The Least Talked-About (Series)-3

"Imagine this:

You live in a city crammed with people. You are convinced that the life in the city today is no different from that of yesterday, and you are still more certain that it is not going to be much different tomorrow. You live aboard virtuous vices and vicious virtues of everyday life. Nothing seems to be going to change till the end of eternity.

And then it strikes. A catastrophe, a momentous one at that. It cuts through the nerves and veins of the city. It rips open its ribs of life. It runs over peace and annihilates predictability. It kills, kills and kills. It does so with most other cities and villages in the coeval world. It rampages everywhere - yes, everywhere you can possibly think of - for about two years. It then withdraws. You realize, with a little disbelief and great relief that you survived. Looking through the settling dust, you take account of spine-chilling facts: nearly half the population, not only of your city or country, but of the entire continent you live in, are not with you any more. They were all gone with the wind of disaster that has just blown.

Now my question to you is, what changes will it bring about in you life? What would happen to your life if you were a well-off business person before the calamity? What, if you were a farmer or a simple mechanic; a writer or a thinker; a professional or an ascetic? "

Swami paused. His pesky lopsided smile accompanied the question.

"Well...er...I can not say it for sure. But I am certain of one thing: It will turn my life upside down. It will affect everything from my personal to social life and the way I look at the world." I mumbled.

"Precisely!” Swami concurred to my relief. I faced up Swami with a fresh courage:

"But why this question, anyway? I don't think a catastrophe of whatever magnitude will be powerful enough to wipe out about half the population of a continent - unless it is an extremely unlikely meteor collation or something. I don't think even an earth quake to Tsunami would do that, would they? Hold back your imagination. I'd better go watch a Hollywood movie”
Swami’s response was not so soft: "I won't blame your ignorance, you moron! When was the last time did you touch any History book? It is no imaginary stuff - they are all hard facts - facts about an outbreak of a decease that is aptly synonymous with death - Black Death (Black Plague)- a form of plague that struck the world in early 14th century!  "

"But, did it…?"

"Yes, it wiped out not one, nor two, but around 40-50 percent of entire population of Europe of the Middle Ages!"

"Gracious me ...!" My jaw dropped. “Tell me more.”

“Well- if you want to know about the causes and spread of the disease, you would rather get it from elsewhere. What I have done is to look at this huge disaster from a whole new angle, and to see how far the human race benefitted from it.”

“Excuse me…! Did you say benefited?!!”

“So I did. Not merely benefited – it, to me, was the key to much advancement we see today.”

“You are kidding!”

Sunrise Renaissance

Swami didn’t seem to care: "You know about the Renaissance period in Europe, right?"

"I do. Fourteenth through Sixteenth centuries AD ? I now know what you are about to talk: The role of Renaissance in blah, blah, blah, right?”

"Ready with your magnifying glass to have a close look at the Renaissance period in history.Ah – here you go! European Renaissance is sandwiched between what Historians call the "Middle Ages" and the ‘Modern Age’
Now the questions should be:

          One    - what put a stop to Middle Ages and how?

          two     -what brought about the Modern Era and how? 

The advent of Modern Era that is marked by giant leaps in all possible fields one can count - Science, Technology, Engineering, Literature, Art, Philosophy, Medicine, Explorations and Social Life. Furtherance of human civilization is nothing but the collective advancements in these fields - would you agree? "

"Well - that makes a pretty complete list - I agree."
"Now, did you start getting a faint scent of what I am about to say? "
"Gee..I am completely lost. How on earth would you hold the outbreak of a disease cause the progress of civilization?”
"That is precisely the point I like to make, right. I will tell you how"

Disease takes lives; Science gets a life

"Take Science, for we can find the most subtle impact the 14^th century plague had on science. Science, as you know, thrives where, and only where, it manages to get off the hook of religion. It was not only the despotism of religions that suffered considerable setbacks following the disaster; the losers also included the systems around witchcraft, black magic, evil spirits and many the other manifestations of irrationality. When many minds in the society had grown exceedingly skeptical of anything that religions could offer to explain the endemic, reason got a chance.

