All Things Medieval

I want to make an argument that may not be provable. I’m aware of what evidence there is, and isn’t, for it; I’m aware of how much work it would entail to actually track this down and provide solid evidence in book form. I don’t have the energy. But it’s still worth putting the idea out.

My argument is that between 1400 and 1950, there was constant keen awareness of sudden death, and that this shaped the ethical values of the time. We inherited these ethical values, but since 1950, a different set of forces has been pushing us in another direction. In our time, both views of the world are still active, and they view each other as, at base, an existential threat. From this comes the very real rancor of political discourse.

Of course people were aware of death before that period. Epidemics, famines and wars were always at hand. But the climate was warmer than average; sea passages were open, settlements moved upward, and harvest seasons were long. The main evidence that Europe had become relatively overpopulated is in its ability to absorb the first visitations of the plague without disruption of services. It took a few more cuts of the Grim Reaper to put real pressure on the labor structure.

The bubonic plague continued to revisit until about 1700. The Little Ice Age was at its peak around that time; North America was settled during the coldest period, when the harvests were shorter and the shoreline lower than it had been in pre-Columbian times. (And of course N.A. was depopulated due to a smallpox pandemic.) In Europe, the plague had destabilized the religious social order, so during the 1500s and 1600s, there were many religious wars as the universal rule of the Catholic church broke down.

To grossly oversimplify matters, life in Europe before the plague was relatively easy, but food was in short supply. After the plague, there was more food but life was harder. People were more actively worried about raising the next generation, but they were worried about spontaneous death, not about supplies running out. If a child could survive into adulthood, nobody doubted that he could find a place in the world. His life would be centered around storing summer food for the winter, and around chopping firewood, but there were plenty of trees and lots of land. Keeping babies alive seemed extremely important. We have some indirect evidence in that England passed its first harsh laws against infanticide in the early 1600s.

America was founded during the Little Ice Age’s demographic bust centuries. Its basic cultural values came from the expanding frontier. More people, in the form of babies or in the form of immigrants, could be accommodated. The next generation was needed to take care of those who grew sick or old. Children began working from an early age and grew up fast. De Tocqueville noted in 1830 that the average US birth rate seemed to be about six living children per woman, compared to a lower rate in Europe.

Since 1950, the climate has begun to be relatively warmer than it was during the settlement period. Growing seasons are longer, and hot-climate animals migrate northward. We’re reversing the Little Ice Age in many ways. We’ve also used political means to stop most wars; at the same time, we have eliminated many causes of infant mortality.

If you step back from the history you lived through, and look at it on a larger scale, it’s not that surprising that abortion was legalized about a generation after vaccinations became routine. There was no connection made at the time, but the people who brought about the changes were living in a demographic boom and were abolishing many other sources of death. A centuries-old ethic, which put the lives of newborn infants above all, seemed less relevant.

In today’s political culture wars, “conservatives” look to the past ethics in which all infant life is precious and there will always be enough food to go around as long as everyone learns to work hard. “Progressives” look into an unknown future and see overcrowding: the fish are dying, GMO crops may turn out to be toxic, the oceans will start flooding our cities. The last thing we need is a higher birth rate, they feel. In fact, a higher birth rate threatens the existing lives of adults. We already can’t find work for all of our young adults, now that the frontier is closed and manufacturing has moved to Asia.

And so the really hot-button emotional issue of our time is whether we should legally recognize marriages that, by definition, cannot produce babies. These marriages would provide companionship, sex and stability for existing adults, but would not add to the birth rate. They might help absorb some of the excess birth rate by adopting babies, but they would never add babies, by definition. I believe that at some level, people who are most in favor of same-sex marriage are also aware of overcrowding; if nothing else, you can see quickly that people believe and vote differently based on the relative population of their voting district. The split isn’t regional, it’s city vs. country, with the electoral battles taking place in the suburbs, who could swing either way.

The question I asked myself in 2011 was why people were reacting to fairly low-stakes political issues as though the stakes were extremely high. They were willing to dehumanize other people over disagreement, even when these other people had no more power than they did. My answer, as I finished writing about the Middle Ages, was that the Black Death gave birth to an era in which all new life was precious, while World War II gave birth to an era in which new lives threaten existing lives. That baby born in a slum or trailer might eat MY FOOD.

The health care debate underscores it again. If you haven’t read Ezekiel Emanuel’s Lancet paper on rationing scarce resources, you should. It’s a logical, fair look at how a society might assign scores to the value of life, and infant life scores lower than the life of a 30 year old who can work. This logic is wrong when you’re struggling to fill a bust with a younger generation; it’s pretty irrefutable when you have more than enough people already. We are moving into a Post-Plague world, where plague ethics don’t apply. And, of course, one that is again experiencing global climate shift and may yet see another pandemic to reset our values.

