Since Influenza A [H1N1] appeared (see – I didn’t call it Swine Flu right away) I’ve wanted to write something about it. But each intention I formed faltered. It seemed utterly unlike an epidemic, let alone a pandemic: a word that has now probably lost its true meaning. It was contained, it wasn’t producing SARS-style fatalities in different countries, and it seemed more like a media event than a ferocious viral contagion. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the actual infection was one thing, and the media event was a related but distinct plague.

With the advent of environmentalism three or four decades ago, science started gaining a suspect reputation. Wasn’t it, people began to believe, the evils of chemistry and technology that were killing off species and poisoning water? As a result, North America in particular was infected with ignorance or biased thinking about science, and both print and electronic media journalists have become frequently incapable of grasping a scientific argument, let alone explaining it. If they can, there is the constant danger that an editor will try to simplify the jargon and eliminate all the nuances, to make a stronger story where the factual statements are diluted or even misrepresented for more impact.

As a result, we are increasingly incapable of grasping the open-endedness of research. We retain an oddly 19th Century absolutism in our view of scientific knowledge, and are uncomfortable with the perpetually unfolding character of empirical science.

On top of that, as has been widely noted, masses of misinformation about this ’flu has circulated on Twitter, or via conspiracy sites. The only thing that surprises me out of it all is that the War on Drugs bureaucracy never propagated the notion that snorting cocaine coming through Mexico was a sure way to catch the H1N1 virus. The effect on sales might have been temporary, but the rumour could have been revived ad nauseam to damage the cartels’ cashflow.

I suspect the current suggestion that the virus might return in the autumn with renewed vigour is partly a way for the World Health Organisation, the Centers for Disease Control and various other agencies to hide their private embarrassment at the lack of dead people, or even the lack of cases. Worldwide right now, we are still at under 3,000 reported infections, though doubtless some sufferers have just headed home to bed with a bottle of Tylenol. But that said, media anticipations of a horrendous outcome have produced a generalised, low-level anger that overlooks the precautionary nature of the steps the health organisations have to take. It also overlooks the fact these things are media-conscious bureaucracies, with their own somewhat tenuous or ambiguous links to the thinking and practices of hard science.

The deeper issue is how we are going to handle such events in the years to come. We expect to be offered vaccines and medications for such outbreaks, while failing utterly to grasp what has to be done, and over what time-span, to develop such things. I doubt one person in five, even in educated populations, really appreciates what a virus is or how it can mutate and propagate. The fact the process shows evolution in action no doubt produces an instinctual rejection of the information on the part of many professing Christians, and Muslims too.

The process of discrimination in handling such information is a major issue that’s been made worse by people doing just what I’m doing right now – spinning a tale on the basis of selective reading and selective knowledge. We don’t know more and more about less and less today: rather, we only know more and more about somebody else’s – or several somebodies’ – limited knowledge.

Aleister Crowley always insisted his occult students become scientifically and historically literate. He was a romantic in many of his ideas, but he did believe in intellectual rigour. Then, as now, the world of esoterically oriented seekers was filled with whiffle-brained believers, sunk in unself-critical perspectives that were loftily impervious to unwelcome information. While concern over species elimination, chemical pollution and destruction of forests and marine environments are important topics, the view that science is somehow a tainted field of study unless it is concerned with the ravages caused by human endeavour has taken a serious toll on our ability to assess issues such as outbreaks of disease.

Greater faith in our ability to manage epidemics, with neither undue optimism that nobody will die, or apocalyptic pessimism that such things are signs of catastrophe, would mark a maturing of our grasp of what we an do to manage our own fate. The notion of such management, it seems, is often anathema to the eco-pessimists as much as to the religious fundamentalists. But it is perfectly possible, and is in fact our only viable alternative for addressing the physical-plane realities of an increasingly crowded planet.