In a time of plague, Part 1

Mighty powers and cultures have fallen and risen not only because of wars but also because of diseases.

In the Peloponnesian War, Sparta triumphed because Athens was devastated by a plague – likely typhoid fever – that decimated the city-state's warriors and in 429 B.C. killed its farsighted leader Pericles. The Antonine Plague of A.D. 165 – probably smallpox – killed the stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Justinian Plague of 541 crippled the Byzantine Empire.

The Black Plague that reached Europe in 1347 via Silk Road trade during the Pax Mongolica killed between 30 and 60% of Europeans. Christians, who saw that Jews disproportionately survived, accused them of spreading the plague and slaughtered the Jews of Cologne, Mainz and Strasbourg. Jews, we now know, survived in part because they were forced to consume only old bread with mold on it, and that mold was often penicillin.

Europe might have lost 99% of its population and disappeared to history, making the future a struggle between China and Islam, as in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "The Years of Rice and Salt."

Instead, Europe restored its lost population in only six generations, thanks to the kind of baby boom Dr. Mehmet Oz expects to begin nine months after today's coronavirus home self-quarantine of millions of Americans.

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The Black Plague ended the worst of feudalism, made workers valuable enough to demand higher freelance wages and more freedoms, and began the road to Enlightenment capitalism and innovation. Europe in 1492 began a conquest of the New World, bringing smallpox and other plagues that buried native New World populations lacking immunity.

Humankind remains vulnerable to plagues, such as the World War I "Plague of the Spanish Lady" swine influenza that killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world.

Today's COVID-19 plague seemed at first far less dangerous than earlier epidemics. People have also been made cynical about politicians who use emergencies to gain more power for themselves and government. Why did Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi delay passage of a coronavirus-fighting emergency bill, holding the health and safety of Americans hostage to her demands for more abortion funding and restrictions on President Donald Trump's travel bans?

President Trump's swift and decisive travel bans appear to have saved thousands – and by worst-case scenarios about this virus, perhaps millions – of American lives. Democrats for their own political advantage have, by contrast, allowed millions of illegal aliens into our country and avoid medical testing in Democrat-controlled "sanctuary cities."

COVID-19 initially was described as a "common cold," but research shows it to be potentially far deadlier. At least three times more virulent and contagious than influenza, it attacks the body in at least one way that resembles Ebola and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Worse, the coronavirus can rapidly mutate. It is a moving target, harder to suppress with some medical approaches. Some healed patients fall ill again. We might be on the verge of finding a magic bullet that can defeat COVID-19 and keep humankind safe until the next plague, which will sooner or later come in the natural war between attacking microorganisms and our immune systems.

Western civilization, meanwhile, seems increasingly to be getting weaker. Our sperm counts have fallen by 60 percent in recent decades, and we have fallen to a reproduction rate below the ability to sustain our population. Our bodies use fever to defeat viral invaders, so the French health minister urged people not to use anti-inflammatory fever reducers such as aspirin and ibuprofen. But Western average body temperature has fallen a degree from 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

We have bright scientists and innovators, but average I.Q. has fallen by as much as 15 points since the Victorian Era. Home Depot has had to create do-it-yourself videos for millennials showing them how to use a tape measure and how to drive in a nail with a hammer. One recent study finds that many millennials literally do not know how to screw in a light bulb. Most, however, know how to parrot the leftist platitudes of their teachers and to demand that conservative views be stifled.

We are no longer the Enlightenment civilization that triumphed over the Black Plague and went on to reshape the world. Instead, writes Joseph Stieb in the March 19 Washington Post, we see our lives justified by being big-spending, indebted consumers in a Keynesian economy where spending, welfare, pleasure and infantile immediate self-gratification matter most.

Lowell Ponte is a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, "China's Top Secret War," shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against the little-known economic threats the People's Republic of China poses. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.