Reflections on Our Recent Visitation

One of the peculiar fancies I enjoy is medical history. Every couple of years I find myself rereading The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and William Boghurst’s Loimographia, along with just about anything else that qualifies from that period. That last great outburst of bubonic plague in London in 1665 holds a special fascination. There are few historical comparisons to the sweeping natural evil that malady held, and reading the accounts is enough to chill the blood. Our ancestors were made of stern stuff, though they didn’t have a lot of choice. In an age where condition of life ranked just above subsistence for most, survival required the cultivation of a certain steeliness. Our language retains reference to that great terror; we avoid things like it, we bless one another when we sneeze, and even if ring-a-ring-a-rosie is now considered apocryphal, in the common imagination it retains its original frame of reference.

In one of London’s earlier epidemics, John Donne, thinking himself struck by plague, declared famously that no man is an island, and that for every clod washed away, Europe was the less.

It helps that the people of London in 1665 were close to us, and thanks to the Great Vowel Shift are easily understood in plain language, once you can get past the use of the long-form ſ. In Pepys’s diary, we see the all-too-human machinations of a man keen to rise in the Naval Board, and his sign-off that year betrays the duplexity that life often presents: “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time.” He never quit the city, sending his family away to safety instead, and hazarded his life as much out of curiosity as duty, and sometimes for eros. In his peccadillos, we see the picture of the full man, even if he did his best to disguise these misadventures in a mixture of Italian, Latin and Spanish. It makes his whole account further believable; there is something wonderfully honest in the things we write that are never intended for others.

Thus, it was with a degree of curiosity that I kept up with the news on the latest malady emerging from China, that primordial seedbed of wondrous diseases. I wondered if we would be able to match our ancestors in the face of ancient terror, something to remind us that we are of the Earth as well as on it. The return of the horsemen ought at least to make an illuminating change from that increasingly simulated feeling, of ever-multiplying degrees of separation, that Western life has taken on in recent years. After all, so much of our cinema and commercial entertainment longs for this sort of thing; fantasises, even, though zombies are often proffered in lieu of plague victims running naked in the streets in their final throes. Perhaps in collective disaster, we might find our better natures thrust forwards; perhaps we might, as the internet Right endlessly extorts, return to tradition, and rediscover what it means to live in a polis properly ordered. Memento mori might shake us out of moral and spiritual complacency; we might discover our own version of Camus’s Dr Rieux.

Needless to say, my naivety was misplaced. Rather than a curative to our atomised way of life, it further extended it. Unlike those trapped within their home for forty days, the sick with the well—as our ancestors too often endured, complete with daubings and locks on their doors, according to the standing Plague Orders instituted in July 1665—our routes for escapism are better mapped, though they are most often solitary pursuits. Where one did aim to actualise oneself collectively, it was through social media, of which I will say little, much having been said about it already; too much, even, as the thing becomes at once what everybody does at all times and yet blames for causing every ill. It suffices that the combination of distance, anonymity and what the social-science types call “echo chambers” hardly make a recipe for harmonious fellowship. Social media has made many of us into screeching fishwives, when we aren’t playing at voyeurism or narcissism, and together constitute something we should guard against. Never was this worse than during the height of those pandemic years.

In one of London’s earlier epidemics, John Donne, thinking himself struck by plague, declared famously that no man is an island, and that for every clod washed away, Europe was the less. Yet if he felt himself involved in mankind, and never needed to send for whom the bell tolls, it was difficult to see a similar spirit abroad in our own time. If our shut-in ancestors had to negotiate with their neighbours-turned-watchmen, to drop them some coins from a window into a vinegar jar for whatever supplies remained in the capital, we were content to put up our feet, expand our waistlines, and enjoy those degrees of separation that modernity allows.

In one of those strange juxtapositions of existence, if life atomised further on the one hand, it deatomised on the other, the hand closer to home. Families suddenly found themselves under the same roof, unable to wander their individually beaten tracks a while, and in some cases, those families were not long for this world. Separations following our visitation shot to dizzying proportions, as modern people discovered they were not able to stand one another, which ought not to be altogether surprising. Without the postmodern version of the outsourced extended family or parish crèche—childcare and the primary school—children raised on screens and takeaway raised hell. The nuclear family has been destroyed as much by its reduction to mere nucleus, and the means granted us to make it so, as by any ideological campaign against it.

