"Dangerous demagogues once again threatening even some of our oldest democracies," Evil Donald Trump déjà vu

Life in Hitler’s Capital- Berlin Germany

In a new book about everyday existence in wartime Berlin, students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are allowed to speak for themselves. Book review by Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker magazine.

"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews." Martha Gellhorn.

My grandmother’s childhood in Weimar Germany was, at least as she described it, idyllic. She grew up in Grunewald, a leafy section of Berlin, swimming and boating in the district’s many lovely lakes. Her parents, though Jewish, threw elaborate Christmas parties and hosted birthday celebrations at which their three daughters were expected to recite poetry. They sent the girls to summer camp and private school and considered themselves assimilated into the city’s haute bourgeoisie. Even after the Reichstag fire, which occurred when my grandmother was twenty, there was, she insisted, still plenty of fun to be had. She liked to tell the story of a friend, nicknamed Bummel, who, after one particularly debauched New Year’s Eve, took off his tuxedo, carefully folded it up next to him, and fell asleep in the gutter.

Not long before Kristallnacht, in 1938, my grandmother—by this point married, with a daughter of her own—immigrated to New York. After I, the daughter of that daughter, came along, she used to tell me, “We were the lucky ones.” My grandmother had managed to get her immediate family out of Germany thanks to a wealthy uncle in Chicago. This, however, was not what she meant. She and my grandfather had been “lucky” because the only difficult choice that they’d had to make was to flee, and that choice had, in effect, been made for them. History had taken a host of fraught decisions out of their hands.

Over the years, I’ve often been reminded of my grandmother’s words. Recently, while I was reading Ian Buruma’s new book, “Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945” (Penguin Press), they played on repeat. Buruma is a writer who grew up in the Netherlands. In the opening pages of “Stay Alive,” he recounts the story of his father, Leo, whose experience was, in key ways, the mirror image of my grandmother’s. Leo didn’t flee Berlin to escape the Nazis; he arrived there to work for them.

Leo was attending law school in the occupied Netherlands when the Germans demanded that Dutch students sign a loyalty oath. Instead of complying, he went into hiding. For reasons that he was never able to discover, another student, who had also gone underground, advised Leo to return to his home town of Nijmegen. Leo’s father came to meet him at the train station, and both men were immediately surrounded by police. Leo had to make an agonizing call: either he could coöperate with the Nazis or both he and his father would be arrested. He opted for the former and was sent to a labor camp in Lichtenberg, a neighborhood in east Berlin.

Leo was one of those who managed to stay alive, though how, exactly, is unclear. At some point, he met a Frau Lehnhardt, the widow of a Jewish lawyer, who lived on the opposite side of the city. Lehnhardt had an elegant, well-heated home, and Leo seems to have spent a good deal of time there, accompanying the widow on the piano. By the end of the war, he had moved into Lehnhardt’s house. In April, 1945, Russian soldiers knocked on the door. When they found a gun, which belonged to another Lehnhardt hanger-on, the Russians very nearly shot everyone in the place.

Leo’s time in Berlin, Buruma reports, “haunted him” until his death, in 2020. He knew that some of his contemporaries, who had remained in hiding, regarded him as “morally compromised.” Was he? Was this true, as my grandmother’s formulation suggests, of everyone in the capital, including the many Berliners who despised the Nazis and spent the war years just trying to get by? “I wanted to know more about life in the city that marked my father’s life,” Buruma writes.

On September 1, 1939, the day that the Germans invaded Poland, Hitler made a speech in Berlin, at the Kroll Opera House. It was broadcast on the radio and also piped, via loudspeaker, out into the streets. Two days later, France and Britain declared war. Again, the news was blared across the capital. William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for CBS Radio, heard it announced from the speakers in the Wilhelmplatz. Some two hundred and fifty Berliners were standing around him in the sunny square. “They listened attentively to the announcement,” Shirer reported. “When it was finished there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before.”

Berlin was, at that point, continental Europe’s largest city, with a population of nearly four and a half million. What its typical—or, for that matter, atypical—resident was thinking at the start of the Second World War would have been impossible to ascertain. Since the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933, Germany had been a one-party state, and only Nazis were free to speak their minds.

Following the war, it would have been almost as difficult to get an honest account of Berliners’ experiences. The city’s population had shrunk by a million and a half, and Allied bombing had reduced many neighborhoods to rubble. Few people wanted to dwell on what they’d seen, or to reckon with their role in the catastrophe. The German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger described the collective response as a “form of moral insanity.” 

American journalist Martha Gellhorn, who travelled to the Rhineland shortly before V-E Day, wrote a famous dispatch that read, in part:

"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews."

Eighty years later, the task that Buruma has set himself—learning what life was like in wartime Berlin—has, in obvious ways, become even tougher. The vast majority of people who actually experienced the period have, like Leo, taken their memories to the grave. In some ways, though, the job has grown easier. As the so-called Tätergeneration, the perpetrator generation, has died off, Germany as a nation has become more open about its past. This is especially true in Berlin, where it’s hard to walk more than a few blocks without encountering a sign or plaque or monument devoted to some horror that occurred there. In the last few decades, the diaries of a number of Berliners who lived through the war have been published, along with a variety of memoirs and collections of letters.

Buruma relies heavily on works like “Das Blaue Buch” (“The Blue Book”), a wartime diary kept by the author Erich Kästner, which was not published in its entirety until 2006. (Kästner, who’s best known for his children’s story “Emil and the Detectives,” hid the volume among the thousands of others that he owned, and, as an additional precaution, he wrote in it in shorthand.) Kästner appears and reappears in “Stay Alive” like a restless ghost.

So does a half-Jewish guitarist named Coco Schumann, who wrote a memoir that appeared in German in 1997. (An English translation came out in 2016.) Schumann was part of a group of jazz-loving teens who liked to greet one another with an insouciant “Swing Heil!” He and his friends spent the night after the invasion of Poland listening to music at a bar on the Kurfürstendamm. Three years later, Schumann was still performing at jazz clubs, even though jazz was verboten, and flouting the Nazi regulation that all Jews wear a yellow star. One evening, he had just completed a set when an S.S. man approached.

“You should arrest me,” Schumann says he called out. “I’m a minor, and a Jew to boot.” The S.S. man at first looked puzzled, then started to laugh. Clearly, Schumann must be joking.

“Stay Alive” is itself organized like a diary, with a section devoted to each year of the war. This structure lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints; in addition to diaries, memoirs, and letters, he draws on advertisements, fashion magazines, propaganda leaflets, and interviews with aged Berliners. Students, musicians, Nazi maidens, and members of the resistance are all allowed to speak for themselves—to judge their own behavior, or not to.

