America is experiencing a critical historical ‘deja vu’ in at least two significant ways that threatens to sink our ‘ship-of-state. The most threatening is the pandemic viral disease, Covid-19, which current humanity, like 700 years ago, is struggling to organize itself to cope with. The ongoing threat is economic which agin. Like the recurrent waves if pandemic disease, we have not been able to control... neither the periodic collapses nor the speculative greed driving usover that economic cliff-edge,
And additionally, we are experiencing along with the Covid-19 virus inundation, the cancerous worsening of class (race and caste?) inequality of wealth and privilege that has virtually remained unchanged since the Roman Empire of 542 AD, extending through the feudal Middle Ages when the upper 3-5% of Western Europe’s population owned 80-90% of arable land, animals, forests and mineral wealth, and now in 2020 when same degree of inequality exists, though the landed nobility is replaced by a financial-markets elite and super-wealthy created by a century of predatory, ‘free-market’ capitalism.
2020’s Neo-feudalist world picture seems to send a fatalistic message - that perhaps inherent in Western Culture is a built-in seed of instability and rot that at any moment can inflame into full mayhem with faces of social upheaval, economic collapse and disease pandemic .... in all combinations.
This condition, the broad-spectrum collapse on a global scale, might be termed ‘
Civilization Implosion.’
Right now (actually since March 2020), we are experiencing a global scale ‘IMPLOSION’ of just about every aspect of global culture. This imploson happened unprecedently fast (and without warning, so it seemed!) And everything simultaneously seemed to come apart - hospitals overflowing, schools and colleges closing classrooms, restaurants and bars shutting,! Imploding! Exploding! Confusing! Terrifying! We are like ‘deer in the headlights.’ (But meanwhile, as humanity is about o ‘bite the big one,’ ‘buy the farm,’ one hears that the lesser cousins, our ‘animal’ co-dwellers who reside just a wall away in many cases, are blithely, and undisturbed, taking back the streets, lakes, and perches in our cities. Plus, the marine mammals seem jolly enjoying the fall-off of noisy, oil-leaking shipping. But, sadly, we humans, from much-repeated practice, have demonstrated a knack for escaping extinction and recovering, and then even ‘advancing.’ Alas, dear porpoises and urban raccoons and all, ‘enjoy our self-quarantining while you can...it won’t last....and we humans probably once again won’t learn...but no doubt there’ll be a ‘next time,’ wearing the same masks of human stupidity.
(Hmmmm??? Why is it that the animals are not as stricken as humans. Or is it that we just ignore their suffering?)
Are we, humanity, blissfully ignorant of our precarious ‘hanging ten’ on a tidal wave of self-destructive greed magnified by a global disease that once again threatens to wreck all that humanity has built?
Could it be that in addition to our folly, Mother Nature’s micro-virus messengers are wagging their COVID-19 fingers at us saying in their tiny voices, ‘Momma warned you/ We told you, don’t push it, humans, or she will send you right back to fighting your monkey cousins over bananas and coconuts!’
We pray that most of us will survive this repeat performance of a Great Pandemic, which we’ve named
Covid-19. (Mother Nature, Gaia, no doubt knows the proper name, but she hasn’t yet let us in on all of her secrets!)
Academically speaking, Covid-19 is the fourth Great Pandemic since the 542 AD, ‘
Justinian Plague’ that exploded from Asia then via Constantinople (capital of the Eastern, Byzantine, Roman Empire), then to Europe (and essentially closing down the Roman Empire).
But, among the 400 years of disastrous plague storms following the Justinian Plague of 542 AD,’ the 1345-48 AD plague, The
Black Death, created conditions so frightening that all of western ‘civilizaton’ seemed to recognize its overall death and seemed to come awake to its collective value which should be preserved, somehow. This new perspective spawned a new generation of artists, writers and thinkers who sought answers, or at least useful perspectives on the meaning of life and humanity from classical art and philosoophy that had disappeared since the end of the Roman empire. This drive for ‘rediscovery’ created a transformative historical period now known as the ‘
Renaissance,’ the rediscovery of ancient, classical culture (science, art, literature, and medicine). The ‘spark’ that set the Renaissance in motion is credited to
Petrarch (1345 AD), the Italian poet and scholar who rediscovered the classical Roman writings of
Cicero (106-43 AD).
P
oint: will the broad-spectrum ‘shakeup’ of global cultures and institutions provide an impetus for a 21st-century renaissance? Will new ideas bloom from the ashes left by the Covid-19 pandemic? Let’s hope so.
At least for America, fresh thinking can help (is needed, desperately?) in the areas of economic redevelopment, wealth redistribution, healthcare, education, the American legacy of slavery, our Civil War and left-over racism, and voting,
The line of Great Pandemics following the Justinian Plague of 542 AD, occurred as a series of waves that originated in Asia and crashed into Europe from 1348 until as recently as the 2020 Covid-19 viral disease.
The next prominent plague following the 542 AD, Justinian Plague, occurred in 1345-48AD, the Black Plague (‘Black Death’) a bubonic bacterial affliction described in Boccaccio’s
The_Decameron, and reputedly preserved in these long years in the childrens’ nursery rhyme, “
Ring Around the Rosie, Pocket full of Posies,” etc.). Then the ‘last’ plague of the 400 year pandemic since 1348 AD, flooded into Europe from China in 1665-66, the
Great Plague of London (diaried ‘real-time’ by
Samuel Pepys , and again described by Daniel Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year published in 1722
). Then came again from China, a global pandemic known as the
Third (Bubonic) Plague Episode(1850-1890’s), and once more in 1918-1920 AD (the
Spanish Flu).
