ABSTRACT
My argument is that we need to understand the COVID-19 pandemic through the development of a sociology of catastrophes. The analysis of the consequences of pandemics, floods, earthquakes and so forth has been dominated by disaster studies. I claim that wars, famines, genocide, earthquakes and pandemics are better understood as catastrophes rather than disasters. While a train crash might be reasonably classified as a disaster, WWI, the Holocaust, colonial conquests and pandemics are more suitably classified as catastrophes. The word itself comes from Greek tragedies where the cata-strophe was the end of a dramatic sequence. Catastrophes are major events that bring about the end of a society, way of life or civilization. While disaster studies legitimately examine the resilience and survival of communities and institutions, catastrophes are about institutions and ways of life coming to an end without obvious continuities that would be associated with the idea of ‘resilience’. Disaster studies can be said to offer an optimistic account of survival, resilience and revival, whereas a sociology of catastrophe needs the supplement of studies relating to vulnerability and suffering. Catastrophes tend to come in multiples. War typically produces famine, which in turn leads to disease. To what extent are catastrophes paradoxically associated with modernization? I explore the theoretical issues by a comparison of two influential sociologists: Ulrich Beck on ‘risk society’ and Zygmunt Bauman on the Holocaust and ‘liquid modernity’. Both sociologists assume that modernization, including major developments in modern technology, have enhanced the risks of modern societies. Without the science of nuclear fission, we could not have Chernobyl. One example is the modernization of war or the development of what are called post-heroic new wars in which civilian populations are the principal targets of violence. While the early expansion of trade in the seventeenth century facilitated the spread of disease, economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries facilitated modern globalization and climate change as the platform for the enhanced spread of zoonotic disease which typically spread from animal reservoirs – Lassa fever, Ebola, Rift Valley fever and COVID-19. These developments are related to the many dimensions of modernization: economic development, population displacement, urbanization, soil degradation, the depletion of the environment and globalization. My chapter concludes with a discussion of optimism or pessimism in response to catastrophes.
