How will the pandemic change the world? What do you see as long-term consequences of the crisis?
A friend and I are exchanging emails. Our lenses polarize very differently. He says, “I’m moving to Sweden.” The “medieval method” of forcing businesses to close disgusts him. Never mind that Swedes are mostly staying home, or that their infection rate is the highest in Scandinavia: America’s ruin-the-economy approach is exactly the wrong one. A day later, I see a San Francisco Chronicle’s analysis showing the powerful effect of the Bay Area’s early closure. Seven jurisdictions coordinated a shelter-in-place order on March 17th, and the number of per-capita Covid cases has remained lower than in nearly every other U.S. metropolitan area. I want to tell my friend: “Better to move to San Francisco.”
The novel coronavirus has not eased the partisan divide here. If anything, it’s become even clearer how differently two friends can view the same article or proposal or analysis. We hardly speak the same language, because our news sources share almost no assumptions in common. Among loud partisans on the American right, this is a disease of the blood, strongly affecting the kidneys—hence Trump’s attachment, via Sean Hannity, via Dr. Oz, to hydroxychloroquine. Among respondents on the left, it’s a disease of the lungs, a pneumonia. Both of these may turn out to be correct as far as they go. But as researchers struggle to understand Covid, our president gins up the divide in our outlooks and conclusions. He doesn’t want national unity. He wants States’ Rights, more now than ever. Fifty Americas serve him better than one, because unifying isn’t a huckster’s schtick.
Nevertheless, my friend and I agree that the consequences of hiding out and shutting down could be grievous. He sees the hamstringing of businesses, I see the shedding of workers. He anticipates more deaths from economic devastation than from Covid, I expect one-off shops and restaurants to fail in high numbers as chains revive more easily and spread their sameness. Both of us foresee a protracted weakening of physical and mental health. We feel the beginnings of it in ourselves.
After the risk of Covid subsides, will people touch each other less? Will a generation grow up avoiding strangers on the street? Touch underwrites our health, even in the narrowest sense: by training and strengthening our immune systems. Yet a leading infectious-disease specialist has declared that the handshake should never return. Will those who are able to do so choose to stay in their digital caves? Commuting can be a curse—especially for those who live farthest away, many of whom are still have to commute during the pandemic. But seeing real people during the day, especially people we haven’t expressly chosen to spend time with, preserves a space in our lives for serendipities of caring and connection.
The incursion of technology had reached a tipping point before Covid. If we allow it to, this pandemic could be the boot that nudges us over the precipice—bringing, in the name of efficiency and health, an ill-advised sterility and a further, more permanent retreat from the material world, an abandonment of bricks and mortar and flesh. This is the bleak future the stock market seems to be predicting. Articles in the last few days have noted ruefully that U.S. stocks had their best month in decades even as the pandemic took deeper hold. But April’s rally wasn’t evenhanded: it centered on the digital behemoths.
My friend and I both fear, though he expresses it with a finality I don’t accept, that America’s response to the pandemic will permanently disempower the individual—that the large and faceless will cement its dominance over the quirky and singular. Fortunately, the post-Robber Baron history of the early twentieth century suggests there might be a different outcome—a return or resurgence of the people suppressed. The drying cement of this quarantine will preserve an impression of our haves and have-nots. Who can order in, and who has to deliver? Who stays in the dense city, and who escapes to a country house? Who complains of having nothing to do, and who, after each day’s work, sleeps in donated rooms to keep the virus away from family back home? Why are trained hospital staff being laid off in the U.S. even as hospitals become busier? Why are some workers without health insurance and paid leave, and therefore unable to stay home when sick? Why do so many who lack financial buffers earn historically less than the CEOs of the corporations their humble labor makes possible?
by William Pierce, The Goethe-Institut | Read more:
Image: William Pierce
[ed. From the series Day Afterthoughts: Reflections on a post-corona-time. See also: Schrödingers Virus, by Bina Shah.]
