Will a carpe-diem economy return to society after COVID? A look through history offers clues.
Will a carpe-diem economy return to society after COVID? A look through history offers clues.
T he 21st century must be a teenager. It thinks it has discovered everything, including death and the pandemic. But the truth is the world has survived worse epidemics. The Black Death in the 14th century killed more than half of all Europeans. Yet out of this suffering, that plague brought better wages and more freedom — although I am not suggesting we should create a pandemic every time we want a better world.
I’ve been up to my ears lately in historical documents about the end of that horrible illness, and as a result, my hypochondria has been acting up. I’ve spent several sleepless nights checking my arms, legs, and even behind my ears, expecting to find big black bubbles surfacing. For now, I’ve survived long enough — at least to predict, if history is any guide, the advent of a new social, economic, and cultural renaissance in the West once we’ve rid the planet of the coronavirus scourge.
Agreed, I don’t think anyone is going to carve anything like Michelangelo’s The Pietà, but it is likely that the economy will recover sooner than expected, and we will be thrown into a frenzy of spending, investment, and consumption. It has been proven that we, the citizens of the 21st century, are extraordinary consumers. All we need is to be allowed out, and before we know it, we’ll be back at the bars, drinking as only we know how, before cramming ourselves into crowded shopping malls for the sales, unafraid of the Chinese virus gatecrashing our party.
I’ll admit that it’s probably not a good idea to compare the processes of six centuries ago with those of today, but it is likely that the resulting emotional phenomena are similar. I always say that economics is an emotional science. You may laugh, but I’ll wager you don’t handle your money the same way when you think you’re going to die tomorrow. In the 14th century, the first thing people discovered was that money and possessions have no use once you’re six feet under. And I’m pretty sure that you can’t bribe St. Peter to turn a blind eye to a life of debauchery.
The first aftereffect of the Black Death was the loss of manual laborers. “There was such a shortage of servants, craftsmen, and workmen, and of agricultural workers and labourers,” an old written account in Rochester Cathedral tells us, “that churchmen, knights and other worthies have been forced to thresh their corn, plough the land and perform every other unskilled task if they are to make their own bread.” Soon workers’ wages rose, and the possibilities of freely choosing for whom to work increased — the golden dream of any journalist.
There was such a shortage of labor, that in some areas the noblemen had to work the fields with their own hands, something that must have been as entertaining to watch as when I try to keep the garden of my country house at bay with the help of a brushcutter and small shears.(Spoiler alert: When you realize that you have reduced all the bushes to stumps, you swallow your pride, call the gardener and tell him that you have been the victim of a terrible act of arbitrary backyard vandalism.)
After the medieval crisis, many manual laborers saw their purses full enough to invest in their own affairs for the first time, slowly shedding the weight of a feudal economy that had reigned until then. I will not judge now whether that economy was bad or good.
However, the change was not only of an economic nature. According to the evidence provided by the medievalist Zvi Razi in his study on England, before the plague, families were large and lived huddled around their lands, which were passed on in inheritance from father to son. Union and solidarity were extended to poor and elderly friends, the extended medieval family being the main support structure for the underprivileged villagers. However, after the plague, a demographic plunge, the abundance of land, the fear of new outbreaks, and the experience of pain gradually brought about more individualistic societies. Families began to disperse, vacant land passed easily from one hand to another, and new homes were gradually limited to the nuclear family.
There were many who refused to live in fear, and dedicated themselves to playing out scenes such as those Boccaccio tells of, following his recipes of “drink a lot, enjoy life to the full, sing and have fun, and satisfy every craving when the opportunity arises, and discard everything as if it were a big joke.” In the end, the pandemic brought to light a relatively new reality: Death would come for all, regardless of class, age, or condition. To better understand this change in the context of the medieval mentality, I find it helpful to recall a comic strip by the brilliant Spanish humorist Antonio Mingote, published in the midst of post-conciliar religious polemic. In it we see two elegant elderly ladies, talking about the news of the Second Vatican Council: “No, my dear, all of this about freedom of conscience is just to make modern people feel better because, as far as going to heaven is concerned, we’ll still be the same lot going.”