According to Buruma’s sources, life in 1939, proceeded much as before for most Berliners, albeit with less illumination (the street lights were turned off) and less food (beer, milk, and meat were rationed). Attendance at the city’s cinemas went up. Goethe’s play “Iphigenia in Tauris” was performed at the Volksbühne, and “Tosca” played at the Volksoper. Buruma quotes a woman named Hilde Korseck, who was studying medicine in Berlin when the war began. “We had a lot of fun,” Korseck told a television interviewer. “It was a wonderful time, especially at night when we danced with small groups of friends.” Buruma himself interviews a Berliner named Jörg Sonnabend, who was in elementary school when the war broke out. “As a boy I must confess I loved uniforms,” Sonnabend tells him. “But otherwise, things were entirely normal.”

That some Berliners would be having a normal, even wonderful, time of it as others “were being tortured in the Gestapo cellars on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and murdered or worked to death at Sachsenhausen, is disturbing but should not surprise anyone,” Buruma writes. “Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to hear or see.”

Soon, it became more difficult for Berliners to remain quite so oblivious. In August, 1940, the British started bombing the city; practically every night, the air-raid sirens screamed. The Nazis, who seem not to have anticipated that the war they had unleashed would come to their own capital, belatedly ordered the construction of massive bunkers. (After the war, one of these, designed under the direction of Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, was transformed into a Soviet prison, then a fruit storehouse, then a rave space. It now houses a collection of contemporary art.)

Most of the eighty thousand or so Jews who had stayed in Berlin or become stranded there were, initially, herded into Judenhäuser (Jewish houses). Among them was a relative of Buruma’s, on his mother’s side, Hedwig Ems. In 1941, when the deportation of the city’s Jews began in earnest, Ems was in her early seventies. “Whenever you met an acquaintance, the first question was bound to be: ‘Are you going to commit suicide, or will you let them deport you,’ ” Ems wrote in an unpublished memoir. Trains bound for the concentration camps left from Platform 17 at the Grunewald station, today the site of another grim memorial. In her memoir, Ems lists twelve of her family members who killed themselves and one who was revived from an attempt, only to die later in Theresienstadt. Ems herself managed to survive Theresienstadt, an outcome she attributed to her decision to wear fourteen layers of clothes when she was rounded up.

In the summer of 1941, Germany justified its invasion of the Soviet Union as a preëmptive strike against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” 

The following spring, with the Wehrmacht bogged down outside Moscow, the Nazis staged a carnival next to the Berlin Cathedral, sarcastically titled “The Soviet Paradise.” Inside a series of tents, visitors could gawk at photographs that purportedly showed Soviet slave-labor camps and tour what was supposed to be a replica of a Russian village—one where people lived in holes in the ground. The macabre spectacle was a big hit: in just six weeks, more than a million Berliners flocked to see it. The propaganda photos, Buruma reports, were fakes; many of the laborers pictured were actually prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of the city, where at least thirty thousand people were killed.

The Battle of Stalingrad, often described as the turning point of the war, drew to its bloody close in February, 1943. German casualties ran to something like a million. (Soviet losses were even greater.) “The mood in Germany has become very grave,” Erich Kästner recorded in his diary. Toward the end of the month, the authorities moved to round up Berlin’s remaining Jews, most of whom were performing forced labor in munitions factories. Some went underground. So-called Taucher, or “divers,” kept themselves alive by staying on the move, sleeping wherever they thought they could avoid detection, including in the Berlin Zoo.

Meanwhile, the British renewed their bombing of the city, after a lull during which they had focussed on destroying Germany’s ports.

When Leo Buruma arrived in the capital, in May, he was assigned to work for Knorr Brakes, a concern that, in addition to brakes, manufactured light machine guns. The guns were so shoddy that the S.S. handed them off to allies in places like Latvia. Perhaps because he spoke German, Leo was soon relieved of manual labor and sent to work in Knorr’s accounts department. He can’t have been paid very much; nevertheless, Buruma writes, he “was able to attend classical concerts at the Berlin Philharmonic, watch soccer matches, take walks around the many lakes on the outskirts of Berlin, and go to the movies.” He ate his first Chinese meal, at a restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm; attended a dance party at another labor camp; and struck up a romance, or perhaps just a flirtation, with a Ukrainian worker named Nadja. She “is a married woman and chaste,” Leo wrote in a letter to his parents.

The Dutch workers at Knorr were housed together in drafty barracks. Nearby were more heavily guarded quarters for Russian workers. In November, bombs destroyed the Russian camp. “Things did get a little scary last night,” Leo wrote home. “But don’t worry too much about me.”

Buruma likes jokes, and offers several that made the rounds in Berlin as the bombs rained down. One went like this:
Man in an air-raid shelter: “Where would we be without our Führer?”
A calm voice behind him: “In bed.”

And, another went: The Nazi regime has ended. Judgment has been passed. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels are suspended from the gallows. Goering, always the know-it-all, turns to Goebbels one last time and moans, “As I’ve always told you: the whole thing will be decided in the air.”

Buruma’s title comes from another joke of sorts, the humor of which is difficult to convey in English. “The new greeting in Berlin now is: Bleiben Sie übrig,” Kästner noted. The phrase übrig bleiben, which Buruma renders as “stay alive,” usually refers to something left over: a last piece of cake, for example, or some odd change.

By 1944, much of Berlin was a ruined hulk. A member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth, confided to her diary, “I’m a disgusting traitor. . . . I wish for peace, precisely for the sake of the soldiers. Is this the proper attitude for a Prussian, a German woman? No, and no again.”

The more that signs pointed to defeat, the more furiously the Nazis tried to stamp out “defeatism.” They formed a special task force to spy on people sitting in cafés (and even air-raid shelters) and report back negative comments. One Berliner who was overheard mocking the Führer was a cartoonist named Erich Ohser. In the Weimar years, Ohser had worked for a leftist newspaper; as a consequence, he’d been banned by the Nazis from practicing his trade. Under a pseudonym, he had gone on to publish a popular comic strip and then, amazingly enough, to work for Goebbels’s propaganda sheet, Das Reich, drawing caricatures of Allied leaders. Ohser was arrested for expressing anti-Nazi opinions. He hanged himself in his cell the day before his trial was set to begin. A journalist friend who was arrested with him was beheaded.

In early 1945, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, prisoners of war were forced to dig tank traps in the city’s rubble-strewn streets. These were referred to—privately, at least— as Lachsperren, or “comic traps,” because it seemed that the only use they would serve was to give the Soviets a laugh. The hunt for defeatists continued, ever more gruesomely. S.S. men and military police went around searching for deserters and “cowards.” When they found someone they thought fit the bill, they hanged him from a lamppost.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a German journalist who was part of a resistance group called Uncle Emil, wrote in her diary about encountering one such corpse. Passersby tried not to look at the body, which was swaying in the wind. “There are so many lampposts in Berlin, thousands of them,” Andreas-Friedrich noted.

