Abstract

Humans live in a world of crises and catastrophes. Usually, we understand them simply as random “acts of God” that wreck human lives and plans. But this common-sense, worm’s-eye view masks important questions. Do catastrophes just happen randomly, or do humans create them? Do they change history, or do they just facilitate it? Are they a patterned evolutionary force or just random noise? As an example, we turn to the bubonic plague epidemic of 1347–1350—the so-called Black Death, in which up to half the population of England died. What does it teach us about the experience of historical crisis?

It’s time to talk frankly about the end of the world. Even if we’ve made it to the present day, we may not be out of the woods yet. Should we worry about it?

How many of our crises and catastrophes are really important? When we are in the thick of things, every thread that connects the past to the future is vitally important, a fiber of our being that feels every change. But look at the newspaper headlines from a hundred, fifty, even twenty years ago: painstakingly hammered-out laws regulating long-dead industries, treaties negotiating long-vanished borders, protests and riots over things we now take for granted. Deadly little wars over territories that no longer exist. Assassinations of now-forgotten people who would have been dead in a few years anyway. Heresies cleansed with fire that are now not even a footnote to history. Did any of this really matter? And yet, to the people of the time, some of these things presaged the end of the world, at least as they knew it.

Were they wrong, and is most of what they—or we—worry about not really so important? Are our crises going to look as dusty in a couple of decades? How do we know what the important crises in history are?

Bring Out Your Dead . . .

If you want to look at a disaster that seemed like the end of the world, the Black Death is an obvious candidate. It was an epidemic of bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, that swept through Eurasia in the period 1347–1350 (Benedictow 2004; Horrox 2013). Bubonic plague is a virulent bacterial infection that painfully kills most people who get it within a few days. The Black Death was the kickoff event for the “Second Pandemic,” a series of recurrent plague epidemics throughout Eurasia that lasted until the early eighteenth century. The first wave struck Britain in 1348 and within a year wiped out 40 percent to 50 percent of the population—perhaps 2 million people. Nobody knew how to explain it. Doctors thought it might be spread by bad air; priests said it was punishment for humanity’s general sinfulness. During the epidemic, as well as fear and grief, there was panic and confusion; many people seriously thought the world was ending or at least that the social world was unraveling into anarchy.

Like the people who endured it, historians have regarded the Black Death as a huge disaster. One traditional view, found in many popular books, is that the Black Death completely transformed European society (McNeill 1998; Herlihy 1999; Cohn 2002). This is the “pathogen as protagonist” model; you only have to explain how the pathogen arrived there and the rest happens mechanically. Its most commonly quoted example of social transformation is that because peasants moved around more after the epidemic, the plague broke the bonds of serfdom and ushered in a modern world of free labor working for wages. But there is a more nuanced historical tradition that sees the plague as ecologically and socially contextualized. Some pathogens are always present; what effect they have depends in large part on their context—for instance, whether the population is healthy or biologically compromised. In this model, most recently expressed in Bruce Campbell’s (2016) socioecological model, by about 1300, most of Europe was overpopulated and under severe demographic pressure. Any event—the late medieval climatic downturn, for instance—could create crises, and the fourteenth century was a century of crises, such as the Great Famine of 1315–1320 in which over 10 percent of England’s population died. The Black Death arrived at a vulnerable and compromised society and developed into the perfect storm. It proved a trigger for some changes; for others, it accelerated changes that were happening anyway.

This usefully poses three key questions:

1. 1. What defines a crisis?
2. 2. Why does rapid or traumatic change have the effects it does?
3. 3. How do crises form a part of historical process? Are they exceptional “acts of God” that intrude upon an otherwise orderly unfolding, or are they an integral part of change?

What Do Crises Do?

The point is not to trivialize the Black Death but just to highlight that the human experience of a crisis is different than its historical effects. And the historical effects may be greater or less or different than we might expect. Given this, how do crises play a particular role in historical processes or in evolution?

