Plagues and Peoples

The key to McNeill’s definition of civilization is one of balance between the sort of bodies that live and do work and the sort of bodies who employ force or subterfuge to live off that work. Much of his emphasis is on the nonhuman preconditions for civilization; in a book about disease, microorganisms must, by necessity, take center stage. In this way—and given a sampling size of every human who ever lived (as the scope of McNeill’s narrative allows)—he describes very little variation or individual effect. When humanity is introduced to a new microparasite, therefore, the result is catastrophic within a limited community, and only the totalizing language of human evolution is sufficient to describe the effects. New diseases, then, cause epidemics; should host and parasite evolve resistance to one another over time as their biology and need demand—especially if no other host presents itself as a more fitting house for the parasite, then endemicity is the result. Endemic balance is reached when host populations can thrive in tandem with microparasitic life.

This broad view allows for little nuance, and when speaking in terms of microparasites, few people would find such a lack of nuance strange. It is little use to the historian of disease, looking for the balance of forces, to talk about the one person who survived an epidemic when 99 people before them died of it. However, McNeil metaphorizes this relationship to frame human-on-human interactions on the same scale. Viewed on an ecological scale, then, humans expend effort to achieve caloric and other survival balances. McNeill says that inevitably the largest and most voracious of these humans gives up working and instead takes, by force, the excess product of another’s work. When this process is epidemic (as when new territories are contested) violent war ensues. When this process is endemic (as when landlords and kings enter the picture), the process becomes political. Balance—that is to say, peace and prosperity—is reached when the host body is neither worked to death or made ill, and when the human parasite recognizes the limits to their power and the necessity of balance.

On the one hand, this is a wide enough view of civilization that it could quickly incorporate every political ideology. Confucianism, Feudalism, Capitalism, Communism, etc. are little more than technologically advanced versions of primitive despotism in this vision, with the only relief being the recognition that a balance must be struck, no matter how. On the other hand, this is a vision that does not allow for the nuance of culture, religion, or empathy to alter that balance. Just as vaccines complicate McNeill’s epidemiological narrative, so are there many examples in history of mutual aid and cooperation that contradict McNeill’s vision of eternal despotism.