Every so often, “Stay Alive” provides a glimpse of Berliners facing the kinds of hard choices that my grandmother felt lucky to have avoided. Marie Jalowicz was one of about fifteen hundred Berlin Jews who survived the war as “divers.” In 1942, she was hiding out with a distant relative when she found the relative’s husband standing by her bed. “He indistinctly muttered a few revolting obscenities,” Jalowicz would later recall. “You can guess the rest of it. I could neither kick up a fuss nor send him back, so I just let him have his way.” In 1945, Jalowicz was raped by Soviet soldiers. She allowed one of her rapists to become her “fiancé,” thus securing his protection.

More common are the evasions. “We never encountered any Jews,” Dorrit Sonnabend, the wife of the man who as a child loved uniforms, tells Buruma—a line that could easily have been dreamed up by Martha Gellhorn. A Lutheran pastor named Kurt Rasenberger writes encouragingly to his son, “Even if you are not a Nazi . . . you must be true to the Germans. God will reward loyalty. Even with tears in our eyes, we should remain loyal to our blood.”

Leo Buruma, too, seems to be seeking exoneration. He may have been haunted by his experience, but in his letters home, which his parents saved, he comes across as a young man intent on sparing his family and also himself pain. “Even in these times I have doubts whether we should demand of every Dutch person that they put themselves in serious danger,” he tells his sister in 1943. “I used to take a different view, but I’m no longer so zealous.” In July, 1944, with much of the city in ashes, Leo reports that he has gone to see a highly entertaining operetta called “The Golden Cage.” The jokes, he writes, “were very daring.”

Is Leo’s self-protectiveness justified? How about that of the many, many other Berliners who made ugly accommodations to stay alive? I confess that I’m not sure, and I don’t know that Buruma is, either. At the end of the book, Buruma characterizes his project as “partly a love letter to Berlin.” This, he acknowledges, may sound perverse; the book is, explicitly and unrelentingly, about the Berlin of the war years, when, in his words, “unspeakable crimes were planned and perpetrated there.” Buruma explains that his affection is for the city of the present and “the way the scars of its worst crimes are openly on display.” Elsewhere in the book’s final pages, Buruma offers a different account of his purpose, more along the lines of a warning. “Dangerous demagogues are once again threatening even some of our oldest democracies,” he writes. This is, or should be, the book’s claim to relevance, in which case not love but shame and terror would seem the pertinent emotions.

(Maine Writer- Excellent question here....)
What historians of the future will do with all of our diaries and blog posts and TikToks is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime, as they used to say in Berlin, Bleiben Sie übrig❗ (Stay Behind!). In other words, "hold that thought", ensure this idea is not forgotten .)

Donald Trump and the Republicans fired hundreds of weather professionals just weeks before the deadly Texas flash floods

Flash Floods and Climate Policy: As the death toll climbs in Texas, the Trump Administration is actively undermining the nation’s ability to predict—and to deal with—climate-related disasters.
Published in the Houston Chronicle by Elizabeth Kolbert

On the evening of July 3rd, as the sun went down over Kerrville, Texas, a small city of some twenty-five thousand people and the seat of Kerr County, the water in the Guadalupe River was just four inches deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s stream gauge there. The area hadn’t had any rain since mid-June. R.V. campers in the HTR TX Hill Country campground in Kerrville, some of whom had arrived at the sixty-five-acre facility only hours before, could barely hear the river, even though they were parked in premium spots next to it

At 3:30 A.M. on July 4th, Dalton Rice, the city manager, went out for an early-morning jog along the sluggish waterway. The river had risen to 1.71 feet, around the average depth. Kerrville’s much anticipated “Fourth on the River” celebration at the riverside Louise Hays Park was scheduled for that afternoon, and Rice saw “not a drop of rain” during his run, he later told Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. By 4 A.M., when Rice went home, “there was very light rain,” he said that day. “We did not see any signs of the river rising at that time.”

Rice was apparently unaware that a few hours earlier, at 1:14 A.M., the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service had sent a flash-flood warning for south-central Kerr County. The area it covered included the town of Hunt, about twelve miles upstream from Kerrville, where Camp Mystic, a girls’ sleepaway camp, was situated, at the confluence of Cypress Creek and the south fork of the Guadalupe. 

At 4:03 A.M., the warning was upgraded to an emergency: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!💥”

The stream gauge at Hunt showed the river nearing twenty-two feet, twelve feet higher than its banks. In the next hour, it would rise to thirty-seven feet, at which point the gauge stopped transmitting.

Network-news footage of flood-related disasters has traditionally shown low-lying coastal towns swamped by storm surges from named weather systems, with residents and rescue workers navigating the streets in hip waders, canoes, and powerboats, and the water level sometimes taking days to subside. Houston, New Orleans, Tampa, Charleston, and New York are among the cities that have been inundated in the past three decades.

Yet storm-surge-driven inundation flooding is not the deadliest kind of flood. The disaster often unfolds slowly enough that there’s time for many people to get to higher ground—and for weather reporters to get in place. The water isn’t moving anywhere near as fast as that of a flooded river. The flowing water in a mad river reshapes the entire landscape, a process known as fluvial erosion.

The flood barrelling down on Kerr County more resembled a tornado or a wildfire, a volatile, rapidly changing hazard, with a narrow window within which to act before the deadly force of the raging river arrived at your door. The September, 2024, floods that killed a hundred and eight people in the high country of western North Carolina, when Hurricane Helene passed over, were this kind of event, as were the floods in Valencia, Spain, in late October, 2024, which killed two hundred and thirty-two people. The recent flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico, which claimed three lives, was, too. In my part-time home of Vermont, storms flooded much of the state, including the capital, Montpelier, in July, 2023, and flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl hit the town of Plainfield, among other places, in July, 2024. Two people died in each event, and the damage from erosion was severe. The 2023 disaster wasn’t even caused by a named storm. Rain-soaked “thunder boomers” were enough to do the damage.

Historically, this kind of flooding, which often occurs in hilly and mountainous regions, has received far less attention than storm-surge flooding, and local municipalities tend to be less prepared than coastal towns to deal with it. People who have moved away from the beach to escape hurricanes and rising sea levels, and have settled in supposed “climate havens” like Asheville, North Carolina, or Plymouth, Vermont, are reluctant to accept that they have merely traded a devil they know for one they don’t. Francis J. Magilligan, a fluvial geomorphologist at Dartmouth College, told me, “We are actually getting pretty good at figuring out inundation risk. I would say, comparatively, we’re at the starting point of thinking about erosional risk. And we don’t have a good set of tools, FEMA or otherwise, to understand that risk.”

