Paleontologists disagree about whether dinosaurs were thriving or had already entered a long decline when an extinction event finished them off sixty-six million years ago. Depending on who is right, the asteroid that struck Earth either radically changed the direction of evolution or merely accelerated an established trend. Disasters that target the currently dominant species invite similarly divergent interpretations. Their capacity to jolt us out of our complacency is not in doubt. But in so doing, do they truly redirect the course of human history, or do they merely act as catalysts of ongoing change? Covid19 is just the latest in a long series of crises that have raised this perennial question.
And how it has been raised! Since the pandemic began, journalists, pundits, scholars, and pundit-scholars speak as if the pandemic will itself periodize history, into the “Before Time” and the new world that we have entered. They have fallen over each other predicting all manner of dramatic change. But what kind of change, exactly? A big divide separates the realists and the continuationists from the aspirationists and the disruptionists. The former prefer to view the coronavirus crisis as an amplifier of present shifts and enhancer of familiar structures. The latter consider it a transformative force, a crisis that is an opportunity, a source of novel remedies for assorted societal ills thought to be in urgent need of correction.
The continuationist position has much to commend it. After all, a great many of the crises highlighted by the pandemic were already underway. Nationalism and anti-glo-balist sentiment were on the rise. International indices of freedom were declining. Digital tracking and surveillance had become ever more invasive. Economic inequality was already unprecedented. Corporate debt had already reached record highs, and central banks had already begun to drive more of the economy. Tensions between the United States and China were already mounting. Iran had long been in trouble. China’s strategic ambitions were already obvious, and its growth had already begun to slow, as had India’s. Oil prices were already too low to sustain the bloated budgets of the petrostates. The European establishment was already eager to go green even before the EU’s covid-recovery package unleashed a torrent of funding for salient projects. Online shopping had long been eating into retail’s market share, and remote instruction and telecommuting had been expanding for many years. Millen-nials had already been dealt lousy cards by the Great Recession and austerity. African-Americans led shorter and unhealthier lives even before they succumbed in disproportionate numbers to the coronavirus. And even the “novel corona-virus” is not as novel as it has been made to sound: multiple outbreaks of SARS and MERS have been recorded since 2002.
In all these and many other respects, the crisis has served as an accelerator and an amplifier. Sometimes the push was felt to be sudden and hard: the head-over-heels transition to remote work and teaching is a prime example. But even that apparent rupture was firmly rooted in technological shifts that had long prepared the ground. This kind of historical acceleration has a long pedigree. The World Wars and the Great Depres-sion spawned unprecedented mass mobilization (for war and revolution) and economic shocks. Taxes soared, the right to vote spread, colonial empires trembled, and welfare states bloomed. Capitalism was temporarily tamed, suspended, and sometimes even abolished. Yet none of this came out of nowhere: well before 1914, there had already been pensions, progressive taxation, labor unions, public schools, suffragists and suffragettes, and independence movements. What these crises did was give an enormous boost to initiatives that were already in progress.
The dramatic empowerment of the masses was rooted in the modernizing institutional and economic transformations of the previous century or two. Even purposely radical communist regimes built on nineteenth-century ideas and embraced generic schemes such as industrialization. Genuine detours from the modernizing script — such as the Khmer Rouge’s murderous evacuations of urban residents to the countryside — remained exceedingly rare and unsuccessful outliers.
Nor had historical pandemics been genuine game-changers. It is hard to imagine disasters more disruptive than the Black Death of the late Middle Ages and the pandemics of smallpox, measles and influenza that ravaged the Americas after European colonizers introduced these pathogens after 1492. Yet even the medieval plague frequently intensified earlier trends, from urbanization and the erosion of serfdom to challenges to Catholic unity and papal supremacy. In the New World, the decimation of the indigenous population greatly assisted the Spanish conquests, but even that process was ultimately a mere acceleration, however monstrous in scale and style. The ultimate outcome had hardly been in doubt: witness the wide and rapidly expanding disparities between the fiscal-military states of Europe and the largely Copper Age societies of the Americas, the fissions that had already opened within the most powerful American empires of the day, and the conquistadors’ zeal to out-colonize their fellow European competitors.
