Reason—Not Chance—Is Mankind’s Destiny
The sudden untimely death of the sports champion, Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, and others when Bryant’s helicopter suddenly crashed in Los Angeles, may shock us with its terrible message for mankind. I thought first of Ecclesiastes 9:11 (King James Version):
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, r yet riches to men of understanding … but time and chance happens to them all.
We are witnessing the latest demonstration of the unlimited efficacy of human reason in shaping our lives.
That is true, metaphysically. In a fundamental sense, the reality is that we are affected by the passage of time and subject to accident and the unpredictable. Of course, investigation always reveals some cause of a crash; nothing happens without a cause. But taken in context, this crash was an utterly unexpected accident. And that is the way it is being viewed.
Simultaneously, however, we are witnessing the latest demonstration of the unlimited efficacy of human reason in shaping our lives. The coronavirus outbreak is an occasion to reflect upon one of history’s spectacular proofs of the efficacy of reason—and the life-and-death importance of uncompromising commitment to reason.
Coping with Coronavirus
The occasion itself is bleak, certainly, and even cause for concern. The “novel” coronavirus (novel to humans) that seems to have infected humans for the first time in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China, is headline news. In China, it reportedly has infected more than 5,000 people and killed more than 100 people. Estimates from outside of China, however, say that as many as 44,000 people already could be infected. Through travel in our global world, it has reached Thailand, Vietnam, the United States, Australia, and Canada. Outside China, the number of infections so far are in single digits.
Although China has a dubious reputation for honesty even about epidemics (Do they reflect badly on Communism—or make China’s masses less easy to control?), it has reacted by sealing off some 50 million Chinese in the affected area. Countries are restricting travel and screening arrivals. In the United States, the full force of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is now focused on analyzing the novel virus.
Reason v Infectious Disease
The single most deadly natural destroyer of mankind has been the infectious disease epidemic.
The single most deadly natural destroyer of mankind has been the infectious disease epidemic. The first one recorded was the “Plague of Athens,” about 425 BC, which killed as many as 100,000 people. Nothing could be done. It may have been typhus; we do not know. No one understood it. No one could treat or cure it. No one could know when it would end. Like every epidemic (a concept not known, then), it followed a predictable (today) trajectory and ended.
For the next 1,500 years, epidemics ravaged the known world—epidemics in civilizations for which we have records and epidemics in areas of the world at the time dark to history.
In Rome and then in the dark ages, plagues now thought to be smallpox killed up to 40 percent of the population of Europe. Nothing was known; nothing could be done. In 540 AD, and two years after, “plague” killed a minimum of 25 million, possibly as many as 50 million.
In the 16th and 17th century, in a typical epidemic, five or ten million people would die. Today, we suspect it often was Salmonella enterica. At the time, no one knew anything.
But quietly, behind the scenes, mankind progressed. The microscope was invented and bacteria were discovered. The germ theory of disease was proposed, opposed, and progressed. Brilliant humans asked how germs spread; the science of public health studies was born.
Still, year after year, hundreds of thousands died of measles, smallpox, plague, flu, cholera. These returned year after year. No one knew why, or the cause, or treatment, or when the disaster might end.
Science Joins the Battle
Descriptions of smallpox today begin with the near-miraculous phrase: “a former infectious disease …”
Then, in 1796, the smallpox vaccine was introduced into England by Edward Jenner. The attack on smallpox by vaccination continued through the entire 19th Century and more than half of the 20th century. Finally, a worldwide campaign by the World Health Organization (WHO), led by Johns Hopkins University physician Donald Henderson, finally eradicated the bacteria. Descriptions of smallpox today begin with the near-miraculous phrase: “a former infectious disease …”
At almost the same time as Jenner, Louis Pasteur was developing a live but attenuated (weakened) cholera vaccine and an anthrax vaccine for humans. Plague vaccine was invented in the late 19th century. These were not isolated triumphs; they were part of headlong progress across the board in science, especially the biological sciences. In parallel were achievements in public health, especially in providing for clean, safe drinking water, management of food, and disposal of sewage—a key to controlling cholera.
Cholera and yellow fever nevertheless ravaged Europe and North America through the 19th century. Numbers of deaths tended to be smaller in these regions, but an outbreak in Russia or Persia could cause a million deaths.
In 1890, an influenza pandemic took one million worldwide. Cholera struck sporadically in Asia and Africa, carrying away hundreds of thousands.
And then, the danger seemed to increase exponentially; this was among the first great impacts of what we call today “globalization.” Between 1918 and 1920, the Spanish flu took 100 million lives worldwide. The name was a typical joke of history. Almost certainly, the disease, like today’s, began in China. Vast numbers of Chinese laborers were transported to Europe in WWI to dig the literally thousands of miles of trenches on the line between the combatants in Europe. From those carriers, the disease was carried worldwide as wounded soldiers returned home on crowded trains. The casualties were significant enough to come to the attention of censors in most countries. The sole European country that honestly and fully reported the devastating flu statistics was Spain. Hence, “the Spanish flu.”
As dramatically and tragically illustrated by the “Spanish” flu, the opening of the world to travel by millions posed a huge potential threat of pandemics. But at the same time, the human progress that enabled world travel on an unprecedented scale also had created the knowledge, tools, organization, and wealth that would close the door on mankind’s greatest natural killer.
