Pandemic as a Portal to the Future: Four Deep Lessons from COVID that Go Beyond “We Screwed it Up”
[The pandemic] is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal” Financial Times, April 2020
I’ve been reading recently about how humans have flunked the pandemic test — we just had a brush with our own global future and it did not go well. It’s now commonplace to compare COVID to the climate crisis and conclude that, rather than taking action when things get “bad enough,” shit can get pretty bad and still not create the impetus we need for unified action.
Based on our pandemic performance, the climate disasters will be well underway by the time it gets “bad enough.”
Unfortunately, few disasters seem deep enough to create unity and common purpose. We look back on WWII as a time of unparalleled national purpose and forget about the significant political opposition of the time and the political and economic games required to prompt action. But action at scale requires cooperation at scale, and that means everyone — government, business, communities — all need to pitch in.
We are a long way from that. Rapid collective action seems out of the picture, judging by most indications. For while the scientific community stepped up with a vaccination miracle, we failed as a community to deal with the uncertainty and the concern for others that would have saved millions of lives worldwide and hundreds of thousands here at home. The particulars of that failure need no enumeration here.
But there is cause for hope amid the gloom. Inspired by Arundhati Roy’s piece in the Financial Times, I am focused on a few ideas that are now on the table in ways they were not before, including:
1. We cannot know the future. Many of us have arranged our lives quite nicely in urban communities or gated developments, good jobs with benefits and insurance, comforts for ourselves and choices for our children. COVID showed how fragile it all is. Suddenly we were worried about doorknobs and toilet paper, never mind our jobs or the education of our children.
Maybe, just maybe, our hubris that “we got this” has been taken down a peg. That would be a good thing.
2. None of us is immune. While our deep wiring is geared toward obtaining security and choices for ourselves and those around us, we are inextricably connected to other humans and, for that matter, all of life. We have always known, or at least have said, that injustice for anyone is injustice for everyone, or words to that effect. We now have a case study where that is literally true. Variants emerge in marginalized, poor, or unvaccinated communities and place all of us at risk.
Perhaps this lesson of mutual connectedness may be sinking in. Stories of people coming together have new resonance. Appreciation of difference is on the rise. This is a hopeful trend.
3. We can change more and faster than we realize. “A decade of change in 18 months” is a fair characterization of what just happened. In nearly every industry and walk of life, we adapted — or responded, at least — at a speed and scale that few of us thought possible. Healthcare, education, and industry and commerce of all kinds underwent revolutions in production and delivery that would not have been even technically feasible twenty years ago. Vaccine technology that did not exist even a decade ago produced an effective vaccine (or 4) a scant year after the earliest cases. We forget how unlikely that seemed in early 2020.
The closest analogue in American history is almost certainly the transition to a wartime economy in the 24 months following Pearl Harbor, the so-called “Arsenal for Democracy.” We actually are able to do this when pressed.
4. We can afford to do what is needed, even on a massive scale. The US economy and the global productivity engine it relies on appear to have weathered the storm. Shutting down huge chunks of a 100 trillion dollar system and starting it back up again has not been without its challenges, some ongoing. But we are learning how to respond at scale.
Since 2018, we in the US have spent about 3 trillion supporting those hurt by the pandemic with surprisingly little impact on the financial markets beyond a touch of inflation. Pandemic spending actually is dwarfed by the costs of the War on Terror (10 trillion) and military spending in general (1 trillion annually) and is comparable to the 2008 bailout (3 trillion) and the Trump tax cuts (2 trillion). We can afford more than we think.
It’s worth remembering that humans often learn best from negative examples. We learned the moral cost of slavery in the Civil War, the risks of market failure in the depression, the horror of genocide in the World Wars, and the threat of nuclear devastation in the Cold War. These stories are told, re-told and absorbed into our cultural memory.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes and is often a reaction to the worst errors of the past. Like the scientific method, we advance not by finding the truth, but by disproving the false bits. The future, in any case, is unknown and our stories are ways for us to try new futures on for size.
The story of the pandemic, with luck, will be less about what didn’t work as about the deeper lessons we learned.
