Whatever Next!
An intent to survive
As a child, whenever we were caught on the hop, or something untoward occurred, my mother would exclaim, in a somewhat apprehensive yet indignant voice, Whatever next!
Nothing of any consequence ever did happen next. Unlike today. With disruption now prevalent, astonishing events pile up like chords at the climax of a Rachmaninoff piano concerto. What an extraordinary era to be living in as our intertwined world turns on itself once again. Whatever next?
There was an inevitability about the coronavirus pandemic. One could almost inhale the sense of panic as successive waves took hold and deaths climbed into the millions. Viruses do not pay much heed to the Gregorian calendar and it is possible we are still not at the finishing line. Instability and anxiety sculpted an unfamiliar world in which everything we thought constant began to morph. I guess nature decided to hit the reset button, showing us once again that the control we thought we exercised is only a cruel illusion. Is that a threat or a gift? I suspect we will find out over the coming decade.
What we ‘know’ is only a small part of what there is to be known. And most of what we assume to be enduring is in fact transient. Almost certainly that includes us. We share the planet with around 100 million biological life forms. Around 99 percent of species that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. There is no valid reason to suppose humans will be exempt from a similar outcome eventually. Certainly everything that we have manufactured can be terminated in the blink of an eye. Equally of course, once invented anything can be reinvented - usually better than before because human knowledge is expanding exponentially all the time.
Momentarily we’e all been caught up in the experience of a developing crisis and intent upon survival. Our attention was on adapting to events that were likely to unfold as we moved inexorably into a period of mass mask wearing and vaccinations. With that crisis passing, notwithstanding the effects of ‘long-Covid’ which are still unknown, we must now mull over the circumstances that led to the pandemic, viewing ourselves and our activities with a more critical eye.
The war in Ukraine continues unabated - Putin making fewer and fewer appearances. Boris Johnson is peering at the exit sign on the door of 10 Downing Street. Joe Biden is becoming more like a senile and decrepit old man as every day passes. And Nancy Pelosi? Well, what can you say? Looking to the near horizon what further disruptions are evident? Are there others, as yet unseen, that could cause even more damage?
Will we continue to tolerate public officials that trip over the slightest obstacle? Politicians that lie to us incessantly, but expect us to heed their advice when the next catastrophe strikes? Will we still be cowed by fear at the end of this decade? Will we have learnt to shape events, or will we remain the victims of circumstance?
Revelations
Throughout history, every epidemic has exploited weaknesses secreted in the most fragile fault lines of the society. Cholera, for example, moved along fissures brought about by poverty. These ecological nooks and crannies allow disease to effortlessly alter geopolitical landscapes and shift personal relationships. They also usher in suppression and entrench socio-economic prejudice.
The fault line exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic brings great clarity to who we really are, relative to others and to nature. Particularly, in this case, our lack of respect for other species and the sacred. Can we learn from this in order to avoid more disturbing civilizational consequences in the future?
As successive countries copied each other, debated the efficacy of differing vaccines, threatened legal action or even worse (such as wealthier nations withholding vaccine supplies from poorer nations) and fluctuating in their piecemeal responses from blasé indifference one moment to sudden alarm the next, one thing has become abundantly clear. We have been transformed by the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, probably in ways that we least expected. We must certainly be prepared for it to shape personal interactions and social affiliations, the structure of work, scholarly endeavours, artistic output, cross-border travel, and the built environment.
The most blatant insight to be had already, from the dire situation in which we now find ourselves, is how physically interconnected we all are. We each have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than our fiftieth cousin.
Remarkably our kinship is preserved across generations. With each breath we inhale into our body around 10 sextillion atoms. Over the period of about a year, because of the wind's endless circulatory flows, we have a relationship with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who has ever lived.
Right now you could be carrying atoms that were once inside the lungs of Malcolm X, Shakespeare, Vlad the Impaler, Margaret Thatcher, Alfred Einstein and Cleopatra - as well as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Now there’s an unsettling thought.
The truth is we live in an interdependent, densely entangled world - one that cannot suddenly be disentangled. Well, not easily. In a reality where damage to an individual is damage to the health of us all, community wellbeing is obviously more important than profits for a few. But our collective behaviours strongly suggest we do not really believe that.
