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

Our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterised by two vast failures of imagination:

1) Many people and most governments —particularly those of the United States and the UK — have failed to imagine exponential growth and how bad it can get.

What are the underlying reasons for this first failure?

Normalcy bias

It is very hard for human beings to imagine things radically outside their experience —especially things that spiral out of control. A “normalcy bias” makes us very poor at being ready for what are called “black swan” events. Uncertainty, “fat tails” and precaution are little understood. Crude, over-simplified versions of “evidence-based” analysis predominate.

There has been no truly global pandemic with high mortality within the lifetimes of virtually anyone now alive — not since the Spanish flu. And since then we have, as humans, become more and more pleased with ourselves, more and more confident that our technology, science, and understanding are such that we are seemingly near-invulnerable to threats from the mere natural world. This is not true — in fact, the contrary is true. We have made our systems — and thus, ourselves — fragile.

Systemic risk vs. individual risk

The risk of serious morbidity/mortality to most individuals from COVID-19 appears to be low. (Though this is still not certain, and gives another reason for precaution: there may be hidden risks to individual health, and the virus does appear to be a very nasty one indeed with effects going way beyond the lungs. Evidence is growing that there are silent risks to catching coronavirus — yet another reason for a strong suppressional/eliminational response to it.) But even if it is the case that COVID-19 turns out to be low-risk for most people, the risk to our system is high.

A key reason is the real risk of our healthcare system being overwhelmed, as happened in northern Italy. (There is a greater risk of this in some African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries; the fact that most of these countries have so far fared relatively well may be primarily because they were not so inter-connected geographically. The virus appears now to be spreading widely in India, for instance, and in Brazil.)

Linear vs. exponential risks

Humans are poor at thinking exponentially. The reason the COVID-19 pandemic is something we should all be very concerned about — in a way that we do not need to be concerned about, say, seasonal flu — is that the potential downside to which we are all exposed is particularly dire. The coronavirus is still probably spreading exponentially in some parts of the world, and in the many places where testing is being carried out patchily we don’t even know how exponentially. The risk it poses, therefore, is of a different order of magnitude to that of most other more familiar illnesses. This crisis is probably only a quarter of the way through — in fact, it may become a permanent crisis.

This is why the Precautionary Principle needs to be applied to the pandemic in a number of different ways. 

2) Almost everyone has failed to imagine that and how we could stop movement.

It wasn’t until the virus had gotten under our national defences that flights were stopped or borders closed. (Key exceptions to this rule include New Zealand, which has come out of the crisis smelling of roses.) Virtually no one — except us Precautionauts and Localists — considered stopping the normal practice of untrammelled global travel (which, remember, barely existed a century ago during the last comparable event). Even now, much of the United States still have not instituted state-line control measures [until recently]. In the UK, there are no internal travel control measures at all, apart from the partial, diminishing lock down. There is nothing at the England/Scotland border, nor even at the north-south Ireland border. This is starting to become an issue, now that England is diverging from the other three nations of the UK.

Planes are “super-spreaders.” But the problem goes even deeper than that. We need to begin imagining, not just countries, but communities protecting themselves and each other. This means areas that are serious about suppressing the virus need to have the right to regulate entry, and areas which are pools of infection need to be strongly encouraged to regulate exit. We are not going to suppress or eliminate the virus everywhere at the same time. If we are serious about “crushing the curve,” then we must be willing to imagine communities — nations/states, regions, localities — engaging in such forms of self-protection.

This has been very difficult for us because we have grown accustomed, in this era of economic globalisation, to not being able to imagine limits to the movement of commodities and people. We have grown accustomed to thinking of such movement as itself a good thing. This has made it difficult for us to sustain and nurture strong communities (on which, see Simone Weil’s brilliant work of applied political philosophy, The Need for Roots). Liberal political philosophy in general and neoliberal globalisation in particular has, in fact, been a tool for destroying communities. 

Furthermore, globalisation has helped cultivate our self-perception as individual consumers, such that we have come to see unregulated travel [and not wearing a mask] as an absolute right, and to see borders as nothing but a potential infringement on the exercise of that right.

On the political Right, the unwillingness to place restrictions on the movement of people can take the form of libertarianism or of an extreme economic ideology of open borders. Consider the remarks of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who said on 3 February 2020:

“We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange … [for the] right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”

This is a clear sign of his intention to minimise the virus, and allow people and goods to keep moving in and out of the UK — even at the cost of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of lives. Thus, the UK was for a while the only country in the world to have no coronavirus-related border controls, even as its per capita death rate became one of the highest in the entire world.

On the political Left, the unwillingness to imagine restraints on the movement of people tends to be reactive to nationalism and can take the form of calls to abolish borders altogether. This is catastrophic dogmatism at a time of pandemic.

But, as I say, the point is deeper: we need to be willing to imagine restraints on movement, not just at international borders, but within states as well. Otherwise, we are not serious about the public good, and not serious about suppression or elimination of COVID-19. The lock downs show the way. As they are lifted, they need to be replaced with restrictions on movement that are less blunt instruments, more smart policy. We are going to need to be imaginative.

Consider, for instance, the current situation in the UK. The British government is lifting the lockdown prematurely, from a precautionary perspective. The R number (the reproduction rate of the virus) is not clearly below 1 in many places, which means that the virus may still be slowly growing in some places. Those places need to be able to go back into lock down. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, so centralised is the UK as a nation that it cannot imagine doing so.

Difficult, but not impossible

These difficulties of imagination that I’ve been describing are not impossibilities. We know this because some places did not fail to imagine coronavirus. Countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, and South Korea got serious about the exponential threat that the virus presented, and imposed massive changes virtually overnight — including seriously restricting human movement. And I do mean seriously. Not the half-arsed lock down we experienced in the UK, where airports remained open for business throughout. New Zealand didn’t just go into lock down early; they insisted on a complete national quarantine system to prevent re-infection.

There has been no such seriousness in the UK or the United States about suppressing, much less eliminating, the virus. There has been no effort to crush the curve. Herd immunity by way of deadly infection, tragically, remains the policy of the British government.

In order to see how unserious our lock down was, consider the following thought-experiment. The numbers of those infected with COVID-19 double every few days — so, if the goal is to eliminate the virus, when is the best time, in principle, to impose a lock down? The answer is: at the beginning, of course. By going into lock down when very few are infected, you minimise pools of infection and thence the casualties. Then, when the disease is extirpated, restrictions can be lifted, as New Zealand has done, while retaining a protective ring around the country... (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.