Has the world ever changed so much, so quickly?
Convulsive global change has occurred throughout history, for a variety of reasons. On rare occasions, change has been an intellectually-based and benevolent process, such as during the Renaissance Enlightenment periods. The nature of the change they provoke is profound and the human imagination is permanently altered as a result, but they operate as a slow burn, bringing change over decades or centuries rather than weeks and months. Spiritually-led change can move quicker, particularly if it is led by the point of a sword, as with the eruption of Islam out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 8th century. Though perhaps the more gradual impact of the teachings of the Buddha or Christ more accurately represent the pace of change associated with the spiritual realm.
At the other end of the scale, history is replete with singular events that have almost instantly changed human perception. From an October day in 331 BC when the Persian hegemony of Asia was destroyed by Alexander at the battle of Gaugamela to the dropping of an atomic device on Hiroshima in August 1945, events measured in hours, even seconds, have turned the world on its axis. What is clear is that change is a defining element of the human condition, that it has multiple proximate causes and can rarely be predicted — but that set of simple truisms does not adequately capture the situation we face today.
A threat to life that is globally ubiquitous and near instantaneous has only ever been visited upon humanity by either pandemic or world war; it may be that climate change will join this apocalyptic list, but we have been spared that up to now. And, to make any sense of the scale of change the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to provoke, we need to make some historically comparative judgements.
How else can we adjust for the differences between, say, the early Byzantine world that was devastated by the Justinian Plague and the 21st Century? Equally, a world war is defined by the world you occupy and a citizen of Baghdad in 1258 facing Mongol invasion from the east and the continued depredations of the Crusaders in the west, might reasonably have felt at the centre of a global conflict.
The size of today’s global population and the nature of travel, communications and connectivity means that, in absolute terms, the current crisis will touch more human lives more quickly than any equivalent event in the past. But we should not confuse scale with consequence and we need to place this in its proper context
The first consideration might be the scale of human loss. To compare the death rate of Covid-19 to that experienced during the Black Death would be grotesque. The 14th Century global population was reduced by 40-60 per cent, albeit over an attenuated period, consistent with the speed of communications at the time. In turn, human loss provoked profound social change. The devastation of the agricultural labouring classes meant that wages were monetised and multiplied, fundamentally changing the relationship between social classes within a feudal system that began a decline as a result.
In the same way, world wars have caused not only catastrophic human loss but also enormous social and political change. Perhaps one index of the scale of change is the numbers of political “-isms” any conflict has spawned. The Napoleonic Wars became a struggle between the established European system of monarchism and the French revolutionary concept of republicanism, with consequences that were felt for over a century. The twin abominations of the 20th Century — Soviet Communism and Nazi Fascism — were both created in the crucible of the First World War and carried over into the Second World War and beyond.
In fact, the period between 1914 and 1920 probably sets the baleful standard for convulsive historical change. A period that started in the clear blue skies of Edwardian complacency and ended with the final twitches of the Spanish Flu pandemic and contained a hideous conflict, the industrialisation of warfare, the end of four European empires and the emancipation of women will take some beating in terms of the scale and nature of change it caused.
So, in historically weighted terms, Covid-19 is big, but it ain’t that big. Neither is it over, and, while we can make some observations about its legacy, they must remain provisional for the time being.
The first observation is the patent failure of the West. From President Wilson’s 14 points at the Versailles peace conference to FDR’s role in both the Great Depression and the war that followed; through the Marshall Plan, the space race and the defeat of the Soviet Union, the world has been able to rely on American leadership for the last century. That leadership is now conspicuous by its absence and characterised by a mean-spirited petulance that looks inward and seeks to apportion blame rather than find solutions.
And Europe is not much better. Another sticking plaster solution has been found to temporarily fix the original sin of EU monetary union: the creation of a currency without a fiscal system to support it. With Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek debt levels already flashing red, when will the time be right for the mutualisation of debt obligations, if not now? By failing this test of its own destiny, the EU will run on but without the vaulting ambition of federalism or a European army, neither of which are possible without an integrated economic structure.
Is there also something uniquely incompetent about the Anglo-Saxon response to the pandemic? Do the buccaneering values of Wall Street and the City of London, which elevate risk and reward above prudence and responsibility have an obverse — and has it been revealed in the A&E departments or emergency rooms of London and New York? Too early to tell, but what is clear is that the West will need to empty the substitute’s bench if it to have the strong second half to this crisis, which is now needed to restore its reputation.
In contrast, China seems to have played a bad hand well. Medieval public health practices are not a good look for a nation aspiring to global leadership; neither is a clumsy information campaign that seeks to blame visiting US military delegations for planting the virus in Wuhan. But the swift and efficient limitation of the spread of the disease and restoration of economic activity can only recommend the machinery of Chinese government. The world does not necessarily want to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, but, if a measure of the impact of great events is the number of political “-isms” it bequeaths to history, statism might be one to watch.
Finally, the most significant individual contribution to combatting Covid-19 has probably been made by a nonagenarian great grandmother, speaking for less than five minutes. The intervention of Queen Elizabeth shows how, in times of accelerating change and uncertainty, we crave stability above all else.
