A Plague Is an Apocalypse. But It Can Bring a New World.
July 21, 2020 | NEW YORK magazine
It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.
It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind—surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-fourteenth century. Smallpox arrived in America with the first Europeans and went on, with several other imported diseases, to wipe out up to 90 percent of the native population in a relatively short amount of time—millions and maybe tens of millions died.
They were horrible, harrowing deaths. The virus Variola major incubated for two weeks, followed by an intense few days of fever, before the pustules emerged: first in the mouth, throat, and nasal passages, then all over the body, including around the eyes, where they often caused blindness. A human being would struggle for perhaps ten days, covered in these sores, erupting in bloody and pus-filled bumps—and then, with luck, the illness subsided. The sores healed; the pockmarks, highly visible on the face, remained. The residue from these sores was also terribly infectious and lingered on surfaces or cloth for years—but scholars now consider the vast majority of deaths, just like those from COVID-19, to have been from human-to-human transmission.
Much of the terror of this experience is lost to us moderns because a great deal of the death and suffering occurred before Europeans were even able to witness and record it (though, of course, the trauma for the indigenous reverberated for centuries). But we do know why the toll was so high. Those Native Americans had been the first to discover this continent and, with it, their own sort of American dream—thousands of years before Europeans imagined theirs. They had first arrived, probably over the Bering Land Bridge connecting Alaska and Russia, around fifteen thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, and they found a whole new world, with no humans at all, packed with huge beasts relatively easy to kill with spears, vast prairies, and natural resources that allowed a vibrant hunter-gatherer population to grow as they conquered a virgin continent. It’s not hard to imagine how miraculous this must have felt in the collective memory of these peoples: a long human journey through the bleakest of landscapes into a land of astonishing fecundity—and no human competition.
But because they were often hunter-gatherers, with only a partial reliance on agriculture, they appear to have had little knowledge or experience of plague and no contact with any of the epidemics that had, by then, ravaged Europeans and Eurasians for a few millennia. They domesticated fewer animals and had developed some immunities to many bugs they encountered in their environment.
In this respect, they were blissfully typical of most humans in prehistory. Our species seems never to have experienced epidemic diseases for the vast majority of our time on Earth, encountering them only when we settled down, formed stable, concentrated communities, and started farming and domesticating animals for food. Plagues were usually a function of diseases that jumped from precisely those animals in close proximity and spread through concentrations of the human population in settlements, villages, towns, and cities as civilization began. Humans lived in more intimate relations with animals; their settlements compounded filth, infected water, fleas, and excrement, human and animal. We were unknowingly creating a petri dish and calling it home.
We are wrong, therefore, to think of plague entirely as a threat to civilization. Plague is an effect of civilization. The waves of sickness through human history in the past five thousand years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel. What made the American plague of the sixteenth century so brutal was that it met a virgin population with no immunity whatever. The nightmare that humans had been dealing with and adapting to in Europe and Asia for millennia came suddenly to this continent all at once, and the population had no defense at all. The New World became a stage on which all the accumulated viral horrors of the Old World converged.
That’s why we live in a genocidal graveyard. We always have. But if plague was created by mass urban living, and spread through trade and travel, and made much more likely with every new foray into virgin territory, then this story is far from over because those stories, of course, are far from over as well. As the human population reaches an unprecedented peak, as cities grow, as climate change accelerates environmental disruption, and as globalization connects every human with every other one, we have, in fact, created a near-perfect environment for a novel pathogen-level breakout. COVID-19 is just a reminder of that ineluctable fact and that worse outbreaks are almost certain to come. Compared with past epidemics, this one is, mercifully, relatively mild in its viral impact, even though its cultural and political effects may well be huge. Compared with future ones, against which we may also have no immunity at all, it could serve as a harbinger: we could be the next generation to discover a promised land, only to have it taken brutally and terrifyingly away.
Plagues have often been catalyzing events, entering human history like asteroids hitting a planet. They kill shocking numbers of people and leave many more rudderless, coping with massive loss, incalculable grief, and, often, social collapse. They reorder the natural world, at least for a time, as human cities and towns recede and animal life reemerges and microbes evolve and regroup. They suspend a society in midair and traumatize it, taking it out of its regular patterns and intimating new possible futures. In some cases, a society redefines itself. In others, trauma seems the only consequence.
Imagine, for a moment, what confronted the understandably complacent Romans of the second century CE. Out of the blue, their unparalleled civilization was beset by a disease that they had never known before and that began killing people in staggering numbers. For much of Roman history, they had lived in a near-ideal climate: warm, wet, and relatively stable. Trade was growing, wealth was accumulating, and globalization—via trade across the Indian Ocean and new roads connecting all parts of the empire—was reaching a peak. But in 43 BCE, the first climate shock came, as a volcanic eruption from as far away as Alaska prompted a sudden cold spell, and then, during the second and third centuries, a far more variable and colder climate set in, prompting distant animal species, with their own viruses, to move territory, creating new pathways for pathogens to break out of their familiar habitats.
