I was 35 minutes into my conversation with Patrick Wyman when he scared the shit out of me.
I’d called Wyman — a European historian focused on the end of the Roman Empire and the world it left behind — to discuss his piece in Mother Jones
on how societies hold together or fall apart. But like every
conversation seems to these days,it quickly turned to plagues and
pandemics. Wyman brought up the mid-1300s bubonic plague that basically
cut Europe’s population in half. Here’s what, in Wyman’s telling, Europe
looked like on the eve of the Black Death.
At the end of a long period of economic expansion and population
growth, wages were low and serfs were struggling to get by. Inequality
had soared as a small cadre of wealthy elite spent heavily on luxuries.
The climate, after a long and stable period, was entering a volatile
shift. Oh, yeah, and in the decade before the pandemic, a group of
historically massive companies had overexposed themselves and gone
bankrupt, triggering an economic crisis.
We
sat for a minute with what he just said, both of us aware of the
parallels and neither of us particularly comfortable with them. But then
he laughed. I did too. It’s dark. I’m terrified. But what else can you
really do?
It’s easy to feel powerless right now. We’re stuck inside, watching the confirmed coronavirus
case count climb and waiting to find out if any of our social
distancing can work, or if we’re already too late. And I’ve started to
wonder if we’re all just sort of stuck on the wheel of history,
believing we’re shaping our society’s destiny, but more just sort of
dragged along in an inevitable cycle. Maybe we need to accept that those
people who thought they built a good, stable society were really just
beneficiaries of dumb luck — born at a place and time when the wheel is
on its way up, rather than during its inevitable fall back down?
Fortunately, Wyman — who, unlike me, has a deep knowledge of history
— had a different take, one that’s both more damning of where we are
right now but, ultimately, more hopeful about where we can go next.
We discussed those hopes, his piece “How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?,”
how pandemics have changed societies historically, and how the Romans
might have succeeded (or failed) at handling the coronaviruses of their
era. This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
A recurring theme in your work on the Roman Empire is, basically, that what you learned in high school is wrong: As shocking as they were both at the time and now, the famed barbarian invasions that sacked Rome didn’t end the empire
— they showed how far it had already deteriorated. In your essay, you
apply that thinking to our modern United States. How does it apply here,
with COVID-19?
Crises like these — whether it’s a crisis of political legitimacy, or
a pandemic that demands response, or some kind of major external war
that crops up out of nowhere — the chances are good that whatever snaps
under the pressure of that crisis was probably straining already, was
probably barely chugging along already. There’s some kind of deep
problem that a crisis is going to expose, bring to the fore, and then
break very dramatically for everybody to see.
We see the crisis and we see the break — and we equate the two. We’re
narrative creatures. That’s how we understand the world. We understand
things as a story with a climax, and the break has to be the climax.
It’s very hard for us to turn a more analytical eye and see the
collection of very small things that lead up to a systemic break. It’s
just difficult. But these disasters don’t create these trends so much as
they supercharge them.
What kind of breaks, systemic failures, and supercharged trends
are you seeing with our response to COVID-19? Your point about systems
breaking that were already stretched thin reminded me of these reports
that somewhere between 90 and 98 percent of our nation’s ICU beds are
being used all the time.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. When you have a
society that has optimized for some ideal of efficiency or shareholder
value, as opposed to redundancy or resiliency, this is the kind of
result that you get. From my point of view, that amounts to a break.
Something like repeatedly cutting ICU capacity in order to deliver more
shareholder profits, that looks like a broken system to me, or at least
one in which the incentives are not necessarily aligned with public
welfare.
Put on a slightly different scale, if you have an economy that’s set
up such that having to reduce consumer spending in order to preserve
public health places such a massive strain on it, there’s probably
something underlying that’s unhealthy about that system as a whole. If
your system of political economy is not healthy enough to withstand a
shock like that or respond to that, something’s wrong. If we end up with
20 or 25 percent unemployment, if we end up with large numbers of
people who can’t eat, who are going to be paying thousands and thousand
of dollars from medical bills if and when they get sick … those are
systemic crises that grew out of problems that existed before the
corona virus.
