Biological Needs and Human Society Theme Analysis

From plumbing to supermarkets, many of humankind’s most prized inventions are designed to distance people from their basic biological needs: food, water, shelter, excretion, and so on. But in Blindness, as “the white sickness” of unexplained blindness ravages the unnamed city, the people who run society’s complex systems stop doing their jobs, and everyone else must completely dedicate themselves to meeting their basic biological needs. Throughout the city, people of all walks of life—doctors, policemen, taxi-drivers, prostitutes, children, and so on—become simply “the blind,” undifferentiated in function and indistinguishable from one another. However, Saramago’s point is not merely to show that human society is complex and fragile. Rather, by erasing the society that humans developed in order to meet their specific biological needs, Saramago demonstrates that people can never truly free themselves from these needs: no matter how sincerely we believe ourselves to be the most rational and sophisticated of all animals, we are still animals like any other.

The epidemic of “white sickness” shows how contemporary human life is designed to automate and distance people from their biological needs through technology. The novel begins with a traffic light, which embodies society’s dependence on technology. When one car does not advance, breaking the accepted social rule, the other drivers lash out. But they soon learn that the stopped car’s driver has gone blind, and the rest of the city soon follows. Blindness becomes a norm, creating something like a temporary alteration in human biology: human society is organized around sight, without which people’s social norms and identities collapse entirely. So while the traffic light is initially a universally recognizable and authoritative symbol, it later comes to represent a social order that, while highly complex and developed, was based entirely on a random quirk of human biology: the human eye. Without functioning eyes, people lack uses for the stoplight and many other technologies that previously seemed essential: abandoned cars fill the city, and the protagonists briefly camp out in a store full of electric appliances that they complain cannot “be eaten or worn.” Similarly, while people initially rob banks during the outbreak, money soon becomes useless, which also shows how human society—while built to serve people’s fundamental needs—actually often distracts from those needs. This does not mean human technology is completely useless. One kind of technology, in particular, is designed specifically to help modify and improve humans’ biological resilience: medicine. And yet, in this book, medicine fails to achieve its goals: not only does the ophthalmologist have no idea why the first blind man has lost his sight, but the doctor himself soon becomes blind, too.

However, the frivolity of modern society does not change the fundamental importance of human biology. When public services and social norms evaporate, Saramago shows how this biology takes over and people are reduced to their animal nature. In the quarantined hospital, it is hard to miss the constant depictions of blood, disease, body odor, insect infestation, and especially feces: since the blind cannot reliably find their way to the lavatory or see one another if they defecate outdoors, the entire building eventually becomes covered with an “endless carpet of trampled excrement.” Saramago constantly returns to the smells, textures, and sounds of a hospital full of starving blind people covered in their own filth. He does this not to shock readers, but rather to emphasize that people’s bodily functions are one of the few constants in human life, which makes this biology more essential than people’s identities, jobs, relationships, institutions, technology, and even vision, all of which can disappear without affecting people’s fundamental nature. Similarly, in the hospital, the blind quickly become preoccupied with one thing: food. They steal, hoard, and even kill for it; everything else loses value in comparison, because food is a fundamental need that must be met before any other human need becomes worth pursuing. When the internees are fed, they often next seek out sex and companionship. (But notably, they do this outside the confines of traditional gender roles—for instance, the doctor’s wife becomes a killer, breadwinner, and caregiver all at once—which suggests that such gender roles are just another kind of contingent, fragile social distinction that falls apart under crisis.) Once the blind internees leave the hospital and start living out in the city, they realize that they have been living in the same circumstances as everybody else: people have left their homes and started wandering around the city in groups, looking for food and sleeping wherever they happen to find shelter. In other words, blindness has served as a great equalizer, and there is no longer any difference between the people inside or outside the hospital—just as all people, regardless of status or identity, are united by the same basic needs and biological functions.

In fact, when society disintegrates, the blind not only become the same as all other people: they also become the same as other animals. When interned in the hospital, the blind frequently comment that they feel like animals, and once they make it out into the city, they search the city for anything they can possibly eat alongside packs of dogs that do the exact same thing. When the doctor’s wife gets lost, she is saved not by a human, but by a dog who licks up her tears and soon becomes part of her family. The narrator even calls the “dog of tears” an “animal of the human type,” which makes it absolutely clear that Saramago rejects the notion that humans are inherently superior to or meant to rule over the rest of the animal kingdom. Rather, humans are a certain kind of animal that have developed a certain kind of society around our specific biological needs—but the ripple effects of blindness show that this biological nature is a product of evolutionary history, which could have been different and could even change in the future, and that society is a product of the quirks of human biology.