The floodplain maps that the Federal Emergency Management Agency uses to designate a Special Flood Hazard Area, or S.F.H.A., are based on historical climate and geological data. The maps don’t show the actual boundaries of past floods; rather, they illustrate statistical constructs based on the probability that a flood of a certain magnitude will occur there in a certain time range. The National Flood Insurance Program uses the maps to calculate risk. People who live in a hundred-year floodplain, for example, have a one-per-cent chance of being flooded in any given year. Anyone who builds or buys property in a mapped floodplain must take out federal flood insurance in order to qualify for a mortgage. The maps cover the coastal areas and the borders of major rivers, like the Mississippi, that flood frequently. They often don’t cover mountainous communities with smaller rivers and streams, where flooding can affect not only people living down by a river but also those living on banks high above it, whose homes may be lost to erosion. Moreover, most of the data FEMA uses to designate S.F.H.A.s are based on readings from the nineteen-sixties and earlier—data that climate change has largely rendered obsolete. The language, too, engenders a false sense of confidence. It makes it sound as though a bad flood will occur only once every hundred years, and that’s not the way the statistic is supposed to work.

Flash floods often occur in terrain with steep, narrow valleys that drain into rivers where the water is confined in natural and man-made channels and has nowhere else to go. The trigger is very heavy, concentrated rainfall. Warmer oceans lead to more surface evaporation, and warmer air is capable of carrying more moisture. When the warm air is forced upward by mountains, it cools and loses its ability to retain water, causing a sudden release of rain. With the Valencia floods, a year’s worth of rain fell in a single day. In North Carolina, upward of twelve to fourteen inches of rain fell in several hours. As global temperatures rise, outbursts of extreme precipitation will increase. Carl Renshaw, a hydrologist at Dartmouth, told me, referring to the meteorological conditions that led to the Texas floods, “You’re dumping so much water so quickly because you’ve primed the system with moisture. It’s like loading a gun. The people there had no time.”

Kerr County and its neighbor Kendall County sit in a valley that is known as Flash Flood Alley, because of the speed with which rainfall runs off the cliffs of the Balcones Escarpment and sluices down through streams and rivers to the coastal plain around San Antonio. The hillsides are steep, and the thin, dry topsoil over bedrock retains little water. Major flooding occurs regularly. And yet, even in Flash Flood Alley, which the judge of Kerr County, Rob Kelly, described in a press conference on July 4th as “the most dangerous river valley in the United States,” people continue to build in hundred-year floodplains. When properties are flooded, old-timers and newcomers alike tend to fix things back up. Kimberly Meitzen, a geography professor at Texas State University, in San Marcos, a small city in the Guadalupe River basin, told me, “We have this history of flooding and rebuilding here.” She mentioned five floods within living memory, in 1978, 1987, 1998, 2002, and 2015, in which not just houses but whole neighborhoods were washed away. “They just rebuild,” she said. Moreover, she added, “people continue to request variances to rebuild even closer” to the river. “There’s no really strong regulatory authority to prevent it,” she went on. “And so it just continues to put more people at risk.”

In Vermont, a flood in August, 2011, caused by Hurricane Irene, was so devastating that the U.S. Geological Survey called it a five-hundred-year flood, and at least one analysis deemed it a thousand-year flood. The flood that tore through Plainfield on July 10, 2024, occurred one year to the day after the 2023 flood, which had been a hundred-year one. And, on the same day this July, a violent flood struck Caledonia County, in the north of the state. Although such a tight grouping of floods isn’t statistically impossible, it suggests that the probability curves used by FEMA are out of whack with real climate conditions.

Psychology of fear and how it motivates our behavior. Hint: We humans are part of the mammalian chain

This echo essay published in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, includes a review of the book "Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground", by Kurt Gray.

Rethinking and learning about the human evolution and "moral foundation theory" (MFT). "Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger.  But wihout saber-tooth cats to fear, we fret instead about elections, arguments in group texts and decisions made at PTA meetings," writes Kurt Gray.

Essay published in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert:
Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments❓
When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancestors survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today.

Raymond Arthur Dart (4 February 1893 – 22 November 1988) was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924, discovery of the first fossil found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa.

On November 28, 1924, Raymond A. Dart, a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, was getting ready to attend a friend’s wedding when a pair of South African Railways workers staggered up his driveway with two large crates. The crates contained fossils that had been found at a limestone quarry some two hundred miles to the southwest, in the town of Taung. Although the wedding was being held in his own home—and his wife begged him to leave the boxes alone—Dart tore off the stiff collar he was wearing and rushed to find some tools. When he levered off the lid of the second crate, he later recalled, “a thrill of excitement” shot through him. At the top of the pile was a rock that appeared to be a cast of a skull’s interior. Dart, who taught anatomy, guessed that the skull had belonged to a primate, but it seemed too big for a baboon or a chimpanzee. Further rummaging yielded a second chunk of rock that seemed to fit right in front of the first, like a face.

Dart was pulled away from his investigations by the groom, but as soon as the wedding was over he returned to the specimens. Using one of his wife’s knitting needles, he chipped away at the second rock until he had exposed the creature’s chin, jaws, and eye sockets. The teeth, which appeared to have belonged to a child, were decidedly human-looking. More significantly, the opening for the spinal cord was positioned in such a way that it seemed the creature must have walked upright.

In a paper published in Nature just a few months after the wedding, Dart announced that he had discovered an “extinct race of apes.” He called the creature Australopithecus africanus and proposed that Africa must have been the place where our “troglodytic forefathers” evolved. (Definition:  "relating to or characteristic of a cave-dweller, or someone who is reclusive, unsophisticated")

In the nineteen-twenties, the prevailing theory—strongly influenced by racial prejudice—was that humans had evolved in either Europe or Asia. The pro-Europe crowd pointed to a set of remarkably humanlike fossils that had been unearthed in 1912 in Piltdown, a town south of London. Dart’s announcement rubbed the scientific establishment the wrong way. One of his British colleagues labelled it “preposterous.”

In the next few decades, as more Australopithecus fossils were uncovered in Africa—and as the “Piltdown Man” was revealed to be an elaborate fraud—Dart was vindicated. In the meantime, he had moved on. The limestone deposit that had yielded the Taung Child, as the original Australopithecus became known, also contained the remains of all sorts of other creatures, including baboons, turtles, and hyraxes. In another limestone deposit, in Makapansgat, northeast of Pretoria, Australopithecus fossils had been found among a great jumble of animal remains. From these and other bits of evidence, Dart concluded that Australopithecus had been a ferocious hunter who had wielded animal bones as clubs.

“Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers,” he wrote. They were “carnivorous creatures that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims.”

Dart’s account of the “predatory transition from ape to man” was profoundly influential. This time around, though, his theory was wrong. The Taung Child, scientists now believe, lived around three million years ago. It was killed by a bird of prey, as were the animals it was found with. The bones in Makapansgat were left behind by large carnivores, like hyenas and leopards, who were also happy to consume an Australopithecus or two if given the opportunity. 

