Where we are
The country’s been shut-in/shut down for almost two months now, cowering from the coronavirus. About 26 million have filed for unemployment. The virus shows no signs of letting up, or of even having noticed our efforts to social distance and shelter in place. We’ve finally figured out that wearing masks might help slow the spread and severity of a respiratory illness, probably a bit more than social distancing, but not everyone is wearing them. The virus seems able to evade even masks when looking for a new set of lungs to infect.
The US, with only about 4.5% of the world’s population, has a third of the world’s reported infections and a fourth of its deaths. American exceptionalism.
How accurate are the reported numbers? New York recently did antibody tests on a cross-section of its population and found that as many as 2.7 million NY’ers have had the virus, which is roughly the same as the total reported infections worldwide.
There’s no vaccine or treatment on the horizon.
Cities vs Countryside vs Coronavirus
Cities do nothing essential for mankind’s survival. It’s why economic activity in them can be turned off as if nothing they did mattered. It doesn’t. Cities parasitize the efforts of the countryside. From the countryside flow the necessaries of life that keep cities alive. So long as that spigot remains open, city folks needn’t do anything more than visit a grocery store to pick up their necessaries, compliments of the countryside.
Cities have always been countryside parasites, ever since first arising 10,000 years ago as a by-product of mankind developing the ability to produce food in lieu of hunting or gathering it. Cities arose as a place for people superfluous to food production (initially, mainly priests and rulers and their attendants) to gather. Cities don’t produce food. They depend on the countryside to provide it. Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine/shut-in/shut-down, whatever they like, so long as the countryside doesn’t. It must continue laboring for the cities, regardless whether they’re rushing about to their next appointments, closing deals, preparing exotic meals, dreaming up new ways of expressing angst through art, cheating on their spouses, i.e., doing all their normal things, or coviding in tiny apartments, hiding from the virus. Quarantined or not, no city would last a week should the countryside quit.
The ancient relationship of cities parasitizing the countryside abides, but it’s by now gone for so long it’s hardly even noticed, like a fish doesn’t know it’s in water. To be fair, part of the ancient relationship has been that cities necessarily pretended they were more important to human welfare than the countryside to motivate those most important to human welfare—the food producers–to provide food for the ones who sat on their asses in the cities demanding it. And because cities are where the votes are and were, it is also ancient tradition that politicians not only bought into the lie but perpetuated it. The US Senate, being representative of lands (states) and not people, is a notable exception to this rule, and explains how US Presidents, via the electoral college, can be elected without winning the popular vote. In the US, in effect, land is given a vote.
Usually it doesn’t much matter, which is the parasite and which the parasitized, city or countryside. But it does now. If the same criteria for quarantining in a city were applied to the countryside, both countryside and city would collapse. Cities depend on the countryside for their survival.
A recent advertisement by the CEO of Tyson Foods explaining that the food supply chain is breaking does not bode well for cities.
The Source of All Wealth
Imagine yourself a giant, standing smack in the center of what is now Indiana in the American Midwest around two hundred years ago. You take your giant’s clippers and cut down all the surrounding trees (they look like weeds to you) to make a clearing for a farm. As the crops come in and animals fatten, you gather all the best corn, wheat, soybeans, cattle, chickens, etc., into a giant pile (tiny to you) in the center of the state, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned to buildings and people (the ordinary-sized). You name it Indianapolis. Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside. The giant is nothing but the grinding inevitability of the economics of life.
The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labor of one. It only became possible with the development of sedentary agriculture around 10,000 years ago (ants developed the capability some 50 million years ago). Hunter gatherers lived hand to mouth. Only since agriculture did we start living hand to storehouse to hand to mouth and had enough extra to feed people who contributed nothing to the production of food, who instead built temples and managed relationships with the gods, exclusively fought wars, wrote poetry and prose, etc.
Agricultural surplus built the Egyptian pyramids. Their construction depended on Egyptian farmers growing food sufficient to feed many more than just those who worked the irrigated fields. The nourishing spring flood of the Nile and abundant sunshine year-round made agriculture extraordinarily productive. The pyramids were the result. Thousands of years after the last pyramid was built, Egypt’s agriculture was still so productive that Rome’s masses were kept happily sedated by grain imported from Egypt (and perhaps, Egyptian beer) and entertained in arenas built by slaves who were fed with it. Rome appropriated Egypt’s agricultural surplus for itself to feed and build its empire.
The US is today the biggest exporter of foodstuffs in the world. But only 2-3 percent of the population works directly in food production, making roughly 97% (everyone else) of people, and all of what everyone else does, superfluous. By comparison, several times that proportion likely worked in agriculture in ancient Egypt.
Egypt’s later experience with Rome illustrates the need for defending agricultural surplus, i.e., wealth, once it is created. Rome had the military power and will to take Egypt’s surplus, so did. An aircraft carrier in port in Guam for a few cases of coronavirus that prevents it patrolling the South China Sea portends ill for the US’s ability and will to defend its surplus. If the US can’t or won’t defend the surplus, someone else (China, e.g.) will take it. It’s how the world works. Ask Cleopatra.
Where do we go from here?
We’re gonna have to learn to live with the virus. Like our hunter gatherer ancestors learned to live with lions, tiger and bears. And how our more recent ancestors learned to live with a host of infectious pathogens (e.g., plague, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, malaria, yellow fever, cholera, polio, etc.) made possible by sedentary agriculture packing surplus people in cities.
There’s no cure, aside possibly from infection and clearance, and no preventative on the horizon. We can’t stay shut down forever.
The virus is here and has spread to all corners of the globe. Assuming Elon Musk doesn’t get his Martian colony up and running any time soon, we’re stuck here with it (besides, we’d likely bring it with us even if he did). We can wear masks and wash the hands and social distance to prevent getting so heavy a dose the immune system can’t deal with it. But we must carry on. It’s fantasy to imagine we can live in suspended animation for long enough that the virus will somehow go away.
Strange weather to go with strange times
Another round of severe storms earlier this week, but that’s not what’s strange. The cold snaps seem to be getting cooler as we close out April. Strong winds yesterday and today gave a bite to the mid-40’s dry air we awoke to. Air that’s not so heavy with humidity it sags is alone remarkable. After all, this is Alabama. And in the mid-40’s in almost May? What’s next, a cool, dry summer? That’d be more remarkable than the collective economic suicide the coronavirus has induced.