CORONAVIRUS: DOES IT HAVE TO BE A WAR?
If you were going to design a virus that confuses our ability to act collectively, this is it.
It is as if an invisible force has placed our public health on one scale and our economic well-being on the other. All the while, our policymakers frantically try to find a workable equilibrium.
For now, in imploring the public to social distance and self-isolate, emphasis is on the health consequences of the pandemic. But most of us won’t experience the worst that the coronavirus has to offer, but we will all experience a recession and perhaps even a depression.
While we are in the early stages of this crisis, the tensions between our public health and economic needs will diverge as time goes by. Our ability to reconcile these needs into a shared narrative that sustains collective action is critical.
Based on what has already happened, I’m not optimistic that we can. This piece explores why, but I hope I’m wrong.
Western leaders are united in their declarations of war on the coronavirus.
“We are at war,” implored President Macron of France.
“We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes,” said Boris.
It is “our big war,” Trump proclaimed.
But for many, does it feel like that?
Yes, jobs are being lost in their masses, but bombs aren’t falling from the sky. Public utilities like our water, transport, energy, and communications are still functioning.
After three weeks of self-isolation, what I’m struck by is how separated most of us actually are from the war zone (panic buying at the supermarket does not count).
I speak to friends who work in healthcare, and I hear their urgency. Like everyone, I’m following the news incessantly and have seen those harrowing images of Italians wearing “plastic bubbles” on their heads while gasping for breath.
It isn’t that this isn’t personal for me. I have an immunocompromised brother with diabetes who the NHS has informed us is “extremely vulnerable.” My family is grappling with the prospect that he now faces a mortal threat that we can’t hold back.
But at the same time, my day-to-day life doesn’t match the rhetoric of war that our politicians are espousing.
I felt this separateness when I listened to “Dr. Jack” who works in an intensive care unit speak on the radio. Listen. He is furious. People are going about their normal lives. “I’m on a parallel planet!” he cries.
It’s led me to wonder whether we will be able to act collectively when our experiences of the pandemic are so different.
Will the coronavirus create a “community of sufferers”?
In Tribe, author Sebastian Junger recalls the work of Charles Fritz, who studied the psychology of disasters. His thesis is that disasters bring us together. Junger summarises his life’s work beautifully:
Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.
There is no doubt that the coronavirus is already creating sufferers. But will it create a community of them?
There are challenges on two levels.
First, as my opening suggests, social distancing and self-isolation could work against feelings of togetherness and a “Blitz spirit” when people feel separate from the battle that is being fought (even accounting for the groundswell of community-led activity that has already emerged).
Second, our experiences of suffering are going to be different as is already apparent.
Renowned epidemiologist Larry Brilliant says the virus is “an equal opportunity infector,” but it is not an equal outcome infector.
For the most part, it pits the critical health needs of the aged and the weak against the physically able and those who can’t afford to miss work.
Our individual choices matter as they contribute to a larger problem.
As the authors of a research paper on “The Macroeconomics of Epidemics” write:
There is an inevitable trade-off between the severity of the short-run recession caused by the epidemic and the health consequences of that epidemic.
Influential figures have already hinted where they stand on this trade-off.
Dominic Cummings, the UK Prime Minister’s all-powerful Chief of Staff, is alleged to have said the UK’s strategy was to “protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”
Even if denied, this crude statement provides early evidence of how policymakers may come under increasing strain to prioritise our economic well-being over public health.
But some question whether there is actually a trade-off to be made. Ezra Klein, for example, writes “there’s only one equilibrium: it’s economic inactivity until the danger passes.”
This may be manageable in wealthier countries that are able to ramp-up the capacity of their healthcare systems while compensating for losses resulting from economic inactivity.
For developing countries, it's likely to be a different story.
Beyond an “us and them” narratives
Regardless of where we are, some of us will experience poor health and death. Many of us will know someone who dies. But all of us are likely to experience a recession and perhaps even a depression.
These differences in our experiences of suffering are the key fissures that will dictate our ability to face down the coronavirus collectively.
While compliance with suppression measures will increase in the coming weeks as they are backed by enforcement powers, this strategy will be tested as those who are less affected by the coronavirus seek a return to “normalcy.”
As such, our ability to create a shared narrative that unites individuals, reconciling their different needs and experiences, is critical if we hope to compel sustained joint action over the next two years.
But it also matters for when the “war” against the coronavirus is won (which it will be).
After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles fed into a narrative of German victimisation and the rise of National Socialism.
After World War II, the Marshall Plan, the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions, and the United Nations helped to forge peace. While imperfect, standards of living rose all around the world.
The narrative matters.
You can see it in Trump’s efforts to blame China for the pandemic.
You can see it in China’s coronavirus diplomacy that is delivering much-needed medical support to nations across the globe. China’s solidarity while admirable is clearly not entirely altruistic.
Both China and the US seek to control the emergent narrative on the coronavirus. This tussle matters more than most, but there is something greater at stake.
Our individual narratives and sense of agency are under assault.
In Plot Economics, Venkatesh Vao goes as far as to argue they are actually collapsing:
Global narrative collapse events tend to have a very surreal glued-to-screens quality surrounding them. That’s how you know everybody has lost the plot: everybody is tracking the rawest information they have access to.
It’s as if we are all in a snow globe. Someone is shaking it really hard, and the pieces have yet to settle.
We will remember the world before the coronavirus as vastly different from what came after.
We’ve been here before. On 9/11, 2,996 US lives were lost. It wasn’t just the death toll that made 9/11 significant. A narrative of fear was sown across the West.
Right now though, many nations are fearful and contemplating death tolls equivalent to multiple 9/11’s.
The scale of the upheaval unleashed by the coronavirus is likely to mean that our politics and economics are going to be remade at every level in a way that it didn’t after 9/11.
If we succeed in creating a shared narrative to guide collective action, we have a chance that this will be a positive transformation—even if there is unimaginable pain in the months to come.
While I’m not optimistic, there are some reasons that suggest we can.
Unlike 9/11, the coronavirus is agenda-less. As Vao notes the coronavirus “doesn’t know it is playing or competing”.
It’s randomness is what frightens us. It can strike anyone.
But this randomness offers a chance. It isn’t a threat over there that we can ignore. Like we have in Syria or Yemen. It’s all around us.
This gives us a choice.
We don’t have to fall prey to “us and them” narratives. We can reject the warlike and nativist rhetoric espoused by our politicians.
Instead we can build a different narrative backed with tangible action at home and abroad.
One that is rooted in empathy and interdependence.
One that cuts across political labels, no matter how cleverly they are recast.
One that commits to using the might of the state to power local action rather than Big Tech.
We have a choice. You have a choice.
What change do you want to see?