I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and pandemics. People still have kids and get married and start businesses and hike and play the guitar, etc. History is just what we decide to deem important or not.
Images play a big role in how events are perceived. Whenever there's a natural disaster you tend to see all of the worst examples, even if they're not fully representative of the event. But I think it's sometimes necessary in order to get people to take these events seriously, since they can negatively affect so many people. Otherwise people might look at images where some things look normal and think that those who were most affected are overstating the impact of the event.
Another example that comes to mind is the 2020 protests. If I looked at how conservative news was reporting on events, it seemed utterly chaotic. But I had multiple friends that were present at many local events, and they were all perfectly safe.
Floodwaters tend to stir up a lot of dirt and mud, so the water is usually totally opaque. That makes it very hard to tell how deep it is. A lot of overhead views of flooded neighborhoods look completely disastrous, but in reality it's just a foot or two of water that will just go away once the drains can handle it.
But, sometimes, flooding really is severe and the damage is monumental. But it can be hard to distinguish those from imagery. Every picture of a flood looks biblical.
People also completely underestimate how much force flowing water has. It's hard enough to walk in waist-deep water when it's still. Somehow they see a few feet of rushing water and they think "hey, I'm gonna drive my car through that"
A couple feet of water is still disastrous though. You're insurance most likely doesn't cover it and you could be left with tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage easily.
It really depends. In my neighborhood in Louisiana, most yards sloped down to the street. So when the flood was a couple of feet at its deepest, most houses were still fully above the waterline. It's just that the streets were impassable and you needed a boat to get around.
If you are interested in images' role in public perception of events--particularly suffering and tragedy--you might look to read Susan Sontag's essay collection "Regarding the Pain of Others," published in 2003:
> To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.
> a single photograph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s lens. A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?
> Indeed, the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of something posthumous.
> And, of course, atrocities that are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of which we simply have had very few images—the total extermination of the Herero people in Namibia decreed by the German colonial administration in 1904; the Japanese onslaught in China, notably the massacre of nearly four hundred thousand, and the rape of eighty thousand, Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking; the rape of some one hundred and thirty thousand women and girls (ten thousand of whom committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945—seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim.
> Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.
> A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence.
While this is mostly a good piece of writing, in the real world handmade images (and handwritten notes) are, like photographs, potentially evidence, and the issues raised with photographs are the reasons both photographs and hand-written/hand-drawn items (and all other physical items) as evidence tend to demand supporting (and admit opposing) testimonial and physical evidence of provenance (and, the physical evidence offered for this purpose has the same features, such that ultimately, it all rests on testimonial evidence of provenance.)
I also don't think the first parr of the sentence is true: pictures may be supposed to show, but pictures have been noted for their evocative power long before this piece was written—pictures are in certaim circumstances understood to show, and under other and frequently overlapping circumstances to evoke; there is certainly a common danger in mistaking evocative power for also indicating informative power, but few anywhere have denied the existence of the evocative power of photography.
The 2020 protests were either dangerous or ok depending on where you were and the time of day. Minneapolis had a lot of damage and someone was even burned to death in their store. US insurance costs were over $1B.
> But I think it's sometimes necessary in order to get people to take these events seriously, since they can negatively affect so many people.
Overreacting can have equally bad outcomes, I think. Social isolation sanctioned by pandemic era school lockdowns left me with depression, social anxiety and suicidal ideations - none of which I have managed to fix so far. And I know I'm not alone with this in my age group (in high-school at the start of the pandemic).
Now, I think the resulting number of suicides does not reach the amount of people saved by the countermeasures in total, but it's nevertheless something to consider. (Well, but it's much harder to find a direct correlation in the first place, so really who knows.)
(Re-reading your comment, I now realize that maybe I was completely missing your point, in which case I'm sorry.)
I think this is an important lesson for folks struggling with anxiety about what will happen with climate change as well. It is already awful for lots of people and will continue to be, increasingly so to some degree and up to some point, but like it did during Covid and the Cold War and the world wars and the flu pandemic, in aggregate, life will also go on.
But I think it's also important to remember that that's only the case in aggregate. For many many individual people, life did not go on during all these events (and all the other tragedies that are constantly happening), they lost their own lives, or their parents, or their children, or their friends.
I personally find it really hard to hold both of these truths in my head at once.
Having an incomplete understanding of history goes both ways. Consider the myriad of diseases that were widespread then, but have practically vanished in modern countries with modern healthcare. Getting brutally-to-fatally sick was common in the early 1900s, and day-to-day life was alot worse because of it.
Life in general is better now, and we can keep doing better! And to do better, we have to be honest about history.
On the flip side, if you're a Gen Xer, you almost certainly grew up knowing an adult whose health was directly impacted by polio. And if you don't, Mitch McConnell is sitting up there in Congress. One of the reasons he didn't push back so much when they were passing COVID legislation was because of his own experiences as a child.
This is important, history will remember emotionally charged comments but indeed a lot of what happens is "normal" and forgotten. We could see that in syria or even ukraine.. the geopolitical tension level was completely removed from most day to day stream we could see.
I wonder if this bias/memory-capacity is studied, I assume so but I don't know the name :)
The historical context also misses a lot of what we know about the impact of malnutrition and stress on the immune system. Was the spanish flu actually that bad, or was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population?
Reconciling modern information with historical events is hard. But I think it's completely necessary if we're going to make policy decisions based on history.
> was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population?
No, because those affected worst by it were young adults in relatively good health. Small children and the elderly were proportionally spared. The prevailing theory for why Spanish flu killed more healthy young adults was because it was an over-reaction of the immune system itself that was most harmful:
It is definitely the case that the war led to many young adults being moved around the world and kept in close quarters, which certainly exacerbated the spread and effect of the pandemic.
The Spanish flu really was very bad but would not have killed as many people if it occurred today. Malnutrition might have been a factor (though today's obesity rate might also be a problem) but the bigger thing was lack of antibiotics. Flu almost never kills you directly- it's the bacterial pneumonia you develop on top of it that does. Without antibiotics back then there would have been little they could do
Bacterial Pneumonia was not the novel danger of the "Spanish" flu; They cytokine storm it caused in perfectly healthy people was horrifying, with perfectly healthy people who would normally fight off any flu dying from this one. A lot of young twenty somethings, strong people who were not malnourished died from it.
Hell, people got cytokine storms from COVID-19 and we still can only treat it if we catch it really early, otherwise it's still a great way to die for a normal person.
That's a hypothesis. It is known that (supposedly) that strain can cause cytokine storm more than other flus do. I would not assume that means cytokine storm was the primary cause of death or even the primary cause of death in young adults. Based on my experience my guess is that the pneumonia was a much bigger cause of death than the storm
Right I wasn't expressing the cytokine storm as the primary cause of death but rather a phenomenon that definitely pushed it above a normal flu, especially for healthy young adults.
