In high school I went through a Cormac McCarthy phase. When I read books I read reviews of them obsessively, mostly to see if there’s anything useful about them I’m missing because I’ve trained myself to read for a particular thing. When I finished McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain, I kept reflecting upon this 1998 New York Times review:

“But by continuing to write in the grand style, McCarthy sometimes gives the violence in his books a grandeur it doesn’t deserve. Of the horror stories that have become a staple of McCarthy’s fiction, the Texas writer John Graves once observed: ”They’re dust-mote-sized when you compare them to the violences two wars in two generations have wrought among our race. I once saw 4,000 Japanese stacked like cordwood, the harvest of two days’ fighting, on one single islet of one single atoll awaiting bulldozer burial.” Graves’s message — that all misery is local — is not so different from McCarthy’s. But the plainness of his prose is more eloquent about the pitilessness of history and fate than McCarthy’s often portentous rhetoric. If we’ve learned nothing else about suffering in the 20th century, it’s that it’s ordinary.”

Overall it is a positive review. I am always disturbed on a visceral level by suggestions, though, of an alteration in style; this is not to say I am suspicious of critiques of function (“the style obscures the story”) or personal taste (“I hate long sentences, they bore me”) but that I am concerned by normative style arguments. This is the wrong style; this style is bad. This style is doing bad things.

Statements like those are not always wrong. But they’re almost always much more profound than they’re commonly credited as. This is because they are attempting to regulate discourse, often discourse that is attempting to make some contribution to the status quo, either for or against. Style is quite often part of the contribution. So when we say: your style is bad, we are often saying: the effect you’re trying to achieve should not be achieved. This reality is especially weighty when your job is to contribute to discourse, when you’re someone who is a part (however small) of the way public discussion is shaped.

So much hinges here on the last word of the review, ordinary, the signifier of the status quo. Mosle says violence is ordinary; therefore McCarthy’s style is a bad one, because it makes it seem like something it isn’t. This tells us that by ‘ordinary’ she doesn’t mean common, because McCarthy makes violence very common. What she means is something more like meaningless, hinted at by both the shape and content of pitilessness. McCarthy’s style gives violence a kind of meaning, a real cosmic presence and its own kind of awe. But this is not an accident; he hasn’t merely misapprehended modernity’s evaluation of violence and made the mistake of imbuing it with more meaning than its currently thought to be due. It is, rather, part of his entire objection to modernity: that violence gets a particularly stunning treatment in a series of novels about the loss of a rich civilization to a comparatively sterile age is totally natural, probably necessary. It’s a part of the point he’s raising. You can’t rob him of that and leave him with the same project.

When your profession is to contribute, even in very small ways, to public discourse, you’re obligated to evaluate how your style comports with the ordinary. This is because public discourse helps us settle out what we should think of as the ordinary, the regular, the status quo. It’s in these conversations that we determine normalcy. Corey Robin, on Arendt and careerism:

“The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.”

This is poignant, and it struck me especially in terms of people who make or present ideas for a living. Certainly the expectation is to comport yourself with a certain mannerliness, to perform even opposition within a kind of collegial parameter that suggests, as I have argued before, the equality of positions even when you don’t believe in such a thing. The threat that presents itself when you express yourself in one of the non-friendly, non-gentle, non-civil styles is this: you won’t have a career. We’ll all stop listening to you, you’ll be seen as a nutty ideologue, or if you’re a woman, just another purveyor of catty ‘snark.’ Ditch the snark; say it like we want you to say it.

Which is another way of putting: discuss this as though it’s ordinary. Some people were upset about the Rand post, saying that the way in which it was written was too mean or too severe, too snarky, bitchy, un-funny; uniformly arguments of bad style. The good style, one concludes, would have all the opposite elements: detached or passionate in the genteel way of friends who debate in pubs; subtle, searching, uncertain, just one proposal among many. That’s the way people tend to like to read about positions in politics, because that style makes everything seem very ordinary. If we’re discussing Christian attachment to Rand in the way that we discuss things which have merit, which are part of the landscape of valid and legitimate opinions, then it’s perfectly fine that Christian politicians can claim both Jesus and Rand. In that case, the pro-Jesus+Pro-Rand crowd is part of the schema of the normal, a regular feature of the status quo. Nothing to see here, nothing to change.

But it’s madness. Maybe this is what McCarthy would say about the type of atonal, blithely bland violence you can get out of any old modern marvel that sells the faux-profound non-shocker, “hey man, violence is whatever, it’s just how the world is.” Ordinary, in other words — but this just isn’t the way he sees it, not so far as I can tell. And I don’t think Christian Rand apologia is legitimate or valid, and I don’t want to write as though it might be among those things we can reasonably disagree about, and I don’t want anyone to see it as ordinary. Maybe I don’t have any real control over that (probably not) but I do have to account for how I present what I do, how I play my teensy tiny role in making up the ordinary. Yeah, there’s a certain careerist impulse not to be dismissed as, y’know, another catty-snarky lady blogger, but I’m comfortable that’s not what I am, and I am aware of the service careerism does for particularly brutal forms of ordinariness. For me certain positions don’t belong in the canon of the regular, and I try to use style to advance that.