As pandemics run their course they hold up a mirror to societal norms as well as our most common beliefs - reflecting a universal moral code underpinning almost all human activity. The outbreak of COVID-19 made palpable the motivation of people attempting to blend an ardent social mutuality with political, social and economic systems that expect us to fend for ourselves - leaving us even more defenseless as a species.
Alone-together
Three factors emerge from this stampede towards individual safety. Firstly, the prevailing system of socio-economic stratification means relatively few people have the power or financial resources to disengage and withdraw completely. For those who are neither affluent, nor in receipt of a regular salary, the choice between epidemiological caution and financial survival is stark yet unavoidable.
Secondly, as long as such social and political separation keeps driving us back into an unrelenting cycle of desire and consumption, our material interdependence exposes all of us to the same risks.
It was never impossible to envisage the steps needed to contain a pandemic such as Covid-19 when the aim was inevitably going to be herd immunity: a slowdown or even a limited stoppage of all superfluous work everywhere simultaneously; the resumption of financial thrift; massive injections of public funding for income support - including the possibility of a temporary universal wage; a moratorium on personal debt; finding emergency accommodation for the homeless; and vaccinations for all, for example.
This scenario of camaraderie and harmony demands that we reinvent those systems that are failing us, by re-evaluating our priorities - changing the focus of business and government from corporate profits to community wellbeing. This heresy is not altogether out of the frame. Politicians in Wales, New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland concluded as much and now develop all government policy within those axioms.
Thirdly, responses need to be coordinated universally. It is clear from the range of diverse nation-state reactions to the Covid-19 crisis, as well as other crises which still threaten our species, that we are out-of-step with each other. Rather than displaying a resilience to shifts in human needs, our systems remain finely-calibrated, structured for competition and geared to making profits. By applying context-specific relief the lack of global coordination has been cruelly exposed. This, in turn, threatens human unity.
At a time when we were being instructed to stay away from each other, we needed each other more than ever. The entire world needs clean energy, nutritious food, potable water, a decent education, readily-available healthcare and, let us state this quite openly and without shame, armies prepared to put down their weapons and wage peace. We need all of this much more than we need to hurry around doing deals, fighting wars, disparaging each other, and exchanging money.
Aftermath
Ultimately we need to decide whether we are here to get wealthy or to help each other live better lives. If we opt for the former, the inevitable trajectory will be overburdened healthcare systems, severe economic downturns, extreme weather events, escalating conflict, and countless deaths.
If the latter, then a total restructuring of power is on the cards. That would certainly change much of what we do and how we do it. For that reason alone we must expect resistance from some quarters. It is highly probable, for example, oligarchs will seize the opportunity to advance already established authoritarian agendas. Indeed there are signs this is already happening. But other transformative changes are possible.
Success in arresting the rate of infections - resulting from speedy responses, new technological solutions, and the restriction of public movement - while stepping in to provide help to nations that cannot get assistance from elsewhere, like India and Turkey, could mean China will move faster into the leadership of a multipolar world with a moral compass that is in glaring contrast to that in the depleted empires of the 20th century. I am not convinced this would be a bad thing, in spite of an upsurge in hysterical anti-Chinese sentiment and propaganda out of the US and its puppets.
We are now beginning to see a return to what looks like normal. Postponed events are going ahead. Lockdowns are being lifted. Travelers are returning to airports as grounded fleets take to the air once again. But some of that is an illusion. We will also have taken this time to reorder our priorities. Perhaps we will become less reliant on getting somewhere at a particular time. Divisions of race, religion, ethnicity, or economic status, may escalate for a while before receding into the background. Becoming less frantic means we might be more inclined to spend time playing with the kids, taking a nap, reading a book, or writing a poem.
We will also have discovered that some jobs are unnecessary, while others are actually harmful. And we will be deciding what to do about that.
A momentous moral melodrama is still being played out. More than likely we will come through this recent ordeal changed, having rediscovered our common humanity, more engaged and emotionally connected with our fellow humans than ever before. If that is the case we will think and feel very differently about viruses in the future. And we will think and feel very differently about what it means to be human.
In the words of Kitty O'Meara....
And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently. And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the Earth began to heal. And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the Earth fully, as they had been healed.