March 20, 2022

On post-plague disappointment

For my apocalypse book, I’m researching the Black Death. It’s probably the most stereotypically “apocalyptic” event I’m exploring, in terms of its sheer speed and mortality. Between 1347 and 1351, the plague killed somewhere between 30% and 60% of people in Europe and wrecked similar havoc in Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. (Some scholars are starting to think it similarly affected the rest of Africa and parts of East Asia, too.) That’s not 30% to 60% of people who got infected—that’s 30% to 60% of all people, period. 

People at the time interpreted the Black Death as the end of the world. Most of the chronicles and eyewitness accounts I have access to were written by medieval Christians1, and comparisons to biblical plagues and Noah’s flood abound. These writers were positive that once again, God had unleashed his wrath to punish humanity for its sins, and this time, it sure seemed like that punishment was going to culminate in actual extinction. At least after Noah’s flood, chroniclers in Padua wrote, some people were left alive “and the human race was able to recover.”

Despite the vastly different scale of mortality of the Black Death, there are plenty of things about it that are hauntingly familiar to us after two years of our own pandemic: The new funeral regulations, intended to both limit gatherings and speed up the logistics of burial to cope with the sudden crush of bodies; the dramatic increase in the bargaining power of surviving essential workers, such as tenant farmers and servants, to demand higher wages and better conditions, and the decades-long legal backlash that tried to keep them in their place; the blame heaped on marginalized minorities (in medieval Europe’s case, Jews), resulting in violent attacks on their communities; the widespread mental health crisis hovering just below the surface of descriptions of hollowed-out people unable to weep at funerals but continuing to throw weddings and parties, “so that by rekindling a sort of half-happiness they could avoid despair.” All that and more will be in my book, I hope. Today, though, I’d like to reflect on the prevailing feeling so many of these writers had in the years and decades after the Black Death: Disappointment.

The French friar Jean de Venette, writing around 1359, sums it up nicely: If the plague had indeed been sent by God to sweep away sin and spark a new age, “the world, alas, has not been made any better by its renewal. For after the plague men became more miserly and grasping, although many owned more than they had before.” Greed abounded, violence erupted at every scale from brawls to wars, charity and generosity disappeared, and “evil spread like wildfire.” I’m not particularly sympathetic to the specific complaints of de Venette and other writers, who, as part of the religious and political elite, saw sin where we see rising worker power and increased social mobility. But I can so easily identify with him looking around at a world that (in his eyes, anyway) continued to be fallen, that had refused the apocalyptic redemption God had offered, that insisted on learning nothing from its ordeal, and thinking, “What the fuck is wrong with everybody?”

Subscribe now

I’ve had that feeling a lot over the last two years, and I’m sure most of you have had it, too. I had it when my hair stylist/doctor/dentist, at my first appointment in two years, asked why it’d been so long. I had it when I heard sports announcers using their unparalleled public platforms to grouse about Covid safety protocols at the height of the omicron wave. I had it when the expanded child tax credit was allowed to expire in the U.S. I had it when Mexico City tacitly ignored its own rules for when things should close. I had it way back when people first started posting about their pre-vaccine parties and travel on Instagram (and then I promptly got off Instagram and never looked back). I have it every single time “back to normal” is held up as a goal—or worse, an inevitability—instead of a failure. I can’t shake the disbelief that things haven’t changed more, that so many people are apparently willing—eager!—to let the transformative potential of the pandemic evaporate into nothing. That we faced an apocalypse, and we refused to let it renew the world.

One way to read Jean de Venette is that our hope for positive societal transformation in the wake of a plague was always naive; if the Black Death couldn’t do it, measly little Covid never stood a chance. But another way to read him is that society did change, just not in the ways he wanted it to. Workers began to see just how much their bosses’ lives (literally!) depended on them, and they started to demand more and work less. Wealth inequality fell, and people’s general health improved, perhaps because rising wages meant more of the population had access to sufficient and nutritious food—not the case in the century or so of famines and worsening poverty leading up to Black Death. Medieval Christian cultures, at least, became obsessed with the inevitability of death and the importance of preparing for it. No one wanted to return to the days of mass graves and corpses rotting in the street, so communities of care sprung up in the form of guilds and fraternities that saw to the proper and dignified burial of their members. Lasting public health measures like medical checkpoints and quarantines kept the plague at bay for long stretches in the places where they were instituted, like Italy (though when it did manage to get in, it was devastating all over again).

Practically speaking, for all of de Venette’s apocalypse talk, he and the other post-Black Death disappointment scolds didn’t really want a restructuring of the social order. They wanted something much closer to “back to normal”—back to low wages and poverty being considered virtues, back to people accepting their place in an unjust social order, back to no one thinking they deserved more. The ferocity of the laws trying to force people back to work under pre-plague conditions certainly pushed society in that direction, but the fact that England was still passing these kinds of laws in 1388—40 years later!—hints that the new possibilities unleashed by the Black Death were not so easily or quickly suppressed. In that context, de Venette’s disappointment can be seen as a good sign, a sign that things changed a lot more than he was willing or able to see.

Emotionally speaking, however, I think de Venette’s writing does suggest that some amount of post-plague disappointment is inevitable. We all want terrible experiences to have meant something, within whatever our system of meaning is. We all want a tidy moral story that explains what we went through and why. De Venette wanted the plague to wash away a sinful world and replace it with a new, more pious one. I want Covid to not only have revealed the terrible price of all sorts of inequalities, but also put us on a path to fixing them. Otherwise, in both our cases, what was it all for?

The thing is, feeling vaguely disappointed about the ways the world did or didn’t change after a crisis doesn’t actually bring the changes you want any closer. Events like the Black Death open the door to transformation, but they don’t guarantee it, or preordain what form it will take. We are the ones who do the transforming, one small action at a time. I see in de Venette’s passive, elitist disappointment a reminder that by dwelling on what we thought should have happened already, we risk missing what is actually happening now, and what role we can play in it. Disappointment doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It can be the beginning.

Leave a comment