As often happens after disaster strikes, the reality and presence of death caused two types of reactions: those who reaffirmed their faith in God, and those who chose to dismiss it, at least until the final moments of their lives, and enjoy the rest. But in both extremes, a certain cynicism pervades the outlook on life. Something that is inevitably tied to socioeconomic fluctuations. The medieval pandemic slowed down the period of economic growth of previous years. Fewer workers and fewer consumers brought about a severe economic recession which was, however, the gateway to a new splendor.
In fact, the world has never been the same after the Black Death, but before the end of the 15th century, many more people had joined the market economy. And in general, many families were able to dedicate their efforts in agriculture or livestock to going beyond subsistence, creating commercial networks that were the precursors of those we have today.
It was no bed of roses for the survivors, however, as is often thought due to oversimplification. Inflation shot up for a while along with wages. Nevertheless, many peasants easily became owners or even moved into unoccupied properties in the cities that were until then the sole reserve of the nobility. On the other hand, the lack of labor drove technological ingenuity in agriculture and livestock farming, just as we are seeing today — although for other reasons — with teleworking or automated services adapted to new health conditions.
The years following the plague were marked by relapses, but also by the birth of a new way of living and working. The French historian Jean Delumeau speaks of the emergence of a “rush of life,” the fruit of fear throughout Europe at the return of the plague. Being on the verge of losing one’s life, without a doubt, offers a very different perspective. Historians say that this elation for life could even be seen in the way they dressed: Farmers who before the crisis dressed in a rather gray way went on to buy the best outfits and left fortunes in extravagant clothing.
A comparison between past and present might be relevant at this point. If in the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages, a feeling of guilt prevailed — as if the plague were nothing more than divine punishment for the sins of men — nowadays, an environmentalist current is finding its fortune, associating the pandemic with climate change and with the alleged exhaustion of the planet’s natural resources. In the face of the growing negation of God, contemporary man seeks explanations in environmentalist religions, just as pre-Christian societies implored the gods represented in totem poles. You see, climate change is good for anything.
During these months, the Left has tried to take advantage of the suffering caused by the pandemic to pinpoint capitalism as the culprit, but their voices have been muted to a certain extent, especially now that we see that the vaccines are arriving thanks to competition between private laboratories, and in some cases, from companies that reject any entry of public money into their capital because of how it could condition their decisions and projects. This has not prevented, for example, the social-communist government of Spain from putting an immense sticker with its logo around the first boxes of vaccines that arrived in the country and photographing the landing of the merchandise in front of an epic daybreak backdrop, as if they were the ones who had formulated it by mixing magic powders in the bathrooms at La Moncloa. But I suspect that even propaganda has limits.
So it is unlikely that the predictions of some contemporary prophets about the infinite expansion of state power after the pandemic will be fulfilled, to the detriment of capitalism. Even if the crisis is severe, any attempt to dismantle contemporary capitalist societies would only bring worse consequences. We do not need to travel to Soviet Russia to know that the alternative to freedom and capitalism is economic ruin.
In other words, it is not possible to renounce capitalism and continue to enjoy the advantages of a competitive economy, including the standard of living and comfort that we enjoyed until the arrival of the coronavirus. The “rush of life” is likely to be the main driver of a rapid recovery in the United States and Europe. We will certainly enjoy dining with friends in nice restaurants more than ever, be happy to travel the world again, and private competition will be aligned with public policies to try to prevent a future health collapse such as the one we have experienced.
As for faith, we will pray more than ever that the Chinese succeed in getting rid of the Communist dictatorship that hid the disease as it spread throughout the world. If there is one thing most of the planet longs for behind this damn pandemic, it is freedom. And that’s not bad news either.