Fudan General Knowledge and The Thoughts of Scholars: Disease, Disaster and Sci-Fi - Philosophical Reflections.

. Under the outbreak, fudan general knowledge organization "student seismology" series, Fudan University General Education Center invited teachers from different disciplines in the school to write, from their respective professional areas and academic interests, to carry out different angles of discussion on the epidemic, interdisciplinary in-depth interpretation and analysis.

introduction

a disease that pierces the barrierbetween reality and metaphor. In the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, disease has become a "landscape." Reality overflows with imagination. Arguably, the most unfortunate of this era is the writer. The magic of reality goes far beyond imagination and rhetoric, and the dystopia that literary and artistic youth love is dwarfed. I happen to see someone ask, coronavirus "crown" is the first sound? Several types of writing of the word "san" can't be helped out of the mind... The reaction of the crowd turned into a large scene of strangeness.

disease can create an exceptional "state of exception". The usual exception states are the love of Xiong and Tang Qi, because they can seize power with impunity, or pursue love without scruples - if there is no exception, but also create an exception state. However, the "exceptional state" of disease lets everyone know the value of the exception's terrible, normal, even if the latter is tedious and mediocre.people often "rehearse" the exception in fiction. The lines between dystopian, sci-fi and disaster works are originally blurred. Many sci-fi snares with infectious diseases, such as "Twelve Monkeys," "Prometheus, Biochemical Crisis" series, and so on. The sideline is not indifference, but retreats and tries to calmly "understand" the disease.


from exotic diseases
Susan Sontag, in Metaphors of Disease, argues that infectious diseases are always associated with "exotic". Pathogens in science fiction often appear as "intruders." Perhaps the most famous biological invasion in human history was the Spanish conquistadors who brought smallpox to the Americas, which eventually led to the end of the Inca Empire. This also inspired Liu Cixin conceived the "three bodies" in the "down-to-the-post strike." Hollywood sci-fi has even introduced the most distant people to disease sci-fi- outer space. In the hard-core sci-fi film of the 1970s, The Human Catastrophe (The Andromeda Strain, 1971, director: Robert Wise), the superbug Andromeda strain was actually a crystal that came from an accidental impact in outer space. Some people have reverted to the deep western panic of the East during the Cold War as an alien invasion in science fiction. However, when that political confrontation disappeared, the panic not only did not go away, but intensified.

tropical climate and species diversity are considered hotbeds for the cultivation of new pathogens. The deadly pig viruses in the Japanese film "Infecting the Islands" (2009, director: Yu Jingyu) and South Korea's "Flu" (director: Kim Sung-hyun) are all from Southeast Asia. AIDS and Ebola come from Africa. Bringing the source of the disease to an exotic approach naturally reduces the psychological and moral responsibilities of the "us" but does nothing to control the outbreak. In an era of hyper-convenient messaging, finding scapegoats is no longer so easy to succeed, because scapegoats are also looking for scapegoats.in recent years it seems that Korean directors have begun to challenge this approach, putting the source of the epidemic in "here" and "we." The South Korean film "The Iron Nematode Invasion" (2012, director: Park Chung-woo) did not resort to the disease from afar, but blamed the plot of the country's medical group. "Busan Walk" (2016, director: Yan Shangxuan) and "Seoul Station" (2016, director: Yan Shangxuan) both trace the dead virus back to the laboratory of a biopharmaceutical company in the country. After all, it takes a lot of courage to get your own people "dead" across the place, even if it only happens in the movies.

terminally ill people usually ask: Why me? This is a question, but also a question of day. And in the gap between "I" and "I", the devil laughs. In the 1980s, AIDS was once considered a curse on the "West". But decades later, no country in the world has been "spared". Epidemics of high-speed transmission change the man-made pronouns of disease from singular to plural. Now the question is: Why "we"? Humans, as an animal hanging on the web of language spiders, always like to blame "others". However, the epidemic blurs the line between others and us. "Exotic" also contains the possibility of geographical and psychological "isolation". But pathogens don't understand ideology, and they're not "racist." Viruses are bound to "break the loop", at this time people will see who is "us".

the charm of the

disease sought from not only from the exotic, but also from the distant "past". When it comes to specific diseases, we often associate them with the Middle Ages, ancient sons and even ancient times. For example, in the US drama The Last Ship (Season 1-5, 2014-18), scientists found ancient viruses in Arctic ice that killed more than half of the world's population. Under the light of "progress", modern memories of disease are dispelled like vampires. However, dispersal does not amount to disappearance.this is a time of great ambition. Westerners used to think that the focus of medical care had shifted from infectious diseases to chronic diseases. The disease also carries with it the "modernity" - the strong infectious disease belongs to the 16th century, tuberculosis is the disease of the 18th-19th century, only cancer and AIDS belong to the 20th century, and the postmodern seems to have no place for disease. The disease is as removed as the witches of the pre-modern times. In the film Black Death, 2010, 14th-century Englishmen were convinced that witches and paganism were the culprits of the plague. To this end, some villages burned all the women overnight. And the witch hunters are obsessed with this belief, and eventually blackened.

the word "ghost" was coined by the German thinker Max Weber at the beginning of the 20th century. "We know or believe that any time we want to know, we can understand, we know or believe that in principle there is no mysterious, unknowable force at work, and we know or believe that, in principle, we can control everything by calculation," he wrote in "Academics." But the only thing that all means: the charm of the world. "In the face of the outbreak, people really want, as Weber said, we understand, we know that we dominate the virus. Ironically, however, Webb himself was the victim of that belief. In June 1920, he died of pneumonia. Over time, people forgot that Webb subtly side-by-side the use of "know" and "believe". So, is it "know" or "believe"? The ancients knew that they believed, and today they believed they knew - and still "in principle".

