The BBC, ever the purveyor of maudlin human interest, sends a reporter to the epicentre of an Ebola outbreak and what does he find? Joy. Amid the death, the weeping, the stench of bodily fluids and incinerated corpses, he finds joy.
And he wants you to feel it too. This is the hallmark of an age that has lost its nerve: the insistence on extracting a redemptive narrative from every catastrophe. The Victorian era, for all its anxieties, knew better.
When cholera ravaged London, John Snow did not seek out plucky survivors smiling over a cup of tea. He mapped deaths. He traced the pump handle.
He understood that the only appropriate response to a plague is grim, clinical resolve. We, however, have become a civilisation addicted to the sugar rush of ‘uplifting’ stories. We tell ourselves that if we can find a single mother dancing with her child in the quarantine zone, if we can film a nurse laughing with a patient, then the horror is bearable.
It is not. It is a lie we tell to avoid the terrible truth: that nature is indifferent, that progress is fragile, and that millions of lives can be erased in a matter of weeks. The BBC’s report is not journalism.
It is therapy for the comfortable. It allows us to consume the suffering of Africa as a backdrop for our own emotional validation. We cluck our tongues, feel a pang of empathy, and then return to our lattes.
Yet the outbreak rages on. The dead are not consoled by your feeling of joy. Nor should you be.
We have seen this pattern before: first the Romans, then the Victorians, now us. A civilisation that cannot look death in the eye without flinching is a civilisation in decline. So spare me your heartwarming tales of African resilience.
It is not resilience that is needed. It is a vaccine. It is a functioning public health system.
It is the cold, hard math of triage. We do not need a reporter smiling through the tears. We need a return to the stiff upper lip, to the discipline that built empires and conquered diseases.
We need, in short, to stop enjoying the horror and start ending it.