Although I’ve had difficulty keeping up the momentum of this long series on the medieval plague’s effect, I’m going to wrap it up with a short series on why I believe that we have lived in the plague’s world for 600 years, and why it’s ending. When I say “we,” I definitely mean industrialized, European-descent societies: the literal descendants of plague survivors, in most cases.

I believe that we all have an approximate sense of the ratio between “resources” and individual lives; economics may have a mathematical way to express it, I don’t know. But we can roughly “calculate” it based on our experiences. It comes from our experience of how much of everything there is to go around, and we use it to predict how likely we are to get a share. People who grow up in demographic “boom” generations learn to eat fast before the food is all gone, apply early to get the jump on other job seekers, and blend in. People in demographic “bust” generations don’t need to do those things. They can take risks and are more likely to still fall on their feet. They can walk into good-paying jobs and rent nice apartments at cut rates.

The pre-plague world was like a Boom generation. Most people never had quite enough to eat; competition for work was tight; houses couldn’t be built fast enough so they often lived in squalid overcrowded city tenements. The climate was generally warming, so for the few centuries before the plague they were consistently moving northward and upward in altitude, settling closer to tree lines. The post-plague world was more like a Bust generation. The world was growing colder and settlements were moving south and downward, but at the same time, fewer people were pressing into these new settlements. Empty buildings and low prices characterized the new economy.

People’s minds are calibrated by their sense of scarcity or plenty; this happens at a non-verbal level. It’s analogous to an individual’s “set point” of mood or weight; people as a group create “set points” of values based on their expectations of life. Boom people take fewer risks and make sure they’ve secured their share; bust people can be careless about security. Boom people feel like there may not be quite enough; bust people don’t worry. Boom people may feel, like the Mad Hatter, that there’s “no room” at the table. Bust people wave you over to the empty plates.

At a larger level, we’ve been seeing boom and bust values across the centuries. Next: what I mean by that.

For the record, bubonic plague was a major cause of death until the mid-17th century.

Seville had a devastating outbreak in 1647, followed by another, the last, in 1676. London’s last huge plague outbreak occurred between the two in Spain, in 1665.

We know a lot about London’s last visitation because the court official and diarist Samuel Pepys stayed in town and recorded what he saw around him. A century later, Daniel Defoe wrote a fictional account of what the plague had been like, A Journal of the Plague Year. London was never the same again, literally, since during the same time that the plague was ravaging and the wealthy were fleeing to their country homes to avoid it, fire destroyed much of the old medieval city. The oldest buildings in London generally date from the rebuilding effort begun after the fire.

The last remnants of folklore about the plague probably date from the final outbreaks. There’s the song “Ring around a rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” It seems to be talking about symptoms of bubos, the lymphatic swelling characteristic of the disease, and about the belief that smelling good air from flowers might ward off bad air of infection.

Bubonic Plague had a third major outbreak in the 19th century, when scientists could finally determine its cause: the Yersinia pestis bacterium, carried by members of the squirrel/groundhog family. The disease ravaged China and India, but did not create high mortality in Europe or the New World.

People can still die of it, but antibiotic treatment is now effective if it’s diagnosed in time. Get tested if you’re in close contact with or bitten by a squirrel, especially in the Western US.

As the farming situation slowly stabilized in the next century, the plague kept returning to clear out surplus workers. Probably, in every year until the 1600s, someone in Europe had bubonic plague; regional outbreaks occurred without becoming continent-wide events. Other illnesses and weather-related famines took their toll as always.

If Europe had been over-populated for its level of development in 1300, it no longer was. Its level of development sped up after 1400, too. More iron production, more coal mining; more metals of other kinds, more wind and water powered mills; more specialized crafts, more machines to spin, weave and carve; more specialized land use, better crop hybrids. The continent did not again reach a point of feeling like it could not feed its people (barring weather-related famines) for many centuries.

Additionally, the continent’s population was now spilling into the New World. From 1500 to maybe 1950, there was always a sense of some frontier where restless surplus men could go if they weren’t fit for a ladder-climbing traditional rat-race work environment at home. The very existence of a frontier shaped Europe’s mentality, and subsequently, America’s and Australia’s.

People tended to have big families. I want to talk more about this in other ways in future essays, but for now, let’s just look at it economically. There was never a question of five sons growing up and finding no work. (Except for local, temporary downturns, which still happened.) They could go to sea, or emigrate, or head into the city to get job training. If parents could feed ten children, they could feel confident that all ten would find places in the economy.

When the economy is expanding but there are still serious mortality threats, people’s philosophical attitude to individual life is “it is precious.” Each person matters and can fill out the place the world has for him.

This idea became a bedrock notion of Western society. It shaped medicine, farming, education, social class change, and religion. I’ll pick up another thread of life after the Black Death next, but we’ll find that other topics, too, eventually connect to the same idea.