Throwing People Out Windows in the Time of the Plague

When things are bad, don't start stabbing

You Wouldn’t Believe the Psycho I Saw Today

Not all harm is created equal.

Imagine you’re sitting outside at a cafe when you see a kid trip on a crack in the sidewalk. They fall and start crying. The parents, whose backs were turned, hurry to console their kid.

How would you react in this situation? I’d feel bad for the kid, but wouldn’t be too concerned. Kids cry almost automatically, regardless of how hurt they are. Besides, their parents quickly tended to them. Kids are uncoordinated, sidewalks are uneven, so it goes.

Now imagine that you’re outside the same cafe when you see a grown man, a stranger, intentionally shove the same kid from behind. The kid falls, cries, and his parents tend to him, just as before. The stranger, thinking nobody saw him, keeps walking.

How would you react in this situation? Me, adrenaline would flood my blood. I’d wave down the parents, half-yelling “Hey that guy just shoved your kid!” while also half-yelling “Him! That guy!” at the stranger. I would dwell on it the rest of the day, think about how fucked the world is, and recount to my friends the absolute psycho I saw today.

The harm done to the kid is exactly the same. My reactions would be wildly different, though, because it’s not about the harm done. It’s about stopping people from performing that harm.

Regardless, we hate to see other people hurt. When you hear a friend was injured in a ski accident, you instinctively grimace. When you hear they twisted their knee, you reflexively reach for your own knee out of empathy.

Seeing one person hurt another, though, triggers not just empathy for the victim, but outrage at the culprit. It triggers a lizard-brain desire to gather a mob, buy some pitchforks, and bring the perpetrator to justice.

While “gathering a mob” has some, uh, negative connotations, the impulse has a purpose: it keeps the peace. It makes sure that nobody is going around, shoving kids for no reason. It keeps us vigilant for lighter forms of “harm” as well: someone bullying another person, someone lying about another person, someone not doing their share of the mammoth-hunting or dishwashing. Really, anything that upsets the social order. We’re social creatures. Our groups protect us, and we in turn protect our groups.

---

---

The Stabbings Will Continue Until the Plague is Cured

As society gets larger, this impulse can have strange consequences.

Sometimes, the biggest, nastiest problems are not caused by other people. But because we are such social creatures, we fixate on other people’s misdeeds over systematic problems. For example:

The most devastating, destructive army in the history of war has been disease. For most of history, if you were a soldier in an active war, you were more likely to die of disease than enemy action. From the National Institute of Health:

In the American Civil War, twice as many soldiers died of disease as from hostile action. In the Spanish–American War, nine times as many, largely from tropical diseases such as yellow fever.

Historical wars are usually presented as two-sided affairs. But really, they were three-way contests, where two human armies impotently stab each other while the disease army rolls over everyone.

(This changes in the 1900s, when we finally became technologically sophisticated enough to kill a majority of soldiers ourselves, thank you very much.)

You might think that humanity would recognize the common enemy, put aside our differences, and devote ourselves to defeating disease. Instead, we spent most of our energy killing each other to prove who was more civilized.

Okay, that’s a bit facetious. Many doctors (and priests, and kings) tried to stop the Black Death, typhoid, dysentery, and the countless other diseases that literally plagued Europe. But given the number of deaths caused by disease, we would’ve been better off pouring far more resources into battling disease, rather than battling each other. Especially when you consider that all the fighting spread even more disease.

For example, the 17th century Holy Roman Empire was hit with “regular outbreaks” of the plague, which had already killed upwards of 50 million people across Europe. To many people, though, the real problem were those dastardly Catholics (or Protestants, depending on your side) worshipping the same God with slightly different traditions and customs. Naturally, these differences called for a little defenestration and a whole lot of stabbing.

So began the Thirty Years War, “one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history”, which killed between 4.5 and 8 million soldiers. According to this research, only 3% of these deaths were from “military action.” 12% died of hunger, and a whopping 72% died of disease — mostly the plague, but also typhus, smallpox, dysentery, and others. Worse, the war spread these diseases:

Although regular outbreaks of disease were common for decades prior to 1618, the conflict greatly accelerated their spread, due to the influx of soldiers from foreign countries, the shifting locations of battle fronts and displacement of rural populations into already crowded cities.

By any metric, the winner of the war of Protestant v. Catholics was overwhelmingly… the plague.

One might look at all the pointless suffering caused here, “well, that old-time religion sure made people do crazy things.”

But I think that lets us off a little too easily. People worshipping God incorrectly outrages us more than disease for the same reason a stranger shoving a kid outrages us more than a kid tripping. In both situations, people are upending social norms, and it brings our fury.

