The 600 Year Blink

The 600 Year Blink

I read two enlightening articles this morning, one from The New Yorker and one from The Atlantic. It has occurred to me lately that in the age of digitized content, several magazines have seemed to be in ascendancy rather than decline like so many other magazines. In the pattern unfolding of the Coronavirus era, I sense that magazines will not be excluded from the tendency to accelerate the prevailing trends. The death of ink on paper, as painful as that may seem to some who enjoy the feel and heft of a good book or of a glossy magazine, is likely headed towards a slow but eventual death. Whatever gaps there have been in the adoption of digital technology, now that it is so very portable and wireless (I carry around both my i-Pad Pro and my iPhone all day, every day), are brushed aside by our prolonged shelter-in-place requirements. Those previously so inclined are more so (the cartoon of the Millennial seeing that his daily screen-time report exceeds 24 hours). Those not so inclined are forced to revise, increase and adapt accordingly, zooming forward, so to speak. But this change seems also to be highlighting the strong survivors, of which The New Yorker, Atlantic and perhaps Vanity Fair are at the top of the list. Those three publications in particular, not to mention the “mainstream media” like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have been forced to up their game and have done an admirable job of it. I can only hope that others have recognized the value these journalists provide us in interpreting a complicated world in a confusing time.

I believe that the complicated nature of discerning truth in a world gone divisive makes fulsome discussion, analysis and interpretation more valuable than ever. I used to wonder how and why these magazines, known more for their literary offerings became socio/economic/political journals of note. But then, as I read more and more of their articles, directed to me by the likes of Apple News, I just decided that I was happy that someone was writing about these important issues.

The Atlantic article was titled Pandemics Leave Us Forever Altered and it was written by Charles Mann, a scientific writer. Its topic was to examine the history of Pandemics, going back to the Black Plague of the Quattrocento (14th Century) and how society was dramatically changed by the events of the illness, the loss of lives, the shifting of power and the changed economic circumstances. As for the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, the most notable fact was how much the impact of such a significant tragedy was overlooked by historians who wrote of the early Twentieth Century. The supposition is that the overlap with the War to End All Wars, especially the American entry into the fight just as the Pandemic was taking hold, was to blame. It is quite curious that such a significant and impactful pandemic would be so uniformly and totally ignored in the telling of the times.

The New Yorker article was much more direct and was called Why Weren’t We Ready for COVID-19?. It was written by David Quammen, a science and nature writer who had had the benefit of having previously interviewed Ali Kahn, the prior Head of the National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases, a part of the C.D.C. that was specifically tasked to anticipate and prepare for the possibility of a pandemic like COVID-19. Kahn is now the Dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He has the knowledge, experience, training and perspective from the positions he has held to fully understand what happened and why perhaps more than anyone else. I applaud Quammen for finding and developing Dr. Kahn as such a valuable resource and bringing his perspective in an interesting and expositive manner. I also applaud The New Yorker for giving voice to such qualified thinking. I now better understand what has gone on here and perhaps why. In combination with the Atlantic article, I have formed some new views (new to me anyway).

I suspect that the Spanish Flu pandemic, coming when it did during WWI and originating in Europe, where the hostilities were raging in what can only be described as squalid conditions, seemed to fit into the sense of the times that men could not expect to be healthy or necessarily lead long lives. The nature of the influenza was perhaps more “common” seeming in its similarities to the grippe or colds and the prevalence of Tuberculosis. It seems that the Flu pandemic may have just seemed like business as usual in difficult times. This may be what led the boom times of the 1920’s to the excessive heights enthusiastically driven by the Carpe Diem thinking of survivors. And, of course as we all know, where there is boom there is bust and the excesses of the former decade flowed directly into the depths of the Great Depression. This view is consistent with the historical interpretation, but this interpretation includes the pandemic as a supplemental cause.

The discussion of the Black Plague taught me a great deal. To begin with, I had no idea that it only really lasted three years. I would have thought it lingered far longer for something that occupies such a big role in history (quite contrary to the Spanish Flue pandemic). I had always thought the Black Plague threw the civilized world of Europe into the Dark Ages for several centuries. The new perspective tells me that the Black Plague changed the economic order in ways that were adopted differently in different parts of Europe to startlingly different effect. I lived in Italy long enough to understand that northern Italy is far more developed and prosperous than Il Mezzogiorno, or southern Italy. I always assumed it was just like the U.S. in an industrial versus agrarian regional sense, but apparently not so. It seems that the extreme labor shortages brought about by the Black Plague (it decimated 25% of the population and struck the working classes much harder) forced lords and landowners to choose how they solved the labor shortages. The northern Italian lords took a more enlightened approach of paying better wages to lure workers and in so doing, developed a much broader middle class that went on to provide the broadened consumer base that allowed for far greater prosperity. Meanwhile in southern Italy, the more reactionary and greedy landowners banded together to force the peasants into working at historically low wages and thus traded small short-term gains for long-term development and shared prosperity.

The lessons from these and other examples were quite meaningful to my understanding of how we should try to drive the global recovery from the trauma of the Coronavirus pandemic. The deaths may not equal those of either the Black Plague or Spanish Flu, but the economic impact may be as great or more. The Information Age and Digital Age overlay issues may make the solutions that much more important as everyone now knows everything almost immediately and expectations are a big driver of the socioeconomic order of the future. I find myself hoping that history always remembers the lessons we will all be paying for and that enlightenment through learning from the past drives good long-term thinking and solutions versus short-term fear and greed. After reading these articles I came to realize that since the time of the Black Plague, 600 years, is a blink of an eye to the universe.