At the beginning of the lockdown, amid anxiety and confusion, I began to realize that I was having fun. I was doing more cooking and gardening; the air was cleaner, my city was quieter and I spent more time with my partner. Many other people have begun to write about the concept that #NoGoingBack. It seemed that we had taken a deep collective respite, and then we had begun to think of coronavirus as a stimulus to inspire us to think about how we can deal with other primary disorders: climate, inequality, racism, etc.
As an academic, I must write a quick and dirty e-book about what life will be like after the crisis. I have persuaded various activists and academics to write short articles on home paintings, money, leadership and many other topics. The concept was to show that the global could replace it if we wanted to. The eebook is now available, but it is already felt, only 4 months after I imagined it, as the document of a lost time. The sounds of the people return and the squirts begin to frighten the sky. Missed the time?
The moment’s lesson of coronavirus, it seems, is how cursed the old structures are. Wanting the global to be different doesn’t mean doing it. Slogans replace when power, behavior, and infrastructure remain the same. So what can we be informed about the crisis and lasting replacement now?
Think holidays in Spain and Portugal. Sunny beaches, inscrusting drinks and reasonable food. For many other people, going back to usually means going back to what they had before, and they don’t need to hear lightning, whether it’s a head of state or an Extinction Rebellion spokesman, telling them they can’t have it. To address the problem, there are thousands of jobs at stake in the industries that take other people on vacation: aircraft production and maintenance, airport and hotel paintings, duty-free sales, aviation fuel and special lunches for tourists.
The world we live in now has a kind of rigidity, either in terms of other people’s expectations and the infrastructure that exists in one position and reinforces the expectations of others. The global pre-COVID was sculpted through cash and trade, roads and shipping containers. As we gradually begin to exit the blockade, those channels are in a waiting position, in a position to fill with other people and things.
In the social sciences, we communicate about “dependence on the path,” the concept that our history limits our existing options. If we have organized villages around a large number of people passing through the city center, or houses and apartments that do not have space for paintings, then it will be difficult for a large number of people who have paintings from home. If you have to park your car on the street, charging an electric car means placing a cable on the sidewalk. If our pension budget depends on oil corporations making massive profits, encouraging investment in green technologies will be a challenging struggle.
No wonder, then, that it is less difficult for many other people to assume that the long term will be like the afterlife because the way of this limits the way we can think about things to come. That’s what worries me most in my book. I think you can object to a door that’s already closing. And the other people who drive it are neither stupid nor bad, just politicians, companies and others who need to go back to what they had.
If the first lesson of the coronavirus is that things can be replaced and the lesson of the moment is that they fall easily, the third lesson will have to be about the importance of presenting long-term photographs that motivate others to believe they replace. It is transparent that we cannot continue as we are and that we will have to avoid doing the things that we were doing, but just say that this is a very bad way to inspire other people to replace.