Much of the “collapse” literature in archaeology is surprisingly uncritical on this question; it tends to be built on a progressivist view of social evolution; to take things such as towns, political hierarchies, and elite culture as inherently advanced; and to assume that their disappearance inherently constitutes a “crisis” and is somehow a mark of failure. For all I know, most Mesoamericans, Mississippians, Mesopotamians, Harappans, Mycenaeans, and so on were actually happy to see these things “collapse” and to watch the step pyramids or citadels gather dust in the desert. There has been more consideration of what disasters do in other literatures. Catastrophism—seeing disasters as major agents of change—was important early in evolutionary thought but was sidelined by Darwinian gradualism for over a century until revived in Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould’s (1972) “punctuated equilibria” model. In this view, catastrophes can break up periods of evolutionary stasis, cause mass extinctions, and provide space for adaptive radiations. Similarly, in orthodox Marxist thought, revolution—abrupt, traumatic transformation—is needed to accomplish the real, major change that will bring about the end of capitalism; gradual change is not big enough and inevitably involves too much complicity with existing institutions (Marx and Engels 2017 [1848]). In both Marxism and evolutionary thought, disasters create alternative spaces of history in which other rules of change apply. They thus can accomplish things—for better or worse—beyond the potential of ordinary historical process, such as:

• Focusing awareness. Gradual change often passes unnoticed; crises attract attention and, potentially, social response—a fact often exploited in labeling something a crisis to generate action on it (such as branding obesity an “epidemic”). As politicians say, you should never waste a good crisis.
• Converting quantitative process to qualitative change, forcing decisions, and triggering new chains of action. The real culprit may be poor original design and years of accumulated stresses rather than the last truck going across the bridge, but the collapse is what actually forces rebuilding the bridge or rerouting the road somewhere else. This may result in unforeseeably different outcomes—going in new directions rather than simply ramping up existing ones.
• Making the unthinkable thinkable. The first mandate of any social order is to protect and perpetuate itself. Thus, all proposed policies have the unspoken corollary “if, of course, this doesn’t upset the way we do things too much.” During times of crisis, it may become clear that ordinary practice isn’t working and ordinary reality is suspended, and things previously unimaginable may be thinkable—even necessary. There’s a war on—we need women in factories. And, as the USA discovered in World War II, the experience of joining the workforce may have changed women’s self-images and attitudes, making it difficult to push them back into the kitchen . . .
• Breaking through constraints: the productive crisis. A city’s structure can become a straitjacket—until an earthquake, fire, or war levels it and offers a blank canvas for a new century. The Great Fire of 1665 let London grow from crowded medieval lanes into Georgian squares and Wren churches; a lot of modern(ist) housing throughout Europe was built in the wake of World War II’s urban bombings. Similarly, a social order can get trapped in layers of self-protection that prevent any movement toward change, even when the system is creaking with the effort of trying to stop history. A crisis may open spaces for movement, allowing it to break free and develop in new ways.
• Directing change. As an evolutionary force, crises may change internal structures in specific, perhaps predictable ways. For instance, they may focus attention and resources on core needs. In many examples of the “fall of civilization,” peasants and their productive structures continued intact; what “fell” were elite institutions. Similarly, if complex environmental settings change, specialized organizations that are adapted to them may be knocked back into more generalized components. Crisis, thus, can push a society toward particular forms.

Do different kinds of disasters have different effects? The answer is probably yes, though it would be pedestrian to formalize the typology of monsters. Epidemics reduce population and freeze interactions, but they don’t destroy infrastructure; if the population rebounds, plagues may fade into memories relatively rapidly, as the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920 did and Covid-19 may do. This may be aided by the sense that they are impersonal, effectively random events, unless they are politicized as AIDS was and Covid-19 may also be. Physical events (earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, floods) mostly destroy landscapes and infrastructure and dislocate people, but that occurs mostly locally. Volcanic eruptions cause local destruction, but their potential for global reach really comes from their ability to send dust around the world and lower atmospheric temperatures. Wars potentially combine wide-ranging physical destruction, loss of life, dislocation of populations, and restructuring of politics and memory. But wars are contextualized within larger political movements that take decades or centuries to break out in conflict (indeed, politics may be history-as-process and war its alternative historical space of crisis). But to really change the course of history, we probably need to address the less dramatic and visible parameters that provide the context for all of these—large-scale climate and environmental change.

