MID MARCH
THE BLACK SWAN
The Black Swan.
I have a book by that name, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The subtitle is The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. The sudden appearance of the Coronavirus qualifies as completely unusual, totally outside the realm of regular expectations: in other words: A Black Swan!
The most influential weekly in the world, is the British THE ECONOMIST. As its title suggests, it mainly focuses on financial matters. Each year, in January, it publishes an extra issue, looking forward what will happen in the coming year.
Its excellent editorial staff have usually been substantially correct, even though a famous baseball coach, Yogi Berra, once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Yet, nothing in that otherwise excellent issue, some 150 pages, with the presumptuous title, THE WORLD IN 2020, will pan out as these highly paid authors, the best of the world in their field, predicted, because THE VIRUS has emerged and the economy suddenly has stagnated: it now wobbles, and falls, with ominous consequences for us all.
Eric Hobsbawm, a well-known historian, in his book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, asserts that the 19th Century ended in 1914, when, 100 years after Waterloo, a conflict began, now known as World War I. He also stated that the 20th Century was short, only 75 years, ending in 1989, when The WALL in Berlin tumbled down.
I agree with him on the 1914 date but not on the second statement: after the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991, the world continued on its capitalistic path, even expanded its reach to embrace the entire world, especially China, which today has more billionaires than any other country. I now maintain that the 20th Century ends this year, in 2020, with the sudden – Black Swan – emergence of the Coronavirus, throwing the entire global situation for a loop. This PANDEMIC forces us to radically change everything, from manufacturing, relying on ‘just in time’ delivery, to debt service as payments are due while production has stalled, to air travel and cruises. Boeing, already on life support – the USA biggest exporter – may well crash entirely. Any bets on the stock market or gold?
Back in time.
Pandemics tend to cause sudden lasting changes. That’s why history never is a gradual affair. It is prone to jump.
In THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY, Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, relates how Christianity found general acceptance during a PANDEMIC in the year 260 in Rome. While the pagans fled the city, “the Christian Community nursed the sick and dying and even spared nothing in preparing the dead for burial.”
Such action caused Christian growth. This PANDEMIC was instrumental in Christianizing the Roman World.
Something totally different happened more than a thousand year later, which Barbara Tuchman describes in her A DISTANT MIRROR, the Calamitous 14th Century. The Black Plague PANDEMIC killed perhaps as many as 30% on Europe’s population. Then the church, with its humble beginnings after Pentecost in Jerusalem, had become a supreme power. She writes, “The plagues accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual assurance………Human conduct was found to be ‘wickeder than before’, more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself.”
As the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his HERFSTTIJ DER MIDDEL EEUWEN relates, the period following the Black Death in Europe turned out to be the “WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES”. For him, the real story was not just the economic aftereffects of a PANDEMIC; it also put paid to the mysticism, irrationalism, and xenophobia that in the end brought an end to a basically ecclesiastical culture. Thus the Black Plague PANDEMIC paved the way for the Reformation.
Likewise, it looks entirely possible that COVID-19 will open the door to the “Waning of Capitalism”.
I believe that it took until the first two months of 2020 for the long Twentieth Century – 1914- 2020 – to come to an end. History jumps from one disastrous system – Capitalism – whose aim has always been ‘Creative Destruction’ in which it succeeded by destructing itself.
This will be the decade when the majority will come to understand that things are never going back to “normal.” Our bills are due: environmental, financial, ethical, social, even religious.
Capitalism.
For all of us Capitalism has become a quasi-religion: we, all of us, are paid-up members of the Church of Capitalism, whose creed is to “Shop till you drop.”
True, we greatly benefit from its products, from orange juice first thing in the morning, to television at night, touting the wonders of the current age. Not for a moment are we free from its influence. The Bible tells us “To pray without Ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), but for most of us our real adherence, all the time, everywhere is to “Consume without Ceasing”, to the point where, for every calorie of food, we expend 10 calories of climate-wrecking carbon substances.
The Bible tells us of instances where parents sacrificed their children to appease the gods: we have gone a step further: we sacrifice our very lives on the altar of Capitalism.
And that is about to come true.
The Black Swan of a PANDEMIC rears its ugly head. Just as in the Third Century Christians willingly sacrificed their health and life in the service of their neighbors, and so caused to Good News to spread, just as in the 14th Century the opposite happened, and a pandemic was instrumental in church reform, so now, in Century 21, a PANDEMIC will break the idol of Capitalism, and teach us the lesson how God will not be mocked, will not be taken for granted, teach us the lesson that creation is holy, is the apple of God’s eye.
Psalm 19 comes to mind:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of His hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
Without speech or language,
without a sound to be heard,
their voice has gone out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world…..
The Law of the Lord’s (creation) is perfect
Reviving the soul.
We have silenced that voice.
The Lord is coming back to reclaim the creation he paid for with his life (John 3: 16).
“THAT is the Ultimate Black Swan.”