What moves human societies? I have long doubted the broader relevance of rational discourse – or abstract ideas – as agents of social change.1 Rational discourse is slow, emotionally ‘empty’, confined to elites, and rarely drives large-scale social phenomena. Shared experience, by contrast, is far more powerful in shaping collective intention and human cooperation (see A Natural History of Thinking by Michael Tomasello and Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind by Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar).
‘Enablers’ – material or mental tools, or ‘congealed experience’ – have long been a favourite concept of mine. Recently, I have found striking evidence of the power of analogies as instruments of collective thinking. Analogies are ‘mental enablers’ – similarities so striking that they seem self-evident (see Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter; see also Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter and Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander).
Martina King – both a medical doctor and a doctor of German philology – has traced the diffusion of the ‘Koch model of bacterial infection’, discovered in 1876, across society (Von der Massenunterhaltung bis zur Avantgardekunst: Bakteriologie als ästhetisches Spektakel der Moderne (1880–1930), unpublished manuscript, University of Bern). She shows how the ‘bacterial analogy’ spread into popular culture, entertainment, and even art, from Art Nouveau to Dadaism. This demonstrates how pervasive it became. Here, I explore her analysis in the context of international relations.
Applying the microbial model to society
For centuries, Western culture linked disease to malevolent stars or deities, the evil eye of neighbours, or the imbalance of bodily humours (Hippocrates, Galen). Paracelsus was the first to promote antisepsis and mineral remedies, yet humanity remained largely helpless, regarding ‘pestilence’ as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Pasteur and Koch changed this by revealing the bacterial causes of infection. Koch, in particular, explained tuberculosis in 1882 and cholera soon after. These diseases afflicted both rich and poor, and Koch also developed the first therapeutic agent, tuberculin. As more bacterial and viral diseases were identified, doctors became ‘microbe hunters’ (see Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif).
The hopeful narrative of infection leading to illness, followed by cure through drugs or vaccines, spread rapidly. Humanity felt empowered: the biological model replaced the older mechanical, cause-and-effect worldview. Applying the infection–cure model to society seemed almost self-evident.
King shows that at the time, the analogy between the human and the social body – which dates back to medieval times and beyond – was transformed by adding a medical dimension, which included ‘cleansing’ of the nation through war. The microbe infection topos came with a healing message, that ‘vermin’ attacks could be successfully rebuffed. This microbial topos also came with a novel message: disease could be prevented – either through vaccine, or hygiene. Hygiene in particular had a strong social component, for it postulated that only collective efforts could protect the individual from disease. The similarities between individual and collective health became powerful, because so plausible.
This theme of a fight against invisible pathogens in the social fabric dovetailed with the contemporary social Darwinist ideology of ‘survival of the fittest’, but with an ominous twist.2 While the struggle between races was a manly face-to-face combat among nations, here we had social ‘vermin’ surreptitiously infecting the social body. This twist is enough for me to maintain that the two – the analogy of bacterial invasion and the ideology of social Darwinism – have wrongly been conflated. We can better understand the difference if we consider that war weakens the contestants – the best die in establishing supremacy – and thus is not the logically preferred tool of social Darwinism (which would rather work by ‘shock and awe’). ‘Cleansing’ actually makes the nation stronger, even as it loses many of its best fighters.
Anti-Semitism has more to do, in my view, with the microbe infection topos than with an alleged social Darwinist superiority of the Herrenvolk. For the Jews had no nation, in fact they were accused of being ‘internationalists’ – stateless, and of conspiring in the darkness to take over the body politic. Jews were ‘vermin’ – to be eradicated: the nation had to be made ‘judenfrei.’ This is the highly emotional language of infection. The ‘industrial’ approach to the extermination – the most repellent aspect of the Holocaust – can be better grasped within the context of a medical analogy. At the same time, Hitler also dreamt of an ‘open frontier’ to the East, where he could make available Lebensraum for a growing agricultural German nation. As a lesser Volk, the Slavs had to make room for the stronger race, just as the American Indians had been forced out of the prairies of the Western USA by the Americans. Hence Hitler’s two-pronged approach to ‘cleanse’ the nation of the Jews and to create an open space in the East.