No crisis ticks all the boxes. As noted above, the Black Death was, by and large, a missed opportunity for political change. Further, it did not generally breach taboos of thinkability except in a few minor theological ways (such as new, temporary forms of burial and regulations allowing non-clergy to administer sacraments to the dying). In hastening mobility for serfs, the epidemic may have brought to action tensions over the nature of land tenure that had been building up for some time. And in clearing (albeit cruelly) an overpopulated society, the epidemic may have allowed scope for economic innovation and maneuver—for instance, expansion of pastoralism and the cloth trade—in a way impossible in the packed landscape of 1300.

As this suggests, there is no single recipe for how a specific crisis will unfold; too much depends on circumstances. To take a big issue—inequality—the forces of crisis pull in contrary directions. On one hand, crises offer an unparalleled opening for increasing hierarchy. As an organizational form, hierarchy allows fast, decisive response to emergency conditions much more readily than horizontal organization does; indeed, many systems make provision for invoking emergency dictatorships or martial law during crises. And crises offer an unparalleled opportunity for would-be leaders to sow confusion, fear, and doubt; seize control; and wrestle society in previously unthinkable directions—so much so that inventing crises is almost an obligatory part of a demagogue’s playbook. On the other hand, crises may exert leveling effects. They may involve jettisoning the less necessary components of society, which rarely include actual producers redeveloping local self-sufficiencies of basal units, and adding moral pressure for change. Even in modernity’s class-divided societies, major benefits to workers may result from or follow social spasms—universal suffrage in Britain following World War I, the American New Deal during the Great Depression, and the American GI Bill and the British National Health Service following World War II.

The Zombie Apocalypse: Theoretical Considerations

Crises are events, and events are linked into ideas about causation. We want to think linearly: Circumstances A caused Event B, which caused Consequences C. This desire for simple linear narrative is exemplified in those Nature headlines that are the bête noire of serious historians: “My Cherry-Picked Climatic Wiggle Caused the Fall of the World’s Most Famous Civilization.” But at the risk of restating the obvious, this isn’t really how history works. History is multi-causal: any event has a lot of different causes. As historians have argued since Braudel (Bailey 2007; Robb and Pauketat 2012), history is multi-scalar, a palimpsest of processes going on at different scales and speeds. So these causes are embedded in both short-term surface histories and deeper histories going back a long time. All of this implies that we can, and indeed must, write multiple histories at multiple scales. Moreover, as a general rule, anything important enough for us to want to explain it will also influence other processes, and anything important enough for us to call it a cause will also be affected by other things. In such an approach, “causality” becomes a narrative way of holding everything else equal so we can highlight particular relationships within a complex web of relationality (Robb and Harris 2013).

What defines a crisis? It is clear that what people experience as the end of the(ir) world isn’t always the same thing as real historical change. Nobody would downplay the human tragedy of the Black Death, but its historical effects were much less sweeping and more subtle than we might expect from the sheer scale of death. Instead, crises are times when the pace of change outstrips our ability to deal with it. What their consequences are depends on the specific historical context and the nature of society. The Black Death didn’t result in widespread unemployment and starvation in part because of the locally self-sufficient nature of medieval society; a much smaller disruption would have much greater effects in our world today. But it is clear that crises also create a different mode of historical time in which different kinds of things can happen. Crises as a form of historical time may have special effects distinct from processual change. These potentially include galvanizing people and groups to new actions, pushing social organization in specific directions, making previously unthinkable possibilities become thinkable, and clearing away the past to allow new things to emerge.

