“Global Catastrophes” and a quiet Canadian: Vaclav Smil

A somewhat reclusive, multi-disciplinary Canadian scientist, long associated with the University of Manitoba, by the Czech name of Vaclav Smil, was the inspiration for Bill Gates’ TED Talk prediction that “not missiles but microbes” will be the next enemy.[1]  Gates is known to be an admirer of Smil, and he has read a great number of his many works, which are published by MIT Press. 

Smil writes in his book Global Catastrophes and Trends, first published in 2008, that “we remain highly vulnerable to another episode of viral pandemic.”[2]  In light of today’s global crisis, I do recommend seeking out Chapter Two, “Fatal Discontinuities,” in particular the section on “Influenza Pandemics”. Failing that, look up Smil!

---

[1] See my previous blog, below: “Homomorons – excepting Bill Gates,” Saturday, March 21, 2020.  At last count over 17 million people have viewed this particular TED Talk by Gates on YouTube.  By comparison, Smil remains a relative unknown.

[2] Vaclav Smil, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (Cambridge, Mass.: 2008), p. 41.

Homomorons - excepting Bill Gates

President Xi: saving face

Chinese Communist Party propaganda update, March 2020:

Viruses of the world, unite …

Coronavirus and “The Tragic Sense of Life”

There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious.  And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples.  And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.  Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness – dyspepsia, for example; but at other times it is constitutional.  And it is useless to speak, as we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy.  Apart from the fact that there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature.  And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal.  Consciousness is a disease.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those men who possess this tragic sense of life.  I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thompson,[1] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard – men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge.

And there are, I believe, people who possess this tragic sense of life also.

It is to this that we must turn our attention, beginning with this matter of health and disease.

Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (1912)[2]

---

[1] John Thompson, author of The City of Dreadful Night [translator’s note].

[2] Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, tr. J.E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1954), pp.17, 18.  The above selection concludes Chapter 1, “The Man of Flesh and Bone”.  It is worth pointing out that Unamuno’s work was published the same year as the sinking of the Titanic.

A coronavirus irony

Maybe a billion people in China are wearing protective masks – certainly more than ever in the history of the planet – at a time when air pollution in the country is in steep decline …