Instead of being dauntless predators, our ancestors, it seems, were more likely prey. They spent much of their time—and their increasing brain power—trying not to become dinner.

What does all this have to do with life today, when big cats are headed toward extinction and meat comes on Styrofoam trays? According to Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the answer is everything. In “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground” (Pantheon), Gray argues that the most pressing problems of contemporary society can be traced to the Taung Child. “It is easy to think that we have transcended our animal nature because we wear performance fabrics and prompt artificial intelligence to help with our ‘knowledge work,’ ” he writes. In fact, “all our thoughts and feelings arise from a mind that evolved eons ago.”

Gray describes himself as a moral psychologist. In contrast to moral philosophers, who search for abstract principles of right and wrong, moral psychologists are interested in the empirical matter of people’s perceptions. Gray writes, “We put aside questions of how we should make moral judgments to examine how people do make more moral judgments.”

For the past couple of decades, moral psychology has been dominated by what’s known as moral-foundations theory, or M.F.T. According to M.F.T., people reach ethical decisions on the basis of mental structures, or “modules,” that evolution has wired into our brains. These modules—there are at least five of them—involve feelings like empathy for the vulnerable, resentment of cheaters, respect for authority, regard for sanctity, and anger at betrayal. The reason people often arrive at different judgments is that their modules have developed differently, either for individual or for cultural reasons. Liberals have come to rely almost exclusively on their fairness and empathy modules, allowing the others to atrophy. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to keep all their modules up and running.

If you find this theory implausible, you’re not alone. It has been criticized on a wide range of grounds, including that it is unsupported by neuroscience. Gray, for his part, wants to sweep aside moral-foundations theory, plural, and replace it with moral-foundation theory, singular. Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion. Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm.

“If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,” Gray writes at one point. At another point: “All people share a harm-based moral mind.” At still another: “Harm is the master key of morality.”

If people all have the same ethical equipment, why are ethical questions so divisive? Gray’s answer is that different people fear differently. “Moral disagreements can still arise even if we all share a harm-based moral mind, because liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization,” he writes.

Consider abortion. There are (at least) two parties who could suffer from terminating—or not terminating—a pregnancy. According to Gray, progressives focus on “the harm suffered by women lacking access to medical care,” and therefore come out in favor of abortion rights. Conservatives focus on “the harm suffered by fetuses,” and therefore support abortion restrictions. Arguments over immigration are based on similar differences in what Gray calls “assumptions of vulnerability”: “Progressives focus on the suffering of innocent children fleeing war, while conservatives highlight victims murdered by drug smugglers.” And so on down the list of hot-button issues: “Liberals emphasize how trans women are vulnerable victims, while conservatives emphasize how they could be threatening to other women.” As long as there’s a perception of harm, there’s a potential for outrage, because fear and moral indignation are inextricably linked. Indeed, Gray argues, the safer we’ve become from physical danger, the more hazards we see lurking out there.

“Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger,” he writes. “But without saber-toothed cats to fear, we fret about elections, arguments in group texts, and decisions at PTA meetings.”

Two key figures in “Outraged” are a pair of college-aged siblings known only by their first names, Mark and Julie. One summer, while vacationing together in France, the two decide that it would be fun to have sex with each other. Julie is already on the pill; Mark, to be extra careful, puts on a condom. The sex is indeed enjoyable, but the siblings agree that once is enough. They resolve to keep the experience a secret, and this brings them even closer together.

Julie and Mark are characters dreamed up by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who was one of the original architects of moral-foundations theory. Haidt concocted their dalliance as a test. Would people who read about their incestuous encounter label it morally wrong, even when it was made clear that neither sibling suffered as a result of it? And, if they did condemn the coupling, how would they explain this?

At the time that Haidt invented the siblings, he was teaching at the University of Virginia. He recruited students there to respond to Mark and Julie’s story, along with a macabre tale featuring a vegetarian named Jennifer. One day, Jennifer, who is working in a pathology lab, is asked to incinerate a fresh cadaver. Dismayed to see so much perfectly good flesh going to waste, she cuts a chunk from the body before burning it; then, once she gets home, she cooks the chunk and eats it. Four-fifths of the students surveyed found Mark and Julie’s conduct immoral, while in Jennifer’s case the proportion rose to six-sevenths. As for how they had arrived at their judgments, the students could rarely offer a coherent account.

“I don’t think it’s accepted,” one student said in response to the Mark-and-Julie episode. “That’s pretty much it.” From this, and similarly strong but inarticulate reactions, Haidt concluded that the students had arrived at their judgments impulsively. “Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search,” he wrote.

Haidt’s cheerfully incestuous siblings pose a serious challenge to Gray. If people consistently deem certain actions to be wrong, even when those actions cause no injury, then it would seem that harm can’t be the “master key.”

Gray responds to this challenge with experiments of his own. One involves participants who were instructed to shoot each other with toy guns. In another, participants were quizzed about scenarios of the Mark-and-Julie variety. (Among the scenarios was the case of a man who made love to a grocery-store chicken.) Gray claims that his results confirm the primacy of harm. Haidt may have told the students that no one was hurt by Mark and Julie’s tryst, but, Gray concludes, this assurance didn’t convince them. The same impulse that made them condemn the siblings’ hookup made them certain that harm had been done. Perhaps shame would haunt the pair in the future, or their families would eventually find out and be devastated, or society at large would fall apart because everyone would start sleeping with their siblings.

“People’s intuitive minds simply cannot believe that harmless wrongs are harmless,” Gray writes. “The more harmful something intuitively seems, the more immoral it seems.”

“Outraged” was written at a time of extreme political polarization, and it is coming out just days before the polarizer-in-chief, Donald J. Trump, is set to be inaugurated. The book’s tantalizing promise, as its subtitle announces, is that it will help us “find common ground.” Gray tries to make good on this with a section on the do’s and don’ts of “bridging moral divides.”

He starts with the don’ts. A big one is: Don’t imagine that facts are convincing. Gray cites a study from 2021, in which researchers argued with strangers about gun control. Half the time, the researchers tried to bolster their case with facts. The rest of the time, they offered stories, one of which involved a relative who had been wounded by a stray bullet. (The relative, though made up, was presented as real.) The encounters were taped, so that the conversations could later be analyzed. Strangers who were offered anecdotes were, it turned out, much more willing to engage with the researchers than those offered data were. The group that got stories also treated their interlocutors with more respect.

“Sharing personal experiences instead of facts improved cross partisan perceptions by about 0.7 to 0.9 on a 7-point scale,” Gray writes, trotting out statistics to argue against trotting out statistics. “This may not seem like a giant effect, but it’s actually quite substantial.” Gray’s takeaway from this is that the best way to reach across a moral divide is with a narrative, preferably one that features suffering: “Respect is easiest to build with harm-based storytelling.”

