HISTORICAL OUTLOOK
The social reality of Covid-19 reflects life during the Plague
Back to the future and why nothing has changed
Everything is going to change. Over the last few months, a flurry of Covid-19 related media reports has propagated. Whatever outcome, good or bad, is being forecast, experts across multiple disciplines agree on the fact that the world and society itself will face major disruption-it’s no co-incidence that the terms “pre-” and “post-pandemic” are being thrown around like candy.
In the past, whenever major epidemics threatened the general state of affairs, such as the outbreak of virulent diseases in the Roman Empire, it caused the death of a significant portion of the local population, a direct result of which was the loss of not only essential knowledge and skills, but, most importantly, collective memory. We’re fortunate in that don’t have to share that burden when there is everything from historical eyewitness accounts to popular literature to draw from in order to put the current crisis into context.
Saying that, the 1347–53 outbreak of the Plague in Europe is a fitting metaphor for the problems we are now facing.
Religion, rumours and racism
Having originated in China in 1331 (ironic, in some ways), it spread across Italy, Germany, the Lower Countries and England, managing to wipe out about 70 percent (75 of 220 million) of the then living population. Doctors were stumped, facing a crisis of of hitherto unforeseen extent and scrambling for explanations, consigned to learning by doing whilst facing a disease they had not had to encounter in recent times, the last Plague outbreak having occurred in the 10th century . Religious dissent grew loud as the Church could not provide answers, leading to radical cults like the Flagellants, a group of penitent beggars that went from town to town in large swarms, lashing themselves for supposed transgressions that supposedly caused the Plague, becoming more and more popular. As these were suspected of being disease carriers themselves, people turned against all forms of religious as well as societal order, fleeing cities when they could afford it and leaving the poor to fend for themselves as best they could.
It was an era of mistrust and rampant fear, characterized by racist sentiment (with Jews being herded and burnt across Europe in prescient approximations of the Holocaust yet to come) but also a time of startling self-discovery that directly led to a partial self-empowerment of the working class, the rise of the merchant class as well as the discovery of new tools and work processes that required less human labour in a time where the workforce was depleted.
Any of this sound familiar?
Systemic inequality
For most of us, the fact that the rich were less liable to suffer from the Black Death should come as no surprise. Amazon most recently came under fire for requiring their workers to continue with grueling shifts without providing them with any form of safety equipment whilst making a hefty profit on the backs of the self-same workers. So called front-line employees have now been profiled extensively in the news media yet the talk of honouring their contributions in the health field or the service industry in concrete ways, specifically on a permanent monetary basis still remains a pipe dream. Select politicians across Europe and the US have been clamouring for a universal minimum wage yet beyond financial concessions, one-time lump sums and freebies issued by local organisations rather than the government, nothing has really come of it.
The callous way in which we treat the men and women that make public life run like clockwork even in these dark times is in no ways different to how house servants, cart drivers and house watchmen were treated in London during the Great Plague. In his pseudo-journalistic account of that time, “A Journal of the Plague Year”, novelist Daniel Defoe writes about the way essential workers of his time were forced to endanger themselves in order to keep the risk of infection at a minimum for the rest of society.
One specific passage in his book is reminiscent to the way we take the services of people such as cashiers, cleaners and nurses for granted, without making allowance for the fact that these people do not only place themselves in physical danger for us but help us carry the emotional trauma of all that the current situation entails. In it a man who lost both his wife and children follows burial workers in order to catch a last glimpse of his loved ones and has to be consoled by the selfsame graveyard workers.
[N]o sooner was the cart turned round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise to [the widower], for he at least expected they would have been decently laid in, though indeed he was afterwards convinced that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see the sight but he cried out aloud, unable to contain himself. . . . The buriers ran to him and took him up, and in a little while he came to himself, and they led him away to the Pie Tavern . . . where, it seems, the man was known, and where they took care of him.
-A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
The heroes of our time
During the mid-14th century, orders such as the Franciscans as well as select individuals, including doctors, public servants and police commissioners distinguished themselves as local heroes. These men (and, selectively, women!) rose to the occasion by nursing the afflicted, taking care of orphaned children and boosting public morale.