Nothing quite as dramatic has happened since, even as epidemics remained common. When bubonic plague intensified one more time in seventeenth-century Europe, the most dynamic economies — most notably Britain and the Nether-lands — weathered it quite well. In the nineteenth century, massive outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever famously raised support for ambitious public health measures but cannot rightly be viewed as their root cause. After all, the counter-factual of ever richer and more knowledgeable societies persistently failing to invest in sanitation is hardly a plausible one. However much repeated health scares shaped the pace and scale of intervention, it was economic growth and science that made it possible in the first place.
A century ago, the Spanish Flu was as global in its reach as Covid19 is today, but it turned out to be much more lethal. It targeted not only the elderly but also infants and, most crucially, people in their twenties and thirties — workers in the prime of life who often had just started a family and who left behind spouses and small children. Vast numbers of people died: perhaps forty million, or 1 in 50 people on earth, equivalent to more than 150 million today. Yet in the end, little tangible change resulted from this catastrophe. Improved coordination of international health monitoring was well in line with the overall consolidations of the League of Nations period and fairly unremarkable.
This is not to say that crises never reroute trajectories of develop-ment. But such outcomes are made all the more noteworthy by their extraordinary rarity. A few years ago I was able to identify a clear example: the attenuation of income and wealth inequal-ity through major disasters. I found a pattern that has held true across recorded history: massively violent ruptures were the only events that have ever greatly shrunk the gap between rich and poor. Those events, I found, came in four flavors: the collapse of states, catastrophic pandemics, mass mobilization warfare, and transformative revolution. The latter two were especially characteristic of the twentieth century.
State collapse was the most ancient leveling force, dating back to Old Kingdom Egypt. It was also the most dependable. Early states were designed as powerful engines of inequality: whenever they unraveled, they took elites and their accumulated wealth and power down with them. While most people ended up worse off, the rich had the most to lose. Pandemics, by contrast, equalized by different means, administering a harsh Malthusian solution to demographic pressure. When they carried off a sufficiently large enough share of the population, labor became scarce and wages rose, while demand for land fell, reducing its value. The masses who sold their labor found themselves less poor while the rich who controlled capital lost some of their income and wealth.
There occurred, in these cases, a kind of egalitarian intermission in history. Such shifts are faintly discernible during the first pandemic of bubonic plague at the end of Roman antiquity, are amply documented in Western Europe in the wake of the Black Death, and have also been observed in seventeenth-century Mexico, where real wages increased once indigenous population numbers had dropped to record lows. But these violent levelings — these adjustments by catastrophe — never lasted. As states were rebuilt, greedy elites returned. As plagues faded, population recovered, wages fell, and fortunes grew. Even so, the egalitarian intermissions could go on for generations, providing rare relief from plutocratic dominance. At the very least, they proved to the world that life did not always have to be the way it usually was.
The unique ruptures of modernity drove home that message with even greater force. In the World Wars — especially the second one — returns on capital plummeted, and governments launched aggressive interventions in the private sector and raised taxes on large incomes and estates sky-high. Conscription and the war effort boosted the bargaining power of workers and unions thrived. After the war, social solidarity and the newly grown fiscal and organizational capabilities of government underwrote welfare states. During the 1950s and 1960s, and occasionally even the 1970s, economies grew, middle classes expanded, and inequality was kept at bay.
Those societies were the lucky ones. Others experienced violent upheaval that led to far more dramatic change, as in Russia after World War I and in China after World War II. Communism actively pursued economic equality by the bloodiest of means. But that grand and grotesque experiment merely created new social hierarchies. The compression of wealth and income distributions persisted only as long as violent regimes survived or remained committed to that goal. The moment restraints were relaxed, material inequality soared to previously unknown heights, from Russia to China and beyond. In the West, where equalization had been less radical, its reversal was also more muted, but it has proven equally persistent. Since the 1980s, large economic policies and processes such as globalization, deregulation, financialization, and automation have rewarded some more than others, to put it mildly. In the United States, this process has gone further than among its Western peers, creating economic disparities not seen since the 1920s. Seemingly impervious to political preference, this process has continued under Democrats and Republicans alike.
