[Xmca-l] Re: Covid 19: Getting the Name Right

Fri Apr 17 02:42:57 PDT 2020

Dear all,

I haven't checked in yet because I've been busy just coping, but I have appreciated some of your reflections.

Regarding the flu pandemic of the early 20th century (during World War I), its naming seems to have been related to media censorship. The 'great' powers tried to minimise reporting of it (sound familiar?) and pumped money into campaigns to keep spirits up (that rings bells too).

Why Spanish? Because Spain was neutral and therefore censors were not headbent on keeping the population calm and focused on fighting the war, as in other countries. Media reporting (including reports on the King who almost died from the flu) could therefore have given the impression that incidence was higher in Spain. Or, as others claim, the naming comes from the fact that news on it came from Spain; like naming a deathly comet after the scientist who detects it and writes about it.

I didn't have a clue about all this till the other day when I listened to a documentary on it. What strikes me as particularly worrying (but not surprising) are the resemblances between the censorship/jingoism of then and what's happening now.

Take care everyone,
julie

________________________________
De: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] en nom de Andy Blunden [andyb@marxists.org]
Enviat el: divendres, 17 / abril / 2020 09:01
Per a: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
Tema: [Xmca-l] Re: Covid 19: Getting the Name Right

I read that in a book on the history of pandemics, about a decade ago. Can't remember the author. But I really hated what the author had to say about HIV, which he characterised as a "life-style" illness of homosexual men. So I checked his credentials with Prof. Short, an epidemiology expert at the University, who confirmed that the author was indeed authoritative, and it was unfortunate that his personal prejudices let him down when he came to HIV. So I took it that the Kansas story was legit. In any case, it was never anything to do with Spain.

I see https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu*Hypotheses_about_the_source__;Iw!!Mih3wA!XZBOM3Gmr03DJy3usmZJNWi8MDE4L9VBLyx_ikGL4T__dQbqiKa1Ls41UovkTXxna1PIvw$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu*Hypotheses_about_the_source__;Iw!!Mih3wA!RVmjWrnqeBJAI3Z50ZvFTvUzhV5qGCVz7aRPbEzP-_dWzviP8MxkAPYK8Weo5MlThnCFEw$> has a number of hypotheses.

Andy

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Andy Blunden
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On 17/04/2020 3:45 pm, Edward Wall wrote:
An article I read in National Geographic (around 2014) gave a quite different story as regard incubation. I assume you are referring to a somewhat more recent and trustworthy source? I’d appreciate the reference as I used to study the mathematics behind things of this sort.

Ed

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

On Apr 16, 2020, at  9:54 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:

Well, the Americans did pretty well in naming the flu pandemic which was incubated in a military camp in Kansas and taken across the Atlantic to Spain en route to the carnage in France, the "Spanish Flu."

Andy

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Andy Blunden
Hegel for Social Movements<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!WkdkQgveBxmpghUoOmf7xks2JBWnLppU0ECMuZC0NNuLIi0R5MGMZdiJsQ85FPM0KExfeg$>
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On 17/04/2020 8:21 am, Edward Wall wrote:
      If you’all want to get picky about names you might look here for some possibilities:. https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html__;!!Mih3wA!XZBOM3Gmr03DJy3usmZJNWi8MDE4L9VBLyx_ikGL4T__dQbqiKa1Ls41UovkTXx8vO7wAQ$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html__;!!Mih3wA!QDqoHKfN9rsIen0hktwg62vWF_Zg0RnuNDpr6G3EFD42Kj1NDYzm2T7NEly6rlqhG6ZKwQ$>.

      In any case, I find the other name: SARS-CoV-2<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html__;!!Mih3wA!QDqoHKfN9rsIen0hktwg62vWF_Zg0RnuNDpr6G3EFD42Kj1NDYzm2T7NEly6rlqWKjRnFQ$> far more informative, far more relevant, and far more disturbing as regards the situation at hand.

            Gadamer writes “Thus a person who wants to understands must question what lies behind what is said. He must understand it as an answer to a question. If we go back behind what is said then we inevitably ask questions beyond what is said.” So, perhaps, I have problems with a thinking that believes it has landed on the “correct” definition/answer (and all other thinkers are fools) as that may well entail, perhaps innocently, a curtailing of the crucial question. I find that the the answer 'COVID-19’ obscures a lot (and, to be fair, does some illumination).

Ed
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

On Apr 16, 2020, at  3:35 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com<mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:

I won't pretend to you that this is on my night table. Someone recently sent me the following quote from Hegel:

“For although it is commonly said that reasonable men pay attention not to the word but to the thing itself, yet this does not give us permission to describe a thing in terms inappropriate to it. For this is at once incompetence and deceit, to fancy and to pretend that one merely has not the right word, and to hide from oneself that really one has failed to get hold of the thing itself, i.e. the Notion. If one had the Notion, then one would also have the right word.” (p.198) – sec. 329

Vygotsky liked to quote Tolstoy: Слово почти всегда готово, когда готово понятие (the word is nearly (!) always read when the concept is ready) but it seems to me that in this case he would have stressed the word "nearly". There was a long debate over what to call Covid 19 at the WHO, and many people (including Michael Lin at Stanford) opine that they got it wrong.

I think that they got it right, but that it took a while. I don't think it is
non-argument to point out that repeated attempts to change the name to "Chinese virus" or the nineteenth iteration of Covid or whatever are also motivated and not in a good way.

More importantly (because as Hegel says mere incompetence and transparent self-deceit are at stake in this instance) I think in most societies naming is a process--a child has different names at different times of life, and LSV is probaby wrong to treat naming as a single function of speech that is simply replaced by signifying and does not itself develop.

What disturbs me about the Hegel quote (and LSV's obvious enthusiasm for it) is that it seems to suggest that everything has, in the final analysis, only one correct name. But perhaps it all depends on that final analysis.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of Critical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!XZBOM3Gmr03DJy3usmZJNWi8MDE4L9VBLyx_ikGL4T__dQbqiKa1Ls41UovkTXzFb8WqcA$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!RxSyHRy22kiqZQHwsKuP3HGFuU9O2uo9DyVwSIIsNFfE0O3RpibgknJS735vbN8JpRvTyw$>

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New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"

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