Gray presents this finding as a cause for optimism. The reverse case could easily be made. In outraged America, stories of victimhood are legion. Trump in particular loves to share “harm-based” tales—the less true, the better. A typical example is the fiction the President-elect recounted, in September, about the immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

If more harm-based storytelling isn’t the answer, what is? To the extent that the research presented in “Outraged” is persuasive, it suggests that there may not be one. The essential—and most compelling—claim of moral psychology is that people make ethical judgments on the basis of intuition rather than reason. We have, it could be argued, been surprisingly good at muddling through modern times with the impulses we inherited from our “troglodytic forefathers.” But there have been close calls, and some of these occurred before the advent of nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intelligence, and Truth Social. The great question of our era—and it is a question—is whether the mismatch is finally catching up to us. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 20, 2025, issue, with the headline “Fear and Loathing.”

If you see one pandemic, you have only seen one pandemic - history and pandemics

Even in the modern era, disease outbreaks are nearly constant, although, not every outbreak reaches the pandemic level like the coronavirus has.

In The New Yorker, an excellent summary about pandemics, from the aerial view provided in this historic retrospective.  In other words, politicians and world leaders have learned very little during the eons of pandemic history, in spite of overwhelming evidence about how ignoring the past dooms us to repeat it.

On Easter Sunday, 2020, the majestic Christ Redeemer statue in Brazil was lit up to honour healthcare workers across the world fighting in the front line of the battle against the coronavirus.

Pandemics and the Shape of Human History

Diesase outbreaks have sparked riots and propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions and redrawn maps.  By Elizabeth Kolbert

Just as there are many ways for microbes to infect a body, there are many ways for epidemics to affect the body politic.

What’s often referred to as the first pandemic began in the city of Pelusium, near modern-day Port Said, in northeastern Egypt, in the year 541. According to the historian Procopius, who was alive at the time, the “pestilence” spread both west, toward Alexandria, and east, toward Palestine. Then it kept on going. In his view, it seemed to move almost consciously, “as if fearing lest some corner of the earth might escape it.”

The earliest symptom of the pestilence was fever. Often, Procopius observed, this was so mild that it did not “afford any suspicion of danger.” But, within a few days, victims developed the classic symptoms of bubonic plague—lumps, or buboes, in their groin and under their arms. The suffering at that point was terrible; some people went into a coma, others into violent delirium. Many vomited blood. Those who attended to the sick “were in a state of constant exhaustion,” Procopius noted. “For this reason everybody pitied them no less than the sufferers.” No one could predict who was going to perish and who would pull through.

In early 542, the plague struck Constantinople. At that time, the city was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which was led by the Emperor Justinian. A recent assessment calls Justinian “one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived.” Another historian describes the first part of his reign—he ruled for almost forty years—as “a flurry of action virtually unparalleled in Roman history.” In the fifteen years before the pestilence reached the capital, Justinian codified Roman law, made peace with the Persians, overhauled the Eastern Empire’s fiscal administration, and built the Hagia Sophia.

https://infograph.venngage.com/p/944/bubonic-plague

As the plague raged, it fell to Justinian, in Procopius’ words, to “make provision for the trouble.” The Emperor paid for the bodies of the abandoned and the destitute to be buried. Even so, it was impossible to keep up; the death toll was too high. (Procopius thought it reached more than ten thousand a day, though no one is sure if this is accurate.) John of Ephesus, another contemporary of Justinian’s, wrote that “nobody would go out of doors without a tag upon which his name was written,” in case he was suddenly stricken. Eventually, bodies were just tossed into fortifications at the edge of the city.

The plague hit the powerless and the powerful alike. Justinian himself contracted it. Among the lucky, he survived. His rule, however, never really recovered. In the years leading up to 542, Justinian’s generals had reconquered much of the western part of the Roman Empire from the Goths, the Vandals, and other assorted barbarians. After 542, the Emperor struggled to recruit soldiers and to pay them. The territories that his generals had subdued began to revolt. The plague reached the city of Rome in 543, and seems to have made it all the way to Britain by 544. It broke out again in Constantinople in 558, a third time in 573, and yet again in 586.

The Justinianic plague, as it became known, didn’t burn itself out until 750. By that point, there was a new world order. A powerful new religion, Islam, had arisen, and its followers ruled territory that included a great deal of what had been Justinian’s empire, along with the Arabian Peninsula. Much of Western Europe, meanwhile, had come under the control of the Franks. Rome had been reduced to about thirty thousand people, roughly the population of present-day Mamaroneck.

Was the pestilence partly responsible? If so, history is written not only by men but also by microbes.

Just as there are many ways for microbes to infect a body, there are many ways for epidemics to play out in the body politic. Epidemics can be short-lived or protracted, or, like the Justinianic plague, recurrent. Often, they partner with war; sometimes the pairing favors the aggressor, sometimes the aggressed. Epidemic diseases can become endemic, which is to say constantly present, only to become epidemic again when they’re carried to a new region or when conditions change.

To this last category belongs smallpox, dubbed the speckled monster, which may have killed more than a billion people before it was eradicated, in the mid-twentieth century. No one knows exactly where smallpox originated; the virus—part of the genus that includes cowpox, camelpox, and monkeypox—is believed to have first infected humans around the time that people began domesticating animals. Signs of smallpox have been found in Egyptian mummies, including Ramses V, who died in 1157 B.C. The Romans seem to have picked up the pox near present-day Baghdad, when they went to fight one of their many enemies, the Parthians, in 162. The Roman physician Galen reported that those who came down with the new disease suffered a rash that was “ulcerated in most cases and totally dry.” (The epidemic is sometimes referred to as the Plague of Galen.) Marcus Aurelius, the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors, who died in 180, may also have been a smallpox victim.

By the fifteenth century, as Joshua S. Loomis reports in “Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power Over Humanity” (Praeger), smallpox had become endemic throughout Europe and Asia, meaning that most people were probably exposed to it at some point in their lives. Over all, the fatality rate was a terrifying thirty per cent, but among young children it was much higher—more than ninety per cent in some places. Loomis, a professor of biology at East Stroudsburg University, writes that the danger was so grave that “parents would commonly wait to name their children until after they had survived smallpox.” Anyone who made it through acquired permanent immunity (though many were left blind or horribly scarred). This dynamic meant that every generation or so there was a major outbreak, as the number of people who had managed to avoid getting infected as children slowly rose. It also meant, as Loomis rather cavalierly observes, that Europeans enjoyed a major advantage as they “began exploring distant lands and interacting with native populations.”