Crashing tidal waves of the disease have periodically washed across western lands for the last 1500 years, and, to our shock, even in these times of technological superlatives, we are experiencing a disease inundation repeating itself, and like our predecessors in 1345-48, and 1665-66, we have been caught unprepared though not exactly forewarned, just perhaps preoccupied with sniffing out riches.
So we here are - in the midst of our 2020 AD Pandemic, ‘
COVID-19’, again from China (Wuhan), again a ship of fools wallowing in stormy pandemic confusion - leaderless, rudderless, paralyzed by administrative confusion and partisanship, and all the while counterproductively seeking to somehow gain speculative wealth from others’ suffering such as overcharging for critical hospital supplies and citizen masks. “Ship of Fools’ seems very much alive.
The will be more plagues, no doubt, as it appears humanity is sadly ‘endowed’ with the ability to forget lessons learned from past epidemics and pandemics. We have learned, though, to acknowledge there are ‘
natural reservoirs’ (a disease-nurturing environment that supports the ongoing evolution for pandemic diseases).
IMPORTANT NOTE
In the face of every pandemic, it seems, humans have reacted in a characteristically Devil-May-Care,
‘lets a party while we can‘ way! Compare the following two graphics depicting a 14th-century woodcut, ‘Walking-Dead’ revelers in a ‘Dance-of-Death,’ and a 2020 photo showing an American over-crowded Pool Party held during a national ‘quarantine’ - and defying local stay-at-home and social distancing guidelines...which have been (are) a politically loosened ‘recommendation set’ allowing state-by-state discretionary interpretations (how ‘wishy-washy’ can we get). Plus, throw in a dose of Charismatic religious fundamentalism that apparently translates the Good Book to say something like, ‘when it's your time, it's your time, why fight it!’. And here we are, back to 1348 AD.
This 1493 AD woodcut of The Dance of Death (
Danse Macabre’) shows humanity frolicking in the face of relentless death in the 14-15th century time of both famine and pandemic plague. The
Black Death carries a message for us in today’s moment of pandemic
Coronavirus disease (presumably originated from a similar animal vector, this time the bat rather than the 14th century’s rat).
And, the Peak-pandemic, summer
2020 version of the 14th century’s ‘Let’s Party Like There’s No Tomorrow’:
Even separated by 700 years, the Black Plague (1348-1490) and the current Covid-19 Pandemic (the fourth Great Pandemic - 542ad, 1348ad, 1890 ad and 2020), both pandemics have had the same outcomes, in addition to sudden onset and great loss of life - social panic, political polarization, religious evangelism (with death cultism) and general confusion....all of which, if one pauses to think about things in the larger picture, illustrate how fragile are the ‘works of hu-mans’.
In addition to our current Pandemic, the overall theme for the past three years has been the barreling train wreck that is the Trump tenure. From the first week of Trump in the White House, we’ve watched America being dismantled. At first we thought, he’ll calm down...soon. He’ll ‘grow’ into the office. But that didn’t happen.
The dismantling of America started from the beginning of Trump's tenure and hasn’t lessened... as with a temperamental child, things broke or were broken so quickly . And now America is almost down to ashes.
And that is another lesson we’ve been forced to confront: the American constitution really is a framework whose implementation relies on there being a core set of principles within the nature of a president that, despite political party ties, provides ‘constancy‘ and above all explanations for executive actions.
This feature of our Constitution - a great great framework construction, broad yet fixed in law, and reliant on principled execution - has given America stability combined with robustness, ie., adaptability to history and societal growth and maturity. It appears that Trump neither meets the qualifications needed for the chief executive nor comprehends the guidelines for performing the job.
The ancient Greeks, who has died us the formula for our democracy, had two terms they invented from their own experiences over 600 years -
kakistocracy and
idiocracy. In short, These words describe a confused and disorganized government led by those who are completely unqualified And who most importantly also lack a sense of the greater good beyond their own selfishness (Trump is both of these combined into one).
And this is where America is now...America is now a ‘ship of fools’ captained by the greatest fool of us all.
The fragility and impermanence of human society constantly threatened by our hubris, is even for our ‘modern’ society, which has progressed from a belief in the Ptolemaic earth-centered universe to walking on the moon, a repeating challenge we must nevertheless take on like some permanent
Sisyphean burden, a tragic original sin imbedded in our genes. The Classical Greek philosopher Plato
(The Republic, 375 BC) aptly described this human condition as the winding journey of a ‘
Ship of Fools. In significant ways, this is where we are - on a ship of fools ‘led’ (or cheered on from the poop deck) was by a rancid-brained fool’s fool. Note the Wikipedia
descriptor of Plato’s Ship of Fools in his ‘Republic’ (
Book VI):
ship of fools is an allegory about a ship with a dysfunctional crew. The allegory is intended to represent the problems of governance prevailing in a political system not based on expert knowledge, such as democracies.
There’s the shipowner, larger and stronger than everyone in the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather short-sighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight.
In significant ways, this is where America and the globe are - on a ship of fools ‘led’ (or cheered on from the poop deck) by a hubris-full, rancid-brained fool’s fool’s (2020’s fool, the ‘kakistropic’ D Trump).
(Post script: it’s not that Trump has no competence, it’s that his abilities don’t seem to match the requirements for the President of the United States.
Additional Reading:
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