Page 204 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

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many city dwellers died from disease that a constant im- of ability to deal with the resulting death and devastation
migration from rural areas was required to sustain urban created both widespread panic and subsequent culture-
areas. wide depression.The impact of massive, inexplicable loss
of life on a society cannot be overestimated. Belief in spir-
The Black Death itual traditions and ways of understanding how the
and Its Effects world works are crushed, leading to a sense of spiritual
Development of world trade routes rapidly increased the desolation.
dispersal rate of epidemic diseases. By Roman times the The experience of the plague, described by some his-
populations of Europe, Asia and North Africa had torians as the “greatest biological-environmental event in
become a giant breeding ground for disease organisms history” and the “equivalent of nuclear holocaust” by oth-
that originated in domestic livestock. Smallpox reached ers, forced western Europe to develop a new way of
Rome in the second century CE, killing millions of organizing its perception of reality. Within Christianity
Roman citizens as the Plague of Antoninus.The animal- the plague led to loss of faith in a benevolent, heedful
borne disease with the most profound impact on the Creator, leading to persecution and scapegoating of
course of history in Europe and Asia was bubonic plague. “heretics,” eventually leading to the beginnings of Protes-
Spread by fleas that pick up the plague bacillus from the tantism and its images of a vengeful, wrathful God.
fur-bearing mammals that are their normal hosts, plague From a more scholarly perspective, response to the
first appeared in Europe as the Plague of Justinian in plague experience may well have led to the development
542–543 CE.The most devastating impact of the plague of an intellectual tradition that separated mind from
(the Black Death), however, occurred in fourteenth- body, objective from subjective, and human from nature.
century continental Europe where it killed as many as 25 In turn, this intellectual tradition can be linked to the
million people. In the British Isles alone, plague killed beginnings of the Renaissance and development of the
nearly 1.5 million people (25–40 percent of the total western European “rationalist” scientific tradition, ulti-
population).The major vector for the major outbreak of mately generating Cartesian Dualism, the machine
plague appears to have been furs brought from low- model/metaphor as a way of understanding nonhuman
population-density areas in central Asia with the intensi- life, and the Baconian-Newtonian worldview. Thus, the
fied traffic on trade routes to China in the mid-fourteenth philosophical and spiritual impact of plague led directly
century. to the “modern” rationalist approach in which experi-
One important, often unappreciated, consequence of mentation and measurement substituted for observation
the fourteenth-century plague was its profound impact on and experience.
European philosophy and science.The prevailing world- This new way of dealing with reality had numerous
view in Europe prior to the mid-fourteenth century was positive effects. For example, it led to increased sanita-
mythic and symbolic, rooted in an idea of cyclical time, tion, which reduced background levels of many conta-
placing far more emphasis on links between human and gious diseases. This division of reality into separate
nonhuman aspects of the world than did the worldviews spheres of mind and matter provided a powerful method-
that arose after the Black Death. ology for the study and understanding of the “outside”
When plague arrived and began to have devastating world. It was largely inadequate, however, for under-
impact on local populations, the knowledge base and standing inner experience, the human mind, and our rela-
techniques of this older philosophical tradition were tionship with the world of our fellow life forms. Thus,
pressed into service, including prayer, medicine based on although this dualistic view led to improved sanitation,
sympathetic magic, and scapegoating (e.g., witch burn- there was no increased understanding of the natural
ing). None of these methods proved effective, and the lack cycle of disease or the evolution of immune responses.