Why pass up the braised lamb shank, which has long been my favorite meal? It was sitting right there, gleaming and glorious, ready for the taking. I refused because the buffet also included varieties of fish and seafood I cannot get otherwise, all prepared to perfection in ways I could never achieve at home.
All of it is delicious and healthy—one can be confident of that—to the point that renders one silent in awe.
I’m writing from Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Costa Brava, Catalonia, looking at rock formations that seem to the eye to be on the edge of the end of the world. It’s really the coast of Spain, and I’m happy to call the town down the street by the English translation, Saint Felix of Girona, because I can say that and remember it.
The charming hotel is built on and in a huge rock formation on the Mediterranean, so every time you open your eyes it is like looking at your favorite 17th-century painting of the ocean from the shore as found in the National Gallery, except that it is breathing and moving in astonishing ways, all without CGI or AI.
What we cannot remember—it barely exists in human consciousness now—are the 1,200 years of plagues endured by this special spot on the planet and the cycles of suffering and death that periodically killed off 20 to 40 percent of the population between the 4th and 16th centuries. For example, between 1347 and 1351, Catalonia in general lost as much as 60 percent of its population to one pathogen.
Why this spot? Was it in the air or water? No. It was because this place was one of the more important trading ports in the world, bringing people, food, goods, and diseases from all over Europe and the world, mixing with the local population, itself always growing and changing, and creating a very dangerous microbial cocktail for anyone and everyone here during all those years.
The beginnings of the town trace to the late period of the Roman Empire, initially populated by many communities on the move. Six hundred years passed before it became home to the Benedictine Monastery of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, built to house perhaps only 50 monks but whose work and industry turned out to provide growing waves of employment to locals in the classic feudal structure.
The monastery, now a museum, survived in active use for 900 years.
We usually think of what we call “capitalism” as beginning in 18th-century England but this is simply not the case. Capital accumulation, widespread division of labor, production, and trade involving great distance, and double-entry bookkeeping had their origins in exactly such port towns as this in Spain and Italy from the Middle Ages, with the monastery as the center of commercial and prayer life.
It’s the plague part of the story that intrigues me the most, given the recent history of the last five years.
How did it happen that such plagues were a feature for all of human history and then gradually came to vex humanity ever less to the point where today we do not see anything like them at all?
As bad as COVID was, it centered its mortality in an age range above 80 years that was essentially nonexistent throughout the whole of human history until recently. Even 100 years ago, COVID would barely have registered in mortality at all because most of the victims would otherwise have died of old age.
The key to understanding this otherwise mysterious decline in deadly plagues is not only better sanitation, hygiene, and fresher food (which was never an issue around here). The uncelebrated and widely ignored and misunderstood hero of this story is simply the scalability of the human immune system.
Over many centuries of growing human travel, contact, and interaction, our immune systems gradually came to be upgraded, generation after generation, with resistance encoded and earned through the roil and boil of the dangerous dance scripted by the interaction of the human and microbial kingdoms.
On the one hand, exposure to disease is a disaster. On the other hand, it is the greatest guarantor of healthy and long lives that we have. This lesson has been understood since at least the first documentation of the Peloponnesian War some 2,500 years ago. It is perhaps the major contributor to why we have seen a dramatic decline in infectious disease epidemics since the Great War. The travel and movement of peoples entailed in that war, leading to the disastrous flu pandemic of 1918, graced the world with mighty systems of immunity. It was the last great exposure.
Very strangely, in 2020 and following, all of this knowledge—admittedly complicated and counterintuitive—seemed to have vanished from public culture as if by design. Anthony Fauci was asked about natural immunity in mid-2020 and he demurred that we do not yet have the research to say. He was hardly unusual in this respect: Countless scholars in our times have ignored or otherwise disparaged this critical part of the story of human evolution.
We now know that much of our information systems of 2020 and following were rigged to deprecate everything other than the great innovation of the mRNA shots which were promoted as the one and only perfect solution that would end the pandemic. But within weeks of their release, the evidence was in (which, again, could have been known in advance) that it simply could not protect against infection or spread.
We’ve had five years to reflect on what went wrong in these days of confusion. It’s hard not to see the element of hubris at work. We’ve lived through a time of tremendous technological wonders unfolding before us. As President Donald Trump said when he first got into a Tesla, “Everything is computer.” Indeed it is. Not even the windows on the airplane that brought me here are analog.
The digital revolution has changed the experience of human life. And yet there are mysteries that abound all around us that evade the capacity of science to game. The promise of mRNA tech seemed remarkable, but it was easily bested by the power of the exposed human immune system—so complex, so powerful, so adaptive, so much smarter than any technology—when faced with a new virus. It sprang into action to create that which we sought: endemicity; that is, the reduction of a terrible threat to the status of a manageable seasonal annoyance.
Today, anyone can come to this incredible spot on earth and luxuriate in beauty, food, comfort, and health. It seems almost impossible to imagine the periods in history in this very place where disease panic swept through leading to quarantines, waves of sadness, the stench of death, and deep tragedy all around.
With the great bounty of goods and people bringing them, building prosperity growing with each passing century, there also came dangerous pathogens that naive immune systems were forced to confront. It is at once a terrible and glorious story, one that is very much in our past but also a history from which we benefit today.
It’s remarkable to consider that the full exposure of the human family to many of the most fatal pathogenic threats was largely completed barely a century ago, hence granting to the human experience the possibility of life without plagues.
Sitting at the seaside in this glorious place draws my imagination back to realize just how short our own lives truly are in the full sweep of what came before and what will come after.
This is no longer a land of plagues. It is a land of plenty so bountiful that I would actually turn down a braised lamb shank in favor of the fish, caught that very day just a few hundred feet away from this mighty and terrifying body of water that is so much mightier and more powerful than anything we’ve yet invented. The greatest unsung hero of this land is, again, scalable natural immunity, hard-earned through centuries of both suffering and triumph, granted unto me and others in ways we rarely consider.
