase susceptibility to diseases of all kinds. Although communicable diseases are said to be great equalizers, however, they manifest a gruesome calculus in the discrepancies in susceptibility. The numbers of sick and dying broadcast daily in macabre chants do not tell the full story. A system’s failure and a culture’s shame are etched in the breakdown of morbidity and mortality, with even that memory haunted by the incalculable losses of the invisible and the apparently expendable among us.
But catastrophes also breed heroes as they bring into relief social dependencies as vital and intricate as the routes of contagion, some, again, more visible than others. While medical professionals knowingly, selflessly care for those afflicted by deadly diseases for which there are no preventions or cures, front line workers—in pharmacies and grocery and other supply stores, in factories and on farms, in trucks and on planes—encounter risks they had not likely anticipated in their efforts to keep a population alive. A community sees itself reflected most clearly in its worst contagions.
The power of contagion as an analogue makes it especially available for a broad range of meanings. In its earliest incarnations, it referred more typically to ideas than to microbes. The term circulated widely, for example, during the French Revolution to refer to the spread of revolutionary ideas, dangerous or salutary, depending on one’s perspective. At the turn of the twentieth century, sociologists described the “social contagion” through which a group of people living in close proximity came to share a set of beliefs and codes governing behaviors and shaping interactions. Nineteenth-century French psychiatrists Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret coined the phrase "folie a deux" to describe the contagious delusions that can spread among close acquaintances. In contemporary parlance, malicious software known as viruses spread easily among computers and disrupt the functioning of the machines we depend on. Emotions are contagious, often in positive ways. Laughter is contagious, as is kindness. It is difficult not to smile back when smiled at, but even on social media, emotions are contagious. A 2015 scientific study at the University of Southern California describing the “emotional contagion” on Twitter found positive emotions to be significantly more contagious than negative ones (Emilio Ferrara, Zeyao Yang, ‘Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media’).
These meanings show how fundamental contagion is to the experience of being human. Moments of crisis typically reinforce a survival mentality that can divide the world into “us” and “them,” but just as strongly underscore the interconnection and interdependence that undermine those distinctions and remind us that our survival ultimately depends on our cooperation. When we emerge from a crisis, we would do well to remember the fundamental lessons of contagion: our responsibility to each other and the benefit to all if we strive to live more justly and wisely in a global world.
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