Sticking with this theme of “crises don’t break societies, they
reveal what’s already broken,” how does that pertain to other
world-changing historical events?
Take the “Black Death,”
a bubonic plague in the mid-1300s that killed somewhere between 40 and
60 percent of the population. To someone living in it, it seemed like a
massive breakdown. But if you look at the conditions in Europe in the
run-up to the plague, you’ll see the pandemic supercharged a lot of
trends that were already in progress.
So the Black Death came at the end of a long period of economic
contraction that had begun way back in toward the end of the 1200s.
Before that, there had been this long period of economic efflorescence
in high medieval Europe of “the commercial revolution,” where
long-distance trade spread rapidly, lots more money was in circulation,
the economy grew. But it was built on demographic growth; some
populations doubled or even tripled throughout a lot of Europe.
And that meant that by the end of the 13th century (1200s)
practically all of the arable land was under cultivation. Even a lot of
marginal, mucky, hilly, swampy land was in use. But the effect of having
all of these people was that wages were extremely low. There were a lot
of people living on the edge of subsistence without land of their own.
These were the material conditions that underpinned the peak of the
serfdom system, a labor arrangement in which people owed unpaid service
to the lord in return for the use of his land.
There’s a climate element, too. Part of the reason for this long
economic efflorescence was that it was a period of really good, warm,
stable weather. It’s less important for farmers that the weather be good
than that it be predictable, because what you need to know is when to
sow your crops and when to harvest them. But over the late [1200s] and
into the [1300s], the weather gets much worse. It’s much less
predictable — it’s wetter, colder. And that reaches a particularly bad
point in what’s known as the “Great Famine,” which spikes between about
1315 and 1322. A lot of people died: Hundreds of thousands or millions
of people starved to death across Western Europe. So that’s a sign that
there is something systemically wrong. And that continued up through the
Black Death.
There were also a whole bunch of bankruptcies of very large
businesses — unprecedentedly large businesses that in the historiography
are called “the Super-Companies” — that were invested all over Europe.
They went bust in the middle of the 1340s, before the Black Death. They
went under for a lot of reasons, but one of them was because of how
overexposed they were and how teetering the economy was.
So you have tight money. You have high population, low wages, high
land costs … that’s a recipe for a really bad series of outcomes.
Um, you hear how that sounds, right? [Long silence, followed by laughter]
Yeah, when you lay it out that schematically, it looks bad, huh?
What’s interesting is that, while of course you get economic contraction
in the aftermath of that many people dying, in the long run, the Black
Death made living conditions a lot better in Western Europe,
particularly for peasants. Land was cheaper and you were more likely to
acquire your own, you got to eat better, more nutritious food and more
variety of food, your wages were higher …
But that came at a serious cost. You don’t want to have to “Thanos
snap” half the population out of existence in order to get to a point
where the peasants are doing better. There’s something sort of depressing and deterministic about all
this, to be honest. If you’re a peasant born in 1330, you’re going to
grow up poor and then, as likely as not, die of the bubonic plague
before turning 25. If you’re born in 1360, you have a much brighter set
of possible outcomes. Are we all just sort of spinning on the wheel? Do
you ever worry we’ll tell our grandkids about how good life used to be, and they’ll just look at us in disbelief.
The end of the Roman Empire did not make life worse for everybody, and I think that’s an important point. Life does not have
to get worse because of the end of a large-scale political entity.
There’s some desperate inequality in the Roman Empire. A lot of groups
of people are systemically treated terribly in the Roman system. For
most people, there is no baseline assumption that their life has any
real value. So the standard of living probably rose for a lot of people
in the post-Roman world, population health was probably better, and
diets were probably better in large swaths of the world.