The disease burden among Romans was already high and getting higher, as Kyle Harper has explored in his groundbreaking book The Fate of Rome. Bigger settlements and cities, combined with appalling hygiene (open-cesspool toilets were usually located within the house) and close proximity with domesticated animals, created a network of danger zones. Malaria was a constant, diarrhea ubiquitous; tuberculosis became more common; leprosy arrived and stayed. Some viruses—like Tatera poxvirus and a few of its relatives—were carried by only a single species, such as camels or naked-soled gerbils, but they could jump species in certain circumstances, from animals to humans if any were nearby, and then from human to human.
When the inevitable epidemic arrived, in what was likely a form of smallpox, it was one of the deadliest enemies the Romans had ever faced. Its symptoms were, in Harper’s words, “fever, a black pustular rash, conjunctival irritation, ulceration deep in the windpipe, and black or bloody stools.” The asymptomatic period was about ten days, easily allowing those infected to travel with no one knowing, and death often came within a week or two. By 172 CE, what is now known as the Antonine plague had devastated the Roman military and killed somewhere around one out of every ten people in the Roman Empire. It came and went for at least the better part of a decade, culling the population mercilessly.
Rome staggered on at first, rebuilding and repopulating, and seemed to recover. But as the climate churned, another pathogen wrought havoc, a virus Harper suggests may have been related to Ebola, which caused bloody eyes, a blo
ody esophagus, and bloody diarrhea. This one hit a society already weakened, and this time Rome struggled to survive. Mercifully, there was an epidemiological reprieve in the following centuries, allowing some population recovery. But then an extraordinary series of volcanic eruptions in the year 536 shifted the odds again. The volcanic activity was greater than at any point in the past three thousand years, spewing a massive amount of debris into the atmosphere, clouding the sun for over a year, destroying crops from China to Ireland, and, once again, producing shifts in microbial and animal behavior. Procopius, a Byzantine historian, noted: “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.”
It was likely this sudden weather shift that rebooted human epidemics in the sixth century. Harper notes that volcanic, climate, and weather events affect a whole variety of species. Among them, crucially, are rodents, who may respond by moving out of their accustomed habitat to find warmer or wetter territory, and who naturally carry with them their own viruses and bacteria. A current scholarly hypothesis is that it was probably Chinese marmots, carrying a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, that, in these cold years, moved territory and transferred this pathogen to other rodent populations they interacted with, likely by sharing fleas. Among these new carriers were the enterprising and highly mobile black rats, often called ship rats because of their propensity to follow grain and food across the oceans. Scientists have also discovered a mutation in Y. pestis in just a single protein-coding gene that emerged, they believe, right before the Roman outbreak in the rat population, making the rodent disease suddenly more transmissible via fleas.
And soon enough, those black rats arrived in the Roman port of Alexandria. They carried with them their own parasite, a flea that lived on the rats’ blood and could survive up to six weeks without a host—making it capable of enduring long sea voyages. And as the bacteria spread among the rats, and their population began to collapse, the fleas, desperate for food, sought alternatives. Living very close to the rats, humans were an easy target. Before too long, the bacterium was everywhere, because, once in human blood, it could also be spread via droplets in human breath. For several days after infection, you were asymptomatic; then grotesque black buboes appeared on your body—swollen lymph nodes near where the fleas had bitten. Death often came several days later.
John of Ephesus noted that as people “were looking at each other and talking, they began to totter and fell either in the streets or at home, in harbors, on ships, in churches, and everywhere.” As he traveled in what is now Turkey, he was surrounded by death: “Day by day, we too—like everybody—knocked at the gate to the tomb.… We saw desolate and groaning villages and corpses spread out on the earth, with no one to take up [and bury] them.” The population of Constantinople was probably reduced by between 50 and 60 percent. The first onslaught happened so quickly the streets became blocked by corpses, the dead “trodden upon by feet and trampled like spoiled grapes… the corpse which was trampled, sank and was immersed in the pus of those below it,” as John put it.
This must have seemed like the end of the world. For most, there was no other explanation. To have the skies go dark for more than a year, and then to see a hideous disease fell half your family and friends, destroying agriculture, city and town life, and religious practices, was an extraordinary trauma. Even the countryside was afflicted, because the rats could scurry and survive anywhere there was food, and, at the same time, the failed harvests following the year of darkness led to widespread malnutrition, weakening immune systems. Imagine living in a city that, only a couple of years previously, had had twice the population: the empty streets, the vacant houses, the silence, and the near madness of the survivors, stricken with PTSD, crippled by grief, desperate for food.
This time, Rome simply could not recover, its armies laid low by disease, its finances depleted, its borders increasingly insecure, its population cut by half. What have sometimes been disparagingly referred to as the Dark Ages were caused, then, by the construction of an advanced, networked, sophisticated civilization and its subsequent destruction by microbes you couldn’t even see.