Any hopes that bigger problems might ease the commentariat’s peculiar fascinations were short-lived, too. There was a moment of moral panic, that the Chinese government was careful not to waste, where we got to hear about anti-Asian hate crimes. It gets tiresome, being regarded as frothy-mouthed would-be executioners on the verge of a pogrom at any moment, what the millennial woman would refer to as “being gaslit”. It’s always our fault, even when it isn’t. There is an ever-fascinating interplay between our present obsession with hyper-individuality that recognises no limits, even biological ones, on the one hand, and collective grievance on the other, usually actualised along ethnic lines, or those of sexual preference, for some peculiar reason the two being regarded as equally inalienable. This commitment to the individual being able to be or do whatever he, she or they please was badly tested, for the first time in a long while; and oddly enough, the greatest advocates of total individual licence swapped hats so fast that if you blinked, you’d miss it.

The pandemic gave governments a good chance to see how far a cowed public would let them take it; and the answer was pretty far. Adding to this sense of a sudden Big Brother, of QR codes and mask mandates and jabs, was the convergence of government and big business together, like Dutch and Dillon sharing that muscular handshake in Predator. Well might Amazon executives say that they never lived so merrily (besides that they never got so much) as during the pandemic; helpful, for those big international megacorporations, that the lockdowns obliterated small business en masse. It goes to show how ephemeral all our cries to individual self-determination really are, when the state decides its course. Anybody who knows what society is really like, when the strong gods come calling, is aware that individual freedoms exercised in the name of enjoying oneself are never guaranteed in time of crisis. After all, it’s why we conscript soldiers in dire times, or compel voting; in the case of Australia, one more ardently than the other. It’s why the Leviathan exists at all, if we are to take the account of Hobbes seriously, and while we might get the best of this social contract while the skies are blue, we are all subjects when the Leviathan roars. One can admire the pluck of the radical nonconformist, if he is nonconforming for the right reasons, and a country that turned Ned Kelly into a totem ought to be expected to deliver on this front; yet nonconformism purely for the sake of being different, and thus remarkable, delivers a rather counterfeit product.

As for the antivax crowd, many of whom I suspect were driven by an attraction to latter-day Ned Kellyism, it was difficult to avoid the sense they had fallen into a trap.

There is something very dystopian and peculiar about our present dispensation, but this has developed out of our embracing liberal principles as much as any departure from them; and this should be obvious without the state requiring everybody be locked at home and encouraging experimental injections. The suspicious Australian, who senses at a primordial level that the elites might not have his best interests entirely in mind, is keen to articulate this somehow, and is glad to see it manifest in terms that are easy to understand, and easy enough to oppose, simply by saying no. How refreshing to be able to blunt the endless tide of linguistic weaponry that radiates downward, designed to shame and befuddle, with a single word.

It is more difficult to identify the problems closer to the marrow of our thing, and no good at all that the language in which this Australian articulates his grievances is the language of liberalism, couched in individual rights and personal freedoms. Mill was a liberal too, and utilitarian arguments can be made just as effectively for less deontological courses of action. At any rate, the coalescence of the antivaxers served to draw out what might have otherwise been a populist movement, united behind a kaleidoscope of ideas of varying quality, drawn largely but not entirely from the fringes, into the open, where they could be made fun of. Many ended up fired from their jobs, banned on social media, subject to misinformation tags that read like something out of the former communist world, or wound up with the police at their door, like something actually out of the former communist world. It reminded me of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, against Henry VIII’s anti-Catholic reforms: people decrying the destruction of the sureties of the world they knew, in a moment that made clear that world was gone and unlikely to return.

As for state governments, well, they got a sniff of power and went mad. All leaders must wonder who they’d be, if the bombs were falling on London, and hope there’s a Churchill somewhere within them. Naturally, this particular catastrophe had to be a very postmodern one, and the rhetoric never quite matched the reality, the reality of a crisis spent at home on television feeling anxious and depressed, rather than digging bombed-out citizens free. We don’t produce master statesmen any longer. Our leaders, with some exceptions, have come to resemble used car salesmen, and are respected about as much; a natural result when the entire political process, like almost everything else, is reduced to marketing and selling a product. Voters are consumers now, and increasingly view the political process that way, even if they aren’t entirely cognisant of it themselves.

