In the 1980s, I went house hunting in London. This took me to Blackheath, just over the River Thames from my newspaper offices in the Isle of Dogs, in the docklands.
A real estate boom triggered by Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms was gentrifying the place. Restaurants, bars, and shops were springing into commercial life all around the heath. Builders, painters, and decorators were renovating homes looking on to the green, a short commute to the City and its riches.
Beneath the grass, then as now, were mass graves. Blackheath gets its name from the Black Death, a pandemic that arrived from Asia and swept Europe in the 14th century. It’s estimated to have killed a total of 70 million-200 million people and up to 60% of the population in some areas. In England, it was perhaps 20%, which nevertheless meant 60,000 Londoners, many of whose bones now push up the daisies on Blackheath.
These thoughts arise amid today’s pandemic, as I and my family, like everyone else, retreat into isolation at home. It is not that the same percentage of people will perish as centuries ago; world resources seeking a cure surely never have been so focused before on a single global object. As importantly, we know how COVID-19 spreads, whereas the thousands beneath Blackheath were buried 500 years before people learned to stanch viral disease by the simple expedient of washing their hands.
What I’m pondering is not mortality rates but, rather, the fact that pandemics leave profound long-term change in their wake. As Graham Mooney, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, told Quartz recently, “These crises expose social inequality.” More than that, they lay bare practices that are ripe for change.
The medieval pandemic killed half the workforce, pushed up the value of labor, destroyed the feudal system, and created a wage economy. Skilled craftsmen such as stonemasons, in demand by the builders of Europe’s great cathedrals, gained clout and formed guilds. That’s how we got the Freemasons.
Today’s pandemic will also bring comparably significant changes, accelerating some existing trends and ending or reversing others. Many businesses will find that things run pretty smoothly with staff working at home, and they’ll decide they don’t need expensive office space downtown. The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon on Monday in which a man in pajamas and slippers sits at home working on his computer and suddenly realizes, “My God … those meetings really could all have been emails.”
Many a true word is spoken in jest. I await signs that commercial real estate stocks sink further than other indices and don’t recover. The trend toward telecommuting had already begun, but surely COVID-19 will accelerate it. Likewise, online shopping and home delivery of everything from family meals to bachelor’s degrees.
What else?
National borders can be expected to harden where, for decades, they had become increasingly porous. Nations facing contagion from abroad sealed or semi-sealed their borders. This, I suspect, was not simply health quarantining but animated by a turning inward, a desire or instinct for national identity.
Governments that recently fostered the idea that their citizens were Europeans rather than members of distinct nationalities drew a line around the people who knew they were indeed a people. Italians in lockdown didn’t sing the EU anthem on their balconies; they sang patriotic songs about Italy. For worse and for better, this pandemic will stoke suspicion of foreign peoples and lands and will give extra force to increasingly persuasive arguments that nation-states are the most effective bulwarks against arrogant encroachments on self-government.
COVID-19 will also change the way we regard China, which since the Clinton presidency has been treated less as a strategic rival than as a trading partner. Now we will see it as a tyranny responsible for a scourge laying waste to our economy, jobs, wealth, and well-being. We will be less tempted to subordinate recognition of its malignancy to wishful thinking and commercial desire.
Others foresee revolutionary change. It certainly seems likely that some of what is to come will be shocking. The phrase “things will never be the same” is usually either a truism or an exaggeration, but on rare occasions, it is apt. We may be at such a moment now. No one has ever seen an economic slowdown as quick as this, nor a behavioral volte-face as sudden as the whole world’s switch to social distancing.
These are not normal times, and we don’t look like returning to normal times for a long while. One chokes as one remembers that hackneyed old curse about living in interesting times — which, of course, also comes from China.
