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 23rd’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….
