Imagining the World after Covid-19 by Rupert Read (Part II)

Two acts of imagination

Thus far, I have outlined the two greatest failures of imagination that occurred in relation to COVID-19. Let me now propose the two great feats of imagination that are needed in order to build a better future out of this pandemic disaster:

1) We need to imagine a real post-COVID-19 reset.

We need to dare to imagine a better future — a future with much less commuting, much less air travel, much less noise and pollution, much less unnecessary economic activity, much more care and love; much more localisation of our economy; much more preparedness for future “swans” of various hues; much more attention to root causes of our troubles; much more restoration of nature.

If it seems hard to imagine all this, or hard to stay hopeful about it, because of the downsides of the post-pandemic world — such as the further rise of the digital behemoths (and of surveillance-culture), threatening to centralise economic activity — then we need to dare to imagine ways in which those things could change, too. So, if the increase of power which is accruing right now to Amazon, Facebook and Google is worrying you, then we need to dare to imagine how they could be brought low. Google, in particular, seems more impregnable than ever; its invasion of our privacy and its deep-nesting in patterns of consumerism is deeply discomfiting. It may seem hard to imagine how its dominion could be challenged. But here are some ways things could change:

• The self-aggrandisement of the digital giants themselves could form the basis for a public campaign against them and their unrivaled power — focusing, perhaps, on their invasions of privacy, and insisting on not using health-monitoring as an excuse for such invasions.
• This kind of campaign could be strengthened by abuses of power that may come to light — if, say, Google had been found to be conspiring with some state agency to grant access to personal data.
• The increasing power of these digital behemoths might lead to serious calls for their nationalisation, or for their being turned into a genuine commons.
• Existing rivals might gain more power and bandwidth — Ecosia and DuckDuckGo, for example. Imagine these two search engines joining forces: you would have a search engine that respects your privacy and plants trees for you!
• A new rival might arise — perhaps a commons-based system. Imagine a Wikipedia-sed version of Google; or a better commercial rival, perhaps with more ethical sensibilities built in to it.
• Imagine a virus hitting the internet which rivals the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine a sudden plummeting in trust in the internet, if, say, a virus wipes out millions of bank accounts or undermines entire institutions (perhaps even Google itself). It is not impossible that cash could become king again, just as it has near-disappeared from use in recent months.
• Imagine widespread power-outages that make the internet unreliable or inoperative for weeks or months. This could happen, sadly, as we move into an era when eco-driven, partial societal-collapse is increasingly likely in parts of the world — including the United States or UK or Australia. Imagine how everything would change if the internet were unavailable for the same duration of time that we have been in lock down. (John Michael Greer has published serious work well worth reading about how the internet itself could largely die.)
• Imagine Google, say, was the target of an effective non-violent direct-action campaign, or of hacktivists. Imagine a denial of service that lasted for weeks.

We should not assume that the current dominance of the digital titans won’t turn around, maybe on a dime. We need to be able to imagine a world without them — not least because a number of the scenarios I’ve sketched out would require our agency in order to be realised.

2) We need to imagine what was once dismissed as politically “impossible.”

Every time we are tempted to retreat into smallness, we need to remember that before COVID-19 so much of what has happened was thought impossible: impossible that the global reputation of the United States and UK could plummet so far so fast; impossible that so many could come to value care and love over economic growth; impossible that the “magic money tree” could be discovered; impossible that some countries would respond as imaginatively as they did once the virus hit.

We need to be ready to imagine future disasters and catastrophes — and so to plan against them. These plans need to take a precautionary form.

We need to protect ourselves against future pandemics, first and foremost, by building down their causes. We need to stop mistreating animals, stop habitat-destruction, and seek on an emergency basis to arrest dangerous climate change. We need to roll back economic globalisation and human hyper-mobility — as I’ve already said, planes are super-spreaders. We need to have serious plans for coping with pandemics; those plans need not to be too tied to specific diseases (one serious problem with the British response to COVID-19 was that its extant pandemic-preparation plans were all geared to the flu).

Similarly, it makes no sense now that we have been bitten by a pandemic to shift our attention away from other existential threats to civilisation. On the contrary, the pandemic we are now living through ought to teach us how important it is to reduce our exposure generally and to prepare for threats that harbour “fat tails” or catastrophic potential. Most obviously, that means catastrophic climate change and ecological degradation — but other things should be including in our planning, such as nuclear war, high-impact non-state terrorism, and runaway artificial intelligence.