So will the pandemic prompt a change of course? Recent history gives us little reason to think so. Although the Great Recession of 2008 battered the One Percenters, they soon recovered, while many others continued to struggle. This time does not look notably different. Inequality has gone up, in the United States and elsewhere. Job losses have disproportionately hit the young, the poor, the less skilled, and traditionally disadvantaged groups. And economic inequalities have been replicated in other domains, from worse health outcomes for the least protected and inferior learning opportunities for poorer students.
Meanwhile, at least so far, the super-rich have recovered with astonishing speed. Bloomberg’s index of American fortunes among the world’s top 500 reveals the most V-shaped of recoveries: in 2020, a steep plunge between mid-February and the third week of March followed by an almost complete turnaround by early June. Jeff Bezos, the leader of the pack, is richer than ever before. To the relief of non-billionaires, the S&P 500 has closely tracked this plutocratic V. Yet while that has been good news for portfolios of all sizes, key indicators of economic health and general welfare, such as GDP or employment, are lagging far behind.
Taken together, these developments fit the continuationist template: existing inequalities have been brutally exposed, or have grown, or have made themselves more painfully felt, or all of the above. But there has been no change of direction. What does this mean for the future of inequality — or climate change, or “late capitalism,” or the “neoliberal world order?” What, in other words, are the odds of seizing progressive change from the jaws of … more of the same?
A genuine re-direction, a bold new course for society, may be accomplished by peaceful or violent means. Aspirational disruptionists hope for the former. Their message is simple: this is the time. At long last, the coronavirus crisis will make it impossible for us to avert our gaze from society’s ailments. It will shake us out of our customary stupor and jolt us into action, ready to combat inequality and systemic racism while shoring up health care and worker protection and infrastructure and the environment. This perspective, popular in large parts of punditdom, involves a bold leap from trigger (virus) to outcome (transformative change). The proximate mechanisms that are supposed to generate such sweeping change tend to be rather less well defined. During the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders’ vague allusions to a “movement” that would somehow ensure implementation of far-reaching programs were emblematic of the magical thinking employed to bridge that chasm. The path to a grandly upgraded social contract or a Green New Deal seems similarly obscure. Yet the more ambitious and game-changing the goals, the more clearly formulated the way to reach them needs to be. At least for now, the needed clarity is absent.
The current buzz of progressive energy in politics may prove deceptive. The election of Joe Biden was a relief of historic proportions, but with mainstream politics stuck in crisis-management mode, drastic re-directional change would seem less plausible than ever. The results of our recent election, which highlighted persistent polarization and all but guaranteed a prolonged stalemate, confirm this impression. (Old news alert: Democrats and their allies enjoyed a 26-seat margin in the Senate when the New Deal got underway, and a staggering 63-seat margin when FDR’s Supreme Court packing plan failed. Obama dropped the “public option” from the Affordable Care Act when his side in the Senate was 18 seats ahead. Enough said.) American institutions have focused on keeping everything afloat, as have the leaders of European countries and others elsewhere. If such efforts bear fruit, the prospect of radical transformation will once again recede.
That would not come as a surprise. Historically, transformative change has been born of extraordinary violence. Yet Covid19, for all its terrors and mortality rates, is not particularly violent at all. Worldwide, the 1.25 million or so lives lost as of this writing equal about a week of normal mortality (which averages 165,000 per day) — or rather a few days more, allowing for undocumented deaths; and they were for the most part gleaned from among those already well advanced on their journey to the sweet hereafter. This is a far cry from the fall of ancient Rome, which set back civilization by centuries, or the Black Death, which took one in three Europeans, or the world wars and communist takeovers, which ruined entire countries and killed many tens of millions of all ages.
Looked at from that angle, the notion that we might achieve re-directional change without comparably massive dislocations seems more wishful thinking than realistic strategy. At the very least, it is squarely at odds with what history teaches us. There is no historical precedent and no obvious contemporary mechanism for making that happen. While we cannot rule out anything — what if the 2020s are different after all? — this should certainly give us pause.
But what of the alternative? What is the potential for ruptures dramatic or violent enough to upend the established order and open up space for transformative change — for upheaval so severe that it cannot fail to force us off the beaten path?
