Five years ago, we were beginning to face the imminent reality of lockdown. We were confronted with an uncertain future in which our habitual ways of coping, succeeding, displacing and overworking were going to be put mercilessly on hold because of an unprecedented existential threat. And for a few months we lived through a see-saw of emotions: public and private grief at the scale of loss; anger and confusion over the restrictions imposed, withdrawn, re-imposed; exhaustion at the pressure of sustaining basic public services – and also a kind of guilty, sporadic excitement at possibilities we hadn’t guessed at. Clearer skies, silent roads; time; a sense of what mattered and who mattered, to us as individuals and to the whole of society. Fragile shoots of some sort of renewed spiritual imagination pushed a centimetre or so through the soil.
Our capacity for not learning from crises, however, is impressively well developed (as it proved to be after the financial meltdown of 2008). After a few years of floundering and posturing, we are back where we were, our fingers firmly in our ears about the nature of international crises, medical or environmental, engaged in a hectic struggle to prove that we are not going to be “defeatist” about our economic future. We are back with the supercharged language of “growth” as the all-sufficient and self-evident goal of national life – cheered on by a global turn to bloodthirsty competition and the prospect of futile, theatrical trade wars.
