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Course Title
Resilience and Control: Transmissible Disease and the Rise of Modern Society
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Course Description
The Covid19 epidemic has reminded all of us of how fragile the relationship between man and nature has always been. Modern society to a significant extent was based on the mythology of the control of nature by man-made science and the reduction of risk of the dangers lurking outside of human civilization. The latest Anthropocene-approach to understanding human and the natural world tend to emphasize human effect on nature. Human civilization became the determiner of a fragile and weak natural system ravaged by the activities of global man. While the discussion on Risk Society also focused on the dangers of civilizations and the running way of technology to the detriment of human society and civilization. The fear always comes from the dangers lurking from within human civilization. This idea of the scientific conquest of the natural world was a central myth of modern society. Yet, just a century ago, the idea of the natural order controlling human fate and civilization had reigned supreme. Capitalism and industrialization had by then expanded to towering heights, producing hellish landscapes of the Satanic mills or the tragedy of the bondage laborers of tropical plantations. Yet these landscapes were rarely seen as taking over nature. The industrialization of the 19th century and the greater human civilization was still seen to be eking its existence on the margins of the natural world.