Lessons from the Plague: life beyond the pandemic

When people feel unsafe, the pull towards hatred is strong. JANE CARO considers what we can learn from life after another plague feels a glimmer of hope.

“Do you see the line at the top? Where the stone is darker above than below?”

I was part of a tour group in Exeter Cathedral in England, and our enthusiastic local guide was gesturing towards the soaring roof. We all looked up and nodded because, once pointed out, the line was very clear.

“We can date that line to 1349.” She said, “The year the plague came to Exeter, the Black Death.”

As I found out later it wasn’t called The Black Death at the time. It was called “The Great Mortality”.

Our guide went on to tell us that all work halted on the cathedral that year. She then explained that the already cut stone had laid out in the weather for years. I am sure she said 50 years, and the cathedral was completed in 1400, but that may be an exaggeration. Anyway, however many years it was, according to our guide, the stone changed colour in the weather and that is why the top of the cathedral walls are darker than the walls lower down. “The Great Mortality” was literally written in stone.

Estimates of the death toll from the plague range from 20% of the population of Europe to 60%, but just like the death toll from the current pandemic, the figures are hard to verify. We do know, that just like Covid, the plague killed vastly more of the poor than the wealthy, perhaps because the fortunate could make an escape to safer places, often carrying the plague with them, of course. Shades of the naming and shaming those who broke travel bans in the early days of our pandemic.

Unlike Covid, there was no effective medical intervention in the 1300s and no one knew for centuries how the Y-pestis bacterium was spread. Like Covid, superstition, magical thinking, conspiracy theories and hocus pocus of all kinds were rampant. It was more understandable then, when doctors knew little, than now when modern medical science has been able to protect so many of us.

After the plague, the world changed. Wages soared due to a chronic shortage of labour. Post Covid (are we there yet?) workers are also in high demand and able to negotiate both better pay and more flexibility. Post-plague (it returned periodically for many centuries) this rise in the power of ordinary people was resisted fiercely by those who saw being in charge as their birthright.

Just as we are seeing today, employers blamed moral decay for a labourer’s refusal to work for previously acceptable pay and conditions. They tried to deny the massive shift in demand and supply the plague had created. Laws were passed to try and reduce wages to pre-plague levels and, when they could be, these laws were brutally enforced. This led to resentment and that resentment is credited with causing the Great Peasants' Revolt in the United Kingdom in 1381. In the long run, the powerful landowners resisted in vain. The plague spelled the end of serfdom in England, and it basically disappeared by 1400.

We are seeing something of the same disruption happening today. Not only are wages rising – albeit slowly and with heavy resistance from many employers – but the four-day week is being seriously discussed and whether that becomes a reality or not, the days of workers commuting five days a week to the office have gone and will never return.

We are watching decentralisation as many people realise they can do their work from anywhere, just as they did during lockdowns. Many are moving to the countryside, sending regional house prices up and causing an acute rental shortage. NSW public sector workers – rather like the peasants who revolted in 1381 - are in open rebellion against the 2.5% salary cap imposed on them by governments pre-pandemic.

With inflation at more than 5%, that means any pay rise under current rules is actually a pay cut. Nurses, teachers, early childhood educators and train drivers are among those who realised during Covid how indispensable they were (commercial bankers not so much) and are demanding they be paid their due.

Many are leaving because – due to the labour shortage – they can easily get better pay and conditions elsewhere. Market forces being what they are, governments and employers – just like the landowners of the past – will have to bow to the inevitable, sooner or later.

But there were darker forces awakened by the plague as well. Old superstitions and prejudices were turbo-charged. Then as now, religiosity and superstition (hello, anti-vaxxers) increased, and the Jews found themselves in the firing line. The only reason there weren’t any pogroms against the Jews after the plague in England is because they had all been expelled by Edward 1 in 1290.

When people do not understand what has caused a disaster or simply refuse to believe any rational explanations, they often turn to conspiracy theories and finding a group to blame. The Jews, tragically, are seen as an easy scapegoat. They are not the only ones of course. Women are, too, accused of being witches and blamed for any catastrophe, large or small. Gypsies, foreigners, strangers and outsiders of all kinds are particularly vulnerable when a community has been turned upside down by forces beyond human control.

None of these dark, ancient hatreds ever entirely disappear, of course, but it now seems acceptable to publicly voice antisemitism, racism, homophobia and misogyny in ways we have not seen for decades, amped up, of course, by social media and the far-Right who may, or may not, realise they are playing with fire.

Women, members of the LGBTQ community and anyone seen as “different” are subject to sometimes hysterical levels of abuse and bullying. Whatever you think of Meghan Markle, equating her with Hitler, Pol Pot or even Rosemary West is so absurd that it’s terrifying. Rates of domestic violence have risen since the pandemic and more than one woman a week in Australia has been killed by their intimate partner this year.

When stress rises, some take it out on those closest to them. In the US, which seems more susceptible to wild-eyed conspiracy theories than Australia, Right-wingers have plotted to kidnap the Democrat Governor of Michigan and invaded the Capitol, threatening to kill the Vice President and other members of the House and Senate. The retiring Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 80-year-old husband was attacked with a hammer in their home.

In the long run, Europe after the Black Death was a better place than it had been before. Not for everyone, of course: the pogroms against witches and Jews and heretics went on for centuries, but standards of living rose, and peasants were no longer quasi-slaves.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of a better, kinder, more civilised world on the horizon. I see it in the shift in the balance of power between workers and bosses, in the rise of the power of women – especially at the ballot box. The demise of Morrison and the rise of Albanese gives me hope, as does our new attitude towards tackling climate change.

I take comfort in the courage and indomitability of Volodymyr Zelensky and the people of Ukraine holding back an aggressive Russia, led by cold-eyed Putin. Even the surprise result in the American mid-terms made me feel brighter, although it was a modest victory, at best.

Nevertheless, watching the rise of ignorance, fear, hatred and arrant nonsense is fundamentally unsettling. As we have witnessed throughout human history, when people feel unsafe, when unpredictable catastrophe strikes, when leaders seem powerless in the face of disaster, the pull towards hatred, violence and chaos is strong. However, if history is any guide, and it’s the only one we’ve got, I look at what happened to the world after the plague and I feel a glimmer of hope.

Photo: Protesters hold placards during a #ReclaimTheLine rally against vaccine mandates and vaccine passports in Sydney, December 12, 2021. (AAP/Bianca De Marchi)