Saramago anticipated how citizens and governments would react to a new, serious and unknown infectious disease. Drastic measures would be imposed. The sick and their contacts would be isolated. Abuses would be justified in the name of the common good. Governments would be overwhelmed. Moral values questioned. The eternal conflict between selfishness and solidarity would intensify. Save yourself who can or better united? Anger and resignation, fear and hope would surface.
All this can already be found in the novel Essay on Saramago's blindness, published in 1995, twenty-five years before the covid emerged, and which is being performed at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya until October 30.
Curiously, none of this appears in the futuristic predictions of Harari, who wrote in 2016 in Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow that “major epidemics are likely to threaten humanity in the future only if humanity itself creates them in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era in which humanity was defenseless against natural epidemics is probably over."
It is ironic that an Essay on blindness sheds more light than a historian who offered us 21 lessons for the 21st century. Twenty-one lessons published in 2018 that ignored the inevitability of a pandemic coming sooner or later.
(For a more comprehensive examination of Harari's inconsistencies and their consequences, you can read this excellent article by Darshana Narayanan published in Current Affairs.)
The contrast between Saramago's lucidity and Harari's myopia is easily explained. Saramago bases his story on human emotions: how will people react to a devastating epidemic they don't understand?
Harari bases his on admiration for technology: the advances with which Homo sapiens have controlled nature make us Homo deus.
Of course, psychology and technology are connected. It is the ability to transform the world with tools – technology – that defines humanity, says archaeologist Eudald Carbonell, and we use all kinds of technologies with enthusiasm.
But in understanding the present and predicting the future, and in deciding how to regulate the use of genomes and chips, humanists who think of people first are probably better guides than gurus who idolize machines.
If everything seems very abstract to you, think of practical examples. Remember the covid contact tracing apps? We could install them on the mobile to alert us if we had been with an infected person or to inform others if we were the infected. In a world of androids, these apps would have reduced the impact of the pandemic. In the real world people have been a failure.
Saramago, without knowing so much about engineering but more about psychology, would have seen it coming.
