The World Health Organisation has raised the risk level for Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo to ‘very high’. A familiar dread creeps back into the headlines, but how many of us will truly feel its shadow? The answer, as always, is suffocatingly predictable: the global health alert escalates, yet the collective pulse of the West barely quickens. We have grown too comfortable with catastrophes that occur in faraway lands, numbed by a surfeit of crises that flicker across our screens like episodes of a tedious drama. I am Arthur Penhaligon, and I am here to remind you that the fall of civilisations often begins not with a bang, but with a yawn.
Let us turn to history, that dusty mirror that reveals our own reflection. In the late 19th century, the British Empire faced repeated outbreaks of cholera in India. The response was often sluggish, bureaucratic, and tinged with a quiet racism that deemed the lives of the colonised as lesser. Today, we have swapped empire for international organisations, but the pattern remains: the poor and the vulnerable bear the brunt, while the comfortable sip their lattes and scroll past the headlines. Ebola is not a new enemy. We have faced it before, in West Africa in 2014, and we watched it spiral out of control precisely because the world did not act swiftly enough. The ‘global community’ is a phrase that sounds noble but acts only when its own borders are threatened. Congo is not the heart of the world; it is the heart of darkness, and we treat it as such.
The intellectual decadence of our age is partly to blame. We have become exhausted by the sheer volume of existential threats, from climate change to pandemics to geopolitical tensions. The result is a kind of learned helplessness, a shrug that says ‘what can one do?’. But this is a luxury of the prosperous. In the Congolese villages where Ebola now spreads, there is no such luxury. The disease thrives on poverty, weak infrastructure, and a lack of trust in authorities. We could throw resources at this problem, build clinics, train local healthcare workers, and fund research. Instead, we offer statements of concern. The Victorian era had its complacent optimists who believed that progress was inevitable. We know better now, yet we act as if we do not.
National identity, too, plays its part. The Congo is a nation scarred by colonialism, conflict, and corruption. Its government is fragile, its people wary of outsiders. Containment requires a level of cooperation that seems almost utopian in such a fractured landscape. And what of our own nations? The United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe are busy squabbling over trade deals, immigration, and cultural wars. We have no appetite for a global health campaign when we cannot even agree on mask mandates. The Fall of Rome was not a single event but a long, grinding process of internal decay and external pressure. So too with our global health security. We saw this in the covid pandemic, which exposed the frayed seams of the international system. Now, with Ebola, those seams threaten to tear further.
What is to be done? I do not have a simple answer. But I know that indifference is a form of violence. To treat the Congo’s plight as a distant curiosity is to participate in the intellectual and moral decay I speak of. We must demand more from our leaders and from ourselves. Fund the WHO, yes. But also push for a new kind of global citizenship that recognises the dignity of every human life, regardless of latitude. The alternative is a world where plagues are allowed to smoulder in the margins until they inevitably engulf the centre. That is not a world I wish to bequeath to my children. But then again, the Victorians believed they were building an eternal empire. Look how that turned out.