A friend and I are exchanging emails. Our lenses polarize very differently. He says, “I’m moving to Sweden.” The “medieval method” of forcing businesses to close disgusts him. Never mind that Swedes are mostly staying home, or that their infection rate is the highest in Scandinavia: America’s ruin-the-economy approach is exactly the wrong one. A day later, I see a San Francisco Chronicle’s analysis showing the powerful effect of the Bay Area’s early closure. Seven jurisdictions coordinated a shelter-in-place order on March 17th, and the number of per-capita Covid cases has remained lower than in nearly every other U.S. metropolitan area. I want to tell my friend: “Better to move to San Francisco.”
The novel coronavirus has not eased the partisan divide here. If anything, it’s become even clearer how differently two friends can view the same article or proposal or analysis. We hardly speak the same language, because our news sources share almost no assumptions in common. Among loud partisans on the American right, this is a disease of the blood, strongly affecting the kidneys—hence Trump’s attachment, via Sean Hannity, via Dr. Oz, to hydroxychloroquine. Among respondents on the left, it’s a disease of the lungs, a pneumonia. Both of these may turn out to be correct as far as they go. But as researchers struggle to understand Covid, our president gins up the divide in our outlooks and conclusions. He doesn’t want national unity. He wants States’ Rights, more now than ever. Fifty Americas serve him better than one, because unifying isn’t a huckster’s schtick.
Nevertheless, my friend and I agree that the consequences of hiding out and shutting down could be grievous. He sees the hamstringing of businesses, I see the shedding of workers. He anticipates more deaths from economic devastation than from Covid, I expect one-off shops and restaurants to fail in high numbers as chains revive more easily and spread their sameness. Both of us foresee a protracted weakening of physical and mental health. We feel the beginnings of it in ourselves. After the risk of Covid subsides, will people touch each other less? Will a generation grow up avoiding strangers on the street? Touch underwrites our health, even in the narrowest sense: by training and strengthening our immune systems. Yet a leading infectious-disease specialist has declared that the handshake should never return. Will those who are able to do so choose to stay in their digital caves? Commuting can be a curse—especially for those who live farthest away, many of whom are still have to commute during the pandemic. But seeing real people during the day, especially people we haven’t expressly chosen to spend time with, preserves a space in our lives for serendipities of caring and connection.
The incursion of technology had reached a tipping point before Covid. If we allow it to, this pandemic could be the boot that nudges us over the precipice—bringing, in the name of efficiency and health, an ill-advised sterility and a further, more permanent retreat from the material world, an abandonment of bricks and mortar and flesh. This is the bleak future the stock market seems to be predicting. Articles in the last few days have noted ruefully that U.S. stocks had their best month in decades even as the pandemic took deeper hold. But April’s rally wasn’t evenhanded: it centered on the digital behemoths.
My friend and I both fear, though he expresses it with a finality I don’t accept, that America’s response to the pandemic will permanently disempower the individual—that the large and faceless will cement its dominance over the quirky and singular. Fortunately, the post-Robber Baron history of the early twentieth century suggests there might be a different outcome—a return or resurgence of the people suppressed. The drying cement of this quarantine will preserve an impression of our haves and have-nots. Who can order in, and who has to deliver? Who stays in the dense city, and who escapes to a country house? Who complains of having nothing to do, and who, after each day’s work, sleeps in donated rooms to keep the virus away from family back home? Why are trained hospital staff being laid off in the U.S. even as hospitals become busier? Why are some workers without health insurance and paid leave, and therefore unable to stay home when sick? Why do so many who lack financial buffers earn historically less than the CEOs of the corporations their humble labor makes possible?
by William Pierce, The Goethe-Institut | Read more:
Image: William Pierce
[ed. From the series Day Afterthoughts: Reflections on a post-corona-time. See also: Schrödingers Virus, by Bina Shah.]
