The present period of American history reminds me of nothing so much as the middle of the fourteenth century in Europe. This is not a consoling parallel. That period was marked by a general loss of faith in the great universal institutions of the medieval period—the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire; by the rise of a new and formidable external enemy—the Ottoman Turks; by the failure of Europe’s collective security arrangement in the Crusader states with the fall of the last Crusader base at Acre in 1291; by a “forever war” known as the Hundred Years War, the longest war in history; by the first great international banking failure in 1343, when King Edward III of England couldn’t pay his Italian creditors; by the inability of states to protect themselves from violent predators—the “great companies” of unemployed soldiers who ravaged Italian city-states in the period; and most of all by the greatest pandemic in history, the Black Death. Admittedly, to compare the latter, which wiped out a third of the population of Europe, to the Covid pandemic, which caused an incremental increase in mortality of, at most, .5%—that’s point 5%—is like comparing an elephant to a gnat. Nevertheless, the responses of the public health authorities in both periods, 1348-50 and in 2020-2022, produced outcomes of negative utility which severely damaged their credibility.
I hope that you, dear reader, are already consoled: things are not as bad as the fourteenth century—yet. But there is another side to this parallel which can offer us guidance, and that is the response of educators to the crisis of the fourteenth century, in particular the man who was probably the greatest educator of the West since Socrates: the scholar-poet Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch, trying to explain how Europe had gotten itself into such an appalling state, blamed the educational institutions that had grown up in the previous two centuries: the universities. Whatever the ideals that had once animated them, by Petrarch’s time, in Italy, almost all the men universities were graduating were lawyers and medical doctors. The education of lawyers (in Petrarch’s somewhat overheated view) had turned them into predators who sowed social discord in order to profit from it. The education of medical doctors produced frauds and religious doubters.