Airborne - Revisiting the Black Death Now
As we settle into a marathon rather than a sprint of Covid-19, the word “plague” is on the rebound. Jill Lepore outlines several in her New Yorker article “Don’t’ Come Any Closer”. She notes that in 1666 people weren’t very different from us as they examined their bodies for possible changes. They prayed, raged and poured over “books that frighted them terribly”. While journalists wonder today whether they should cover the meandering utterances of the president, the British government then thought that banning books would help. People in Britain fled to Hampton Court rather than the Hamptons, and shortages of horses for travel parallel our empty shelves of toilet paper. Instead of Zooming, some people in Italy fled to quieter realms and told the stories of the Boccaccio’s Decameron while in hiding from the Black Death.
It reminded me to look at what Thomas Berry said about that same Black Death in his article, “A New Story”, written in 1978 — the first of many works that influenced a rethinking of theology in many quarters. Berry saw the Black Death as a turning point in human understanding.
The Christian world up to that point, he observed, had been predictable. Seasons arrived and passed in the mediaeval world and it was not without hardship and suffering, but there appeared to be balance and renewal. But in a Europe where a third to a half of the population was wiped out, things changed forever. To many, the Black Death was a punishment from God. That perception enhanced a need for redemption and emphasized personal salvation through repentance. This change in emphasis from reliance on the original creation story happened long before the Protestant Reformation, Berry notes, but the reaction to the plague set in motion the individualism that would later question the power of corporate Catholicism and a move to Protestantism.
The other change of direction was almost like being drawn to a fire in spite of fearing it — a fascination with the cause of the plague that led to exploration and ultimately to the development of modern science. It gave birth to geology, a science that explored the origins of the planet and initiated our ability to move beyond history, Its sister science. paleontology, with its new ways of extracting bones of our ancestors, enhanced our understanding of history even more. The telescope and the microscope gave us entry to new worlds not previously imagined, and we gained a growing understanding that humans as a species evolved from simpler life forms. Our growing consciousness gave us the additional sense of being a species with a right to dominate the earth. Medicine and biology could save us,
Those times resonate today. One the one hand we have thought with confidence that we are in control of the environments that surround us through our growing advances in biological research — but suddenly we’re not. On the other hand, we have individuals who resolutely say they are “washed in the blood of the Lamb” and can go to their megachurches no matter what. When asked whether these folk might put others in danger by getting infected, they simply don’t care - because they are saved. The more secular adherents of capitalism want everything to open up and if that means sacrificing the elderly, even including themselves, — well fine.
The impact of the modern virus is small compared to the loss of life in the Black Death, but today’s news travels with the speed of the virus itself. Viruses have always moved along trade routes. In another New Yorker article, Kate Brown notes that the modern crowding of humans and animals in some parts of the world has contributed to zoonotic disease transmittal not only from east to west, but quite possibly through American megafarms. Their monocultures sent diseases from chickens and livestock to other parts of the world. Viruses have little respect for border or walls.
The poor in crowded cities, Brown notes, are often dependent on foraging on urban borders to find wild animals to eat and survive. Their manufactured factory goods travel the world. More affluent modern traders include people who exchange their boring local lives for more exotic foreign shores on planes and cruise ships — hothouses for viruses to grow and penetrate. We congregate in conference centers, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and some of us even in churches. We’re totally focused on our self created worlds and pay no attention to corona viruses unless we are research scientists. And the news that reaches every point is processed selectively. We like the metaphor of butterfly wings flapping on one side of the world having a direct impact in organizational seminars as a neat idea without applying to us — until it does.
I also can’t help getting Clive Hamilton’s book, Defiant Earth, out of my head. Has Gaia looked around and pondered, “I sent them hurricanes, I sent them floods, I sent them tornadoes, I sent them fires — all with increasing intensity. While the environmentalists moan and the politicians deny or ignore, what do I have to do to get their attention? Are they not seeing what they are doing to despoil the earth? Maybe I should try something that they can’t see but has a universal effect to scare the bejusus out of them”.
One of the effects is that climate change and the Anthropocene have almost disappeared in favour of the viral scene front and centre. The omni-present press can talk of nothing but medical disaster and economic disaster in an endless news cycle and when there is no news, they turn to analysis to assign blame. The battle between economics and health can suck up all the oxygen. If that is isn’t enough, add in the drama of federal versus state. Paying attention to the news these days is a disaster leading to outrage or despair. It’s as though climate changes and its ongoing danger have disappeared. The only odd glimmer that “Hey the air is cleaner now that there are fewer cars on the road” disappears as we now decide that the contamination of the virus isn’t caused only by travel and congregating. It’s in the air.