Diary of a `Plague` Year

Almost a year ago, I wrote a short exhortation on this website entitled Sun, Steel, and South Africa.

We knew coronavirus was in the country. We knew deaths would happen. In the face of it, I suggested we get outside, eat meat, and lift weights, and then, once the dust had settled, we could try to build a new world order in which we re-discover a will to life that would usher in a new age of beauty.

How naïve.

I thought Chinese lack of hygiene and its ideology of national Marxism were the problems, and that coronavirus, hailing from some wet market or ugly lab was the spearhead of this darkness. Face it, know its origin, overcome. We could do this.

Fighting the virus would remind us that elemental gifts like fire and sunlight were from the gods.

That quickly turned out wrong. Despite overwhelming evidence that vitamin d and good muscle tone were the best ways to combat the disease, we quickly turned to plastic masks, constant swabbing of the recesses of our faces, ethanol spray, and plastic screens and sheets everywhere. Even the old school quinine from the classic mixer, gin and tonic, which French experts quickly identified as a game-changer, was declared to be some kind of conspiracy theory after Trump mentioned the efficacy.

We know now that handing out vitamin d and zinc supplements, getting people outside, and using quinine as a prophylactic were really good things we could have done, and that masks are, like that 80-year-old Fauci said at the beginning, mere tokens of compliance.

Instead, we took the plastic route.

So much for the coronavirus year being a way back to a healthier world. Instead of shocking us into something new, we attacked the virus with a new lifestyle of Zoom meetings, lockdowns, and loss of human connection. Beaches were emptied. We doubled down on what we were already doing in the western world – smothering ourselves in the detritus of modernity.

Thus coronavirus did not ultimately turn out to be some foreign problem. No, we in the west are the problem. And our plastic world is not owing to some kind of hidden communism at the heart of our politics, it is rather the crown of our spiritual lostness.

The best way I can understand the meaning of coronavirus is that it has not been a plague. It has rather been an apocalypse.

A plague is a disease that runs rampant and decimates populations. People are shocked when I say this in conversation, but coronavirus has not been a plague by any historically literate definition.

Sweden, that bad boy of European health policy, which supposedly recorded mass deaths unseen in times of peace according to the talking heads on TV, has not even had a year of notable mortality.

The chart above records deaths per 1000 per year in Sweden. The red line on the far right is 2020. I think you will be able to spot the year of the Spanish Flu which killed the young and healthy.

The same goes for the UK.

Note that the jump upwards in mortality in 2020 only puts 2020 in 35th place in deadliest years of the last fifty in the UK – below average in other words.

Yes, there were deaths. The graphs show this. But also note declining mortality in the years before 2020, which exacerbated the numbers of elderly and vulnerable.

South Africa has similar statistics. We had a jump in mortality, but we are not even close to the mortality rates of the Aids years or any other year other than a select few around the 90s as well as the past five years or so once Zuma had rectified the Mbeki criminality with regards to Aids treatment.

This is one reason why I say 2020 was not a plague year. It was an apocalypse.

The word apocalypse means an unveiling. We often think it refers to the end of the world but that is owing to a misinterpretation of how the word is used in the Greek New Testament. The word in context means a revelation of what is truly happening in the world, who is in charge of the world.

What was revealed then in our world in 2020? What was our apocalypse?

What we learned was that our world is not just physically plastic. It is spiritually plastic.

We were proven unable to experience a time of disease and moderate death without losing our minds. Our minds were plasticised by corrupt media figures looking to gain clicks with macabre death counts and images of busy hospitals – images which they showed no interest in revealing when it was merely normal deaths and squalor of prior years.

We have gained so much in our western, first world lives. Convenience and safety and a general, albeit unevenly distributed, plenitude of food.

But it has come at a great cost. And that cost is an awareness of the ever-present reality of death and the subsequent desire to live out our brief flame of life on this earth with beauty and glory.

I have been very quiet on this platform lately for three reasons. First, I finished my doctorate over these past months. Second, I am still getting to grips with how much of my mind I am willing to speak in public, given the consequences of expressing too much badthink these days. Third, I moved to Switzerland in the midst of this pandemic.

Something I have seen in Switzerland has helped me make sense of this year of apocalypse.

Switzerland is a very interesting country. It is extremely wealthy. Where I live has the highest minimum wage in the world. There is virtually zero litter. The people look so much healthier than they do in South Africa. Everything closes on Sundays. You see families in the towns enjoying themselves.

These are some photographs I took this past week in my town here.

Above you see the crystalline Lake Geneva, and to the left you can see an old castle in the distance. This is a town, a human place.

But then I changed my perspective slightly…

This is the modern art which adorns this scene, which signifies the relationship between the present and this landscape.

Metres away, you encounter the recently built local library:

This is where children come to find the great stories of their culture, in this box.

What does this have to do with coronavirus? We can find a clue in this last image I have to show you:

This building is apparently a feature of every small town in the country. The local box where the elderly are stored.

Think about that for a moment – in the wealthiest country on earth, in the midst of a natural beauty nearly unmatched in Europe, this is where the aged live, sharing communal facilities.

Art, books, the elderly – the people and artefacts which denote the passing of time - this is the context we give them; this is how we position them in our modern world.

This town is by no means unique, to Switzerland, or to the world.

What you notice in these landmarks is a mood in which we all share – that what we build now has no meaning beyond us. What matters now is storage and utility.

This is the spirit which shaped our response to the coronavirus. It was not a tragic part of a story in which we live. We saw it as some gaping hole which must be plugged. We must do something, anything, because deep down we believe that the world is just a scene for our own present, the world ends when we are not there, and whatever utilitarian measures we can take must be taken no matter what scarring we leave behind.

To re-iterate, we have not experienced a plague by any kind of sane measure. What we have experienced is apocalypse. We were ready to shut out the sun, cover our faces, do anything, if only we could extend fleeting moments by mere quantity.

There is a scene in the popular television series Downton Abbey where the two leading characters, Matthew and Mary Crawley, dance in their ancestral home whilst other members of their family are fighting off the Spanish Flu. (If you have read much 19th century literature, you will remember that this was the way serious illnesses were treated. Doctors visited homes. Relatives became nurses. Risks were taken.)

Whatever you think of the show, and much of it is really not that good, the scene itself is really moving. (Although I could just be a bit of a sentimental sucker for this kind of thing.)

What I am trying to say in writing is expressed in the cinematography, the setting of a grand home, the music, the dialogue – all of which emanate the lost idea that we are always living in the shadow of death. And that should not cause us to shrink back, but rather to live, to take part in the primal dance of life.

Watch:

Another story I have found myself thinking of in this time is the classic novel, Till We Have Faces, by CS Lewis. Set in the ancient, pagan world, the female protagonist is embittered by the fact that we cannot see the gods face to face, that they require things of us without speaking to us directly. The story is really her grand argument against the gods, her attempt to formulate a speech in defence of all her anger and bitterness. Yet by the end of the novel, after coming face to face with the mysteries of all things divine, after being given an opportunity to state her case to a god himself, she comes to this unexpected conclusion:

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

How can we meet the gods till we have faces?

In 2021 we no longer have faces. But if we want to live, we have to face death.

If you want to see the gods, you have to take your mask off. Sun and fire are still natural lights leading us to the Eternal Light.

And as I have said, we have not lived through a plague but rather an apocalypse. And what has been revealed is a world that has been made into a plastic mask.

I would rather live and die face to face. I would rather see the gods.