Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Arien Mack in the late 1980s, at the height of the hysteria surrounding the AIDS epidemic, we organized our very first Social Research conference. It was designed to reflect on and help us understand what was happening in light of past plagues and epidemics, which have occurred relentlessly throughout human history. The papers given at that conference became our Fall 1988 issue, and when I looked through it in preparation for republishing it with a new set of comments about our current pandemic, I realized how much my introduction to that issue, written in 1987, was completely relevant to what we are living through now, in 2020. We are grateful to NYU Press, which in 1992 published the original papers in book form, for permission to republish those papers here. We are once again living in a time of plague—this one even more alarming than AIDS, since AIDS, frightening as it was, seemed restricted to what many people considered "the other," the "not us." It was viewed by many as just punishment for the sins of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, visited upon those that many in society held in contempt. Unlike AIDS, COVID-19 threatens us all, not only "sexual sinners" who seemed to deserve what they got. This time around we are all vulnerable, although, as we have learned, it does not as a matter of fact affect us all equally. The majority of those dying from COVID-19 are not the well-to-do who have access to proper medical care and are able to practice social distancing because they have the income to do so. The majority of those dying from COVID-19 in this country are either African American and poor or the elderly, neither group held in the highest esteem. Almost everyone recognizes, or at least should recognize, that in order to control this pandemic we must agree upon, enact, and [End Page xxxiii] enforce global regulations. The likelihood of this happening, however, is extremely low, given the rise in nationalism around the globe. We must also understand and behave with the knowledge that what each of us does or does not do profoundly affects many others. Alarmingly, this too seems unlikely, especially in what in the United States are deemed "red states"—states in which savage individualism reigns supreme and Trump seems like just what the doctor ordered. Thus, our hope lies in finding a vaccine, although this would only work if everyone is willing to be vaccinated, which also seems unlikely in a country where the measles vaccine is rejected by too many parents of young children who falsely believe that the vaccine will cause autism. So how this pandemic ends remains far from clear. It is my hope that by reissuing our 1988 issue, "In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Diseases," with new comments by experts on how the current COVID-19 pandemic resembles and differs from the AIDS epidemic, we will once again help our readers better understand what is happening now and what we might expect. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Front cover of 1988 issue of Social Research. The medal commemorates the courageous response to a plague which swept Hong Kong in the late nineteenth century. [End Page xxxiv] Copyright © 2020 The New School