Obviously, we all know suffering is bad, disease is bad. Obviously we want to stop it.

But once we see other people upsetting the social order — those damn Catholics/Protestants, with their outdated/heretical customs! — we get so outraged we develop tunnel vision. One side throws people out a window. The other side, worried that they too might get thrown out a window, gathers an army and starts stabbing. Both sides are so blinded by the lust for justice that they overlook the plague tearing through all of them.

---

---

In Which I Blindly Wander into a Political Flashpoint

(The following section discusses abortion.)

Obviously, we’ve made a lot of progress since the Bubonic Plague. The number of religious wars has gone way down. We had a good streak going without a pandemic, too, until COVID broke our combo.

Still, our focus on “harm caused by people” over “systemic harm” lurks around, pulling the strings in unexpected places.

In a discussion about the morality of abortion, Ezra Klein points out that far more pregnancies end in miscarriage than abortion. As his interviewee, Oxford law prof Kate Greaseley says:

Yeah, if blastulas, which are very, very early embryos, are persons, then you’re right. That would mean that natural miscarriage is the greatest human disaster on the face of the Earth, right? It would mean that disease, famine, war, Covid, none of this has anything on that. So if somebody really believed that these are persons that are dying off, you would want to know what are their views about where we should be putting all of our resources. Surely, we should plug them all into miscarriage prevention.

What Greasely is getting at: medical researchers believe a vast majority, maybe more than 70%, of human embryos die naturally in the first few weeks of pregnancy. Assuming this is true, far more embryos — and therefore, human lives in the eyes of pro-lifers — are lost to miscarriage than abortion.¹ If you believe that life begins at conception, miscarriage is an unparalleled tragedy.

One might note this tragedy, then note that pro-lifers barely talk about it.

A cynical reading would say, “Obviously they don’t really care about saving fetuses at all, they just care about controlling women.” And I mean, the inconsistency is bad for the pro-life case.

But there's no need attribute to malice what we can attribute to human nature. To me, this is a classic case of people overlooking “systemic harm” to tunnel vision on “harm caused by people”.

Pro-lifers don’t get riled up about miscarriages for the same reason most people don’t get riled up about heart disease. Sure, it’s the number one killer of Americans. Sure, most people would say they want less heart disease. But it doesn’t make the headlines the way war does, doesn’t do the rounds on social media the way partisan outrage does. In heart disease, there’s no clear villain to get mad at, so it doesn’t grab our attention.²

Similarly, there’s no villain in miscarriages. We all acknowledge that miscarriage is bad, and of course, someone should do something about it. But the moment we see someone doing bad stuff, that becomes problem number one. Everything else falls by the wayside. And so pro-lifers get outraged about abortion and ignore miscarriages.

But… they shouldn’t, right? Everyone wants fewer miscarriages! Evangelicals, atheists, Muslims, astrologists, NXIVMers, everyone. This is a nice, easy place that we can all agree: miscarriages suck and we should invest a ton into preventing them.

---

Who Am I to Say Murder Is Bad When Heart Disease is On the Loose

That all said, even if our outrage at harm caused by other people leads to strange behavior, we need it. We really, really need it.

Suppose your neighbor murdered someone in cold blood and society’s response was:

“Well, heart disease kills 600 thousand people a year, and this guy just killed one, so it would be pretty irrational to get all worked up about the whole murder thing.”

Once everyone realized there was no punishment for murder, at least a few people will think, hmmm, murder might solve a few of my problems. Then a few more, then a few more, then you’re in living in the Purge.

People sometimes behave badly. And more would, if not for other people’s vigilance. Even if the harm caused by one person is far smaller than that caused by heart disease, the harm caused by individuals might grow bigger than heart disease if unchecked. We police each other to prevent murder spirals.

So let’s not turn off the parts of our brains that polices other people.

But maybe, we can tune it down a notch. Or tune up the part that’s looking for systemic harm. Disease, accidents, and difficult-to-untangle systemic problems still do a lot of harm. They deserve our attention, even if they don’t grab us the same way a good villain does. Otherwise, we’re still stabbing each other while the plague waltzes around in the background.

---

1. I spend more time researching this than I care to admit. But in case you’re thinking, “I looked up the miscarriage stats, and they weren’t that high!”, the difficulty is in early-stage embryos. As this article suggests, it’s extremely hard to tally the number of embryos lost in the first few weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t realize they’re pregnant.

2. Arguably, you could blame food companies execs, but they’re too many steps removed to trigger most people’s outrage.