My answer will be sobering for those who crave radical change. Conservative forces are more powerful than they have ever been. The four violent leveling mechanisms that have been operating in the past are now kept at bay by four robust stabilizers of the established order. Mass affluence is the most basic one. It is hard to find societies with a per capita GDP of more than $5,000 or $6,000 (measured in 2011 standardized dollars to ensure comparability) that have experienced societal breakdown or revolution. By some measures not even Yugoslavia in the 1990s cleared that fairly modest threshold of prosperity.
While this lack of precedent does not rule out truly violent dislocations in Western countries or their peers, it strongly suggests that the likelihood is low. Moreover, economic achievement tends to lower fertility and age populations: the resultant paucity of desperate young men — the most plausible agents of revolutionary struggle — imposes a pacifying constraint. Those concerned about secession, armed conflict, and collapse will have to cite the likes of Syria, Yemen, and the two Sudans rather than the United States.
Such outcomes are qualitatively different from the anti-government protests and riots that have become more common in the United States and some European countries over the last decade. Rooted in the Great Recession and its social consequences, these protests have mobilized growing numbers against austerity, globalization, and more recently climate change. The wave of activism and unrest that started in May 2020, while triggered by particularly jarring instances of racial injustice, would likewise seem hard to disentangle from the Covid19 lockdowns and the sudden economic downturn that disproportionately hurt the young. Once again, the pandemic amplified existing discontent.
It is true that this need not be the whole story. In pioneering work that seeks to identify regularized patterns across history, Peter Turchin has argued that these events are not merely responses to acute crises, but are meaningfully correlated to gradual shifts in destabilizing variables from political polarization to immigration and inequality over the long term. He envisions a cycle moving from relative stability after American independence to a peak of destabilizing factors from the 1860s to the 1910s, and then on to another minimum in the 1950s followed by a renewed and ongoing rise. At least so far, however, the overall intensity of unrest has been much lower than it was in the past, when society was poorer and less well buffered against privation. The United States seems a long way from the riots of the late 1960s, let alone the bloody labor conflicts of the 1910s and 1920s — not to mention the Civil War. This will come as bad news to radicals.
This is not an accident. Other stabilizers have been contributing to this striking attenuation. The social safety net has helped tame the fallout from crises. Europeans woke up to the virtues of welfare when the mobilizations of the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution shook the foundations of the old order. Although America briefly lagged behind, the Great Depression quickly forced it to follow suit. Support schemes have been expanded ever since, from Johnson’s Great Society to the second Bush’s prescription drug benefit and Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Threadbare though this system may seem to admirers of the most generous European welfare states, it largely manages to stave off mass immiseration and serious social unrest, especially as ad hoc patches — such as the $600 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits this spring — can be applied as needed.
The third and fourth great stabilizers — the other impedi-ments to cataclysm — are more recent in origin. Quantitative easing — whereby central banks expand the money supply by buying government securities — has come to play the role of a miracle drug that promises to shore up businesses and markets without the need for austerity or punitive taxation. Thus far, this torrent of keystroke money has been good news for investors and bad news for progressives. The aforementioned V-shaped recovery enjoyed by the former would not have been possible without this intervention. And the final stabilizing force is science, and its particular potency in the face of a pandemic. During the Spanish Flu, there was no flu vaccine and DNA was unknown. A century later, the SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced mere weeks after the first report in Wuhan, and its mutations are now carefully tracked around the globe. Within months, more than a thousand drug and vaccine trials were underway, fast-tracking has cut development time to a fraction of the usual slog, and pharmaceutical production capacity was ramped up on spec.
Of course we still do not know how all this will work out, especially as the efficacy — and the popular acceptance — of new vaccines and treatments remain uncertain. Yet a measure of cautious optimism seems warranted. The sooner science delivers the goods, the better are our prospects of a return to some version of normal, if indeed that is, or should be, our goal.
Yet modernizing development is not a one-way street toward greater resilience. At the same time as it buttresses the established order with growth, welfare, finance, and science, it also undermines the status quo, rendering it more socially and economically fragile as a direct result of progress. Governance is the main exception. In rich countries, the state and its agents are firmly entrenched. If push came to shove, we would soon realize just how far their instruments of surveillance and repression surpass anything available in the past. The only restraint resides in the political will to employ these means.