Given how strenuously people object to style, it must be doing something.

Sometimes I think the fact that so many Christians slavishly devote themselves to Ayn Rand is part of her infernal punishment. I imagine Satan periodically delivering her reams of praise for her work, all of it penned by delusional Christianist libertarian types. Thumbing through it on the way to her cell, I suspect the Prince of Darkness would be pleased, in part because the arguments so weak, and he loves lies; and in part because Rand is still doing the work of the devil posthumously, convincing Christians of her corrupt worldview. “Thanks for the hand, Rand,” I imagine him saying, while she despairs that all her would-be Galts are just doughy Christianists who hate income taxes.

I’ve long wondered: what is it about Rand that captures so many Christian imaginations? Is it the terrible prose? The lumpy bathos of Interview With the Vampire is at least suited to its material. Or is it the wanton, militantly atheist, libertine individualism? If that’s the case, why not go for the Marquis de Sade? His sex scenes are better, and he detested radical Jacobins with all kinds of zeal. My confusion is magnified by the fact that many defenders of Rand seem not to have read her trash; for instance, they will periodically claim her book exhibits ‘conservative values‘, by which I presume they refer to all the glorified adultery and non-procreative unmarried screwing in underground tunnels. Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture also has a scene like that, so I guess she’s a paradigm of conservatism by equal measures. (This point is contested.)

Of course, when conservatives apologize for Rand, they usually just ignore the terrible sex ethics. This can be frustrating, but it’s a gift to leftists: it means they acknowledge traditional sex ethics don’t have to come along with right-wing economics. The latest round of Rand-apologia comes from The Federalist, the literary equivalent of a landfill in reverse:

Rand’s atheism, materialism, and reduction of the human being’s value to economic productivity are all reasonable targets of critique for a variety of good reasons. Let those arguments continue to be made, though perhaps with less rancor. But it is important to be clear about the charges for which Rand should not have to answer. She was an atheist and clearly had an insufficient appreciation for (and accounting of) human solidarity, but she loved freedom and she understood the importance of work for human flourishing. And finally, although some accused her of fascism, she ardently opposed the cut-rate philosophy that makes an idol of the state. Ayn Rand deserves some of the opposition she has received from Christians and many others. But she also deserves better.

Why less rancor? Seriously, do you know what you’re dealing with here? For one, Rand’s libertine ethos (here expressed as a merely ‘insufficient appreciation for human solidarity’ and a ‘love of freedom’) produced more than an adoration of capitalism. In fact, the form of ‘freedom’ she embraced doesn’t even remotely comport with the sort of ‘freedom’ Christianity imagines. For instance, take Rand on abortion:

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”

And moreover, what’s this nonsense about appreciating the use of ‘work’ for ‘human flourishing’? Rand didn’t regard work as a moral good insofar as it led to human flourishing; for instance, she didn’t have Oscar Wilde’s view that artistic production would be a great way to spend all our time, so we should funnel all income through state socialism. For Rand, the value of work was in its capacity to generate wealth, which is why the weasely author of this piece can point out that she would’ve thought the hard working factory laborer superior to the shiftless rich do-nothing. True, but she would’ve thought the enterprising rich venture capitalist superior to the factory laborer, which is where her ethics crash and burn in terms of Christian appraisal.

But the really interesting thing is this: if all you have to do is show some love of freedom, who can’t Christians apologize for? If you can claim that Jesus Christ himself was an immoral agent for sacrificing himself, which Rand did, and still earn the pathos of Christianist political types, who must be condemned by that logic? Is there any figure who we can dismiss?

Not really, no. And Rand’s appeal, I think, will continue to be refreshed by these seemingly unlikely fanboys precisely because their adoration of her is not related to the ways in which her ethics could — in isolation from their total system — periodically be forced into some kind of accord with deracinated Christian ethical principles. Rather, their love of Rand is specifically premised on the ways in which she is un-Christian; they like the elements of her work which flatly militate against Christian reasoning, and are willing to dress them up as vaguely Christian-esque in order to smuggle them past honest onlookers. So it’s not much use for me to say: hey, Rand was virulently anti-Christian and Objectivism is not only silly but evil. They already know that. The game is to confess as much and then try to reclaim a few seemingly small principles from her work, pardoned by their evident acknowledgement that the vast majority of them are evil.

But the principles they try to reclaim are not small, and they are all evil. If justice is poetic, Rand’s fans will be sealed in with her for eternity, she embittered by their love, they tormented by her rejection. And all the while her work will produce fresh crops for the inferno for ages to come.