"magic" has a dual effect: man has become the only one in the universe, the top of the world's primate; God, God, devil, soul, ghost, witch, elf, evil, can not be a legitimate reason to explain the disease. But at the same time, man has also become a "species" that occasionally appears in the course of natural evolution, which is helpless, untrustworthy, and can only rely on itself. It comes from, but it doesn't know where to go. People broke all the idols, removed all witches, no longer believe dain emperor, turned themselves into the universe's "orphan." The orphan was more confident than ever, forgetting the admonition: "Skills, knowledge and organization will change, but the fragility of humanity in the face of disease is immutable." Viruses have existed for billions of years, and humans have only been around for millions of years.

The Andromeda Strain (2008, director: Mikael Salomen) and his previous work, "The Human Catastrophe" (1971, director: Robert Wise), do not consciously reflect this false arrogance: extraterrestrial crystal life can not tolerate acid-alkali through high or too low environment. Just a little acid or weak alkali can kill it. Sci-fi can be given a "cure" lightly. Lucky, can not help but fear. It's reminiscent of Independence Day (1996), in which the alien fleet that finally broke the Earth's invasion was a set of human computer viruses...
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we believe in science and we believe in experts. But sometimes the honest answer is "I don't know." However, the identity of a scientist is not allowed. A "I am afraid" only really revealed the survival anxiety of modern people. Some writers say that a grain of dust from the times falls on everyone's head is a mountain. Every "in principle" of science, on every disease, means generations. Socrates's motto, "I know I don't know", is deafening at the moment.

anti-phage organism

the functionalism in sociology like to compare society to an organism. This analogy can be traced back to the founder of sociology, Tuergan, and even earlier Conde. The founder of sociology consciously resisted the expansion of natural science methods to society and human beings- there was no iron-like "law" in society. It is also a diagnosis of the characteristics of modern society: how do people coexist when the old bonds are broken? Hope is like the organs of the organism, each do its duty, with the "body" to help each other. However, this metaphor masks the inherent conflict of society. The "organic unity" in the sense of Tulgan is not so much a characteristic of modern society as a modern social ideal. The life of the ancient son is god, the life of modern people is other people's life.

the epidemic and ask: Do we have to pay so much to save a few? Utilitarians may not hesitate to abandon the "minority" to save the "majority". The infected train on the Cassandra Crossing (1976) was the "minority" and the American colonel decided to sacrifice them. In "Extreme Panic" (1995), the president and the military used air-fuel bombs to "suffocate" the living in the town. A strongman's broken wrist is never a wrist decision. The strongman is not an octopus, there are many wrists to break. Every "epidemic area" can become a "minority" of sacrifice, and no one wants to be a "cost". Kant stood in the dark and whispered: Man is the purpose, not the means.

Netflix series Kingdom (season 1, 2019) raises the question of political philosophy: Does the king have the right to rule when he has become a dead body? The king had two bodies, but at this time it was not a broken wrist, but a matter of the dagger. If some parts of the organism are unable to perform their duties faithfully, they are not only unhelpful to the whole body, but can even be able to re-eat other healthy tissues and organs. This is a function that functionalism does not want to see. In this sense, the disease needs to be treated. Treatment must come from the outside. Treatment is not self-healing.

the dystopia of epidemic prevention

many fictional works will be marked at the beginning of the "if there is a similarity, pure coincidence." In fact, for the disaster film, more appropriate is to use "don't say no." The 2011 film "Contagion" after SARS, gave a textbook "God prophecy" - international travel of the zero patient, intermediate host bat, aerosol spread, R0 (basic infection number), the public snapped up double yellow company, square cabins and so on all appeared ... Although a number of big-name stars (Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Lawrence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet) make up the ultra-luxury cassein, it's a hit. The film is full of irony, and even when the vaccine is eventually developed, it is still distributed to the public with a partial placebo.

fiction itself has an epidemic prevention effect. Read a passage on Weibo: Someone once protested to Tolkien that his book described too much evil. Tolkien replied, "A book that does not involve evil, but a book of evil." "Because it makes the reader misunderstand the whole world. Despite the abhorrence of medical abuse, there is also a deep banon on fictional works of disease disaster. A society probably doesnot disintegrate because of a dystopian one. Over and over, dystopia presents unimaginable and unacceptable possibilities to create an uncomfortable future. Dystopia is a warning, a prophecy, a warning. Instead, a society lacking a dystopian imagination is the Titanic, which has been de-alerted. For dystopians, positive energy is a medicine of sweat.

disease became a mirror. Blind Flu (2008) envisions a blinding flu that, while mild and self-healing over time, finds society more prone to collapse than the body. Plague Inc., an infectious disease-themed strategy game, has a grotesque set-up to infect all of humanity, but it concentrates on the entire epidemiological textbook. And the South Korean film "Flu" has reached its peak in visual shock - in cities where the deadly flu epidemic is too late to screen, the military uses large machinery to burn bodies in stadiums, which are also interspersed with living heavy patients... Dystopia put the terrible "hell on earth" in front of you, just to avoid hell in the world.

modern sci-fi and disaster films partially replaced the ancient prophets of bitterness - knowing that it's useless, or that it's not going to be said, it has to be said. If we can't face the difficulties we've created ourselves, we can find solutions. Then "the means of solution will inevitably be in the hands of one or all of the ancient enemies of mankind, who have famine, plague, and war..."
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the end of The Hot Zone(2019), scientists say, only fools think the battle is over. ...... We didn't get away with it, and the disaster fell on us. We should plan ahead... We can choose to ignore it or look straight into the future. This monster (virus) will come back... And at the end of the Holocaust, the Congressman asked the scientist: What can we do? The scientist replied, yes, the problem is exactly what we can do.

cited literature.