David Brooks recently wrote an arresting article in the New York Times entitled “Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too: You might not like what you’re about to become.” In it, he gives a lean, yet incisive history of how epidemics expose human nature.

Brooks quotes Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, who lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665. This plague claimed the lives of near 100,000 people –a quarter of London’s population in just 18 months…