(A Book review of Mr. Jojo Fresnedi)
There’s a powerful little experiment that I like doing in my leadership development workshops. I show the participants a short video of people passing the basketball to each other. I instruct them to count the number of passes they make. They get the number right. Then I ask them, “Did you see something strange?” Only a few raise their hands. The majority’s response is, “What? What are you talking about?” I rewind the video. Now they see it. “Oh my God, how did I miss that?!”
The experiment is an object lesson of how, at times, we fail to see – even the obvious. And we’re not even blind.
Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve been re-reading some classics related to our present situation. I’ve read “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe, a fictional account of the Great Plague when it struck London in 1665; “The Plague” by Albert Camus, a novel about a deadly epidemic in the coastal town of Oran in north Africa; and “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Greatest Pandemic in History” by John M. Barry, a nonfiction examination of the so-named Spanish flu that killed over 50 million people worldwide in 1918.
All three books contained frightening details, some striking for their similarity with our times. How familiar, regardless of the century and country! They’re chockful of sobering lessons, but none hit me harder than this: human nature hasn’t changed. In so far as crises are concerned, people cycle through surprise, denial, panic; chaos, suffering, opportunism; utter deterioration of systems, structures – and moral character.
“Blindness”, a novel published in 1995, by Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, is quite intriguing. One by one, the residents of an unnamed city (presumably in Portugal) were struck blind. Their eyes were perfectly healthy, but they described a cloud of whiteness and couldn’t see. How strange, found the ophthalmologist who examined a patient. The typical blind person, in his wide experience, reported complete darkness; this one claimed a fog of whiteness. That evening, the ophthalmologist himself turned blind. About 250 people became blind soon thereafter.
Strangely enough, only one person remained sighted – the ophthalmologist’s wife.
Fearing contagion, the government quarantined the infected in a mental asylum, guarded by soldiers day and night. Things quickly deteriorated. Soldiers scared of contamination freely shot the interns asking for food or medicine when they approached at close distance. “The rabies of dogs are killed by nature”, the commander reasoned. If the interns die, the disease dies with them. The wild and aggressive interns commandeered the food ration and extorted the others of their belongings at gunpoint, and later demanded the women surrender themselves for their pleasure. The women did, for food. Their partners consented. Murder happened, the mental asylum burned down killing most of interns. A handful led by the sighted woman escaped. They discovered that the soldiers, too, became blind. They made their way back to the city, where the government people and citizens alike were now all blind.
The decay was now complete. Governance, healthcare, hygiene, infrastructure, food and water supply, etc. – nothing worked. Everyone left alive has been reduced to animal survival, except for a few struggling to maintain their humanity. “If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals,” pleaded the wife of the ophthalmologist. She took care of the handful, foraging for food and feeding them, reading to them at night, keeping them sane, even as she herself suffered. Who suffers more: the ones who cannot see how bad things were or the one who witnesses everything?
“Blindness” is a rumination of society’s and human fragility. Take away one faculty, just one, in this case eye sight, and the whole world crumbles. Man turns into beast. Civilization flies out the window. But it’s not simply about physical vision; it’s really about the intellectual, emotional, and moral fog that plague us. “Fighting has always been a form of blindness,” said the ophthalmologist, alluding to our failure, nay our willingness, not to see the point of view of others that leads to partisanship, division, conflict and, ultimately, wars. And death. That’s the real pandemic. Playwright and executive, Margaret Hefferman, calls it wilfull blindness. “There are no blind people, only blindness,” Jose Saramago concludes.