I’m trying to reduce my visits outside as I find it more stressful than anything else. I’m not so much worried about getting Coronavirus – indeed, I suspect I had an early variant when I was ill for 3 weeks in early February (c.f. Spanish Flu waves) – as I am unhappy at the eerie desolation of an empty city, the masked & awkward citizenry, as if everyone has out of fear become a superhero. When I passed a guy leaning against a pillar outside a restaurant, a delivery bike/hamper nearby, and he didn’t move aside, I just shrugged and held my breath then wondered, Is he unconcerned about the ‘rona because he already has it? – but he doesn’t care if he gives it to everyone who passes?

Most of the people I saw when I went shopping last night were food delivery guys on motorbikes, electric bicycles, one on some kind of electric-powered Segway, lit up in the dark, a food hamper on his back.

I’ve been considering the Spanish Flu as a precursor and possible model. In the 1918 pandemic, Italians were disproportionately affected, and there was a clear north/south divide in Europe, the Mediterranean countries being significantly impacted relative to the north. As I was walking to my local supermarket today, I noted Italians on bikes, in masks, all babbling excitedly on their phones, and wondered if it could be – genetics aside – a question of gregariousness; that Finns and Germans are an introverted people who prefer a small social circle, and are undemonstrative in their affections. Could it be that hundreds of thousands of people were saved in Finland because the Finns don’t like to socialise so much? Could infection (if not fatality) rates correlate to extroversion?

It could be that periodic pandemics exercise a pro-introversion selection, culling the extroverts. It is hard to see how typically extrovert behaviour would be other than deleterious in a time of Plague; whereas the lonely scholar in his tower, leafing through his Augustine and his Kant could well be a lone survivor. Plague might, then, serve as a corrective mechanism to societies which unduly favour the extrovert. One could argue that only a fairly prosperous individual could survive as an introvert, but that only means that introverts would tend to be higher IQ (since wealth is correlated with IQ) – so the introvert would come from a higher-IQ family, his inherited wealth serving as a buffer against an extroverted world.

It would be interesting to study IQ/introversion correlations, as I find it hard to imagine an impoverished introvert surviving outside of the very recent welfare systems of the West; could an introvert survive in Karachi or Mogadishu, or would the constant screaming and bustle rather deplete his energy, suppress his immune system, and lead to an early shallow grave, eaten by feral dogs and shit-encrusted urchins? My guess is, introverts tend to be from more wealthy families, and so will also be higher IQ.

Over time, recurrent Plagues could, then, select for high-IQ introverts, culling off the worst of the extroverts and dummies.