The Start of a Plague Mentality

By LANCE MORROW

An epidemic of yellow fever struck Philadelphia in August 1793. Eyes glazed, flesh yellowed, minds went delirious. People died, not individually, here and there, but in clusters, in alarming patterns. A plague mentality set in. Friends recoiled from one another. If they met by chance, they did not shake hands but nodded distantly and hurried on. The very air felt diseased. People dodged to the windward of those they passed. They sealed themselves in their houses. The deaths went on, great ugly scythings. Many adopted a policy of savage self-preservation, all sentiment heaved overboard like ballast. Husbands deserted stricken wives, parents abandoned children. The corpses of even the wealthy were carted off unattended, to be shoveled under without ceremony or prayer. One-tenth of the population died before cold weather came in the fall and killed the mosquitoes.

The plague mentality is something like the siege mentality, only more paranoid. In a siege, the enemy waits outside the walls. In a plague or epidemic, he lives intimately within. Death drifts through human blood or saliva. It commutes by bugbite or kiss or who knows what. It travels in mysterious ways, and everything, everyone, becomes suspect: a toilet seat, a child's cut, an act of love. Life slips into science fiction. People begin acting like characters in the first reel of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They peer intently at one another as if to detect the telltale change, the secret lesion, the sign that someone has crossed over, is not himself anymore, but one of them, alien and lethal. In the plague mentality, one belongs either to the kingdom of life or to the kingdom of death. So the state of mind glints with a certain fanaticism. It is said that when children saw the telltale sign during the Black Death in the 14th century, they sang "Ring around a rosie!" That meant they saw a ring on the skin around a red spot that marked the onset of the Black Death. "A pocket full of posies" meant the flowers one carried to mask the ambient stench. The ditty ended in apocalypse: "All fall down." The Black Death eventually took off half the population of Europe.

During the American Civil War, more soldiers died of typhoid than died in battle. The epidemic of Spanish influenza in 1918-19 killed more than 500,000 Americans. Before the Salk vaccine, nearly 600,000 Americans were infected by poliomyelitis, and 10% of them died. The polio epidemic caused memorable summers of trauma, during which swimming pools and shopping centers across the U.S. were closed.

In the past four years, some 6,000 people have died of AIDS in the U.S. From a statistical point of view, AIDS is not a major plague. Still, one begins to detect a plague mentality regarding the disease and those who carry it. Paradoxically, homosexuals are both victims of the plague mentality and themselves perpetrators of it. Because 73% of those who have AIDS are homosexuals, the general populace tends to look with suspicion on all homosexuals. Because the virus is transmitted by homosexual intercourse, homosexuals themselves bring to their intimate lives a desperate wariness and paranoia.

The mentality was most evident last week in other quarters, among the mothers of New York schoolchildren, for example. A plague mentality results from ignorance and fear, but not in the way that is usually meant. When medicine is ignorant about a lethal disease, then the only intelligent approach, by mothers or anyone else, is to be fearful and intensely cautious. But, like a plague itself, a plague mentality seems an anachronism in the elaborately doctored postindustrial U.S. The discussion in recent years has gone in the other direction: Has medicine got so good that it is keeping people alive past their natural time? At a moment when rock fans of the First World undertake to cure a biblical scourge like the Ethiopian famine with 24 hours of music bounced off a satellite, AIDS, implacable and thus far incurable, comes as a shock. It arrives like a cannibal at the picnic and calmly starts eating the children.

Cancer used to be the most dreaded word to be uttered in a doctor's office. But cancer no longer means a virtual sentence of death. AIDS does. AIDS therefore sounds with a peculiar and absolute resonance in our minds. It catches echoes of the voice of God and of nuclear doom. AIDS carries significances that go beyond the numbers of those afflicted.

In many minds, AIDS is a kind of validation of Judeo-Christian morality. The virus is a terrible swift sword in the hand of God, a punishment for transgressions against his order. Thus the disease partakes, so to speak, of the prestige of the infinite. AIDS becomes a dramatically targeted refinement of the doctrine that all disease is a form of God's retribution upon fallen and sinful man. "Sickness is in fact the whip of God for the sins of many," said Cotton Mather. AIDS renews in many minds, sometimes in an almost unconscious way, questions of the problem of sin: Is there sin? Against whom? Against what? Is sex sometimes a sin? Why? And what kind of sex? And so on.

The psychological reaction to AIDS, apart from the real fears it engenders, represents a collision between the ordered world of religious faith--God presiding, Commandments in force--and a universe that appears indifferent to the Decalogue or the strictures of St. Paul, one in which a disease like AIDS, a "syndrome," is as morally indifferent as a hurricane: an event of nature. Beyond that argument, which itself now seems ancient, it is probable that in most minds a vague dread of the disease is accompanied by a sympathy for those afflicted. Sympathy, alas, is usually directly proportional to one's distance from the problem, and the sentiment will recede if the virus spreads and the sympathetic become the threatened.

In a way, AIDS suits the style of the late 20th century. In possibly overheated fears, it becomes a death-dealing absolute loose in the world. Westerners for some years have consolidated their dreads, reposing them (if that is the word) in the Bomb, in the one overriding horror of nuclear holocaust. A fat and prosperous West is lounging next door to its great kaboom. It is both smug and edgy at the same time. Now comes another agent of doomsday, this one actually killing people and doubling the number of its victims every ten months as if to reverse the logic of Thomas Malthus. The prospect of nuclear holocaust may be terrible, but the mind takes certain perverse psychological comforts from it. It has not happened, for one thing. And if it does happen, it will be over in a flash. AIDS is much slower and smaller, and may not add up ultimately to a world-historical monster. But the bug has ambitions, and is already proceeding with its arithmetic. Meantime, science, which dreamed up the totalitarian nuke, now labors desperately to eradicate its sinister young friend.