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Alaska Airlines flight 1805, Los Angeles to Washington DC, March 5 2020. So spookily empty is the cabin, the nice stewardess keeps offering me the surplus sandwiches, somehow not realising that the physical splendour mesmerising you from the byline photo above isn’t compatible with white carbs. Not until I land in a deserted capital a few hours later do I absorb what is happening. The world has changed.
Then, quicker than even the bulls predicted, it un-changed. Urban life was mostly back by 2022. Tourism is as rampant as ever. (Imagine knowing mid-pandemic that Britain’s government would back extra runways at Heathrow and Gatwick.) Restaurants are like Fort Knox to get into. There are vestiges of the pandemic — in office occupation rates, in public debt, in ongoing health problems, in harrowing memories — but the idea that it would refashion society wholesale looks quaint.
Five years on, one lesson stands out, and it is hard for a journalist to accept: almost all events are ephemeral.
In my lifetime, the only historical turning points have been the fall of the Soviet Union, the election of Donald Trump and the current war in Ukraine. I’d suggest the 2008 banking crash, but it seems ever more Eurocentric to do so. The US economy overcame that trauma, and then some. China and India continued their rise despite it. The Iraq war, then? A fiasco, and a regional boon for Iran, but some way short of world-changing.
After 9/11, it was common sense that religious terrorism would dominate western strategic thinking thereafter. Who now ranks it over traditional inter-state war as a threat to life and liberty? I recall a former colleague, at the height of Isis, saying that Britain should cut its nuclear deterrent to fund special forces, intelligence and other agile assets. The argument wasn’t just cogent. In the room, it was close to overpowering. Looking back, however, he and we exaggerated how much the world had changed. It takes an almost inhuman detachment to stand outside your times and see them as transient. Fail to, however, and irreversible mistakes happen. (These needn’t be political. The art that dates worst is often that which strives for contemporary relevance.)
Of course, “turning point” is a sly phrase. Most social change happens through gradual trends. Again, though, which of these in my lifetime have really mattered? The rise of China and the non-west, certainly. But the digitisation of life? Without getting into the Solow paradox (“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”), it is not as though we are growing at rates unknown in the analogue era. In Britain, after decades of liberal mores, of “relativism” and the loss of deference, the public marked the death of the Queen with the devotion that it would have done in 1960. Condemned to record novelties, my profession can overrate how deep a new trend or idea ever penetrates.
You can go two ways here. One is to comfort yourself, in a “This too shall pass” sense. But there is a bleaker angle: the tenuousness and insubstantiality of almost everything. If an event as huge as the pandemic did not set society on a new course, what chance the “loneliness epidemic”, or most elections, or this or that over-chronicled Gen Z fad? Almost all in the public realm that you are asked to devote time and thought to is vapour. I gave a summer of my twenties to the parliamentary expenses scandal.
There were other things to take from the pandemic. People are bad predictors of their future behaviour. Compare the high vaccination rates with all the refuseniks who had shown up in surveys. Also, no one who advocates car-free cities can have thought about it much. Without the ambient presence of traffic, a silence and stillness reigned that was more medieval than pleasant. But the ultimate lesson, with the distance of five years, has to be the “stickiness” of human nature in the face of mere events. Lots of conservatives have come to see that era as an authoritarian travesty. They might with more justice see it as the highest vindication of their worldview.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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