A Gradual Unravelling
In case you have failed to notice, although I am not at all sure how you could miss it, much of what we used to take for granted no longer works as well as it once did. Like a giant clockwork slowing down, occasionally missing a beat, or an arrhythmic heart condition, many of our most life-critical systems appear to be faltering and breaking down. Public services spring to mind. Hospital waiting times, conflicting advice from different government departments, prolonged delays in court proceedings, slow internet connections, congested and unpredictable public transport systems, and delays in the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines, are just some examples of systems failing to meet even basic standards of efficiency.
We tend to grumble about these things when they impact our own lives. But mostly we just put up with any inconvenience, rationalizing this as being caused by a mixture of population growth, bad planning, insufficient or poorly trained staff, rundown infrastructure, or problems associated with rapid urbanization. But the problem runs more deeply than that.
The current pandemic has exposed some very deep fault lines in our civilizational model. A few of these are cracking wide open to reveal fundamental design flaws, mismanagement, the misuse and abuse of power, miscommunication, and the accumulation of personal wealth on a scale previously unthinkable. All of these threaten social cohesion and stability.
Political systems in the West have become susceptible to right-wing populism, pork barreling, media manipulation, unethical behaviour, scandals and corruption. Globalism has temporarily stalled. Work is set to dry up in the face of increasing automation. Conflicts and state-imposed sanctions are being prosecuted with greater enthusiasm under a smokescreen of public safety and healthcare. Meanwhile at the peak of the pandemic the production of goods and services slowed to the extent that at one stage it seemed like the entire world was poised on the edge of a recession.
At the same time, inspired by nature showing us a gentler, brighter side to our existence in terms of what might be possible from the perspective of renewal and regenerative practices, our ability to break through cognitive and emotional thresholds in which we have been held for so long seems to be picking up pace.
Some individuals, who wield enormous indirect power and influence in our society, encourage us to go back to what was as soon as we can. Their convictions, personal fortune, and authority are too often bound up with bolstering the inordinate power games underpinning industrial economic production and geopolitical exploitation. It is true that some members of this cadre are now having a few doubts about whether the status quo is actually sustainable in its current form.
This is evident from the ways they try to reframe the intentions behind key systems of human activity, shaping them into what they hope will be more acceptable modes and neutralizing any bad or unintended consequences. Two recent examples are the World Economic Forum's concept of a 'great reset' for the global economy, and the British Academy's attempt to soften use of the term 'profit' in defining the purpose of business. Manipulating language this way is a psychological ploy that ultimately changes nothing in terms of their ontological constructs.
Those whose task it was to lull us into an obedient slumber, so as to manipulate a contrived demand for more and more stuff, for which we need to keep earning money, in work that is often unsatisfying, have themselves been distracted. Taking their eyes off the ball, they are now frightened we might simply refuse to do as we are told in future. Advertising has lost its spark.
This failure has meant that we no longer need to waste emotional energy on the hope that life will eventually return to normal. The high probability is that it will not. That is the good news. It means that what we habitually ascribed as being 'normal' behaviour was as self-destructive as any sentient species could have contrived. It also means life could well be clumsily and casually edging towards a new-found wisdom, where health and wellbeing are at least on par with material wealth.
This is the inestimable gift left by the pandemic in memory of its many victims. But, like the virus itself, this gift is useless without the physical life-force of informed action to cling to.
Ranging from fresh models and mindsets, to more sophisticated moral codes designed from alternative ontological perspectives, and including peaceful civil disobedience if and when that is needed, we must not wait for others to undertake the work each one of us is being called to do. This is our destiny. This is the moment we have been waiting for.
Given that science is arguably the best means we have yet invented for understanding how things work I tend to read scientific reports all the time. The most recent thorough analyses on the climate, for example, all point to a similar conclusion: in spite of initial signs to the contrary, lockdown-related falls in emissions will not reduce CO² concentrations in the atmosphere, which remain on track to increase to new records.
We know that most previous modelling miscalculated the speed of the glacial melt, shedding of Antarctic ice, warming of the oceans, destruction of habitats and corals, and desertification.
We know that industrial trawling is causing fish stocks to decline so rapidly that the oceans will be almost empty of harvestable fish by 2045. We know that current attempts to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere fall far short of targets set during the Paris Climate Conference in 2015, and that those targets will not keep the climate under the 1.5º Celsius objective. We know that methane leakage is the immediate emergency. And we also know unchecked use of agricultural pesticides across hundreds of millions of acres each year is poisoning those organisms like earthworms, beetles, ground-nesting bees, and ants, so critical for maintaining healthy soils.
The history of human evolution has taught us one fundamental thing about life on Earth: it is abundantly vibrant and impossible to keep in check. It will not, indeed it cannot, be confined. Sooner or later it will break free. Rejecting all kinds of suppression or censorship it proliferates, expanding into new territories and crashing, awkwardly at first, through barriers that would otherwise contain it.
And so when we look at the struggle universities are facing today - declining student numbers and staff redundancies, the means for anyone, anywhere, to study anything online, mounting debts for courses where credentials trump content, and intensifying vocational unimportance given workplace automation - it is not the time to get back to normal, but an opportunity to challenge the very notion of what a university education is for.
When we witness police officers blatantly and unashamedly abusing their power, when we are given no reason for killings in custody, when police are armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and tear gas in order to keep order, and when racism is ingrained within the policing fraternity and culture, it is not the time to get back to normal, but an opportunity to find better ways of protecting the public.
When economists continue to insist that there are no better alternatives to market capitalism, with its array of increasingly prejudiced features of growth, debt, and the unimpeded accrual of personal wealth within the framework of unbridled competition, it is not time to return to normal but an opportunity to reinvent economics to work within planetary boundaries, utilize natural laws, and create prosperity for everyone rather than an ever-shrinking minority.
When corporate and social media resort to blatant prejudice, often accompanied by histrionic frenzy, when there are constant attempts to misinform and to manipulate how people think, opinion bubbles substitute for the truth, and trivial fictions laud celebrities behaving badly, it is not time to return to normal but an opportunity to recast the role of information, and limit the power of media moguls, in a complex pluriversal world.
And when nation states fall back on their sovereign powers to suppress human rights, attack their own citizens, destroy smaller nations branded as 'enemies' through the imposition of tariffs, sanctions, and state-endorsed assassinations, refuse to act in cooperation with others for the wellbeing of society, and continue to patch up the present rather than to embrace the future, it is not time to get back to normal but an opportunity to reinvent the concept of the nation state in a borderless world.
Right now our civilization is on the brink of physical, spiritual and moral collapse. This decade is likely to be a punctuation point of momentous significance. For it happens also to be a crossroads where only the path ahead, rather than the rearview mirror, leads to a world in which human enterprise can flourish, generating a society of healthy abundance, in a world that works for everyone.
Which path we choose has yet to be determined. Every path will no doubt be an adventure, full of hurdles and unforeseen problems. That is in our nature. If we baulk at that prospect, considering it too risky, if we dawdle, recoiling at the thought of so much uncertainty, or if we prefer the comfort of retracing a familiar track, our lives will return to some level of what used to be considered normal. But only to some extent...
Taking those few retrograde steps would at least guarantee certainty. The certainty of more pollution, of continuing global heating, loss of species, and of an uninhabitable planet. More to the point, each one of us will have to deal with personal embarrassment, the knowledge that our generation is leaving an insurmountable problem to our children, burdening them with the dilemma of how to construct a future from the remnants of a world we stole from them while they were watching.