Pandemic Fault Lines: The Black Death in the Age of Covid

Abstract

Pandemic Fault Lines:The Black Death in the Age of Covid Dorsey Armstrong It will be a surprise to no one that in this current time of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people have turned their attention to earlier pandemics in an attempt to make sense of the current global crisis. The turn to the past provides a context or historical framework into which our present circumstances may be fitted, a comparative measure alongside which similarities and differences may be gauged. This look backward to earlier moments of devastating illness and death, oddly, provides a kind of solace: humanity has suffered through this kind of catastrophe before, and we have come out the other side. We are living through a pandemic that is slightly different in both degree and kind from, for example, either the 1918 influenza outbreak or the Second Plague Pandemic (commonly referred to as the "Black Death" during its initial outbreak in the European world in the fourteenth century), but by many measures of comparison, Covid-19 is less lethal and less devastating than these earlier pandemics. Modern science and medicine have given us knowledge and tools that, when used correctly, are able to slow the spread of the virus and may be used (often successfully) to treat those who become ill; the rapid development of vaccines has given us the means to lessen the virus's transmission and lethality. But by some other measures of comparison, however, Covid-19 is worse than any of these earlier pandemics. While modern advances have given us weapons to fight the disease, the disease has also revealed how much of our modern infrastructure and social organization is alarmingly fragile. Indeed, as I suggest below, the experience of pandemic disease in a technologically-advanced world such as ours unsheathes—and brandishes—a double-edged sword. When the first wave of the Black Death struck medieval Europe, it both revealed and exacerbated serious flaws in the spheres of religion, economics, politics, and more; so too did it seriously impact physical infrastructure, trade in essential [End Page 1] goods, and have a negative effect on social order. In the mid-fourteenth century, much of medieval Europe was more interconnected and was becoming more urbanized than it had been since the time of the Roman Empire; it was a world on the point of transitioning out of a primarily rural, subsistence, agrarian culture to one in which craft and trade specialization was significantly increased, a newly burgeoning merchant class was on the rise, and a cash economy existed alongside but was gaining ground on barter-and-trade. When the Black Death disrupted these social and economic advances, medieval society was not so far advanced that the majority of the population were unable to adapt and shift their activities, livelihoods, crafts, and trades (briefly) slightly backward toward a more localized, subsistence economy. By contrast, the flaws and fault lines the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed about our modern society—more specialized, more globalized, more mechanized, more urbanized, and more critically dependent on those factors to continue functioning as they have in order for us to continue—suggest that it is our reliance on modern advances in science and technology that could, ironically, be our undoing. It is a point that is made explicitly in Robert Harris's 2019 novel The Second Sleep, a story that at first appears to be set in the Middle Ages, but as we slowly learn, is actually set in a post-catastrophic future. According to the novel, in the year 2025 the character of Nobel Laureate Peter Morgenstern issues the following warning: We regard our society as having reached a level of sophistication that renders it uniquely vulnerable to total collapse. The gravity of the threat has increased vastly since 2000, with the transfer of so much economic and social activity to cyberspace . . . a prolonged general interruption to computer networks . . . would lead within 24 hours to food and fuel shortages—especially in urban areas—a dramatic curtailing of money supply (due to the loss of ATMs, credit card transactions, and online banking), communications and information breakdowns, transport shutdown, panic buying, mass exodus, and civil disorder . . . 30 years ago, the average...