Same story, different plague
In trying to make sense of the world today, there’s much comparison to the Spanish Flu of 1918. We’re shown old-timey photos of nurses tending to men on stretchers, families (and cats!) masked up, policemen scolding the maskless.
I’ve noticed that the media likes to reminisce about this time as if it’s our only reference point to a sickness this vast and devastating.
Millions dead! Unfathomable loss of life! People who also didn’t like masks!
But even by 1918, the situations and behaviors the media is drawing parallels to were old, old news.
It’s widely known (but often forgotten) that plagues have ravished civilization since the beginning of time. 5,000 years ago, a prehistoric Chinese village was wiped out by one. Ancient Athens, the Roman Empire – both experienced massive plagues. A plague was thought to have brought down the Incan and Aztec empires. Even America suffered bouts of smallpox that took out a good chunk of the population. And of course, there’s the granddaddy of all plagues – the Black Death of the 14th century.
As I watched the news one night, I got to thinking about what life might have been like in those times compared to ours. So I went where all smart people go when they need perspective – the history books. But I didn’t want to read about this through the eyes of a historian. I wanted a first-person account of daily life. So after digging around, I picked up a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1772 and detailing events of London’s Bubonic Plague of 1665. There are many questions of its authenticity as a work of nonfiction (Defoe was just a boy when the plague hit), and many historians speculate the account is instead based on his uncle’s journals. For my purposes as an armchair anthropologist, this was enough of an endorsement.
It turned into a fascinating read. The writing itself wasn’t as interesting as the meticulous detail about the experience, from house numbers to individual names to casualty reports. What’s even more interesting though, is that I went into this book as a tourist would – dropping into a moment of time and expecting to some memorable tidbits. Instead, I came out a fully-fledged voyeur. I couldn’t put it down because the similarities to our current situation were staggering.
Some highlights:
The church massaging numbers to quell fear and hide their disastrous response
People turning to quacks and conmen for a quick fix
The rich fleeing to the countryside and inadvertently infecting innocent people at their destinations
Substantially higher death tolls among the poor, the vulnerable, and the “other”
Frantic (and misguided) closing and re-opening of borders
Complete ignorance about how transmission might be happening
Repeated flaunting of stay-at-home orders
Spikes of infection following holidays
False hope after a quiet period that led to an even worse second wave.
Utter hysteria about food and resources
Doesn’t that sound like a CNN “greatest hits” of the past 6 months? And yet, the news today still carries itself with this weird sense of disbelief. How did we get here, they wonder?
I suppose I shouldn’t have been so naive. After all, there’s a reason we keep saying that history repeats itself. I guess I just … forgot. That’s easy to do in our world sometimes. We’re surrounded by technology that keeps those thoughts at a distance. Technology that parcels life into 15-second increments. It’s hard enough to remember what happened 24 hours ago, let alone the past 500 years. That’s the price of innovation, I guess.
But technology, science, medicine, even art – those are just artifacts of progress, not progress itself. Walmart, Teslas and iPhones alone cannot insulate us from the past. Only we can do that. Whether we wear a mask or not, vote red or blue, the past is ubiquitous. The least we could do is stop acting like we’ve outsmarted it.
A few days after I finished the book, I got my lab results back from 23 and Me. Here’s something interesting. At the top of the ancestry section it said:
“If every person living today could trace his or her maternal line back over thousands of generations, all of our lines would meet at a single woman who lived in eastern Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago.”
Given all the tension with race today, it’s beyond comprehension that everyone on the planet shares the same DNA. Meaning that physically, we’re just infinite replicas of each other, from cavemen to plague survivors to the next Steve Jobs.
What this report didn’t tell me though (but that DeFoe’s book reminded me of), is that every one of us shares the human condition. The drive to be healthy and happy. The desire for autonomy and independence. A rebellious streak. And a deep fear of the unknown.
We’re so very lucky to live in modernity. Which means it’s fragile and we need to protect it. But, despite our desire to believe and behave otherwise, we also need to remember that it’s a big, beautiful illusion.