Thoughts on COVID?
I can’t help but think if we didn’t live in such a dense agrarian techno-industrial globalised world a pandemic like this would never have happened. It only spread quickly because of extreme globalisation. COVID has lead to so much preventable disability and death.
Edit: Maybe I have a different definition of anaracho primitivism to you all but I’m reading through the lense of James C Scott’s Against the Grain, and the problems with the agricultural revolution.
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At what point in history are you starting from?
Spanish flu?
Various black deaths / plagues throughout history?
Agricultural revolution.
Living on permament land with majority reliance on grain and livestock. Increasing chance of catching and trasmitting illness compared to hunter gatherer counterparts.
Well I was just going off your point of ”extreme globalisation” being the reason covid had the impact it did. Is your definition then that extreme globalisation started very early, even before early medieval times?
extreme globalisation hightened the impact. If covid had started in medieval times, it might have taken decades to spread (as the black plague did).
Comparing the speed of a pandemic - should take into account how quickly people and things can be moved today vs back then. The actual disease spread within communities was still very quick.
I suppose thats very much a part of globalisation. However, also being able to create vaccines and at least have some measure of protection is also a result, which wasn’t available in historical times
agreed. My point isn’t about medieval vs now though.
It’s that the pandemic never would have happened in pre-agricultural times. Obviously I wrote the post kinda quickly and acknowledge I didn’t phrase that properly.
So the point is hunter gatherer societies wouldn’t be able to support pandemics due to how much smaller every community was?
Yeh, they would all likely die.
Poof! End of pandemic before it started.
Due to how much smaller the community was yes. Also due to the fact there was limited contact with other communities, that we didn’t live in close proximity to animals in unhygienic conditions.
It’s a known fact that life expectancy declined with the agricultural revolution, and I think that’s a major reason why.
I kind of thought this was common knowledge in an anarcho primitivist community, but my bad for being wrong about that, since I am wrong about that, I acknowledge my post was poorly made.
Edit: Infectious events still occur in hunter gatherer communities, but due to the modalities of covid (loose infectiousness after a couple weeks and recieve a couple months of immunity) it wouldnt have survived beyond an initial infection of a small group.
Remember back in 1665, when globalization was not yet a thing? When people lived in the land, hardly moving more than a days walk from their birth place in their whole life? And still the black death came and took half the population.
Please read my edit and the first thread of comments. My intention was to discuss pre-agricultural revolution.
Pre-agricutural revolution, i.e. when people were nomadic? Guess what, they had pandemics even back then. They took a little longer to travel, they did not cross from Europe to the Americas or vice versa, but as long as people move from one point of the world to another, diseases travel with them. And spread.
Read against the grain by James C Scott. It was exceedingly rare. And the modalities of covid wouldn’t have allowed it, given the group dynamics of hunter gatherer society.
As Science put it, that theory is "fascinating" and "speculative". Which mirrors my impression of the book.
If the goal was to defeat COVID, there were such simpler solutions than avoiding globalization... if everyone masked and vaccinated as soon as they could, COVID would have been severely stunted and wouldn't have survived 2 years.
have you checked the community you’re in?
I’m talking about hunter gatherer society, not a pragmatic goal to defeat covid.
Dude,
You're doing a great job of replying, elaborating, and explaining yourself. And carrying the conversation.
Ignore the downvotes. It's a weird bug on lemmy.
Thanks. Appreciate it :)
I mean I’m not suprised my views are unpopular, I just thought they would be more popular in an anprim community.
As I understand it, many of the big pandemics started because of raising many animals in close proximity, those animals develop some sickness, and at some point it makes the jump from the animal to humans.
When a virus or bacteria starts in humans, the progression of the disease is more gradual, so our immune systems have time to develop responses. But when it jumps the tracks from animals we have less defense built up.
All of that to say, a globally connected world means the disease spreads faster, but it would likely reach everyone eventually, and they wouldn't have an immune defense whether it hit them two weeks after introduction to the human population or a year after.
yes completely agree. I edited my post to be more specific. Maybe anarcho-primistivism is not exactly what I thought it to be.
It's been pretty widely accepted that COVID was transmitted to a human in an exotic market selling exotic animals for consumption.
IIRC it was bats or a pangolin. Hardly has anything to do with "globalization" or large scale farming.
My point about globalisation is not that it caused the pandemic, but that it caused it to spread quickly.
Okay, so airplanes then. 🤷
?
Airplanes and trains and buses and boats. Spread covid worldwide when in the olden days it would have remained isolated and probably just killed everyone in their remote village.
It was airplanes.