We have, similarly in our midst, heroes who have done and continue to do much the same, one of the most prominent being the centenarian who was recently knighted by the Queen for raising a Million pounds in charity for Covid-19 research. These harbingers of hope lend truth to the adage found in Albert Camus fittingly titled literary work “The Plague”:“It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Substitute plague with Covid and you’ve got yourself a valid mission statement for the time to come.
Sadly, a lot of fear mongering and fake news has been proliferating on social media, at points obscuring the progress made by scientists and doctors as well as shifting the focus from the spirit of kindness and solidarity referred to above.
Eating bananas, using hydroxycloroquine or even more hilariously, injecting hand sanitizing gel directly into ones veins have been suggested as possible miracle cures for the infected.
Conspiracy theories have been ripe, from the eerily plausible sounding one that the virus outbreak in Wuhan may have been a deliberate attempt at sabotage by the Chinese government, seeing as a biomedical research facility was close to the wet market that served as Stage Zero of the pandemic to the more ridiculous proposition that business tycoon Bill Gates instituted the catastrophe on purpose. We’ve even got our very own Flagellants, with the secretive South Korean cult Shinchonji coming under pressure for initially refusing to give the Korean government a list of possibly infected church members.
floods of snakes and toads, snows that melted mountains, black smoke, venomous fumes, deafening thunder, lightning bolts, hailstones and eight-legged worms that killed with their stench (medieval explanations for the Plague)
Even our day to day life has been affected on a grand scale.
People are afraid to even slightly graze against each other in a public space, are vocal and sometimes militantly aggressive about what they perceive as an invasion of their personal sphere and often confrontational when seeing people not adhering to societal guidelines, such as the wearing of masks or the proliferation of larger groups.
At a time when daily life as we know it has been disrupted and human contact limited, the wave of solidarity for the Portland protests as well as the Black Lives Matter movement across the world are a clear sign of the times. In history, a slew of dis-inhibited feelings centred around a known catastrophe-like the plague-merged into a kind of collective spasm, a revolt against existing social orders. The French Peasant revolt of 1358 and, more prominently, the English Peasants’ revolt of 1381 is emblematic for this kind of action.
For people heartened by what they consider a potential spark of new humanism in troubled times, it’s still important to remember that a social revolution under these kinds of circumstances is something of a wild card. Yellow fever outbreaks during the 19th century actually helped bolster up the institution of slavery in New Orleans whereas it helped black slaves gain their freedom in Haiti.
This kind of trauma changes us. Reminding humans of our mortality, plagues throw up existential questions that can lead to deep cultural shifts.
Bolstering the corporate world
At the onset of this article, I briefly mentioned the impact Covid-19 has had on Amazon workers yet the real issue is how the retail giant’s stock has more than quadrupled in spite of, or, rather, because of the crisis. At a time when shops have had to close, Amazon has gotten a boost from consumers stocking up on everything ranging from essentials to luxury items. This isn’t different from the way big business profited during the Plague-the largest companies in Europe at the time actually managed to consolidate their market share and emerged stronger than ever from the crisis.
The concentration of that much power in the hands of a select few was to have catastrophic consequences. The Catholic Church’s use of monopolistic firms to collect indulgences led Martin Luther to condemn the state of trade in a tract he published in 1524. As such, his later call for religious independence is tied to anti-mercantile sentiment which had its roots in the Black Death.
Today, we see society being deeply mistrustful of the corporate model and championing small businesses, giving way to the rise of the green movement, Occupy Wall Street as well as Extinction Rebellion.
Covid-19 has given us a lot of food for thought-at the verge of a global climate crisis, the pandemic has led to transformation in the use of technology, sparked a debate on the future of the workplace and opened our eyes to the injustice some members of our society have to face on a daily basis. There is room for positive improvement, a chance to champion the sustainable lifestyle we need in order to save this planet whilst creating a social utopia free of classism and racism yet there is also the danger of continuing corporatism and protectionism at a time when politicians interpret safety first as thinking nationally rather than internationally.
In the shattering of norms to come, it may be the catchword of the times that will set us on the right track-solidarity. Because in all aspects-work, finance and health, we will always be inextricably tied together-for better or worse.
Sources
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