Thought for the Day

With almost everyone, everywhere, now confined to home, consumer demand is collapsing and central banks are throwing money desperately into the system. Noone knows how long this will last – but some, like Adam Tooze in yesterday’s post, are beginning to explore what lasting impact this is likely to have. 

William Davies – who wrote Nervous States – how feelings took over the world (2018) - has offered this fascinating article -

Rather than view this as a crisis of capitalism, it might better be understood as the sort of world-making event that allows for new economic and intellectual beginnings.

In 1755, most of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami, killing as many as 75,000 people. Its economy was devastated, but it was rebuilt along different lines that nurtured its own producers. Thanks to reduced reliance on British exports, Lisbon’s economy was ultimately revitalised.

But the earthquake also exerted a profound philosophical influence, especially on Voltaire and Immanuel Kant. The latter devoured information on the topic that was circulating around the nascent international news media, producing early seismological theories about what had occurred. Foreshadowing the French revolution, this was an event that was perceived to have implications for all humanity; destruction on such a scale shook theological assumptions, heightening the authority of scientific thinking. If God had any plan for the human species, Kant concluded in his later work, it was for us to acquire individual and collective autonomy, via a “universal civic society” based around the exercise of secular reason.

It will take years or decades for the significance of 2020 to be fully understood. But we can be sure that, as an authentically global crisis, it is also a global turning point. There is a great deal of emotional, physical and financial pain in the immediate future. But a crisis of this scale will never be truly resolved until many of the fundamentals of our social and economic life have been remade.

The calm tones of Dr John Campbell can be heard on his daily video briefings which reinforce the essential messages with a wonderful mixture of visual and verbal points – an object lesson in how to convey clear and effective messages in 20 minutes.

This is Monday 23^rd’s briefing – and this is today’s (Tuesday 24 March)

But he slipped in, almost casually, a horrifying possibility – that a vaccine might not be available until March 2021 with wide availability only later in the summer….