It is a curious feature of our age that we take the greatest interest in the smallest of personal anxieties. A delayed train, a lukewarm coffee, a bad hair day. But when a genuine cataclysm looms, the sort that would have sent a medieval monk scurrying for his bell and incense, we offer little more than a shrug. I refer, of course, to the latest dispatch from the heart of darkness: a football match between the DR Congo and Spain has been cancelled on account of Ebola.
Let us pause to absorb the flippancy of that statement. A football match. Cancelled. Because one of the teams hails from a region where a haemorrhagic fever is busy liquefying internal organs at a rate that would impress a Roman senator contemplating the fall of his Republic. And what is the response in the comfortable salons of Europe? A mild disappointment, perhaps, that the weekend’s entertainment has been curtailed. There will be no chants, no flags, no tribal howling over a misplaced penalty. Instead, there is the quiet, administrative cancellation, a bureaucratic sigh, and a collective return to the far more pressing matters of celebrity divorces and the latest Netflix series.
The historical parallel is unavoidable. We are living through a period of intellectual decadence not unlike the late Roman Empire, where the circus mattered more than the grain supply. The populace demanded bread and circuses, and the elites obliged, ignoring the barbarians at the gate. Today, we demand football and Amazon Prime, while the barbarians are microbial. Ebola is a barbarian with a particular taste for the African continent, but make no mistake: viruses do not respect borders. They travel with the ease of a business-class passenger, and they do not require a visa.
The cancellation of this match is not the story. The story is the grotesque disproportion of our concern. In the DR Congo, thousands have died, families have been torn apart, and the medical system is stretched to breaking point. But never mind. The match is cancelled, and we can all go back to worrying about whether our avocado toast is photogenic enough for Instagram.
This is not merely heartless; it is stupid. The West has become so obsessed with the cult of the individual, with the flattering of our own minor discomforts, that we have lost the capacity for genuine alarm. We are like the citizens of Pompeii, rearranging the cushions while Vesuvius grumbles. Ebola will not be contained by cancelling a single football match, but the gesture is symbolic of a deeper malaise. We treat the disease as an inconvenience to our schedule, not as a existential threat to our species.
Let us recall the Victorian era, that age of steely nerve and stiff upper lip. When cholera threatened London, there was no cancellation of cricket matches; there was construction of sewers, the imposition of quarantines, the mobilising of scientific intellect. There was a sense that civilisation was a fragile enterprise requiring constant vigilance. Today, we have traded vigilance for vanity.
I am not suggesting we ought to have held the match, gladiator-style, to prove our defiance. I am suggesting that our reaction to this cancellation reveals a civilisation that has lost its sense of proportion. We are decadent, self-absorbed, and dangerously complacent. The plague is coming. And we are worried about our football.