The Beginning of the End
In 1957, the “Asian Flu” killed 2,000,000. In 1968, the Hong Kong flu took 1,000,000. But, the once mysterious, unpredictable, lethal enemy was no longer any of those. It was understood, relentlessly tracked, treated—but most of all prevented. One vaccine after another shut down diphtheria, smallpox, measles, polio. Public health measures helped ended cholera, typhus, malaria, yellow fever, whooping cough …
(Virtually all vaccines and vaccination science had been directed toward bacterial diseases, so poliomyelitis, caused by a virus, presented new and greater difficulties in creating a vaccine. The disease had been identified in the late 18th century and the virus at the beginning of the 19th century, but it was not until the 1950s that a vaccine was developed.)
Some of the names are almost unknown, today. Any bacterial disease, as soon as it appeared, was analyzed, tracked, a vaccine developed, a worldwide campaign launched to eradicate it, the last outbreaks squashed, and the final cases isolated. Smallpox no longer exists. WHO hoped to eradicate polio by 2018. From 350,000 cases in 1957, it has been reduced to fewer than 100 chiefly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What made it all work was a public health innovation: the disease surveillance system. National, regional, then worldwide, multi-layered systems of response now halt pandemics by identifying and isolating every outbreak of an infectious disease.
Most nations have such a system for spotting, reporting, testing, and responding to new cases. All national organizations work through WHO to provide worldwide surveillance and response. Much of its work is carried out by personnel from the CDC and other science powerhouses. In practice, only the United States military and NATO have the actual global reach to respond to a true global emergency.
And then, out on the Congo basin, beginning as early as 1960, but not identified till later, came the HIV/AIDS virus. It tested the entire infrastructure of epidemic disease management and rocked back on its heels a world no longer inured to pandemic deaths. The armamentarium of expertise developed for bacterial illnesses did not apply to HIV/AIDS. It was even an extremely unusual kind of virus. Before it was brought under control by early diagnosis, lifelong treatment, and prevention, HIV/AIDs took 30,000,000 lives.
Earlier generations would be astounded to know the toll of world epidemics (“pandemics”) in the closing years of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. In these most recent decades, there have been no significant new pandemics. Occasionally, higher tolls occurred in specific countries, such as Zimbabwe, Africa’s tragically crippled, poor, and starving Marxist regime under a lifelong dictator. The Ebola virus in West Africa has taken more than 10,000 lives.
In a world where science prevails, and the free flow of information and ideas occur, the epidemic of the 21st century is a matter of definition, not large numbers.
In a world where science prevails, and the free flow of information and ideas occur, the epidemic of the 21st century is a matter of definition, not large numbers. There are no pandemics. Epidemics, today, occur in individual nations (for example, 5,000 died of measles in the Congo in 2019).
With a full-time staff of 15,000 and a budget of almost $1 billion, the CDC in Atlanta may be one of our best investments in government. It is tough to tell on first look because CDC’s self-promotion on the internet is overwhelming. It would be reassuring to attribute this effort at promotion to CDC’s dedication to mission. I don’t know.
The Unpredictable Outcome of Coronavirus
The new threatening epidemic out of China is not likely to rise to the level of historic epidemics. Coronaviruses have been known for a very long time and are common in many different species, including camels and bats. Rarely, they evolve and infect humans and then spread between humans. Recent examples are two relatively new and severe coronaviruses, SARS and MERS. Most coronaviruses infect animals, not people, but one chief origin of new diseases and epidemics is evolution of infectious agents and their adaptation of new hosts (i.e., humans).
Latest reports are that the current coronavirus emanated from the seafood market in Wuhan, where “delicacies” such as snake and bat meats are for sale. The coronavirus may have come from snake meat, but the far more urgent question is how it jumped from its animal vector, whatever it was, into humans. And that remains a mystery.
Experience suggests that this latest virus out of Asia will not make headway in the West any more than other recent Asian epidemics. In 2009, some 203,000 died in a worldwide flu epidemic—the only worldwide virus in the 21st century that exceeded a few thousand deaths. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been working since 2003 on a treatment for coronavirus and one is now at an advanced level of testing. The work began shortly after the SARS outbreak, attributed to a similar virus (the drug is called “remdesivir.”) Although the SARS outbreak raised fears of pandemic, it ended after killing fewer than 800 people.
(As a side note, the term “epidemic” is not limited to infectious diseases. Today, there is the opioid epidemic, for example, and, according to the WHO, an epidemic of obesity.)
Advocating for Reason
Many of the disease threats that remain can be influenced by our own choices, our rational decisions.
Precisely because of the triumphs over the spread of infectious diseases, many of the disease threats that remain can be influenced by our own choices, our rational decisions, such as not smoking, avoiding obesity, exercising, moderating alcohol intake (emphatically when driving), abjuring violence, getting solid medical advice and following it.
In a wider sense, we can be resolute in defending the preconditions of all progress:
- 1) Philosophical commitment to reason against the rampant skepticism and nihilism invading higher education.
- 2) Advocacy of the beneficence of technology against attacks especially of ideological environmentalism unconnected to actual science.
- 3) Defense of free societies with freedom of investigation, exchange of ideas, and initiation and development of new products.
All three of these preconditions of human thriving today are under unrelenting attack. To see how a distinguished scientist diagnoses these assaults and responds to them, try Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Stephen Pinker (Penguin Books, 2018), a famous cognitive scientist at Harvard University.
If we cannot escape entirely “time and chance,” the application of reason through science is approaching what is effectively domination of the single greatest killer in mankind’s history. Hundreds of millions of us owe our lives to this science.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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