The Ghost Map, Looking Back, Around, Ahead

Our pandemic has me thinking back on Steven Johnson's great book The Ghost Map. I wrote about it in the first year of this blog and included these two quotes, which I remember to this day, and they both seem particularly relevant lately:

The initial symptoms [of cholera] would be entirely indistinguishable from a mild case of food poisoning. But layered over those physical symptoms would be a deeper sense of foreboding. Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you'd be dead in forty-eight hours (pages 32–33).

And:

From our vantage point... it is hard to tell how heavily that fear weighed upon the minds of the individual Victorians. As a matter of practical reality, the threat of sudden devastation -- your entire extended family wiped out in a matter of days -- was far more immediate than the terror threats of today.... Living amid cholera in 1854 was like living in a world where urban tragedies on [the scale of 9/11] happened week after week, year after year (page 84).

It would be an exaggeration to say we are feeling that level of terror about COVID-19, but it may be the closest that mainstream culture has come to feeling that way from a disease in modern history. Gay men in the 1980s and ’90s felt that way, I'm sure. 

Back when I posted about the book originally, I also wrote this paragraph about Johnson's discussion:

In the final chapters of the book, Johnson expounds on what the cholera outbreak and its aftermath have to tell us about our present situation [climate change]. We need urban density, he says, to make our level of population sustainable on the planet (because city dwellers use substantially fewer resources than rural inhabitants), but at the same time urban density makes us vulnerable both to purposeful attack (nuclear or biological) and unintended pandemics. If density comes to be seen as deadly, people will flee the cities. And then where will we be on a global sustainability level?

Unintended pandemics indeed. And here we are, with people putting six feet of "social distance" around themselves, going to drive-throughs for every need in order to stay away from other people, and avoiding mass transit. Being farther apart is not what we need as a culture or a people.