Fresh hopes for a post-plague world
We can rebuild the way we do business, politics and the media, writes George Pitcher. It's not just desirable, it's a necessity that we seize this opportunity
Looking for good outcomes from plagues can be as distasteful an exercise as putting a positive spin on the slave trade, by arguing that it enriched and therefore enabled the philanthropy of slavers. To be clear: Anything that costs and ruins millions of lives can’t be mitigated by social benefits elsewhere.
But it’s an unarguable cause and effect that the 14th-century Black Death, which proportionally killed more people across Europe than covid ever will, decimated the serfdom workforce, which as a consequence raised the cost of labour and precipitated the end of feudalism.
Similarly, the Great Fire of London cleansed the capital of the Great Plague and presented the opportunity for building a new metropolis. Whether that was a deliberate cause and effect of plague offers one of history’s great conspiracy theories. But, again, that a new order emerged from the curse of plague is indisputable.
So in the wake – if that’s not too morbid a word to use – of Freedom Day this week, with its somewhat muted celebrations of the abandonment of face-masks and social-distancing, it’s a moment to wonder what new and refreshed societal architecture might be built in the ashes of the latest pandemic.
The hope has to be that the ways we conduct our business, our politics and our communications have been sufficiently challenged, and their shortcomings exposed, by the pandemic that in each field a rather more progressive paradigm will emerge for the 21st century.
Collective insecurity
Corporate shibboleths should have been irretrievably shaken. New technologies have long enabled us to abandon the office as a principal locus for trade. But we’ve found it impossible to shake the habit, schlepping into cities in overcrowded trains to pose around conference rooms and water-coolers, a collective insecurity that must have its roots in tribal culture.
Working from home is liberating of time and spirit. But it’s more than that. The individual, since the Industrial Revolution (and arguably before that in agrarian serfdom), has been subsumed in corporate culture. That can spiritually be a healthy thing in religions. In the Christian church, as example, individuals come together in communion to form the body incorporate of Christ in the world – a body of which each member is an equally cherished part.
In a commercial company, the opposite is the case. Individualism evaporates in a hierarchy of equity ownership. This is particularly iniquitous if you happen historically to be on the wrong side of the gender divide that has been forged by a predominantly patriarchal, joint-stock capitalism.
Offices have been the temples that enabled the worship of male hegemony. Returning professional work to the home, with collegiate interaction online, should only serve to redress work/life imbalances and favour an equality for women in the growth of a circular economy.
This is also so in politics. A further effect of the pandemic on our polity has been to expose how inadequate is a two-party adversarial model for the complexities of global contemporary life. Just as doing effective business increasingly favours collaborative rather than competitive structures, so has the expectation that a prime minister and his/her cabinet will have all the answers been found wanting.
The pandemic has exposed as ludicrous the idea that a limited number of (in this instance not very talented) people, who happen to share the same political badge, should get everything right in serving the public good. To coin a phrase so beloved of politicians, this version of democracy isn’t fit for purpose.
Strength in diversity
In the national emergency of the pandemic, we shouldn’t have been afraid of a national government. In the same vein, coalitions aren’t a symptom of political weakness but of strength in diversity, if they are formed not simply to seize power but to serve the public interest.
Progressive alliances are the way forward, if we are not continually to be hobbled by tribal right-left infighting. It shouldn’t matter what political ideologies divide us if what we share is progressive. As Neal Lawson, director of think-tank Compass, puts it:
Progressives of all parties stand on a burning platform – safer ground must be found… the biggest prize of all [is] the refashioning of our divisive political structures and culture into one of collaboration – a truly new politics for a new society.
Finally, the pandemic has demonstrated the vital importance of the dissemination of accurate, reliable and trustworthy information. We cannot rely on that happening without media that own those three essential qualities of accuracy, reliability and trust.
The passing whimsies of post-truth and fake news have not served the public demands of a global crisis such as this pandemic. Those who become billionaires off the ravings of social-media platforms have no more right to evade public scrutiny than other billionaires, whose highest aspiration is to leave the planet for trips to space, have a right to evade tax. The experience of the past 18 months should give us a desire for a flight to media quality, rather than to flights of fancy.
And it’s less a desire than a necessity in a post-pandemic economy in which we need to know, as a matter of some urgency, whether empty supermarket shelves are a consequence of drivers self-isolating, of post-Brexit border bureaucracies or of inefficient immigration controls.
The world looks different post-lockdown. We should embrace rather than resist that difference.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest