The Antonine Plague and a clue to the future

Global life expectancy falling two years in a row tells us something big is happening

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Life expectancy has always been the ultimate proxy for progress. While other markers of human and planetary health trend down, progress bros have always been able to cite longevity to triumphantly disarm critics of the progress narrative. Steven Pinker has practically built a career out of repeating “life expectancy” to any criticism of his work.

But now that’s gone. Not since 1959 and the great famine in China has global life expectancy fallen for two years in a row. Up until 2020, global life expectancy had dropped one year only twice since the mid 1960s. The first was caused by the fourth wave of the Asian A2 flu virus which had circulated around Europe and US in previous years, but hit the USSR particularly hard in 1964. The second one-year fall came in 1969-70 due to another influenza outbreak.

Like those dips, the cause of this more-than-a-dip is also a virus. It’s covid. There is no other candidate. Though life expectancy gains slowed in the global north in the last decade, life expectancy was still increasing almost everywhere to 2018. Even in the US, where the opioid crisis caused life expectancy to level off through the mid 2010s, it was on the rise again in 2018.

You wouldn’t know it from media coverage of collapsing life expectancy, which is written about as a curiosity, rather than as a clue to the future, but we are at a civilisational waypoint. If global life expectancy is confirmed to have fallen for a third year in a row in 2022 – and early data suggests it did – we will be deep into unknown territory.

Even if life expectancy does level off at some point and start rising again (which doesn’t feel like a good bet) things won’t just go back to normal, whatever that was. This is not a blip. When global life expectancy drops like this it means you are in an event. Economists like to talk about “mega trends” determining the future. Maybe we could call this a mega event. And this mega event has broken the fourth wall, letting us in on the mechanics of the machine as well as messing with our understanding of the things that shape our lives: governments, societies, communities. The upending of certainties has had profound psychological effects for many people.

An artificial reality

Already so much has been revealed. The first glimpse that our economic reality was artificially constructed, not fixed, came in the earliest days of the pandemic. Professional politicians more temperamentally suited to a managerial style were suddenly staring down the barrel of a god-honest crisis. So they got the experts in, and the experts told them the most important way to head off a crisis: spend money, pause capitalism. All of a sudden there was enough money to pay nurses, workers and others a decent wage, to find homes for homeless people, to ban evictions and to give no-strings-attached money to those unable to work. Creditors were told not to pursue debtors.

It didn’t last long. The experts were quickly banished when all this spending started to show up the big lie that austerity - the purposeful starving of public institutions in the name of financial competence - was necessary. Even worse, it began to provoke what looked suspiciously like social solidarity. In the UK swivel-eyed media loons proclaimed the Tories were now socialists and that Boris Johnson had led to “the victory of socialism in Britain.” So the money stopped flowing for ordinary people (the taps were turned up for the rich, of course), evictions got going again, and conditions became even harder than they were before.

The fall will not be cushioned

Which is one of the fascinating contradictions of our time. The neoliberal ideological framework, constructed over the past 40 years, means that, despite the unambiguous signs of a civilisation in free fall, governments simply cannot respond meaningfully in a way that would cushion that fall. These structures ensure no useful or long-lasting interventions within existing politics can happen. As we have seen across the west, attempts to soften the blow have been quickly abandoned, processes left to play out and chips left to fall as mass viral infection takes hold and weakens community health and society.

It must look confusing for many people. Why are governments just letting this happen? It’s mainly ideological. If you believe we are in a historically bad event, you have to agree that the response must be historical in kind. This inevitably means breaking with business as usual, because not only did the normal functioning of the machine get us here, it continues to perpetuate said event. Conversely, if the event is not historical nor ongoing, but just a bump in the road with a beginning and an end clearly marked out, the response doesn’t need to be historical - it can, and in fact must, be time bound. This is the do-nothing beauty of denial. Denial of bad things is the perfect psychological facilitator of business as usual.