For many observers of only the immediate during the last visitation, all the constitutional and philosophical efforts made to avoid the iron law of oligarchy appear to have been a waste of time. We sleepwalked our way into one anyway, the oligarchy of unelected bureaucracies, corporate power, and globalised finance without national conscience, or any sort at all. This was bound together and animated by the soft-headed and disingenuous sanctimony of an effete liberal elite. The kitsch and flowery language of various state organs demonstrate this, all about looking after ourselves and each other, complete with helpfully illustrated captions of how to wash our hands. The managerial state would, if possible, reach into your bathroom and hold your hands under the tap; fortunately, we are not quite there yet, even if this impulse has multiplied many times over since 1665, where the sovereignty of King Charles II over any given subject was less than, say, that which the Department of Human Services would like to have over you. Public health can be its own tyranny, because there is no end to what somebody will do to you for your own good, as Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out brilliantly many times over.

Facing this sort of thing, the behaviour of many led me to conclude that Clive James was right, that today’s settler-born Australian is really the descendant of prison officers rather than convicts. In 1665 London, many were employed as searchers of the dead, generally women near the bottom of the urban economy who entered plague-afflicted houses to confirm the cause of death, to add to the meticulously calculated, if nonetheless rather inaccurate, Bills of Mortality. The plague economy was a real thing: it provided employment, and a means of survival, for many who would have otherwise starved. In our age, we had the searchers of the living, instead, who crept about hoping to report on businesses with too many patrons, those who wouldn’t wear masks or posted misinformation online, and most of these went without a cent for their efforts. People were less likely to forgive one another than ever before, whether you believed the pandemic was indeed the return of the Black Death or conspiratorial government overreach.

If this sort of anti-charity, exercised in the name of the collective good, experienced a shot-in-the-arm during the pandemic years, the same could not be said for charity generally. As I believe Thomas Sowell noted, nobody thanks a bureaucracy for a handout, and nobody feels a glow of beneficence when they pay their taxes. Of all the things we’ve outsourced, the welfare of our fellows to the state must rank eminently among them. It is hard to quibble that this has helped provide some concrete goods on the one hand, in terms of material sufficiency, but seems to have exacerbated a more subtle set of moral ills on the other. It’s similarly hard to say if one begets the other entirely. We are still a long way from India, a place hardly known for man’s love for his fellow, where traffic stubbornly refuses to part for emergency service vehicles. Half the reason so many want to come here is that we still retain some elements of a functional civil society, of Lord Moulton’s land of manners, though its survival is hardly guaranteed, and the conditions necessary for its continued existence are in fast decline. Charity, like any musculature, needs regular working to keep its shape, and we must remember that the deprivations of modernity are generally extensions of our worst pre-existing human ailments left to fester, rather than novel additions to them.

If cops and dobbers became the day-to-day, cowardice made its way into the heart of things. To a certain sort of materialist, another minute of life is worth any cost, as a friend helpfully told me. The quality of one’s life, it seems, is best measured quantitatively. The visitation saw a people determined not to go quietly into that dark night, and we can hardly fault them for that; though rather than courage guaranteeing their steel, cowardice took its stead. This was the mentality of the prey animal writ large, of furtive eyes and herds moving this way and that, and where steely resolve was demonstrated, it was in fierce combat over rolls of toilet paper in a shopping aisle. This, too, is as old as time. From the inferno of human life that was Florence in 1348, Boccaccio wrote of those who would pedantically undertake what we now call social distancing; and in 1665 we read of it again, when those of means abandoned London at the first hint of the plague. This included those surgeons and physicians eager to retain their wealthy clients, leaving the ordinary people to the ministrations of quacks or wise women, or the genuinely well-intentioned if clinically hare-brained, like the apothecary William Boghurst. The poor fled into the countryside around London, to live in tents, and in many cases starve. Woodcuts from 1625’s epidemic show a skeletal javelinman pursuing fleeing Londoners; We fly, I follow, Wee dye. There’s something in that; about what we’ll do, or not do, for that extra minute.

Fui quod es, eris quod sum: what you are, I was; what I am, you will be.

Few epitaphs can strike such terror into the postmodern as that, the type who is unused to adversity outside of that we all experience personally, and who takes the notion of being swept away in a great harvest as an affront to their human rights. It’ll make you morbid if you spend too many dark nights of the soul on the subject, yet accounting for our own mortality, as Socrates pointed out, is what all philosophy is in service to. The prospect of infectious disease, that changes the timeline from decades or years to perhaps days or weeks, and strikes with impunity, focuses the attention. It pays to remember what Seneca said, that the man who plans for death only when it comes is like the man who accepts leaving the pub while in the process of being thrown out. Seneca, mind, had to die by his principles, rather than just live groping towards them, and you can’t help but suspect Nero had this in mind.