I probably don’t need to enumerate the many illnesses that are wreaking havoc worldwide at the moment, some with more traditionally plague-like features than others. I have followed with great distress the spread of the Ebola virus through west Africa and now to Europe and the United States, but have also been for sometime concerned with dangerous diseases long in our midst, notably HIV/AIDS. Please know this post isn’t intended to make something abstract and/or lighthearted of a very serious situation; I just thought since the topics are both current you might find it interesting. Without further ado, let’s keep this medieval ball rolling.

So I’d like to divide this post into three impacts the Black Plague (a.k.a: “black death”, “great plague”, “bubonic plague”) had on medieval Europe. The first point will consider how containment measures impacted property law. The second will consider how the changes in population and psyche inflicted by the plague changed labor and wages. The third will consider how the Church’s welfare regime comported with the effects of the plague.

1.) Containment Measures & Property Law

A common misunderstanding of the medieval response to the plague is that the medievals had only one misinformed theory of disease; in reality there were a variety of theories of disease floating around, one of which was more or less Galen’s theory of humors, while others tracked with different senses of ‘bad air’, ‘miasma’, ‘filth’ and so on. As you can see, attributing the source of disease to ‘bad air’ or ‘miasma’ isn’t quite right, but it isn’t totally demented, and it heavily impacted medieval plague containment protocols. If you’re a Foucault fan, you’re already aware of the ‘plague town’ of late 17th century protocol, the kind he associated with the unflinching gaze of the panopticon. Where the premodern response to leprosy produced an us-versus-them simple division, Foucault argues, the plague produced infinite segmentation. Each person was watched. Individual windows were shuttered, individual homes searched, individual pieces of property burned. This early modern plague protocol had medieval precedent in the earliest quarantines, which popped up in the sea ports of the Adriatic in the 14th century. Venetians set up 40-day quarantines for ships suspected of carrying plague infested crews or cargo, and since those, y’know, worked, Northern Italy went sort of hog wild with public health systems:

“Between 1348 and the 1500s — at least in Northern Italian cities — the idea of a plague as a contagion gained great force, and if governments were not yet ready to deny that plague was God’s visitation, in practice they took more and more measures designed to combat the spread of infections. Remarkable and intrusive systems of public health developed, which in turn gave rise to basic questions about the limitations of state authority exercised in the name of public good.”

So writes J. N. Hays in The Burdens of Disease. Now, the public health laws enacted in Northern Italian cities pertained in large part to the movement of bodies; they told you where you could go and when, based on the likelihood that you were infected. But as Foucault’s plague town intimates, there were also massive incursions into property: ships’ cargo could be detained or burned; the possessions of suspected plague-havers were equally endangered. It appears Milan avoided a major outbreak using these methods, which to be fair are panicky and draconian, but represent at least a glimmer of fascinating medieval intuition: your property rights are not even approaching similarity to your bodily rights and/or the right of others to life. This is contra, say, the Lockean impulse, which tries to equate property with body by suggesting a metaphysical admixture of person and property via labor-mixing, therefore extending the rights of the person’s body over the things they own. Not on your life, say the medievals. And, indeed, proprietary contracts mostly languished during plague outbreaks:

“Modern historical studies [of Northern Italian city states] all suggest that after a few months political and legal machinery once again functioned, and that in least some cases city governments tried to assist their populations in coping with the disaster. In Perpignan the persistence of will-making even at the height of the epidemic was impressive; a will written by professionals, with witnesses, was a “fairly sophisticated document, reflecting a rather high level of social organization” that did not break down in panic. When the worst months passed, legal documents reappeared in full flower, and their character reflects a community rebuilding itself: there were again estate settlements, disputes among heirs, restoration of dowries, and apprenticeship contracts as new workers were recruited to fill the gaps in trade.”

That the highly technical craft of will-writing persevered even through the height of the plague tells us a couple of things: first, that the revocation of property rights in quarantine procedure wasn’t a function of complete societal breakdown — that is, it wasn’t a symptom of the disintegration of moral order that permitted all kinds of wild abuse — but rather that it was just part of a set of procedures whose implementation by the state was deemed morally fitting for the most part given the circumstances. This also means the quarantine protocols weren’t a symptom of the seizure of power by tyrants among panic. But it also informs us that most formal proprietary arrangements appear to have become swiftly second-order, with only wills surviving — which makes sense when lots of people are dying and hoping to pass on information about their families and properties. But other functions of property appear to have been given relatively short shrift by the state during this period, and were then revived post-disaster. Medievals could prioritize certain functions of property, that is, given the circumstances; this reflects their general sense that property was for something, not just an empty category of rights.