The problem is, mass death and rapid crashes in life expectancy have always meant something historical was happening, preceding something momentous and then leading to some kind of fundamental restructuring. At the extreme, it ends empires.

The Antonine Plague and Nazis

Ancient Rome in 165 AD was at its peak. Roman power was spread to its farthest reaches under the reign of the last so-called Good Emperor, the warrior-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The silk road trading routes were funnelling more goods and wealth to the empire than ever before and the Roman Army was fresh from victory in the East, having defeated Persia and sacked the Parthian capital Ctesiphon. From the East the soldiers brought back many of the spoils of war – and also smallpox. Many historians see the Antonine Plague as having created the conditions for the decline and subsequent end of the Roman Empire. There were no more Good Emperors after Marcus Aurelius and with the Roman Army decimated by disease, conscription was introduced, rattling Roman society. Two years after the first wave of plague, Germanic tribes (who hadn’t suffered nearly as much from the outbreak) defeated the Roman army and crossed the Rhine for the first time in more than 200 years. Tax income declined as the population fell, the death of artisans disrupted local economies and food shortages became more frequent as skilled farmers died. Spirituality and religiousness grew as a cathartic response to mass death, creating the conditions for the spread of monotheistic religions, such as Mithraism and Christianity. A virus played a big role in ending an empire.

Like Ancient Rome, this plague is hitting the US empire particularly hard. Life expectancy has declined by nearly three years and covid continues to kill more than 4,000 Americans per week. A pandemic is tearing into a population already weakened by lack of universal healthcare, inequality, injustice, shit food, pollution and despair. In response the US has pretended the pandemic is over, dropped the health emergency that kept money flowing for basic mitigations, all the while funnelling more money than ever to its military and obsessing over balloons. This has led to what many might think is an astonishing outcome: life expectancy in Cuba, a country under punishing US sanctions for 60 years, is now nearly 3 years longer than in the US. Cuba is also fast catching up with EU life expectancy, which has also fallen two years in a row.

It seems unlikely that this amount of death won’t affect political systems. The 1918 flu contributed to the demographic destruction of German society that began with the first world war. As flu ripped through the young that hadn’t died in war it helped set the stage for the rise of the Nazi party. Right-wing political extremism thrived in a country deprived of youthful energy and progressive ideas. While the demographics of covid deaths are very different, it seems certain to influence future political outcomes.

Another imperial power where a sharp decline in life expectancy foreshadowed the collapse of empire was the USSR. Big gains through the 1960s saw the average citizen living as long as the average American before beginning a slow decline through the 70s and 80s. Some historians of the time warned that falling Soviet life expectancy was an overlooked clue to deep ruptures in Soviet society.

Mass loss of life leaves scars that last a generation. After the famine in China plunged life expectancy into the dark ages, the areas of the country where more people died and more average years of life were lost have, to this very day, worse economic and social outcomes.

We are not prepared

The WHO said recently countries should “be prepared” for human-to-human transmission of bird flu, with the world currently experiencing the worst bird flu outbreak in history, largely due to the industrial farming of chickens. Fine advice, but asking governments to prepare for a future that may or may not come sounds hollow when they aren’t even preparing for a future that we know is coming.

We can already see glimpses of this future. A record 2.5 million people have left the workforce in the UK due to chronic illness in the last two years, and the story is the same in the US where workplace sickness is at record highs. But this isn’t the end point. With the virus still mutating and with no population immunity in sight, significant excess death will continue and long-term sickness will grow. (Excess death in England in 2023 is up 23% on pre-pandemic levels). And yet there is no beefed-up help for long covid sufferers, no attempt to stop mass infection, no acknowledgement at all that the future will be different from the past.

We don’t yet really know what destructive or creative forces have been set in motion by the pandemic. But we do know its effects will expand across time and, as it intersects with the climate and ecological crisis, will pose the hardest question a civilisation ever has to answer: where do we go now?

(Artwork by @ronniefurbear on IG)