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Spreading of germs - Environmental conditions
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Environment
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 There is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas or propaganda. On the one hand we are dealing with a virus that can be transported and transmitted under certain conditions which favour or limit its transportation or transmission: on the other hand with ideas, religions, and doctrines, which can be described as germs, benevolent or malevolent, according to the point of view one takes up. These germs can either remain at their source and be sterile, or emerge in the spreading of infection. The vocabulary which normally comes to mind is that of medicine. Conditions of infection, besides, will also be the same as in the domain of health. For diffusion to take place we must necessarily have a germ, a carrier, and receptive surroundings. It is then, as in the case of epidemics, a matter of contacts, made easier by the techniques of communication or delayed by obstacles arising from custom or from administration. Sociology and biology are curiously akin in this.
 The human being is in the circumstances the most natural transmitting agent. A particular man, on moving from one place to another, will take with him a doctrine, a religion, a germ of opposition or revolt. It may be that he feels conviction about it, like a missionary, an apostle, or a propagandist, but it might also be the case that such an agent remains unconscious of the contagion he spreads, carrying a germ of which he does not suspect either the harmfulness or even the existence: just as there are carriers of non-apparent infections, who know nothing of the virus they harbor, which is undiscovered even by doctors. These are the most dangerous. We have only to consider the pollen spread to the uttermost ends of the ancient world by those bees, the Tartar conquerors; the fecundation which those kill-joys, the nomads, periodically brought to the owners of solid hereditary estates; the incessant temptations of neighboring idolatries for the faithful of the true God; or the unforeseen spiritual transports brought about by the Parthians, the Mongols, and the Arabs. The world is infinitely more permeable than one could believe, and in order to be so it has not had to wait for the telephone, the telegraph or the aeroplane to conquer distance and time for us.
 Here we again find the routes which we have already come across in the spreading of germs, which are naturally a subdivision of the large class of world communications in general. Thus we have to remember the caravans, those ancient instruments of trade, pedlary, pilgrimages, sea itineraries, immigration routes, and missionary routes, which are often indistinguishable from routes of conquest - a list that goes back over the ages. If we are dealing with modern routes, conditions of contact remain the same, but transport techniques have supplied the railway, the motorway, and the airway. The nature of communications does not alter, but their intensity increases, the route becoming the instrument par excellence of penetration. The insinuation of idea germs can come about through the arrival of tourists, through a detachment of foreign workers, through an army of occupation, through the enrollment of foreign students at a university, through then introduction to non-immunized surroundings of a single individual, or sometimes of a journal or a book, or through the unexpected conjunction of something read with a state of mind which happens to be receptive at that particular moment.
 In order to destroy and sterilize a germ, or simply to circumscribe its diffusion, one can, as in the struggle against disease, proceed in different ways. The most decisive action is to destroy the germ at its source. But this is often difficult. Either one does not know the germ or, if one knows it, one does not know exactly where to find it. It may be that its possibilities of diffusion have not been properly estimated. It may also be that the germ has multiplied in such a fashion that one is defenseless, tempted to say with the combatent who is completely surrounded: One wonders, however, how far such procedures are effective against that winged germ, often invisible, which is the mind. The sterilization of the surroundings by the suppression of all contact with the exterior has produced the expected effect in Russia: the state succeeds in preventing the Soviet citizen from knowing what is going on outside, and besides, if any outside propaganda evoked the slightest response this would soon be suppressed by a police force which could, in this context, be described as ``sanitary.'' The iron curtain, and the bamboo curtain, are, from this point of view, as effective a protection as the ancient wall of China, which protected the refined civilization of the Yangtze Kiang against the raids of the Tartar hordes.
 We have made use of the same vocabulary to speak of the spread of diseases and of ideas and propaganda: virus, germ, source; carrier, soil, surroundings; contact, contagion, infection, contamination, endemic, epidemic, pandemic; prevention, inoculation, sterilization, immunization, vaccination, quarantine. Surely we have more than a superficial coincidence here: both in the domain of biology and in the world of ideas, certain reactions are shown which are common to all living beings.
(From Germs and Ideas)
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