Welfare matters even more. States that capture and redistribute between a third and half of GDP cannot be dislodged, at least not without bringing down everything else. There is no plausible alternative. Bloated in their bureaucratic complexity and persistent in their insinuation into every conceivable aspect of our lives, they are hard to capture, harder to restructure, and impossible to overcome.
Fragility lurks elsewhere now, above all in the economic domain. Advanced economies have become vulnerable in new ways. Three principal reasons stand out, all of them direct consequences of development and progress. First, there is globalization in the broadest — and most de-politicized — sense of the term: the interconnectivities and interdependencies that govern production and exchange. This is, empirically, how economies now work. A chain with many links has many vulnerabilities. Yet despite initial worries about vulnerable supply chains, this intricate web seems to have passed the latest test.
The second is the growing importance of the service sector, which expands at the expense of farming and manufacturing as societies grow richer. In normal times, retail, hospitality, and entertainment account for a tenth of America’s GDP. The greater the role played by these services, the more lockdowns and social distancing drag down the overall economy. When the Spanish Flu struck, there was far less to shut down than there is now, from airlines to resorts.
But this time we also caught a lucky break. Fully a third of official economic output is generated by finance, insurance, the real estate business, and all manner of financial and business services. Well suited to remote work, these crucial white-collar sectors were spared major devastation. Had Covid19 appeared twenty years ago, they would have been much harder hit, with dire consequences for economic life more generally. (All we got was the pathetic Y2K scare.) This in turn underscores the stabilizing potential of science and technology well beyond virology. Information technology has truly been a savior.
Overall, these vulnerabilities have been rather well contained by some of the same technological and economic innovation that has brought them into being. This leaves a third and altogether different source of fragility: our valuation of life and our attitude to risk. Given short shrift in current discourse, it deserves far more attention. All other things being equal, a society more inured to morbidity and death would be considerably more resilient in the face of a pandemic, and so would be its economy.
To be sure, humans have always feared disease and the end of life. Yet no matter how fundamental and invariable such attitudes might seem to be, they are sensitive to overall development. For most of history, life was short. Two centuries ago in the West, and a century ago or even less elsewhere, average life expectancy at birth was a third of what we now take for granted. Perhaps one in three babies did not survive their first few years. The ranks of adults were whittled down in a steady drain of attrition. And even as some lasted to a ripe old age, they were vanishingly few in number. No one thought that odd or even remarkable. Much of the underlying suffering was frightfully mundane, driven by childhood diarrhea and dysentery and typhoid and tetanus. Epidemics merely added further uncertainty to the mix.
When great plagues struck ancient civilizations, there was nothing to be done. The basics of infection long remained a mystery. In Europe, the Black Death of the late Middle Ages inspired early experiments with quarantines. An improvement over helpless laissez-faire, those early lockdowns nevertheless failed to solve the problem: waves of plague pounded Europe for more than three centuries. In the 1720s, when Marseille was sealed off from the outside world for two years to prevent a plague outbreak from spreading inland, half of its residents perished. And the disease slipped through anyway: not even the seventeen miles of actual stone walls that had hastily been thrown up cross-country managed to stop it. When Yellow Fever swept Philadelphia in 1793, the federal government shut down and almost one in ten residents lost their lives. Residents blamed a variety of causes from rotting coffee and lightning rods to that old mainstay, divine punishment.
But then the world finally changed. In the centuries that followed, successive breakthroughs in epidemiology gradually rendered human life more predictable and less vulnerable. Modernity’s crackdown on smallpox and typhus, on cholera and typhoid, on tuberculosis and yellow fever, on polio and measles set us free us from much misery and early death. This was without precedent. Science did not restore a better world we had lost. It cleaned up and increasingly secured a world that had always been a dirty, dire, deadly mess.
It has been all too easy to get used to the blessings of that epochal clean-up, and to take them for granted. Now is the first time they are slipping from our grasp, and the first time we count on science to retrieve them. Gone are the low expectations of even a hundred years ago. When the Spanish Flu appeared back in 1918, global life expectancy at birth was only half of what it is today, and the Grim Reaper was still a constant companion in ways we now find hard to fathom. Vaccines for tuberculosis, typhus, tetanus, measles, and polio had yet to be developed. Viruses raged largely unchecked. In that world, a new strain of influenza was simply one more refugee from Pandora’s well-stocked box. And when that pandemic departed as abruptly as it had arrived, scientists could not take credit.
