Human civilisation will need to invent a new understanding of what it means to be human. Coronavirus has turned the global market into the global hospital. It has presented every single human being with the same threat at the same time, a virus for which there is no cure or vaccine. It is hunting you and it is hunting me. As its prey, the best defence we have is to remain indoors as much as possible. Going outside carries a risk to ourselves and thousands of others. The economists of the past, as well as the political theorists, never imagined a world where standing less than two metres apart from another person could be so deadly. And while past philosophies imagined a shared human “world soul”, never before has our impact on it as individuals been so clear. Today, we all share the same blood, and it’s Covid-19’s hunting ground.
But humans have been prey before, for most of our history on Earth. Our ancestors escaped the jaws of predators that sought to consume us, and they escaped by sticking together.
“This will end with humanity victorious over yet another virus, there’s no question about that. The question is how much and how fast we will take the measures necessary to minimise the damage that this thing can do. In time, we will have therapeutics, we will have vaccines, we’re in a race against that,’’ Dr Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization, told Time Magazine.
“And it’s going to take great cooperation and patience from the general population to play their part because at the end of the day it’s going to be the general population that stops this thing and slows it down enough to get it under control.”
That will not be an easy or cheap process, and if we want to restart the global economy, we need to have a global response. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it in stark terms on Tuesday, pleading with rich nations for help.
"We are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world," Guterres wrote.
"We must create the conditions and mobilise the resources necessary to ensure that developing countries have equal opportunities to respond to this crisis ... anything short of this commitment would lead to a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions affecting us all."
Guterres said trillions of dollars would be necessary to shore up not just the economies, but even the basic food supply, for developing countries. He recommended removing tariffs and impediments to trade. The purpose of international trade, in theory, at least, is to build a web of shared interest around the world that makes catastrophic warfare less likely, and racism less prevalent. Those values will face an enormous test, and will either survive or disintegrate under the march of a new, merciless brand of corona-branded authoritarianism. That is especially true if we cannot distribute Covid-19 vaccines to the billions of people who will need them, billions of total strangers.
Today, so many strangers ask so much of us, and we ask so much of strangers. Together, we stand at a precipice in human history. We can either come out on the other side of it a wiser, more caring, knowledgeable species, or we can enter a period of prolonged, indefinite decline into a dark age full of shuttered schools, bigger prisons and hungrier children.
We can come out of the Silicon Age Collapse with a global civilisation that respects the rights of everyone, or we can revert to a world of rapacious empires that respects the rights of no one. If the global economy is ever going to restart, it will need something approaching a global government to restart it. It’s up to us whether it is a world we want to live in.
Poster Comment:
Just posted this for discussion. Not because it reflects my views.
