The End of Normal

A 21st century plague is exposing the fragility of our society.

As plague-infested bodies arced over the walls of Kaffa, the occupying Genoise must have felt very far from home. In the preceding decades, Genoa had created a vast trading empire across the Mediterranean. Known as one of the two torches of Italy, the Genoise expanded further east in their endless search for riches. However, their quest for fortune brought them into contact with one of history’s most implacable enemies, the Mongol empire. Unfortunately for the unlucky inhabitants of Kaffa, the bodies that littered the streets planted the seeds of one of history’s greatest tragedies, Yersinia Pestis, colloquially known as the Black Death.

The scenes at the docks as masses of citizens tried to flee onto a small number of boats must have been horrific. In the preceding days, the Mongol Army purportedly weaponized plague that was sweeping through their camps by hurling bodies into the beleaguered city. Pestilence was ravaging the city, and a hungry Mongol horde waited just outside. One can almost imagine the melee of desperate people trying to board ships to return them to Italy. Little did they know, human passengers were not the only inhabitants of the vessels. Deep in the bowels of the galleys, plague-infested rats lurked. Rather than escaping the chaos, those fleeing Genoise galleys brought one of the greatest human calamities the world has ever known to Italy and the rest of Western Europe.

“There are, in fact, two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” ― Hippocrates

The plague changed Europe for generations. Prior to the mid-14th century, Europe found itself trapped in a Malthusian Equilibrium. Overpopulation halted scientific advances and left wages stagnant. The land was the ultimate source of wealth, and most peasants were bound to both land and lord at a fixed wage. The Black Death radically altered European life and society for the next century. Wages for Europe’s lower classes began a steady increase post-1350 as the plague precipitously reduced the supply of labour.

Some historians have argued that the plague brought about the end of feudalism. Labour shortages forced the nobility to compete for workers while many farms, estates, and hamlets fell into abandonment. The supply of labour rather than land became the driving factor in the medieval European economy. Yersinia Pestis reshaped European society in ways that none could have foreseen. Traditional authorities such as king and church weakened in the eyes of the European peasantry as they were revealed to be entirely impotent against a disease that respected neither God nor royal authority.

The First Pandemic of the 21st Century Travelled via Boeing 747s Rather than Galleys.

Many will call it hyperbole to compare the Black Death of the 14th century to COVID-19. I beg to differ; social change is not directly correlated with the case-fatality rate. Yersinia Pestis and COVID-19 are vastly different illnesses, but both carry the potential to reshape society, politics, and culture. The world is in the early stages of a crisis that will convulse every country on earth. The 14th century was an almost entirely decentralized agrarian economy in contrast to today’s highly interconnected systems of banking, trade, and commercial goods. One must ask, if a virus that appeared three months ago can shut down global society; how much worse will catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse be?

In a particular light, the nascent Genoise trading empire resembles a precursor to globalization, but their efforts don’t even hold a candle to the 21st century. Capitalism and its twin industrialization have spread across the world with unprecedented rapidity and rapaciousness. Cities from Jakarta to Nairobi now sport high-rise skyscrapers while stock exchanges span every region of the world. COVID-19 offers an extraordinary chance to ask, at what cost have we sold our societies and wellbeing to the globalized capitalist economy? What life forms, ways of life, and ecosystems have we sacrificed in the endless quest for profit and consumer goods?

By 1998 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock that has been maintained since the end of the Second World War to 14 minutes from midnight, marking the furthest that humanity had ever stepped back from the edge of apocalypse. The Cold War was over, the world was rapidly democratizing, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe appeared to be non-existent. It seemed that humanity might be on the precipice of a new golden age, unmarred by the danger of civilizational destruction brought on by the conflict of two superpowers. Democracy and capitalism had triumphed. Some prominent thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama even theorized that the world might have reached “the end of history” with liberal democracy serving as the pinnacle of human achievement and the final form of government.

The Doomsday Clock now stands at 100 seconds from midnight, a pandemic is ravaging our society, and the world is rapidly beginning to experience the initial effects of a warming climate. Most animal species are in decline, and we are currently witnessing a mass die-off of the world’s insects. In the preceding two decades, the United States has invaded two countries, bombed five, suffered a financial meltdown, and looks poised to experience a second. Wages for average workers have declined, and our political system is increasingly veering towards a neo-fascism unhindered by facts or empathy.

Now for the bad news. Due to the world’s complete inaction (and outright denial) of climate change for the past 40 years, the next 40 are looking to be increasingly catastrophic. By 2030 we can expect an ice-free arctic; by 2050, extreme heatwaves will regularly devastate Africa, Asia and North America, causing thousands of deaths and further eroding quality of life. Wildfires will become endemic in the Pacific Northwest and droughts will plague arid regions of the world. The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the nightmare we face was entirely avoidable. Humanity failed it’s greatest and most substantial test, self-preservation.

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” — Milton Friedman

The Black Death reshaped European society, and COVID-19 has the potential to reshape ours. People have lost trust in traditional institutions, and trust in governments will undoubtedly begin to wane as country after country is forced to choose between mass consumerism or mass graves. We have reached the end of the post-world war era. It is likely too late to save ourselves from catastrophic climate impacts and the mass die-off of a vast number of species on our planet. There may, however, be a quickly fading glimmer of hope that we can avert the very worst-case scenarios. That will require rewriting what normal looks like for billions of people, and it’s an open question as to whether we are up to the task.

Originally published on Tersum on April 10, 2020