Berkley Center

Upon reviewing human history, I often find some hints from our wise predecessors on how we should act and what we should keep in mind when confronting a certain problem. Calamities such as the Ebola pandemic prompt us to put that innate intelligence, our historical memory, to work. Catastrophes are so unpredictable that the vast majority of people will be just forced to act upon their own decisions, knowledge, experiences, and beliefs.

When discussed in the context of Christianity, the effects of the Black Death pandemic in the Middle Ages might serve as an instructive example of how we have dealt with trans-regional outbreaks in the past. It is said that the disease wiped out nearly 200 million people or one third of the European population. Due to the disease’s infectious nature, like Ebola, and the fairly low level of medical understanding, we can imagine how terrified and despairing the people were.

Under these circumstances, commoners started to voluntarily form circles, later called confraternitas or confraternities, in which they strove to follow the examples of Jesus to help the afflicted. These voluntary movements, primarily not associated with Church authorities, expanded with a great speed among commoners, especially when the Black Death swept across Europe. Some volunteer actions included caring for patients afflicted with the Black Death, giving funerals for the unfortunate ones, and burying them in the proper manner: all this was done in the hope of perfecting their own spirituality and caring for the victims’ souls. Although the ideal of “Imitation of Christ” was a core part of Christian ethics long before the formation of confraternities, this grassroots movement gained its maximum power during the Middle Age’s hardest times, demonstrating how the masses can act in harmony when confronted with an unpredicted hardship.

In his lecture, President Jim Yong Kim stated that it is essential to devise a model that is equally based on “multiple different individual ones”. In my personal interpretation, this “model” he is referring to encompasses things such as certain medical methodologies and a caring system for the patients. Among those models, I see the local model as most important when caring for survivors. When local people who have suffered a calamity take the initiative and act proactively according to their own beliefs, just as the confraternity members did during the Black Death, they create a bond among them that will serve as their remembrance of the past. Today, remembering how collective local action worked for the common good helps ease the pain of the past for local groups, and helps them maintain order and effectiveness.

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