The speed with which the younger generation was sacrificed for the older generation, in terms of their own prospects, was astonishing. In a properly ordered society, the sacrifices go the other way, at least as far as is possible, outside of war; but this is to suppose societies that no longer look to the future nor the past, that are devoid of spirituality higher than that offered by the psychologist, are capable of generating that kind of collective eudaimonia.

Our visitation revealed the weakness of postmodern society’s central conceit, the illusion that we are always riding the horse, and no longer subject to being trampled underfoot. The peeling away of sureties that have held strong for a century or more was deeply unsettling for many; seeing schools and businesses shuttered, facing empty streets, and the return of some genetic memory that remembers the words “Lord have mercy on us” daubed on doors. There’s a great deal of talk about the long-term effects on mental health following the pandemic, and if you ask me, this is why. There’s a sense that we aren’t in control quite the way we thought we were, that things are no longer given, and that our nice, seemingly self-sustaining societies, carefully built over many generations, can lurch in wild directions at the drop of a mask.

Pepys wrote despondently of no boats on the Thames, of grass growing through the pavers in late September 1665, but in the years that followed, London filled again with people, and ordinary life resumed. The people of his time knew the plague well, and expected it to visit once a generation at least, as it had for the past three centuries. We have not reached that level of stoicism in the face of an unpredictable natural world, because we’ve not needed to; at any rate, we’ll have the medical and psychological types to guide us through, our equivalent of the clergy. I’m sure they’ll have plenty of sage words for us.

Forgive my facetiousness. I’m happier to trust medical experts than, say, literary or political experts; at least the former have a sort of empirical realism against which they must test their ideas. The medical profession has been going from strength to strength since germ theory, but I am not sure their high standing will last forever. Many are now suspicious that the heirs of Hippocrates have joined with experts everywhere, in being, at the very least, rather disingenuous when it suits them, or when somebody leans on them a little, or perhaps having made the very human mis-step of being wrong occasionally. It has not helped that the alarmist medico could get all kinds of airtime, and that the obscure expert, otherwise unremarkable in the academy, suddenly had an unlimited line to power. This sort of thing hardly incentivises one to fade from the foreground, and the goal of the good doctor, unlike it increasingly seems the good pharmacological company, ought to be to make themselves redundant through their treatment, to say goodbye to a patient in better shape than they arrived. There is something undimmingly noble in the physician’s call properly realised, a cleric to the body, who owes loyalties to higher things. It is a shame when you see them beslimed by interests to other things, like apothecaries selling wormwood or a chopped-up snake’s head to peasants in the days of yore, but at least you can say that the latter were acting out of ignorance as much as self-interest.

If the experts were wrong, we should be unsurprised; if you read a little history, the experts are often wrong.

The difference between the experts of now and the experts of then is ostensibly the scientific method and the deployment of military-grade-data-enriched empiricism, buoyed no end by our command of technology, particularly information technology. The temptation is always to regard our ancestors as inferior, both morally and cerebrally. Fortunately, true phenomenological objectivity is nigh impossible, and the man can never be removed entirely from the machine, which should be a little reassuring, especially if you’ve watched The Matrix too many times.

A little bruised hubris would be all right, if that were the only price to pay. For many, the costs have been higher, especially for those who found themselves without work during those years, who had to take the equivalent of 1665’s plague alms, provided by more fortunate citizens, or who took a groat to dig the pits. Many were not in a position to attend boring Zoom meetings with suit-blazer on top and boxer shorts below, mouse cursor hovering near the mute button; to say nothing of those who lost people, or their own lives. As in all epidemics, those who could distance themselves did, like the stream of better-types who quit London at the first alarming numbers in the Bills of Mortality, and few things vanish faster than the pretence to egalitarianism that characterises the modern snob in a T-shirt and jeans.

If we view life a little as before and after the pandemic, and the legacy of the disease serves as a sort of bugbear for every social ill that has reared its head since, from illiterate children to depression diagnoses to family breakdowns and the implacable rise of loneliness, it is difficult to lay blame. The truth is that our visitation merely made obvious the cracks and erosions that were hiding in plain sight, showed us where the fault-lines were, and ought to help us take stock of where we ought to cast up fortifications.

Christopher Jolliffe is a regular contributor to Quadrant.