The following paragraph was published in the New York Times on May 25th, 1915 in an article titled: “Typhus Fever is as Old as Warfare”. This paragraph could describe a dozen conflicts since then, including some current ones.
Civilization is only a thin crust, covering possibilities of relapse into savagery. Long ages have been required to bring civilized man by slow and painful stages to his present condition. Only a few months are required for him to relapse into the condition of barbarism from which he emerged. In times of great disaster, when the conventions of civilized society are removed, man again becomes an individualist, striving like primitive man or like the beasts of the jungle for food and shelter and even for life itself, and ruthlessly abandoning any refinements or customs which might impede him. Under such conditions, he easily reverts to the habits of his former savage state. Even the diseases of barbarism return.
Christopher R. Albon is a political science Ph.D. specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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The de-volution of individuals in a society when confronted by basic survival in the face of an epidemic is a very important factor when examining the ’social psychology’ of a culture. When these individual actions are examined in the context of society as a whole, they lend themselves to an understanding of what the particular society deems important.
Is Typhus at a certain level (number of cases) routine for society, and therefore, considered ‘business as usual’, or has it exceeded that deemed ‘acceptable’ the particular society. Individual actions are combined to form a societal whole and thus, can be observed to form indicators of what a society finds important to its basic construct. When levels of disease exceed individual and societal norms, a point is reached that represents ‘unacceptable’. This pushes a disruption in the society that is, at its base, rooted in individual action but is observable in the greater society when individual actions aggregate into larger mass actions.
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