Classics Will Not Save Us
E(i)ditorial — March 2020
Perhaps this is like the plague of Thebes: the premise of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a mysterious illness that took many Theban lives as a price for the unholy murder of its former king. Oedipus, who now reigns, spends most of the play trying to track down the culprit until he realizes that the pollution is coming from inside the house.
Or perhaps this is more like the plague of Athens. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War recounts a disease that ripped through the city, bringing it to its knees and killing tens of thousands of Athenians. The plague undid laws and morals, splayed out weaknesses. By the time Athens recovered it was, you could say, the worse for war.
But the truth is, the current pandemic is like none of those things, not really, not where it matters, maybe not at all except for the plague part. (Even the 1918 flu pandemic, a far more salient point of comparison, may not have that much to tell us.) It may seem like the differences between then and now are limited to scale or science and technology or globalization, but those are not incidental differences — they define this crisis. The coronavirus thwarts us seemingly at every turn because we are working with insufficient information. Despite the claims that human nature is immutable, human circumstances are frustratingly unpredictable.
This is fine. Classics cannot apply to everything and in the grand scheme of things may apply to very little. This is, again, fine. Classical training, for all its merits, fails to prepare us for the reality of our reality, the profound absurdity of it, the stupefying cruelty in it, and that says more about reality than it does about Classics. But lately there have been some awkward attempts to make the classics relevant to the coronavirus — the hot take equivalent of making your dolls kiss and calling it romance — that, with a few exceptions, range from useless to straight-up offensive. When Tom Holland argued that ancient Greece and Rome teach us that “things could be much, much worse,” people quickly pointed out that this statement is not, in fact, helpful when bodies are piling up by the hundreds.
In my very first Eidolon article, I argued against comparison for comparison’s sake, my rationale being that it is, at its worst, disrespectful. This feels truer than ever to me. It can be productive to think about a modern event in relation to an ancient one; conversely, it can be productive to acknowledge that some modern events lack ancient parallels, because then you can stop looking for similarities and start confronting the very real, swiftly escalating situation that you and many others are trapped in. I’m not saying that classicists have nothing to contribute here, but honestly we don’t have that much to contribute here just because there were plagues in antiquity, too. (I suspect that so many of the hot takes rely on misreadings precisely because the actual texts reveal that those plagues and this plague don’t have a lot in common.) This time, we may want to yield the floor to other experts, such as epidemiologists or historians of science.
On an intensely personal level, Classics offers small gifts in this boundless period: its literature can comfort with a sense of familiarity or beguile with strangeness; its history can be thrilling, illuminating. But we should be honest about the scope and strength of its instruction. You don’t need Thucydides to understand that society is going to fundamentally change when millions of lives are at stake and an unprecedented worldwide recession menaces on the horizon; you simply have to read the news. Nor do the lessons always make sense in context. Let’s say that Donald Trump dissolved into the ether right now. It may not do nothing. It may actually do quite a lot. But it would not dispel the plague as totally as (I assume) Oedipus’s removal did in Oedipus Rex because the problems go beyond a bad king. Americans would still lack the scraps of a social safety net. America would still be running out of time.
What I want to say is that the coronavirus’s incomparability can also be instructive. It teaches us to let the moment humble us, then galvanize us. We have never been here before, so we know less about where it leads; this means that more is possible. At the same time, we will be here again, in some form or another, and it is therefore imperative that we are able to compare future pandemics, rather than past ones, to the coronavirus.
The most important and urgent lessons for the pandemic come not from the Greece of the past but from various countries in the present, as they meet this grave, enormous challenge or crumble at its demands. They demonstrate that time is not only of the essence, but also the essence of effectiveness: it makes the difference between death and death by the thousands and death by the millions. They make the case for taking the situation seriously in a way that the United States is utterly, mortifyingly failing to do. Nevertheless, the lives of the ancient Greeks, even fictional ones, feel more real to some people than the lives of the Chinese.
Here is where Classics does become relevant: it has been complicit in forming a false East-West binary and promoting a harmful narrative where the “West” always triumphs over the “East.” This narrative is why outbreaks in China and South Korea weren’t proof of a problem but an outbreak in Italy was. It’s why when China’s death toll was rising, the New York Times was writing about how it was their fault for having disgusting eating habits. (The same publication later feigned shock at increased racism toward Asian-Americans.) It’s why when my country, South Korea, was trying to slow the spread, the New Yorker ignored its program and crowed that the government had “lost control.”
Even now, when it is clear that the best models for responding to the outbreak have emerged from various Asian countries, the West insists that it cannot learn from them because, unlike those Confucius-addled, authoritarian lemmings, it loves freedom and democracy too much. (Democracy was invented in ancient Greece, after all — never mind that Koreans impeached and removed our corrupt president three years ago while Americans still have theirs.) America, which has one of the worst coronavirus responses in the world, arrogantly looks forward to surpassing South Korea, when really it is falling behind Iran, a country that it has been torturing with sanctions — because apparently the West’s superiority over the East is so absolute that it defies the principles of exponential growth. White supremacists would literally rather die than admit that they were wrong.
The facts are fragile, but they are the facts. Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have all managed to keep their number of cases relatively low. South Korea flattened its curve after a terrible cluster infection caused by a super-spreader in a religious cult (yes, you read that right), using a combination of mass testing, contact tracing, strategic quarantine, and social distancing. We also have drive-through testing, phone booth testing, goodie bags, masks for everybody, and universal healthcare. As of yet, zero cities are on lockdown and businesses remain open, so life here is fairly normal. Do you still believe that the West is better than the East? Do you still believe that we’re all in this together? To be clear, no culture is superior to another and this is true of these cultures as well — then again, not everybody has to learn that lesson.
This is a reversal of Classics’ very ethos: the idea that Western civilization speaks for everybody because it has better things to say. It forces certain people to reckon with, on pain of death, the possibility that someone else, somewhere else, has a more useful perspective, that you should listen to them for once and maybe from now on. But what else is there to do in the aftermath of a pandemic, except remake the world that birthed it?
Yung In Chae is a writer and the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She is safe and doing okay, thank you for asking.