2020 was very different. Cradled by the comforts of peace, penicillin, Prozac, and prosperity, we have grown far less tolerant of hazard than our toughened ancestors. Economies wither under anxious distancing even as case fatality rates fall far short of those wrought by historical pandemics and greatly favor those with most of their lives still ahead of them. This makes our pandemic above all an economic crisis, with all the social, psychological, and political repercussions that entails. Economic activity hinges very much on perception — not just on bare needs (long met by modernity) but on the confidence that has us demand and consume all those superfluities that prop up employment and GDP. But now, unlike in the past, that confidence has been shaken.
Every year about 2.8 million Americans die from all causes. As of this writing, Covid19 had raised this tally by a little over 8 percent, or a bit more if all likely deaths are included. And these bare numbers inflate the pandemic’s overall impact. In the United States, the mean age of death of or with Covid19 has been around 75 years, an age at which remaining life expectancy averages 12 years (or rather less for those with pre-existing conditions, which are overrepresented among those who do die). This is very much worth putting in perspec-tive. Recall the morbid excitement of the media when, last spring, Covid19 fatalities passed the toll of the Vietnam War of a little over 58,000 — a false equivalence if there ever was one. Average age at death among those soldiers was 23 years, at which point the average man could expect to live another 48. A total of 2.8 million years of life were lost. The official Covid19 toll did not reach that mark until around Election Day. And even that calculation ignores the fact that these young soldiers were cut down with their whole lives ahead of them and before most of them had a chance to start a family. If we found a way to factor that in as well, the weight of loss would appear even more staggering.
And yet our response is different, our fear more palpable. How would we feel today if 2.7 million young Americans were drafted to go fight overseas, as they were then? (Or rather 4.5 million, adjusting for today’s larger population.) Would that even be possible? Yet just fifty years ago they mostly went, even if some claimed bone spurs or went to Canada. Over 26 million Americans served in the two World Wars and in Korea, without major resistance at all. In the Civil War, 1 in 50 Americans was killed. The shift away from treating lives as expendable and fellow citizens as cannon fodder is a fairly recent one.
Good riddance, we might say: few if any of us will pine for that bygone age. But our growing commitment to safety, and our ability to honor it, have come at a price. Some economists have cooked up an unappetizing concept known as the Statis-tical Value of Life. Working from dubious premises, they inform us that an American life is currently worth close to ten million dollars. Government agencies eagerly seize on this number to impose costly safety regulations on private industry but conveniently ignore it when compensating the families of service personnel killed in action, who are usually fobbed off with a million or two in lifetime support. Callous as it might seem, that latter approach at least has the virtue of being more realistic than the high-end price tag that signally fails to align with other metrics: equivalent to twice average lifetime per capita GDP in the United States, it values all Americans, who account for a paltry 4 percent of humanity, at more than 3 quadrillion dollars, or close to ten times total global wealth.
Such absurdities are but a pale reflection of a broader revaluation of values. We no longer fight fear, we promote it. We seem transfixed by our fragility. Summary school closings, which wreak havoc on countless working parents, are hard to reconcile with the minuscule health risks faced by the very young. Let us grant that they are designed to protect those parents and not just unionized teachers. But plenty of parents have also been wary of letting their children return to college, despite the fact that only 0.1% of Covid19 deaths have occurred between the ages of 18 and 22. One cannot help wondering how the families of the 26 million Americans who served in the two World Wars and in Korea would have felt about that.
During the Spanish Flu in the fall of 1918, male college students trained for the war in France. And even as this pandemic took more than half a million American lives, its economic consequences were ultimately minor. Shutdowns were haphazardly imposed and retail was not greatly affected. For the most part, people just plowed on — partly because working from home was not an option and welfare was almost non-existent, and partly, perhaps, because it did not actually occur to them not to. The notion that the preservation of life justifies almost any cost —widely if unevenly embraced by a citizenry ready to pull back regardless of government fiat — had not attained its present dominance.