Alfred W. Crosby, the historian who coined the phrase “the Columbian Exchange,” also coined the term “virgin soil epidemic,” defined as one in which “the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless.” The first “virgin soil epidemic” in the Americas—or, to use another one of Crosby’s formulations, “the first New World pandemic”—began toward the end of 1518. That year, someone, presumably from Spain, carried smallpox to Hispaniola. This was a quarter of a century after Columbus ran aground on the island, and the native Taíno population had already been much reduced. The speckled monster laid waste to those who remained. Two friars, writing to the King of Spain, Charles I, in early 1519, reported that a third of the island’s inhabitants were stricken: “It has pleased Our Lord to bestow a pestilence of smallpox among the said Indians, and it does not cease.” From Hispaniola, smallpox spread to Puerto Rico. Within two years, it had reached the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, in what’s now Mexico City, a development that allowed Hernán Cortés to conquer the capital, in 1521. 

A Spanish priest wrote, “In many places it happened that everyone in a house died, and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them.” Smallpox seems to have reached the Incan Empire before the Spaniards did; the infection raced from one settlement to the next faster than the conquistadores could travel.

It’s impossible to say how many people died in the first New World pandemic, both because the records are sketchy and because Europeans also brought with them so many other “virgin soil” diseases, including measles, typhoid, and diphtheria. In all, the imported microbes probably killed tens of millions of people. “The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world,” William M. Denevan, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written. This disaster changed the course of history not just in Europe and the Americas but also in Africa: faced with a labor shortage, the Spanish increasingly turned to the slave trade.

The word “quarantine” comes from the Italian quaranta, meaning “forty.” As Frank M. Snowden explains in “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present” (Yale), the practice of quarantine originated long before people understood what, exactly, they were trying to contain, and the period of forty days was chosen not for medical reasons but for scriptural ones, “as both the Old and New Testaments make multiple references to the number forty in the context of purification: the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness . . . and the forty days of Lent.”

The earliest formal quarantines were a response to the Black Death, which, between 1347 and 1351, killed something like a third of Europe and ushered in what’s become known as the “second plague pandemic.” As with the first, the second pandemic worked its havoc fitfully. Plague would spread, then abate, only to flare up again.

During one such flareup, in the fifteenth century, the Venetians erected lazarettos—or isolation wards—on outlying islands, where they forced arriving ships to dock. The Venetians believed that by airing out the ships they were dissipating plague-causing vapors. If the theory was off base, the results were still salubrious; forty days gave the plague time enough to kill infected rats and sailors. Snowden, a professor emeritus at Yale, calls such measures one of the first forms of “institutionalized public health” and argues that they helped legitimatize the “accretion of power” by the modern state.

There’s a good deal of debate about why the second pandemic finally ended; one of the last major outbreaks in Europe occurred in Marseille in 1720. 

But, whether efforts at control were effective or not, they often provoked, as Snowden puts it, “evasion, resistance, and riot.” Public-health measures ran up against religion and tradition, as, of course, they still do. The fear of being separated from loved ones prompted many families to conceal cases. And, in fact, those charged with enforcing the rules often had little interest in protecting the public.

Consider the case of cholera. In the ranks of dread diseases, cholera might come in third, after the plague and smallpox. Cholera is caused by a comma-shaped bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, and for most of human history it was restricted to the Ganges Delta. Then, in the eighteen-hundreds, steamships and colonialism sent Vibrio cholerae travelling. The first cholera pandemic broke out in 1817 near Calcutta. It moved overland to modern-day Thailand and by ship to Oman, whence it was carried down to Zanzibar. The second cholera pandemic began in 1829, once again in India. It wound its way through Russia into Europe and from there to the United States.

In contrast to plague and smallpox, which made few class distinctions, cholera, which is spread via contaminated food or water, is primarily a disease of urban slums. When the second pandemic struck Russia, Tsar Nicholas I established strict quarantines. These may have slowed the spiral of spread, but they did nothing to help those already infected. The situation, according to Loomis, was exacerbated by health officials who indiscriminately threw together cholera victims and people suffering from other ailments. It was rumored that doctors were purposefully trying to kill off the sick. In the spring of 1831, riots broke out in St. Petersburg. One demonstrator returning from a melee reported that a doctor had “got a coupl’ve rocks in the neck; he sure won’t forget us for a long time.” The following spring, cholera riots broke out in Liverpool. Once again, doctors were the main targets; they were accused of poisoning cholera victims and turning them blue. (Cholera has been called the “blue death” because those suffering from the disease can get so dehydrated that their skin becomes slate-colored.) Similar riots broke out in Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Dublin.

In 1883, during the fifth cholera pandemic, the German physician Robert Koch established the cause of the disease by isolating the Vibrio cholerae bacterium. The following year, the pandemic hit Naples. The city dispatched inspectors to confiscate suspect produce. It also sent out disinfection squads, which arrived at the city’s tenements with guns drawn. Neapolitans were, understandably, skeptical of both the inspectors and the squads. They responded with an impressive sense of humor, if not necessarily a keen understanding of epidemiology. Demonstrators showed up at city hall with baskets of overripe figs and melons. They proceeded, Snowden writes, “to consume the forbidden fruit in enormous quantities while those who watched applauded and bet on which binger would eat the most.”

Eight years later, while the fifth pandemic raged on, one of the most violent cholera riots broke out in what’s now the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. Scores of shops were looted, and homes and businesses were burned. The authorities in St. Petersburg responded to the violence by cracking down on workers accused of promoting “lawlessness.”




According to Loomis, the crackdown prompted more civil unrest, which in turn prompted more repression, and, thus, in a roundabout sort of way, cholera helped “set the stage” for the Russian Revolution.

The seventh cholera pandemic began in 1961, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. During the next decade, it spread to India, the Soviet Union, and several nations in Africa. There were no mass outbreaks for the next quarter century, but then one hit Peru in 1991, claiming thirty-five hundred lives; another outbreak, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1994, claimed twelve thousand.

By most accounts, the seventh pandemic is ongoing. In October, 2010, cholera broke out in rural Haiti, then quickly spread to Port-au-Prince and other major cities. This was nine months after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake had devastated the country. Rumors began to circulate that the source of the outbreak was a base that housed United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal. Riots occurred in the city of Cap-Haïtien; at least two people were killed, and flights carrying aid to the country were suspended. For years, the U.N. denied that its troops had brought cholera to Haiti, but it eventually admitted that the rumors were true. Since the outbreak began, eight hundred thousand Haitians have been sickened and nearly ten thousand have died.

Epidemics are, by their very nature, divisive. The neighbor you might, in better times, turn to for help becomes a possible source of infection. The rituals of daily life become opportunities for transmission; the authorities enforcing quarantine become agents of oppression. Time and time again throughout history, people have blamed outsiders for outbreaks. (On occasion, as in the case of the U.N. peacekeeping troops, they’ve been right.) Snowden recounts the story of what happened to the Jews of Strasbourg during the Black Death. Local officials decided that they were responsible for the pestilence—they had, it was said, poisoned the wells—and offered them a choice: convert or die. Half opted for the former. On February 14, 1349, the rest “were rounded up, taken to the Jewish cemetery, and burned alive.” Pope Clement VI issued papal bulls pointing out that Jews, too, were dying from the plague, and that it wouldn’t make sense for them to poison themselves, but this doesn’t seem to have made much difference. In 1349, Jewish communities in Frankfurt, Mainz, and Cologne were wiped out. 

