Exceptional Moments, Isolation, and Collective Action

Are we in an exceptional historical moment? Will we look back and speak of a ‘before and after’ Covid? Is it starting to define an era?

In the 1970s, the U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met the then Chinese premier, Chairman Mao. Kissinger asked the Chinese leader what he thought the impact of the French Revolution had been (an event that had happened almost two hundred years before in 1789). Chairman Mao answered famously, ‘It’s too early to tell’.

With Covid, it is also of course too early to tell what the lasting impact will be.

In my lifetime, there have been some significant historical events: the moon-landings, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Arguably Covid has had a greater impact than any of these on individual human beings – because we’ve not just witnessed the effects of Covid, we have felt them in our daily lives.

And alongside Covid has come a series of other seismic shifts, shaking the way we see the world – the Black Lives Matter protests, the #MeToo Movement, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the U.S., and of course the widespread anxiety felt around the globe concerning Climate Change.

So how can we start to make sense of these things that seem to have come all at the same time? How can we frame them mentally and emotionally and so better understand this moment we’re living through?

According to the influential French philosopher, Michel Foucault, we should separate out such issues, and not treat them as a group because this can be confusing; we need instead to put each singular moment and idea under the microscope and study them specifically, each on its own – otherwise we risk making false connections.

But according to Stuart Hall, the British thinker, it’s not possible to separate out single issues because they exist simultaneously and in relation to each other, forming what he calls a conjunction, or a convergence; so, in his view, to isolate moments and ideas would be to rob them of their context and give a false sense that these things simply spring up on their own.  

Of course, it doesn’t have to be either/or. We can zoom in and focus on individual issues while also being conscious of context and connecting them to other events. 

A few thoughts first about Covid – not wholly on its own, but with the virus as a focus. I think it’s been interesting to see the way people have reacted to the virus, and how this has reinforced national stereotypes. The Germans seemed organised and efficient. In Italy the shops ran out of pasta. In the U.K. they ran out of toilet rolls.

It also matters what you call a thing. Journalists, who are mostly schooled in the humanities, renamed Corona Virus ‘Covid-19’, so lending it a more sinister flavour. Corona (usually related to a crown) is a much softer word than Covid, while the number 19 – a prime number – makes it seem more mysterious and menacing still.

And it’s been interesting how data has been used ideologically to support different views. The recently-reported rise in infections is extremely worrying for some, while for others it is the obvious result of increased testing focused in hotspots. It’s not the data that’s in question; it’s how you interpret it.

An Italian philosopher recently claimed that Covid has merely accelerated an impulse towards personal isolation that we all secretly want. People don’t want to go back to work. They’re happy having their food delivered, jogging on their own, playing with their mobile phone, earphones permanently plugged in, and, he argues, much less interested in (perhaps even afraid of) engaging with other people.

Who knows whether this is really true. It’s an intriguing thought. Perhaps we do secretly want isolation - or more accurately a kind of networked solitude – but, at the same time, that isolation is being shaped and sometimes distorted by technology, and this is not necessarily something people want. 

We’re told that levels of empathy – our ability emotionally to relate to other people, have reduced in recent years, that people create online selves to hide the vulnerability of their real selves. We’re told people prefer online communities because they avoid the risks and commitments of real communities.

Perhaps, then, the connective thread that unites all these moments and events together, that makes for a ‘conjunction’ or a form of ‘convergence’, is technology.

It is the technology of travel that helped spread Covid. It is technology that might save us with a vaccine.

It is online communities that have called out racist and sexist acts. At the same time intolerance flourishes online. Climate change deniers, white supremacists, sexist patriarchs are more likely to get clicks than someone with a moderate voice.

Technology offers the best hope for future jobs. But the enormous profits made by technology companies also depend on keeping consumers glued to their devices.

And the big dilemma, the tension that remains for society is perhaps that, while technology reduces us to individual consumers, combatting climate change, combatting racism and sexism requires collective action.

This is why schools are so important. Not just for students to learn academically, but so they can learn to socialise, so they learn to engage with people face to face, to interact meaningfully, to listen to opposing views, and to gain a critical perspective, ultimately increasing their capacity for empathy.

The prospect of another lockdown isn’t just tiresome. It also undermines our human ability to understand and learn from each other. It might be useful to isolate a moment or an idea, but to isolate human beings on a large scale is to deprive people of what makes them alive.

So if this does turn out to be an exceptional historical moment, then it might be because it has the potential to reboot the human race, so that rather than being essentially social animals we become instead individuals operating remotely within the hum of our secluded rooms.

But I do have hope for the future – and it comes from our students. Their energy, their cheerfulness, their leadership potential. They give us all hope that we might yet find some kind of ‘convergence’ that allows us to stay out in the light.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO