Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.
In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.
Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.
Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.
The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.
To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival. (...)
In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.
But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.
More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.
For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.
Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.
Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.
To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival. (...)
In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.
But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.
More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.
For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
by Wade Davis, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
[ed. Let's note again: "President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
[ed. Let's note again: "President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
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When you’re in a pessimistic cast of mind, which developments of the COVID era do you find yourself dwelling on, and what grim scenarios do you imagine them portending? And then, when you’re in better spirits, what causes for optimism do you see?
I do think that the American project, the American experiment, is on the rack right now. We don’t know how things are going to go in the next 90 days. We really need to know whether this electoral process will go smoothly and whether it will deliver what it is supposed to, which is a decisive vote of the American public that confirms somebody to the presidency and thereby demonstrates the capacity of this place to govern itself.
And there is a very distinct possibility that that won’t happen. Or that the decision will fall in favor of the candidate and party that has demonstrated its incapacity to govern — and has in fact demonstrated its capacity to drive this country to ever-greater degrees of ungovernability. I never thought I would live under curfew. I’ve lived under curfew now in New York. It was insane. It made me indignant and outraged, and I didn’t think I would ever experience that.
The counterpart to the American election, globally, is obviously Hong Kong. They, too, have elections. And the brutality Beijing is capable of is shocking. For all of my advocacy for détente — in fact, because of my advocacy for détente — I’m haunted by memories of the 1930s and 1940s and the naïveté of many people who advocated for collective security and Popular Front collaboration with the Soviet Union, all for very good reasons that I would have certainly endorsed. We have to reckon with what we now know about the violence of which the Soviet Union was capable. And we have to reckon with what the Chinese Communist regime is capable of too. So those are the two advanced economy problems that are most on my mind.
I recently had the chance to be involved in conversations with a bunch of colleagues in South Africa. If COVID were to become yet another devastating shock to the developmental possibilities of sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of the humanitarian crisis, that has the makings of a truly catastrophic drama. Already, the economic and social news out of South Africa is biblically bad. They started the year with a 30 percent unemployment rate. They think they will have a 50 percent unemployment rate in the townships by the end of the year. Coming of age when I did, the end of apartheid and the advent of multiracial democracy in South Africa stood out as one of the great triumphs of humanity. And if South Africa becomes a basket case, then this is a disaster of traumatic proportions.
But the good news is … (?)
Oh, right. Hopeful signs. Well, let me try. At the risk of sounding trite, I actually do still marvel at the lockdown. And this actually goes back to our earlier discussion — to the question of the extent to which history is determined by the capitalist pursuit of profit. I’m enough of an economic historian to think that it’s a hugely important variable. But there was something really extraordinary that happened in March, in which nearly the entire world — individually and collectively — made this decision to shut down the economy to preserve human life. Politicians and businesses and citizens and trade unions — the whole mass of collective actors — made this decision. The vast majority of humanity was subject to it.
And it may have been a catastrophic mistake. I don’t think we can rule that possibility out. We can’t run it again. We don’t know what the consequences would have been. We’ve ended up with what we’ve ended up with. But part of what we ended up with was this collective decision — and as costly and painful as it was, there’s something truly spectacular about that moment.
And then, of course, all hell breaks loose. Inequalities make themselves dramatically felt. We can’t hold it together. It’s a shitshow. None of that struck me as surprising. But March was a different story.
How Will the Covid 19 Pandemic Change World History (NY Mag/Intelligencer).]
When you’re in a pessimistic cast of mind, which developments of the COVID era do you find yourself dwelling on, and what grim scenarios do you imagine them portending? And then, when you’re in better spirits, what causes for optimism do you see?
I do think that the American project, the American experiment, is on the rack right now. We don’t know how things are going to go in the next 90 days. We really need to know whether this electoral process will go smoothly and whether it will deliver what it is supposed to, which is a decisive vote of the American public that confirms somebody to the presidency and thereby demonstrates the capacity of this place to govern itself.
And there is a very distinct possibility that that won’t happen. Or that the decision will fall in favor of the candidate and party that has demonstrated its incapacity to govern — and has in fact demonstrated its capacity to drive this country to ever-greater degrees of ungovernability. I never thought I would live under curfew. I’ve lived under curfew now in New York. It was insane. It made me indignant and outraged, and I didn’t think I would ever experience that.
The counterpart to the American election, globally, is obviously Hong Kong. They, too, have elections. And the brutality Beijing is capable of is shocking. For all of my advocacy for détente — in fact, because of my advocacy for détente — I’m haunted by memories of the 1930s and 1940s and the naïveté of many people who advocated for collective security and Popular Front collaboration with the Soviet Union, all for very good reasons that I would have certainly endorsed. We have to reckon with what we now know about the violence of which the Soviet Union was capable. And we have to reckon with what the Chinese Communist regime is capable of too. So those are the two advanced economy problems that are most on my mind.
I recently had the chance to be involved in conversations with a bunch of colleagues in South Africa. If COVID were to become yet another devastating shock to the developmental possibilities of sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of the humanitarian crisis, that has the makings of a truly catastrophic drama. Already, the economic and social news out of South Africa is biblically bad. They started the year with a 30 percent unemployment rate. They think they will have a 50 percent unemployment rate in the townships by the end of the year. Coming of age when I did, the end of apartheid and the advent of multiracial democracy in South Africa stood out as one of the great triumphs of humanity. And if South Africa becomes a basket case, then this is a disaster of traumatic proportions.
But the good news is … (?)
Oh, right. Hopeful signs. Well, let me try. At the risk of sounding trite, I actually do still marvel at the lockdown. And this actually goes back to our earlier discussion — to the question of the extent to which history is determined by the capitalist pursuit of profit. I’m enough of an economic historian to think that it’s a hugely important variable. But there was something really extraordinary that happened in March, in which nearly the entire world — individually and collectively — made this decision to shut down the economy to preserve human life. Politicians and businesses and citizens and trade unions — the whole mass of collective actors — made this decision. The vast majority of humanity was subject to it.
And it may have been a catastrophic mistake. I don’t think we can rule that possibility out. We can’t run it again. We don’t know what the consequences would have been. We’ve ended up with what we’ve ended up with. But part of what we ended up with was this collective decision — and as costly and painful as it was, there’s something truly spectacular about that moment.
And then, of course, all hell breaks loose. Inequalities make themselves dramatically felt. We can’t hold it together. It’s a shitshow. None of that struck me as surprising. But March was a different story.
How Will the Covid 19 Pandemic Change World History (NY Mag/Intelligencer).]