To escape the violence, Jews migrated en masse to Poland and Russia, permanently altering the demography of Europe.

Whenever disaster strikes, like right about now, it’s tempting to look to the past for guidance on what to do or, alternatively, what not to do. It has been almost fifteen hundred years since the Justinianic plague, and, what with plague, smallpox, cholera, influenza, polio, measles, malaria, and typhus, there are an epidemic number of epidemics to reflect on.

The trouble is that, for all the common patterns that emerge, there are at least as many confounding variations. During the cholera riots, people blamed not outsiders but insiders; it was doctors and government officials who were targeted. Smallpox helped the Spanish conquer the Aztec and Incan Empires, but other diseases helped defeat colonial powers. During the Haitian Revolution, for example, Napoleon tried to retake the French colony, in 1802, with some fifty thousand men. So many of his soldiers died from yellow fever that, after a year, he gave up on the attempt, and also decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the Americans.

Even the mathematics of outbreaks varies dramatically from case to case. As Adam Kucharski, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the author of “The Rules of Contagion” (forthcoming in the U.S. from Basic Books), points out, the differences depend on such factors as the mode of transmission, the length of time an individual is contagious, and the social networks that each disease exploits. “There’s a saying in my field: ‘if you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen . . . one pandemic,’ ” he writes. Among the few predictions about covid-19 that it seems safe to make at this point is that it will become the subject of many histories of its own. 

Climate change is not a subject to be a "denial issue"

September 11, 2017: Sometimes, I am a year behind reading my The New Yorker magazines. Considering the "climate" of our current political times, I consider this lead article, published in The Talk of the Town, in an opening segment, to be as timely as though the report was published only yesterday. 

Published on September 11, 2017, written by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker

On August 29, 2005, at six-ten in the morning, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, just east of New Orleans. Katrina had spent days wobbling over the Gulf of Mexico, and by the time it reached the coast it was classified as a strong Category 3 storm. As it pressed inland, its winds, which were clocked at up to a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, pushed water from the Gulf westward into Lake Pontchartrain, and north, up a mostly abandoned shipping canal. The levees that were supposed to protect New Orleans failed, and low-lying neighborhoods were inundated. That day in Louisiana, at least six hundred and fifty people died.

Katrina was widely described as a “wake-up call” for a country in denial about climate change. President George W. Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, during their first term, had withdrawn the United States from a global climate agreement and dismissed the findings of the government’s own climate scientists. Now, a few months into their second term, the nation was facing just the sort of disaster that the scientists had warned about. Even if global warming hadn’t caused Katrina, clearly it had intensified the damage: with higher sea levels come higher storm surges. And, with sea surface temperatures rising, there was more energy to fuel hurricanes, and more evaporation, which inevitably produces more rain. “How many killer hurricanes will it take before America gets serious about global warming?” the journalist Mark Hertsgaard asked at the time.

Last week, as Hurricane Harvey lingered over Houston, dumping so much water on the city that the National Weather Service struggled to find ways to describe the deluge, this question sloshed back to mind. Again, climate change can’t be said to have caused Harvey, but it unquestionably made the storm more destructive. When Harvey passed over the western part of the Gulf, the surface waters in the region were as much as seven degrees warmer than the long-term average. “The Atlantic was primed for an event like this,” Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told theGuardian.

Harvey was less lethal than Katrina; as of this writing, forty-six storm-related deaths have been confirmed. But in financial terms the storm’s costs are likely to be as high or even higher. One estimate put the price of repairing homes, roads, businesses, and the petrochemical plants that line the Houston Ship Channel at a hundred and ninety billion dollars. And that estimate was made before storm-damaged plants started to explode.

As misguided as the Bush Administration was about climate change, Donald Trump has taken willful ignorance to a whole new level. The President has called climate change an “expensive hoax” dreamed up by the Chinese. After much posturing, he announced in June that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. With less fanfare, he has rolled back Obama Administration regulations limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from both old and new power plants and from oil and gas wells. (Regarding the wells, a federal appeals court recently ruled against the White House, saying that it could not simply suspend the regulations.) Trump also revoked a 2013 executive order directing federal agencies to prepare for the impacts of warming and tossed out a plan, issued the same year, that outlined steps that the U.S. would take to combat climate change.

Then, just ten days before Harvey hit, the President rescinded a 2015 executive order requiring public-infrastructure projects in flood-prone areas to be designed with sea-level rise in mind. This move is likely to have particularly unfortunate consequences for Houston, a city with no zoning code, where thousands of buildings constructed on floodplains but lacking flood insurance are now filled with soggy debris. Last Monday, as rainfall totals in Houston were topping forty inches, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress that he was planning to eliminate his department’s special envoy for climate change.

Many members of Congress share Trump’s climate-change delusions, especially in the Texas delegation. Lamar Smith, a Republican who represents parts of San Antonio, chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith has spent the better part of his career harassing climate scientists, and in a recent op-ed for the Daily Signal, a Web site sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, he celebrated the effects of global warming, arguing that they were producing “beneficial changes to the earth’s geography.” At a town-hall meeting in April, Joe Barton, a Republican who represents parts of Fort Worth and is the vice-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, repeated the old denier canard that clouds are the cause of climate change. And, in June, House Republicans introduced a bill to prevent federal agencies such as the Department of Energy from considering the societal costs of carbon pollution when fashioning regulations. Among the co-sponsors were three Texas representatives.

Over the next few months, Congress and the President will have to agree on a package of federal assistance for Houston. (With typical bluster, Trump, visiting Texas last week, declared that he wanted a recovery effort “better than ever before.”) 

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, when Congress voted on two measures to provide aid to New York and New Jersey, twenty-three out of Texas’s twenty-four Republican representatives voted against one of the bills, and eight voted against both. 

Most of the state’s G.O.P. lawmakers supported an amendment to the second bill that would have required spending cuts in other federal programs to offset the disaster aid. (Republicans obviously forgot to memorize the words to The Pledge of Allegiance.)

Politicians from New York and New Jersey have been quick to say that they will not mess with Texas the way that Texans messed with them. “I’ll vote 4 Harvey aid,” Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, tweeted during the storm. Lawmakers from the Northeast should vote for aid to Houston, but with conditions. In the place of spending cuts, they should demand that Texas lawmakers and the President face up to the facts. The earth is warming, fossil-fuel emissions are the major cause, and the results are going to be far from “beneficial.” The U.S. needs to radically reduce its carbon emissions and, at the same time, prepare for a future in which storms like Harvey, Sandy, and Katrina increasingly become the norm. ♦