Suddenly there was light! It was just a matter of time before an unprecedented array of scientists and branches of sciences were pullulated in intellectual Europe. The flag bearers included Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo and Newton..."

"Wait a minute- but not all of them lived closely after Black Plague. Copernicus and Newton are separated by more than a century. Don't stretch things too much, Swami .."

"We are not talking about a revolution here, mind you. We are talking about an evolution. The Black Death was the very springboard of that evolution. How do you think these great minds got the courage, conviction and the motivation for divergent thinking? The world had by then transformed to provide enough receptivity for them and their thoughts. The heliocentric theory is a good example..."

"To that point again- Galileo was persecuted no end for what he said, even after many hundreds of years after the great disease. How can you then say that the society was receptive?"

"That's an interesting fact. Yes- the Church and other establishments regained their strong grip when Galileo worked. Things had been slightly different in the time Copernicus, when the monitoring and control of the Church was not as firm. I strongly believe this must have helped Copernicus who, despite being a church canon, could work out a radical astronomical model in his spare time. Also, Copernicus kept on downplaying his work and findings - unlike Galileo, who didn't mind calling a spade a spade, and not a diamond.

In any case, Copernicus was a product of a transformed world. My theory is that, if there was a change, there would have been a cause - that cause were the Black Death and the intellectual riddles that it left for the humanity to solve. Here is the chronology of scientific advancement that followed Black Plague  ..."

Swami took a piece of paper to put down an outline that read :

Black Plague -> Devastation ->Religions fail to account for->Temporal drift away from religions->Minds open up- >Out-of-the-box enquiry->New scientific paradigms

Technology ?

"All right - Now, tell me how the epidemic assisted technological advancements”

"That's even more interesting - Engineering and technology received the proverbial short in the arm past the disease, in a strangely indirect fashion.
We have seen how Black Death brought down the population to an incredibly new low. This resulted in sever labor shortage, the social implication of which we will see shortly. But it did have an insidious side-effect. The social, economical and intellectual elite in Europe found it immensely tough to cope with this huge labor deficit. There was suddenly a heightened demand for alternatives to human labor. In no time, necessity started giving birth to inventions, and both engineering and technology broke away from the confines of a privileged few and percolated into the social mainstream.

I must confess that this theory may not be substantiated with a list of revolutionary inventions made at that time. But this newfound interest of every household in low- end engineering and technology was refreshingly productive and propelling, the accumulated impact of which would have ultimately resulted in lot many future inventions. An impact so powerful, it helped shape the infinitely innovative engineering geniuses like Da Vinci.

This is how it worked: Black Plague -> Devastation ->Reduction in labor force->Need of alternatives-> Awakening in fields of engineering and technology->New inventions

Philosophy: World starts to think out-of-the-box

The biggest aftermath of the hugely destructive disease was that the Religion(s), for the first time in history, was pushed to the back seat. The degree of human trauma caused by the pandemic was inexplicable in any means. Contemporary religions were entirely failed to respond sensibly to the question of why their people were bound to suffer so much.

Yes, there were numerous instances of the usual ordeals: that of holding Jews and their ilk responsible for the misery and that of killing them en masse - the sort of actions that are quite typical of religious slow-wittedness. But all these deeds were  short-lived. Human intellect soon reclaimed its captainship, and sense prevailed over nonsense.

That was a grand beginning of a new era of wisdom!

Too many existential questions were in the air, many of which had never been asked so far. Why were made to suffer to this extend, if there is a God ?If there is, is he a savior or a sadist ? If there is a hell up there, why should earth be a living hell ? If the suffering is indeed a punishment, how can so many people be sinners at the same time ? Why some are still survived ?
That transpired a series of radical philosophical paradigms. Slowly but steadily the humanity regained those lost pearls of wisdom garnered through the Socratic tradition of quest and enquiry. They were now all set not only to polish them up, but to add new ones to their kitty.

The two major pillars of philosophy thus took shape - Humanism and Existentialism ( a crude version at that).

