Of Priesthoods & Pestilence

How COVID-19 Became the New Black Death

This essay is part of a series comparing the twilights of (1) Rome's slave-based economic system and (2) the Middle Ages' feudal system to (3) today's capitalist economic system. In addition to the broad life cycles of these economic systems, we'll note similarities between infectious diseases and changes in communication technologies common to all three eras. Finally, we'll see how belief systems rise and fall in tandem with these broad economic systems. When these systems seize up and stop functioning, people begin questioning authority. And that, in turn, leads to collapses of bedrock conceptions of reality itself.

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Introduction

Science is the source of all the wonderous new technology that, over time, gradually increases the profitability of business. In addition, scientists serve as our modern priesthood. They tell the rest of us what’s true and what’s heresy; science is the authority that defines reality for us. But after the recent COVID pandemic, huge swathes of the population are now questioning that authority. For better or for worse, this loss of faith in authority mirrors another pandemic, the Black Death, which destroyed faith in the priesthood of its day, the Roman Catholic Church.

The Black Death

In the mid-1300s, when the Black Death killed a third of Europe's population, the Church was powerless to stop the dying. Science hadn’t yet developed a Germ Theory of Disease, so the Vatican relied instead on their Wrath of God Theory of Disease. As a result, the pandemic exposed the Church's intellectual poverty.

The Church's claim that it enjoyed an exclusive, inside connection with God appeared highly dubious in the face of the Black Death. The public saw the Catholic clergy dying in even greater numbers than the laity, as the performance of Last Rites brought priests into close contact with the infected. The plague set in motion a chain of events that ultimately stripped the Roman Catholic Church of its position as the supreme political authority in Europe.

The Black Death also marked the beginning of the end of the Medieval feudal economic system, which consisted of lords and peasants. It caused a massive labor shortage that incentivized peasants to stop pledging fealty to specific lords and instead sell their labor to the highest bidder. That pandemic sowed the seeds that sprouted first into the Protestant Reformation and finally into the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

Science

The Reformation severely curtailed the political power of the Popes. Banks arose to replace them atop Europe's political hierarchy, and modern geopolitics was born. Entrepreneurs became employers by borrowing money from these banks. They paid off their loans by hiring the old peasantry as employees.

Banks profit from lending. To stay in business, they require a steady supply of loan customers who can afford to repay them. Only constant economic growth can deliver that.

For 600 years, technological improvement has been the primary source of the reliable economic growth capitalism needs. Over the centuries, employers have harnessed technological innovation to increase business profitability by replacing expensive employees with automated processes.

Because scientific discovery creates new technology, the Scientific Revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution. That makes science—along with banks, employers, and employees—fixtures of capitalism. Science is its seed corn.

While banks stealthily took over from the Popes as masters of international geopolitics, science assumed the former role of the Church as public arbiter of reality. To this day, we still rely on science to separate truth from heresy. Only a vanishingly small minority of us bother to read the stuffy, peer-reviewed papers churned out by scientific institutions. Fewer still conduct any actual experiments. Instead, we have faith in the authority of our scientific community to define reality for us.

COVID-19

Whether rightly or wrongly, it’s undeniable that the recent COVID pandemic has badly shaken the faith of millions in our institutions of science. This fits a broader historical pattern in which pandemics undermine authority.

The Antonine Plague caused a crisis of faith in the late Roman Empire and was a major factor in the rise of Christianity. Feudalism, with its lords and peasants, arose from the ashes of that slave society.

The Black Death exposed the Roman Catholic Church during the late Middle Ages. It set in motion the downfalls of Church and feudalism, which were replaced by science and capitalism.

As our capitalist economic system nears the end of its lifecycle, we’ve been visited by yet another pandemic. And it’s causing the same crisis of faith; people are again entertaining grave doubts about authorities once believed infallible.

Conclusion

Pandemics are terrifying in their own right. But the despair that comes from the deterioration of popular belief in authority is even worse. Not only is that the case for heretics seeing their fellow citizens naively cling to a corrupt old faith, but it’s also the case for the remaining true believers as they watch neighbors backslide into heresy and superstition. The antidote to this despair is recognizing that we’re living through an iteration of a broad historical pattern. During times of economic transition, pandemics expose the corruption of the authorities and lead to dramatic crises of faith.