COVID-19, The Launching Pad to a New Renaissance
This is the first of a two-part article exploring: COVID 19 as a reiteration of the patterns of the past, and the possibilities that are opening before us seen under the lens of Systems Thinking, Complexity Theory and Awareness-Based Systems Change.
Read part II here: Setting in Motion a New Renaissance
COVID-19 challenges us to make a choice as a species. Are we going to repeat the patterns of the past in the XXI century? Or, are we going to embrace the unknown, connecting with the emerging future?
In the first case, we will be inviting an elephant to dance into a crystal shop. In the second, we will be building the launching pad to a new Renaissance.
The Patterns of the Past
Humanity faces two factors at the beginning of the XXI Century that changed the world for good in the XIV Century — The environment and the Plague. Please join me in the exploration of their historical connection.
The British archaeologist Tobias Stone, in his studies of human history, has discovered that we, as a human race “have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction from time to time, generally self-imposed to some extent or another… He says that for a historian looking back throughout human evolution, “every time one of those cycles is about to begin, if you look close enough, you will discover evident signs that a big tragic event was about to take place. Still, surprisingly enough, the people living in that time and place were caught totally unaware. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. For instance, the Black Death, which devastated Europe.”
The Wrath of God
The 14th century in Europe was biblical. Any believer at the time would have thought that God had unleashed his wrath on the world as a punishment for people’s sins.
It began in the year 1300 with the Little Ice Age, which lasted until the 19th century. The sudden climate change disrupted harvest cycles, throwing the feudal system into a deep crisis, sending millions of serfs who worked the hereditary land of nobles into a state of starvation and preventing the latter from receiving the crop’s rent.
That situation worsened in 1347 when a Genoese merchant ship arrived in Sicily from Crimea. The Genoese had left Crimea to escape from the Tartars, who had besieged their Black sea trading post, catapulting dead corpses over the post walls. The Genoese left the post in a hurry, but not before infected black rats boarded their ships.
Later, the ship unloaded its mortal cargo in every port it moored, from Constantinople to its final destination, Messina, Sicily. From there, merchant ships spread the Plague to the rest of Europe, hitting particularly hard the biggest cities — Florence, Venice, and Paris, which lost half of their population. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes the symptoms of the pestilentia and the life in Florence in the grip of the Plague. A total of six waves of the Black Death decimated Europe until the end of the century. It killed almost half the population of Europe, about 50 million, and another 25 million in Asia and Africa.
How Europe Adapted to the Effects of the Black Death
The social structure of Europe changed radically by the end of the 14th century. Europe’s population was lower than it had been at the beginning of the century. The descendants of the survivors had their genes altered, making the next generations of Europeans healthier. Thanks to the Plague, hospitals evolved from way stations and hospices to places where the sick went to be treated.
Due to the shortage of artisans and masons, homes and buildings were simpler, more functional. It was the end of feudalism because the surviving serfs demanded higher wages in cash, not in kind, which raised their standard of living. Many peasants migrated and engaged in crafts and trades, giving birth to the middle classes.
We Change History by Changing the Story
Even though the Black Death was one of humanity’s greatest tragedies, it was a catalyst for the birth of one of the brightest periods in humanity’s history — the Renaissance. How could so much tragedy and sorrow bring about such a radical change in society?
Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens A Brief History Of Humankind, states that “since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths — by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances, myths can change rapidly.” Hence, “Homo sapiens have been able to change their behavior rapidly in accordance with changing needs”. He gives the example of the French Revolution, in which the people of France changed the myth of the divine right of kings to the sovereignty of the people.
Based on historic evidence, we can conclude that Europeans, forced by the Plague, changed the Feudal system myth to a more evenly distributed economic and social system. Due to the enormous mortality caused by the Plague, most people did not look at the church’s dogma and the afterlife as solutions to their everyday problems any longer. On the contrary, people were more focused on the present life and human-based knowledge and accomplishments.
This change of collective mental models led to an appreciation of the arts and sciences, and to the freedom of thought. This resulted in Humanism surging as a philosophical movement and set the stage for the Renaissance as a period of human history. Indeed, we are the stories we tell ourselves, and we can change our destiny by changing those stories. We have done it for the last 40,000 years, and we will continue to do so in the future.
The Disruption of COVID-19
No disruption has affected humanity so suddenly, widely, and deeply than the one caused by a micro-organism known as “Coronaviridae, that infects birds and many mammals including humans.”
In late 2019 someone was infected by an animal, probably a bat, in a seafood market in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province. From there it has spread around the world with the violence of a wildfire, infecting more than 2 million people, and killing more than 120 thousand to this date. COVID-19 has disrupted the lives of all humans and human activity on the planet. In addition, nobody knows when the pandemic is going to soften its grip on the world and what the cost will be in human lives and to the world economy.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
The Spanish flu was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. Lasting from January 1918 to December 1920, it infected 500 million people — about a quarter of the world’s population at the time. The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million.
World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the name the Spanish flu. The so-called “Spanish flu” killed more people than World War I, but the story we told ourselves at the time, was that the war was more important than the plague.
Myths and stories are the ways that Homo sapiens made sense of the things that happened. Throughout the course of history, Homo sapiens treated great tragedies caused by wars and natural causes as very complicated problems, repeating the patterns of the past with worse consequences every time. Even in the XXI Century, we continue to do that as a collective.
Accordingly, most world leaders have agreed that the remedy for COVID 19 is “physical isolation, flattening the curve, get the vaccine to work, and hope for herd immunity”. That’s it. Once this major inconvenience is solved, everything will be back to normal — business as usual. Or so they believe.
I think that they, and us for that matter, are in for a big surprise. The problem with this interpretation is that they are not seeing the whole picture. First, there have been other waves of this Plague in the recent past — MERS, SARS, and now COVID-19, each one worse than the others. Second, there will be other waves after this one. Third, even if we don’t recognize it now, the world after COVID-19 will be different. Those are historical facts. Furthermore, the pandemic has put a cover on a boiling pot — climate change. The tsunami of climate change is rising on the horizon and nobody is looking at it, but eventually, it is going to crash against the coast with full force.
COVID-19 challenges us to make a choice as a species. Are we going to repeat the patterns of the past in the XXI century? Or. Are we going to embrace the unknown, connecting with the emerging future?
In the first case, we will be inviting an elephant to dance into a crystal shop. In the second, we will be building the launching pad to a new Renaissance.
Read part II here: Setting in Motion a New Renaissance
To be part of the GAIA global community, which is immersed in building the story of the future as you read this article, go to the GAIA landing page (www.gaiajourney.org)
