gracchusdixit

In the closing decades of the 2nd century AD, a plague swept over the once invincible Roman Empire.  Brought back by returning legions after a military campaign in the east, the pestilence spread swiftly and in all directions.  As luck would have it, the greatest physician of the ancient world, Galen, was practicing medicine at the time.  Thanks to his meticulous descriptions of the symptoms and trajectory of the disease, historians have concluded that the “Aurelian Plague”—named after the reigning emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius—was probably smallpox.  

The “Aurelian plague” was the first pandemic in history, infecting every province of the Roman Empire, from the Tigris to the Thames, from the Rhine to the Rif, and killing as much as 25 percent of its population.  This devastation ignited a political, economic, and social crisis that lasted almost a hundred years.

And yet, the Roman Empire not only survived this crisis, it went on to recover much of its former glory.  Scarcely more than 50 years after the last vestiges of the plague disappeared, the emperor Constantine built a new capital on the shores of the Bosporus, which soon surpassed Rome itself in both population and magnificence.

What accounted for this remarkable turnaround?

The answer is that the forces which produced the pandemic also led to the recovery.  The Roman Empire was the closest the world has ever come to a “global” political and economic system, in which public and private interests were unified and subordinated to a single purpose.  It wasn’t “global” in a modern sense, of course.  Large parts of the world were either unknown to the Romans or beyond their reach or ambitions.  Even so, their empire spanned three continents, controlled the entire Mediterranean, and extended its sway to the remote British Isles.  Nothing like it had existed before or has existed since.

One of this empire’s greatest achievements was the creation of transnational market, knit together by fifty thousand miles of peerless roads and secure shipping lanes that stretched from the Red Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar.  This astonishing economic network that so efficiently moved spices and gems, silks and incense, wines and wheat, also spread the plague bacillus.  The first global market became the conduit for the first global pandemic.

The globalism of the Roman Empire had another dimension, however, which proved vital to its recovery.  In addition to a unified system of transportation and commerce, the Romans gave much of the world a single government and civilization, whose citizens were bound together by a shared sense of duties and obligations.  There was no confusion about who was in charge.  There was no doubt about what was at stake.  

That is not the situation we face today.  We live in two contradictory and opposing worlds, one economic, the other political.  Those worlds are now colliding.  

On the one hand, we inhabit the world of global capitalism.  For decades, we have luxuriated in the consumer goods and services provided by this system while paying scant attention to its perils.  One of those perils is now consuming us.  While global capitalism did not create COVID-19, the market mechanisms it has spawned have spread the disease, exacerbated its severity, and undermined our ability to respond. 

The global tourism business, for example, enticed half a billion Americans, Europeans, Latin Americans, East Asians, and Chinese to travel abroad last year.  As long as these hordes of people were merely carrying overstuffed luggage and duty-free baubles, nobody gave it much thought.  Now, we know that many of them were also carrying disease and death.

More fundamentally, the dynamic of global capitalism, which is the pursuit of profit, has only made things worse.  The drive to push down costs by pushing the means of production to far-flung countries where labor is cheap has created attenuated and fragile supply chains, “just-in-time” production, and razor-thin inventories of even the most essential goods.  Hospitals throughout the world are now scrambling to find ventilators and protective equipment, because global capitalism has no incentive to produce a single face mask, a single pair of gloves, or so much as an ounce of hand sanitizer, unless those goods can be sold for an immediate profit.

Nowhere is the failure of this system more painfully apparent than in the United States, where, as I write, the number of coronavirus cases has pushed past half a million and bulldozers in New York are digging trenches to bury the dead.  America’s private, for-profit health care system has proved to be so woefully unprepared to cope with the pandemic that several American states have for all intents and purposes “socialized” their own healthcare systems.

Even as the global economic system has helped to spread and exacerbate the pandemic, no parallel global political system exists to combat it.  Instead, the political world we inhabit is comprised of competing and increasingly selfish nation-states.  The United Nations is merely a consultative, not a governing, body.  The World Health Organization can advise and admonish, but it cannot prescribe or compel.  The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are charged, not with supporting the global economy, but with protecting creditors and punishing debtors.  No governing institution, in short, has the authority or power to mount a defense against a truly global threat, let alone lead the world to recovery.

The United States once again exemplifies the problem at its worst.  Just as the world lacks institutions capable of dealing with a global crisis, the United States lacks its own institutions capable of dealing with a nationwide crisis.  Our antiquated “federal” system, in which states are free to make their own decisions about universal human needs and rights, has always been absurd.  Now, it is turning tragic.  

There is some comfort in the fact that a few states—like Washington, California, and New York—have led the way in combatting the pandemic.  This shouldn’t blind us, however, to somber reality that other states—mainly in the South, all run by Republicans—are stubbornly clinging to the ideology of the market and putting the lives of their citizens at risk.  That our country has far and away the largest number of COVID-19 cases in the world and will soon have the highest death count, is no accident.  When the “Aurelian Plague” swept through the Roman Empire, the citizens of that empire could at least console themselves that an enlightened and diligent ruler sat on the throne.  The Romans had Marcus Aurelius.  We have Donald Trump.

One would like to think that, when this pandemic is behind us, people will wake up to the fact that a runaway global economic system requires global governance, or at least a global governing consensus, capable of containing its excesses and combatting its perils.  If that realization fails to dawn, the two opposing worlds we live in will soon collide again, bringing another pandemic or even more catastrophic climate change.  Next time, there may be no coming back.