I would say humanism was a direct product of the turbulent social psyche hit by the devastation. Humanists were characterized by their nonconformance to religious doctrines and their minds conditioned for enquiry. Their quest for truth had made way to some very perceptible and immediate results. All of the humanists might not have been scientists themselves, but their quest for truth intensified the scientific temper across the board.

It was these pre-renaissance Humanists who revived the ancient scientific wisdom through translations of and revisits to ancient Greek works of science. This hugely chipped in to the then existed knowledge-base in most areas - astronomy, physics, biology, medicine to name a few. The finest example is the resurrection of millennia-old heliocentric theory and Pythagorean philosophy that were long lost, and the consequent impact they had on the minds of the Copernican school of astrophysicists as some robust alternatives to theories propounded by Ptolemy and Aristotle.

This is how it worked”:

Black Plague -> Devastation ->Existential Dilemma->Humanism->Enquiry->Revival of old wisdom and new answers -> New philosophical paradigms

Expeditions and conquests

“Do you have some theory to explain the numerous travels that came with Renaissance – you know how important they were!”

“Let me try-
As I told you, ideas were blooming and blossoming all around. As one may well make out, any society that is intellectually advancing would naturally be inquisitive as well. They tend move around as much as they can. Humans have an inherent flair for travel; the only bottlenecks can be the right technology and monitory support. Let's dissect the eventful centuries that followed the Black Death to see what went right.

The society had indeed psychologically transformed to a more courageous and ‘driven’ one. Death was not an obscure terrain any more, thanks to the prolonged exposure to it. This might have induced a new brand of daredevilry into European minds. No land however strange, no travel however ferocious caused the same original awe any longer.
European explorers were also excited about the prospects that Copernican theories offered. At least, they were now sure that they are not going to fall off from the edges of the flat earth. This scientific revelation, coupled with circumstantial necessities seems to have brought out the best from the explorers of the time.

One of the other factors that stimulated this avalanche of travels was linked to a rather unanticipated area - the religion. The setback religion suffered during the death dance of plague prompted them to take calculated measures to regain the lost glory by spreading themselves out. Prince Henry the Navigator, described by many as the parent of European maritime travel had little more than religious reasons in mind when he sponsored multiple voyages to Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The historical wallops of plague over the conquests and colonization of the period were enormous. It is almost safe to say that the reestablishment of Ottoman Empire and glorious victories of Ottoman Turks enjoyed around fourteenth and fifteenth century were direct aftermaths of the Black Death. With luck by their side, Turks were not affected by the disease till seventeenth century. It was a thus much easier work for them to outsmart and conquer many of their East European adversaries. This series of invasions would ultimately lead to the 1493 siege of the Constantinople by with the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

You know what followed this capture! The principal land root to Far East was abruptly estranged from European travelers. Almost all legendary voyages in later fifteenth and early sixteenth century -those of Columbus, Vasco da Gamma and Ferdinand Magellan – were caused by the siege of Constantinople.
So, next time when somebody argues the Discovery of America or European Colonization of India have a plague connection, don't laugh that away wholly!”

Swami scribbled his formula down:

(1)Black Death -> Devastation ->Devil-may-care minds -> uninhibited expeditions

(2) Black Death -> Devastation -> weakened Europe->Rivals seal land roots->Novel voyages

Socio-ideological

 “The endemic gave rise to a plethora of social, economic and cultural shifts. In it can one find the early rootage of many ideologies that would change the course of History forever - Communism through Capitalism! With the stratification going haywire, society was back into its primordial clay-form, ready to be modeled and molded yet again.

Hectors of land suddenly became ‘available’ next to the deaths of their owners, as a result of which the income of survived landlords were hit significantly. Adding to their woes, the labor-class in the society had gained a lot from the sudden demand for manual labor. The wages soared up. It can rightly be considered as the beginning of the end of feudalism. As a result, there was a new phenomenon prospered among landowners: a kind of competition that demanded a strategic and systematic approach to do business. On the other hand, the lower social strata realized the benefits for working-class unity and collective bargaining. Thus the post-Black Death Europe has formed the seedbed of the two ideologies that are mutually antagonistic – Capitalism and Communism! Clear? “

“Quite possible!”