Ebola scare and Barbara W. Tuchman on " The Black Death "

    News of the Ebola epidemic arriving perhaps right here in Rhode Island put me in a contemplative mood this dreary October afternoon to re-read a very disturbing chapter in  Barbara W.Tuchman's book on  the  calamitous 14th century  : " This is the End of the World: The Black Death ".   Europe  was left with " a population reduced by about 40 percent in 1380 and nearly 50 percent at the end of the century ".

         Could this horror once again be Nature's way of warning humanity that enough is enough of unchecked human population growth ? Could the law of Malthus prove more damning to our present civilization than any Marxist-socialist criticism ?  Would a human population greatly reduced reconstruct an oddly familiar Feudal Order - with a merely sustainable economy for centuries to come ?

            In Camus' " The Plague "  one character  was determined to be " a saint without God " and do whatever was in his power to help his suffering brothers and sisters.  He too thought that there was more to admire than to despise in the human race.

            But little saintliness is evident in Barbara Tuchman's account of the Black Death .  Soon people refused to care even for their own family. Chaos and violence replaced civic order.  In general " charity was dead ".  It was all as if the Loving Savior had never existed in this century of FAITH .

      " Survivors .... could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered.... this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. "  And  minds opened " could never again be shut ".

    ... ".... the  Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.  ".

    How many  thinking individuals today in the year 2014-  even if we are spared the equivalent of the Great Plague- will continue to think that human life can go on as usual - without any dramatic changes in our unlimited growth-capitalist economic system, and our unlimited growth population ?   Do we deceive ourselves in thinking the vast and mysterious Cosmos needs us ?  I ask myself this after a huge asteroid came within a few earth-radius of this blue-green jewel of a planet - which reminded one astronaut of a beautiful Christmas tree bulb shining proudly in the blackness of outer space. It SHOULD be a divine miracle !