A well-known Bertold Brecht poem begins: “Truly, I live in dark times! / An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead / points to insensitivity. He who laughs / has not yet received / the terrible news.” For at least a month, every news cycle seems to have encouraged such pessimism. The way we distribute news has also made it harder to avoid the sort of anxieties which used to be private concerns.
Musing on Brecht’s lines, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that “History knows many periods of dark times in which the public realm has been obscured and … people have ceased to ask any more of politics than that it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty.” It is hard to watch the current clown show of British and American politics without concluding that we have already entered another of these periods.
At the same time, the virus has evoked courage and creativity almost everywhere. Our imperfect and evolving responses have shown how imaginative and resilient we can be. The digital platforms which manipulate our attention, so profitably, have partly redeemed themselves by preserving a sliver of normality. Countless hours of confinement have been leavened by uplifting communication, diversion and instruction. Millions of us have reconnected with distant friends and family and rediscovered the joys of community. Several countries have a daily tribute to essential workers, and many have repurposed local businesses to make personal protective equipment, hand sanitizers and the like. Thousands of ordinary people have volunteered to ease the burden on their overburdened healthcare systems, or to buy groceries for vulnerable neighbours and friends.
In a welcome corrective to the fake news, filter bubbles and pornography that dominate so much online traffic, there has been an influx of positive digital content. Online choirs, ballet troupes, concerts and other diversions now stream through our digital arteries. Two nights ago, for instance, the video game Fortnite aired a brief concert by the rapper Travis Scott. His avatar entered the game-space and performed songs in a series of stunning digital settings including underwater and outer space scenes. Fittingly, some of the music came from an album which Scott named in honour of Six Flags AstroWorld, a beloved theme park from his childhood in Houston, Texas that was closed in 2005.
The abrupt pausing of a busy planet has been an economic disaster, but it has also produced deeper analysis of the interrupted societies. In the US, for instance, the journalist George Packer has trenchantly noted the “underlying conditions” which the virus was able to exploit: “[I]t found a country with … [c]hronic ills — a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public …. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.” In the wake of 9/11 a French newspaper famously declared “We are all Americans Now.” The Covid pandemic has shown many Americans that the reverse is true today. For most intents and purposes, few of them are better off than their counterparts in supposedly ‘developing countries’.
In an insightful essay Arundhati Roy describes the ambiguity of the current moment as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” After considering some of the egregious failures of the government response in India, she concludes: “in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” Confronted with this political opening we can either “choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