This kind of trauma, the historical record shows, changes us. Reminding humans of our mortality, plagues throw up existential questions that can lead to deep cultural shifts. As the first plagues hit Rome, for example, Christians were often blamed, and the cult of Apollo reemerged. But as the viral and bacterial hits kept coming, these plagues proved to be a tipping point in the move from the old gods to a new one. Christianity showed itself able to assuage the existential angst of constant death in a way the old religions couldn’t. Better still, it contained, as Harper notes, a socially useful network “among perfect strangers based on an ethic of sacrificial love.” And the Christian willingness to tend to the sick, even in a plague, impressed others. The plague seemed to force Roman society to shake off old patterns, like paganism, and seek new ones, like Christianity.
Centuries later, the Native Americans, similarly, saw smallpox as they saw most terrible events: through the prism of their gods and cosmologies. And as the unimaginable toll mounted, and the invaders seemed spared from the worst, many began to see the disease as some kind of proof of their own iniquity or to believe their gods had forsaken them. Their healing ceremonies and rituals, which sometimes included saunas followed by plunges into icy water, failed again and again. In his masterpiece, Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill poignantly notes reports of unprecedented suicides in their ranks and even the abandonment of newborns, as Native Americans lost faith in their own civilization and gods.
And plagues drive people crazy. You might call them mass-disinhibiting events. It’s not hard to see why. When the plague returned to a fast-repopulating Europe in the fourteenth century, in the Great Mortality known as the Black Death, up to 60 percent of Europeans perished in an astonishingly short amount of time. When normal life has been completely suspended, and when you don’t know if you’ll be alive or dead in a week’s time, people act out.
A cultish sect, which had first arisen earlier in Italy, emerged in Germany, for example, called the flagellants. These half-naked protesters traveled from town to town on foot in pilgrimages, atoning for the sins they believed had caused the plague, and whipping themselves bloody and raw as penance, in bizarre public rituals that drew big crowds. They rejected the established Church, claimed to have direct access to Jesus and Mary, disrupted Masses, and, as time went by, radicalized still further, becoming increasingly populated by the poor and ever more anti-Semitic. Forbidden to take a bath, shave, or change clothing on their pilgrimages, they also doubtless became unwitting spreaders of the disease as they moved from place to place and masses of panicked penitents greeted them.
Jew hatred, which had been percolating for several centuries, exploded. In the fear and panic of the plague, rumors were started about a Jewish conspiracy to wipe out Christendom. Jews did this by poisoning wells, the slur posited, and in response, pogroms became even more severe than in the past. In Basel, for example, as the writer John Kelly notes in his book The Great Mortality, there was a grotesque prefiguring of the twentieth-century Holocaust when a wooden house was built on an island to contain all the Jews in the city, who were then forced into it, locked in, and set aflame as people watched. Jews were bludgeoned to death; they were burned at the stake.
It was as if a plague gave people both an excuse and a license to act out their ugliest impulses. Pope Clement VI issued a bull condemning the violence, making the rather obvious point that “it cannot be true that the Jews… are the cause… of the plague… for [it] afflicts the Jews themselves.” But this was not about reason; it was about scapegoating and a sense that anything was permissible as catastrophe struck.
Plagues do not usually unite societies; they often break them apart in this way. Around the turn of the twentieth century, for example, Asian immigrants were blamed for an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco and Honolulu; in 1918, enterprising xenophobes settled
on Spain as the source of the new and deadly flu and called it the Spanish Lady, to add a soupçon of misogyny. In the polio outbreaks at the beginning of the past century, immigrants from southern Europe were scapegoated. In general, the wealthy escape from cities in plague times, minorities are blamed, the poor revolt, families are torn apart, and cruelty abounds.
Social class comes to the fore. One estimate of the deaths in 1348–49 found only 27 percent of the fatalities among the wealthy, around 42 to 45 percent among priests, and from 40 to as high as 70 percent among the peasantry. Family members were abandoned in their beds, crime increased, thieves stripped victims of clothes, and people ripped the lead off dead neighbors’ roofs. One cleric, Kelly tells us, became known as William the One-Day Priest because he robbed people for six days and celebrated Mass on the seventh.
Some responded to the outbreak by withdrawing from general society in small groups committed to purer, simpler, more abstemious diets to ward off the disease. Others went in the opposite direction. In the words of the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, some “maintained that an infallible way to ward off this appalling evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full… gratifying all one’s cravings… and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke.” Kelly cites John of Reading, a monk who noted that priests, “forgetful of their profession and rule… lusted after things of the world and the flesh.”
And with a literally existential event taking place all around them, fourteenth-century Europeans shifted in their spirituality as the Romans had done before them. Just as the sixth-century plague had finished off the old religion of the Roman gods and brought the final triumph of Christianity, so a newly personal and mystical variety of that religion replaced the more institutional one. Sects from the lower classes began to emerge—like the Lollards in England, who rejected key Catholic doctrines and translated the Bible into English. In these rebellious religious subcultures, the seeds of the Reformation were sown.
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