Alternative Editorial: The pandemic invites us to be bigger
By A/UK co-initiator, Pat Kane
In this 26th week of lockdown, my editorial attention has been a little obsessively caught by a popular animated gif on twitter (reproduced above). It comes from a well-meaning Asian-American medical doctor, who backs it up with a thread bristling with the latest studies.
It’s doubtless also intended to be completely horrifying and cautionary. At first look, I thought it was a cold, abstracted, faceless version of a dinner party—but on closer inspection, this is a modern workspace. The conference table is readied for team-building, a telephone embedded (somewhat anachronistically) at each seat.
And the humanoid in purple looks like it’s endlessly spewing multi-hued droplets of death at its grey-toned counterparts, all from one unguarded cough or sneeze. This is in the same minatory register as those explicit, decaying photos you flinchingly catch on the cover of someone else’s cigarette packet, forcibly placed there by public health regulators.
I’ve never known how anyone reaches for their next fag with these atrocities on the cover. But I also don’t know how we’re supposed to return to any kind of social coexistence, if we have these scenes from The Matrix movies running in our heads as we break bread, or make work together.
This image being on Twitter, it has doubtless been algorithmically selected for maximum impact and retweetability. There could easily be a legion of sceptics, reacting fully in kind, highlighting this as the kind of social control and paranoia the authorities want to induce in a quivering populace. You’re only revealing what has been going on every day among normal, busy people, forever!
And so anti-Covideers return with delight to their pubs, restaurants, nightclubs and holiday beaches, filled with proximate, touchable and laughing people, who’ve always taken the rough with the smooth. And who certainly don’t want to be reduced to the faceless men and women in grey (and purple), spraying dangerous droplets at each other.
Yet it certainly looks like the second wave of coronavirus infection is about to land on us – no doubt triggered by any of the UK administrations somewhat desperately trying to return to our institutional norms, whether in the economy or schools.
If there is an outright social rebellion against the scientific truth-claims coming from government experts, then it will be another ironic twist, among many in recent UK politics. We may see a popular “taking back control” from an administration which, on another front, claims to be enacting the same stance vis-à-vis the EU mandarins.
(The current UKGov shift—from solidarity and “all-in-it-together”, to heavy fines and communal “snitching”—hardly promises to soothe any resistance).
However, there may be a general grumbling acceptance that another period of strict shutdown is required (to which governments must respond with another tranche of furlough and support, otherwise the restiveness may spill over).
Yet how long will people tolerate these endless calibrations and adjustments between their domestic, working and civic lives—this murk through which any kind of “return to normal” cannot be seen?
The answer could be: until the penny drops that the COVID experience may be one (reactive) version of what it means to live in an ecologically-sensitive way. And that, instead, we should strive to design versions that are proactive and creative, connecting short-term functionality with long-term sustainability.
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Where is the patience and capacity to sustain that insight? Last week’s blogging - highlighting a Demos report which uncovered much sour judgement going on between those with differing views of the pandemic - wasn’t encouraging.
This week’s blogs show much more fertile ground. The All-Party-Parliamentary-Group on the Green New Deal’s report, titled Reset, has canvassed over 50000 views, and finds much support for a full range of macro-level measures - shorter working week, guaranteed income and jobs, re-greening and pedestrianisation of town and cities, caps on rent, permanent right to home working.
One Reset participant sums up the underlying, realistic appetite for profound change: “If you give us time, a lot of people would give back.”
Also, Alex Evans and Jules Evans’ report on Collective Resilience (lower down the same blog, PDF here) maps out scores of ways that communities have lifted up their own spirits - through arts and creativity, family and relationships, religion, philosophy and meaning-making, nature and green space, games and sports, volunteering and mutual aid, activism, education and learning, different forms of employment, the handling of grief and trauma.
Listed like that, you begin to see the ghostly outline of what the veteran French leftist Andre Gorz once called the “culture-based” society, as opposed to the “work-based” society.
Except Gorz saw the reduction (not removal) of work values coming through an unstoppable, labour-saving automation—and our enlightened, ambitious collective response to it. He wouldn’t have predicted that a pandemic would rattle the settled structure of work to pieces—COVID letting a different set of human priorities come through, recombining the Lego bricks of productivism.
From the A/UK perspective, it’s clear to see that “Green New Deals” are psychological as well as material bridges between the people and governments, as the torrents of climate crisis roil beneath both parties’ feet.
At the people end, the GND programmes for social, economic and energy infrastructure do a translation job between margin and centre, experts and community. A grand Deal turns environmental urgency into concrete, sanity-inducing employment offers.
As the SF writer Cory Doctorow pointed out a few weeks ago:
Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labour-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zootic and insect-borne pandemics
These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labour freed up by automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future…
We just spent 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.
That feels true, for the production side. But in his piece, Doctorow doesn’t address the crisis of consumerism, and the monstrous externalities of waste that its stimulation of desire generates. The complex popular responses to COVID, charted by the Reset and Evans’ reports, suggests Cory’s missing a trick. There may be a much greater, community-level willingness to commit to this kind of future than is generally recognised.
Our caution on the GND is that, under our current UK regime at least, the government end of the bridge may only fitfully be constructed (if at all). Those with enough energy and inclination to contribute to the slow, uncertain grind towards a progressive parliamentary majority - one that might change direction at the macro-level - have our full support.
But we would prefer to advocate for change right now, at the level of community, network and region, made concrete through working prototypes and constitutes. Our theorising of CANs (citizen action/community agency networks) is being taken up by several localities - and one of the common themes is the importance of a combination of education, deliberation and media services to be provided by CANs.
How much more calming and grounding it would be to speak and explore with your fellow citizens about the measures needed to tide you through the next wave of biospheric disruption? That is, instead of being barked at by far-off government regimes who themselves are in a crisis of their own authority, by virtue of their own erratic and compromised behaviours?
There is a rich new societal space right before us - where a willingness to change meets new structures of power and resource (see our blog on Transition Network’s next five years, for some concrete illustrations of what this space looks like).
Nurturing and building these spaces, with new virtual and actual designs, should move us away from polarising discourses about COVID (the droplet-drenched world versus our stubborn denial of any danger). Polarisations which, as our blog this week on social media shows, are only benefitting the bottom-line of info-corporations.
Here, right now, on the site you’re visiting, it’s being done differently. But we need to multiply massively our efforts. Your support would be most appreciated. And in the meantime, if you’re ever in that grey-world situation depicted at the head of this blog, we literally have you covered.
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