Evolutionarily, history is all about balancing change and continuity. Both stasis and change require deliberate action (Smith 2010:23–24). Humans are attached to the past, and we usually assume that the narrow way we have lived is “normal,” inevitable, and necessary. This shared commitment to a shared social world is part of culture and evolutionarily important for acting together. But change is the state of the world, and humans can live in a huge variety of ways. This creates complexities. If you refuse to change or change too slowly, extinction looms. In the midst of the Italian War of Unification, a character in Tommaso di Lampedusa’s The Leopard remarks ambiguously “If we want things to remain the same, things will have to change.” Thus, change is never total. The future is rooted inextricably in the past through our institutions, our landscapes, our bodies, and our habitus. It can never be entirely new. As frustrated revolutionaries inevitably learn, even if you build a completely new system, you still have to populate it with the same old people, with all their virtues and defects.

The conclusion this leads us to is that crisis is relational, not absolute. The effects of a catastrophe depend not only on how severe it is and how long it lasts but also on how people are organized and relate to the world around them. With the Black Death, for example, we see how a social world made of cellular units with generalized capabilities is more resilient than one made up of highly specialized, integrated units. This leads to an obvious question: are some ways of organizing our social world more crisis-prone than others? The answer has to be yes.

It has to do with how you cope with change. The world around us is constantly changing. The masters at dealing with this are hunter-gatherers in a world of other hunter-gatherers. They typically live at low population levels in highly flexible ways. You just map yourself onto whatever new conditions emerge. If rising sea levels drown your territory, you move somewhere else; end of problem. In contrast, the more demands you place on the world around you, the more you have to fix it stably at optimum levels to continue to live in the way you are accustomed, and the more the mere fact of change becomes a threat and a crisis. Subsistence farmers are not too bad off, as long as they don’t live in a desert or in too crowded a landscape and can move when they need to. In contrast, capitalism positively manufactures crises, particularly when combined with rigid political borders that rule out movement as a response to change. The capitalist system of production and consumption depends on finding a golden moment of maximum productivity and fixing it there stably, so that change itself becomes an existential threat. (As an American politician recently stated when discussing climate change, “The American Way of Life is non-negotiable.”) For example, once you turn land into high-investment ownable capital, a lot of wealth, housing, and food production becomes tied up in specific, non-movable places that must remain dry land; and your options for dealing with rising sea levels are much more circumscribed. Given the futility of arguing with long-term historical change, taking such an attitude is probably setting yourself up to fail.

Of course, it is probably not a realistic option for all of us to quit our jobs and grow potatoes in our gardens. But there may be ways to design societies that are more change-friendly. Maybe we should take thought about how to build societies that do less to conserve yesterday’s world and more to welcome change. For instance, rather than specializing to maximize any single objective (particularly productivity) or to fit any single, particular configuration of circumstances that then have to be fixed stably for survival, one can develop generalized capacities that provide multiple modes of operating under different circumstances. A system with flexibility and diverse organizational possibilities is able to operate in multiple modes as circumstances require. And we should conserve diversity of all kinds as a resource, nurturing kinds of people, ways of doing things, knowledge bases. We might not need it now, but you never know what the future will need.

Ultimately, we don’t live in a world of crises. We live in a world of change. In some ways, the end of the world is always happening; every day sees the end of yesterday’s world and the birth of tomorrow’s. Whether it becomes a crisis is up to us.

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to my colleagues on the “After the Plague: Health and History in Medieval Cambridge” project (Craig Cessford, Jenna Dittmar, Ruoyun Hui, Sarah Inskip, Toomas Kivisild, Piers Mitchell, Bram Mulder, Tamsin O’Connell, Alice Rose, and Christiana Scheib) for many stimulating discussions; the views expressed here are not necessarily theirs. I thank Monica Smith for insightful comments on the manuscript. Funding was provided by the Wellcome Trust (Medical Humanities Collaborative Grant 200368/Z/15/A).

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