I would also hope the long, storied history of quarantines would cool the panic of some panicky conspiracy theorists who see abject tyranny in all public health measures. They’re not alone in their concerns, as the murmuring of some Italian jurists mentioned above indicates; but the plague protocols didn’t transform in their time to long-term domination, and I doubt ours will, either. And anyway if you take Foucault seriously, the plague protocols are already here, anyway.

2.) How the plague changed labor law and wages.

If you were a peasant and you made it through the various rounds of plague, you likely hit some paydirt. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law:

“The most immediate and obvious effect of the plague was to create an unprecedented shortage of labor. Workmen demanded higher wages and villeins clamored to be free of their customary services so that they could take advantage of the favorable labor market. Landlords resisted these demands and governments sought to outlaw them with repressive legislation. This in turn contributed to a growing bitterness between the classes which produced serious peasant rebellions in England and elsewhere in the 1380s.”

Come see the violence inherent in the system, etc. Heh, and the rich folk were bastards about it, too. Tierney goes on:

“The first reaction to the Black Death was the Ordinance of Laborers of 1349. Its main purpose was to prevent laborers wandering away from their work to seek higher wages, and, to render this provision effective, it forbade the giving of alms to able-bodied beggars under pain of imprisonment ‘so that thereby they may be compelled to labor for their necessary living.’”

Hooboy. From Mark Senn’s article, “English Life and Law in the Time of the Black Death”:

“These laws required people who were under the age of sixty who were able to work (with a few exceptions) to do so and to do so at their 1346 wage levels in the places they worked before the plague. These laws also prohibited employers from paying wages at higher levels and vendors from selling their goods at higher than 1346 prices.”

Uh huh. The sum of all this is a sort of enlightenment that came with the dark times. As Senn goes on,

“The importance of the laws that stabilized wages and prices is not only in their recognition of a crisis and their effort to address it. These laws implicitly acknowledged that the feudal bargain had vanished. They did not appeal to the personal bonds of loyalty and protection, but rather, they appealed to simple impersonal checks on monetary exchanges. A law based on status was ceding ground to one based on economics and the bargaining positions supply and demand offer.”

It does not surprise me that a natural disaster that so clearly demonstrated the substantive sameness of the classes (the body and its susceptibility to illness) resulted in a great deal of resentment over the artificial differences (class and status.) The state, acting to protect its wealthy, enacted a bunch of garbage laws, which the people rebelled against. Lesson: rebel, dudes, now is the time!

3.) Effect upon the Church and her welfare regime.

Sometimes you’ll read that the Church’s welfare system ‘fell apart’, resulting in the needs for comparatively brutal ‘poor laws.’ But it wasn’t that the system was just inadequate and broke down. Rather, the structure of the Church was especially vulnerable to the Black Death itself. Both Senn and Robert Palmer (English Law in the Age of the Black Death) note that mortality rates were higher among clergy than laity; Helen Cam writes in England Before Elizabeth that 17,500 priests, monks, nuns, and friars existed in a population of 3 million in 1300, while only 8,000 remained in a population of 2 million after the plague had run its course. Why?

Because, God bless them, the clergy tried to care for the sick.

With numbers vastly reduced, the clergy, which had beforehand administrated a very sophisticated network of assistance, was replaced with young, unschooled agents with far less proficiency. Tierney notes this led to an overall reduction in the efficacy of the medieval assistance regime at least for a time.

Unsurprisingly the role of the religious in the care of the sick is still a matter of contention. Recall this Slate piece, wherein an avowed atheist wonders at the oversight, capacity, and ethics of missionaries working with Ebola patients. His concern about the oversight issue is especially poignant (though, it’s not clear, as he submits, who would replace the missionaries and religious workers if they were to suddenly pull out) given that, as in the black death, religious workers have in this wave of Ebola suffered: a priest passed on after returning to Spain from Sierra Leone — after his repatriation he passed the virus on to a nurse; Texas’ own Kent Brantly was doing Christian mission work when he was infected. It’s heartening to see that, even after all these many centuries, Christianity is still a religion of suffering-with. On the other hand, we are trying to prevent outbreaks here, so some coordination of efforts and tempering of love with prudence probably isn’t a bad idea.

Not that I’m fit to formulate such a schema, and the medieval period can’t tell us much more about one than what not to do. What it can do is tell us that our concerns are not new, which will hopefully provide some cold comfort for those who find themselves increasingly panicked by this state of affairs.

As Sir Walter Scott wrote: “Come he slow, or come he fast/It is but death who comes at last.” Even the great medieval cities whose plague containment procedures spared them from the worst of it are all dust now. We remember the best of them, and let’s try in these very upsetting times to make ourselves memorable for good reasons: for our empathy, our tenderness toward the ill, our willingness to help, our refusal to stigmatize the sick or the survivors, our calm and our faith.

Alternatively, a peasant rebellion also sounds sort of cool.