This collective anxiety, and the open-ended distancing and recession it spawns, places an especially heavy burden on the fourth great stabilizer. Well beyond warding off mass mortality and morbidity, science must now restore the sort of confidence that governments cannot decree. Our trust in the blessings of modern medicine has eclipsed traditional religious beliefs as well as faith in government — at least in much of the population. Last year, a Pew Research Center survey found that more than twice as many Americans had confidence in scientists than in elected politicians. And why wouldn’t they? Unlike the uneasy compromise of life with rampant Covid19, the renewed freedom of life after — or rather alongside managed — Covid19 is entirely the gift of the high priests of science. And the more we value life, health, and safety, the more we rely on that gift to get everything back on track.
This is all the more true as reactions to containment measures vary, driven by factors as diverse as vulnerability, political preference, and class. The pandemic has even provoked a new know-nothingism, an unembarrassed hostility to science, that reached all the way into the White House. This variation in responses to the crisis fosters acute tensions — between young and old, between red and blue, between rich and poor. The longer the viral threat lingers, the more corrosive these tensions are bound to become. Government must help us stay afloat while the pandemic rages. It also has a crucial role to play in subsidizing and distributing medical remedies. At some point it might even have to mandate their use. In the end, however, only science can deliver us.
The coronavirus shock has been both amplified and checked by modernity: by global connectivity and fragilities on the one hand, and by financial relief, Zoom, and medicine on the other. It bears within it both boost and restraint. This is something it has in common with a greater crisis to come. Neither the Paris Accord nor Greta Thunberg will save us from climate change. Geneticists, physicists, and engineers are our only credible line of defense.
Much has already been accomplished, from drought-re-sistant genetically modified crops to the ever more effective harnessing and storing of renewable energy. Nuclear power, an even more powerful redeemer, has been at our disposal for almost eighty years, even as misguided politicians around the world are doing their craven best to snuff it out. But more will be needed to sustain mass affluence in the First World and to spread it elsewhere. If nuclear fusion remains a pipe dream, geoengineering may well have to come to the rescue. Yet whatever the precise configuration of techniques that will keep us on track, all of them will share the same source: science.
We can argue to our heart’s content whether the twenty-first century will be America’s or China’s. But that debate is moot. We already know that this will be the century of science. For the first time in history, it will not be enough for scientists to make the world smarter and richer. Now they will be called upon to make sure that it does not slide back into the dark days when germs held humanity hostage, and to enable us to square the circle by reconciling environmental protection with ongoing growth.
Modernity has long struggled to contain the forces it unleashed. Smog had to be tamed. Nuclear war — the ultimate genie-out-of-the-bottle hazard of modernity — had to be averted. HIV, Ebola, and the SARS outbreak of 2003 had to be contained. The current challenge has not introduced a new dynamic: it is simply the latest in a long line of challenges brought forth by progress. As a challenge, the coronavirus crisis ought to be manageable enough to be overcome even as it accelerates ongoing shifts and trends, not all of them equally worrisome. Yet this need not be true of the next “novel” virus, be it natural or man-made — let alone of the much more complex and daunting process of environmental degradation.
It may seem strange, even a little morbid, to marshal an ongoing crisis to ponder future ones. But that is exactly what we must do, once we appreciate that Covid19 is unlikely to serve as that rarest of agents, a genuine historical disrupter. But the post-Covid19 continuities, for better and for worse, should not make us complacent about the volatility of late modernity. The most positive spin we might put on our epidemiological calamity is that it has provided us with an invaluable trial run for the more enormous crises that await us. Just as corona-virus outbreaks in the early 2000s and the financial crisis of 2008 taught us lessons that have come in handy (or would have come in handy had they been heeded), the more we are willing to learn from the present pandemic the better equipped we will be to deal with worse travails down the road.
In the end, this might well turn out to be the most important legacy of Covid19: an enlargement of our imagination of disaster, a sober preparedness for the perils that surely await us. Do not expect the virus to re-make our world. It will not force us to solve our most pressing problems; only we can force ourselves to solve them. There was a touch of wisdom in Michel Houellebecq’s sardonic prediction that the post-Covid19 world “will be the same, just a bit worse.”