Fascinatingly, the law of war underwent an epochal change around the time the microbe infection analogy was spreading (see The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War by James Q. Whitman). Conquest (and pitched battle) was no longer recognised as a legitimate means of resolving disputes between nations. The then emergent law of nations only permitted ‘self-defence’ – the similitude to microbial invasion is palpable. Just as palpable is the similarity of ‘preventive war’ with vaccination.3 ‘Ethnic cleansing’, with its clear medical connotations, also emerged about that time as ‘legitimate’ state policy and held sway until the 1950s (see, for example, Russian ethnic cleansing of the Circassians (1864–67); the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923); the massive state-sponsored ethnic cleansing of Germans after WWII; or the evacuation of about one million people from North Vietnam under the Paris Treaty of 1954). This observation would need deepening and verifying: it might explain, however, why workers so readily went to the battlefield at the outset of WWI, when they should have shown little enthusiasm for struggles for supremacy between nations. Socialists never recovered from this puzzle of worker enthusiasm. In my view, the workers were marching to a different tune: the analogy of war and microbial infection.
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Foregrounding a topos implies backgrounding other narratives, or even certain aspects of the main story. We are so taken in by the evidence of similarity that we ignore the points of difference. We have here the ‘availability bias’ at work, but also our tendency to think symbolically in order to conquer the abundance of a context. Pars pro toto leads us astray, when the symbol does not capture the full content of the context. Plato’s bane was precisely the division of fact into essence and contingency. All ‘points of congruence’ were arbitrarily grouped as ‘essence,’ and the dissimilarities dismissed as ‘contingencies.’
In the case of the microbe infection analogy, focusing on acute infection concealed the existence of chronic illness. Malappropriate cures have been proposed; including, in the field of international relations, the ‘hit them hard and early’ heuristic. The mechanical ‘aggression <=> response’ approach hides direct and dialectic interactions which are responsible for the evolution of the illness. It was not Koch’s fault, but the phenomenon of resistance to drugs, which was only observed later, never did gain the same purchase in the public mind as the eradication effect of antibiotics. Finally, the coevolution of host and parasite are one of life’s evolutionary fundaments. Far from being dastardly killers – vermin to be eradicated – viruses have allowed the evolution of life in ways that we ignore (at our peril) (see Viruses and the Evolution of Life by Luis P. Villareal).
1. Recapping some of my coarse reflections: One-on-one communication is slow – even after the invention of the press (how many people read non-fiction works?). Though the favourite means of communication within an intellectual elite, rational discourse is emotionally ‘empty’ – does not resonate emotionally – and thus beyond the cognitive understanding of most people. Emotions drive action, and discourse seems to be more of a commentary or justification after the fact. In any case, this process is ‘good enough’ for small-scale diffusion within the elite, but not a driver of larger social phenomena.
2. Darwin had no truck with this theory, which was proposed by Herbert Spencer, utilising misunderstood passages of Darwin’s work. Arguably, the social Darwinian topos was rather a secularised update of the ancient ‘trial by battle,’ over which now nature, and no longer God or the gods, presided. The term ‘theory’ only brought pseudo-scientific authority to an ancient myth.
3. On the origins of WWI, Professor Gerhard Rempel wrote: ‘Below the placid calm that prevailed before the murder of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, there was a growing feeling throughout Europe that the great world war was all but inevitable. The Germans felt themselves to be encircled and gradually outmaneuvered by the growing military strength of Russia and France. In this environment the earlier talk of preventive war attained new urgency. The chief of the German General Staff, Moltke, even asked the Foreign Secretary to precipitate a preventive war. Although Jagow refused, he admitted that the idea influenced him throughout the month of crisis that followed the Sarajevo assassination. There was also a feeling among Germany’s conservative upper and middle-class rulers that a war would resolve the social conflict between the liberal and socialist lower classes and the conservative-aristocratic ruling groups.’
The post was first published on DeepDip.
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