That said, life often can get worse because of the end of a
political system. There are things that large-scale states do that make
life better or are quite useful in a lot of ways. There’s some evidence
that, after Rome, people lived in a more violent world. The simple fact
was that people — and there were a lot fewer people in general — lived
in much more local worlds. Their worlds were much less urbanized and
less connected over long distances. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on
how there was a lot less long-distance communication in the post-Roman
world.
For our grandkids, I worry a lot about the climate, about a time when
you just can’t really go outside in the summer, when you can’t grow
certain crops because it’s too hot. I think we could be in a similar
situation as post-Roman Europe, in which — if the climate stuff keeps
going the way it’s going — we have a more violent world and a more
disordered world. It’s not necessarily worse, but we could definitely be
telling them about a much, much different world.
But you don’t seem to see societies’ fate as predetermined. Can
you point to examples of leaders who’ve successfully pulled systems back
together?
Yeah! To keep to the Roman context, there are at least two. There was
the end of the Roman Republic, and there was nothing to say the
struggle between Augustus and Mark Antony that followed [Julius Caesar’s
death] had to end with their world intact, but it did.
Perhaps more interesting is the crisis of the third century, this
cascading series of system failures all across the Roman world that
included some climatic shock or major drought. There were droughts,
famines, and plagues. (It’s hard to know just how bad they were because
our sources from this time are so bad.) This is all combined with an
economic meltdown, barbarian invasions — the Roman Empire could have
very easily fallen apart in the third century A.D.
But there were a couple of emperors who managed to put things back
together. The first of them was Aurelian, followed by Diocletian, who
essentially rebuilt the Roman system into something much different. The
later Roman Empire is a much different beast. It was much more
militarized. It had a much larger bureaucracy. It was a much more
centralized state. It took massive systemic changes to the empire for it
to survive the crisis, to keep it united. And even then, it still
didn’t survive more than a few centuries after that.
What lessons can we draw from Aurelian and Rome that apply to today?
The lesson of Aurelian is not that we should be looking for a
tough soldier-emperor to make things OK. The lesson is that what
Aurelian’s era demanded — if we think it’s a good thing that the empire
did manage to survive the crisis — is someone whose skill set matched
the moment. What the Roman Empire needed was a gifted military mind with
a ruthless streak. We obviously don’t want to recreate anything like
the Roman Empire, which was in many ways a horribly oppressive society
based on massive human suffering and chattel slavery.
But as we’re looking to solve our current problems, we need people
who have the right skill sets. We need people who know how to pull the
levers of the political system to direct state resources toward the
massive glaring problems that we are facing. We need people who can see a
shortage of protective equipment in hospitals and find ways to ensure
we are producing and distributing that equipment. If we need to test
people for the coronavirus, we need people in positions of power who can
guarantee that we are producing, distributing, and utilizing
coronavirus test kits. That’s what the situation demands.
We’re seeing who has the skill set to govern — and it’s particularly
evident on the state level. The governors who have that, I think, are
going to save a lot of lives. It’s not hyperbole to say that in a
crisis. The inverse of that is going to be, I think, the governor of
Oklahoma. By tweeting out that picture of himself dining out,
he might literally have killed people who decide to go out, and then
contract the virus. The governor of Florida taking as long as he did to
close the beaches during spring break — it’s really hard to overstate
how bad that is. The fact that you had the capacity to take steps to
stop the transmission of this virus by shutting down mass gatherings and
you chose not to do it, that is malfeasance.
I cling to this last line of your Mother Jones piece:
“Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis
weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point
has truly been reached. We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their
varied depth and location. Perhaps it’s not yet too late to stanch the
bleeding.” How do we do that?
And at moments like this, we have the opportunity to evaluate what is
and isn’t working, and you have the opportunity to make change. Yeah,
this crisis is ongoing, but when the dust eventually settles, we will be
able to look at the wide and broad strokes and see things that
desperately need changing. And hopefully we can use this as an
opportunity to build more resilient systems as we move forward.
This won’t be the last shock. We’ve been very lucky that we haven’t had one for a long time. But we’ll have another one.
No comments:
Post a Comment