Relocalising our world after COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the fact that our entire societal “paradigm” is wrong. The shared experience of vulnerability and renewed capacity for empathy that the virus has inadvertently gifted the world with will succeed in transforming our lives only if we let them, and are serious about the depth of the transformation required. To put it bluntly: we need a whole new imaginary — a new way of seeing ourselves and being in the world. This is an ambitious task. But I want to make a start by focusing on one key aspect of such a re-imagining of the way we inhabit our world.

The coronavirus crisis marks the first great step back from the project of economic globalisation. We need to continue that movement. The future will be more local, either because we intelligently make it so or because we suffer the forced-localisation of collapse.

If we go down the route of a tech-heavy, platform-centric consumer-capitalism, succumbing to a culture of separation into our digital boxes, and if the current trend towards being a single-use throwaway culture continues — not least with regard to personal protective equipment (PPE) — then we are finished.

Our vulnerability to pandemic stems directly from our physical hyper-connectivity — and yet a connectivity that benefits only a tiny percentage of the world’s population (about 80 per cent of the world’s population have never flown). As my colleagues Nassim Taleb, Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam warned back in January, this hyper-connectivity is a key part of what made this coronavirus outbreak unprecedented, and necessitated a rapid precautionary response. But in the longer term, to build down the problem we need to shift to a world that systemically relocalises.

We need to reinstate localism rather than globalism as the norm of subsidiarity. Of course, such localism needs to be “fractal,” and globalism is needed where appropriate — for example, the forms of global cooperation facilitated by a truly responsive WHO (and one that is more serious about epidemiological precaution). But communities, as well as countries, should be encouraged to keep themselves safe by going into lock down. Furthermore, nations will certainly want to retain more strategic industries in years to come.

There are some things, admittedly, that should and will remain non-local. We should have globally joined-up strategies with respect to pandemics and similarly common threats, such as climate change. We should have global emergency-responses where necessary; information, wisdom, and experience should be shared globally. But that’s about it. Economic globalisation has fragilised us. It has diffused responsibility, and massively increased climate-deadly emissions. It has uprooted habitats and destroyed ecosystems everywhere. The direction of travel, as it were, of people, commodities, finance and “production” should be back toward the local.

This has nothing to do with ideology. We can be “broad based” about this. As the coronavirus is teaching us, the challenge of relocalising our world transcends our ordinary political coordinates. Libertarians, frankly, need to get over their squeamishness. Conservatives need to embrace economic measures to help “unnecessary” workers not go to work. Socialists need to understand the exigencies of this emergency vis-à-vis borders and the importance of localisation, rather than insisting on pre-existing dogma. They all need to find ways of thinking globally where appropriate, and of acting locally as a default.

The beginning is near

As the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us, we have to live in a world we will never fully understand, predict, or control. The huge cost — in terms both of lives and money — of the world’s collective failure to apply precautionary reasoning to the coronavirus will hopefully continue to wake people up. If we are to survive, let alone flourish, we need to change things up; we need to imagine big, along the lines that I’ve been suggesting. This pandemic is our chance, probably our last such chance, for a new beginning. From its horror, if we retrieve the drive to localise, we’ll be building the best possible memorial to those hundreds of thousands who have unnecessarily died.

The coronavirus crisis is like the climate crisis, only dramatically telescoped in terms of time. We have seen what happens when there is a short-term protective contraction of the economy. The lifestyle-change that was required by the pandemic is more extreme than what will be required of us in order adequately to address the climate crisis. Why not make the less extreme changes required to live safely within a stable climate?

The coronavirus pandemic is like an acute condition: both individuals and entire societies need to respond quickly to it, but probably not for an extended period of time — certainly not if prevention or elimination is successfully achieved. The climate crisis is a chronic condition: it will take decades upon decades of determination, commitment, and “sacrifice” not to be overwhelmed by it. But the changes we need to make in order to achieve that goal are more attractive than those made in order to fight the coronavirus. The life we live in a climate-safe world can be a better life: saner; more rooted and local; more secure, with stronger communities and less uncertainty about our common future; less hyper-materialistic; more caring; more nurturing, and with greater exposure to the natural world.

What is required is the building of care, ethical sensibilities, and precautiousness into the very warp and weft of our lives (ABC Religion & Ethics).

Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales and a frequent spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. He is the author of Philosophy for Life: Applying Philosophy in Politics and Culture and co-author, with Samuel Alexander, of This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire — and What Lies Beyond.