Looking for Landfall

The checkout operator at the supermarket today isn't the only person to have expressed in conversation with me a hope that positive things will come from our current privations: 'a better society'. My sister has talked about 'pressing the reset button'. Of course at the moment these hopes don't have much content or shape: it needs more discussion, discussion which is hard to have in the midst of crisis and especially in one which cuts people physically off from one another. But as people share memes of clear canals in Venice and maps of drastically-declined pollution over China, as they cheer health workers and line more or less pacifically in supermarket queues, you can see the outlines starting to form. It's hard to think of an aspect of modern life which is not affected, in a situation in which the global economy is put into a protective coma and nobody can go out, and the State takes over vast areas of national life.

'We're putting these measures in place so the economy can bounce back once this is over,' I heard a Conservative MP state on the radio over the weekend. I am not at all sure that it can just 'bounce back', as opposed to being painstakingly reconstructed. Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 determined to suck out of the economy the inflationary public spending which she and her partisans believed it had become dependent on; now we find the inflationary spiral of discretionary consumer spending which (along with, in this country, ever-escalating property prices) has substantially powered much of the international economy abruptly halted, vast amounts of spending and manufacture being sucked out in the same way. Some of this we may find we don't really want after all; some of it will simply disappear, never to be replaced. We don't know what, and how much, will survive.

This is a revolutionary situation, but revolutions don't always result in positive change. Instead, the solvent they apply to societies can be hugely destructive. Over time, human beings develop ways of managing their sometimes challenging circumstances to make the best of them: they surround themselves with defences built up over generations, perhaps. Revolutionary change sweeps those away, and with the possibility that things will get better also comes the danger that the structural advantages that already favour the rich and powerful will simply be magnified. Alternatively, we may just forget completely. Governments post-COVID will be under huge pressure to rebuild as quickly as they can, and that could easily mean returning to trashing the world with renewed energy. Rather than thinking 'Well, we just about got away with that, let's learn the lessons,' we could as easily conclude 'Well, thank God we can get back to normal'.

As the sheer shock of the Brexit referendum subsided I toyed with the idea of hosting a set of talks at the church which might go some way to examining the issues that were behind it and looking towards something beyond. How long ago that now seems, but the concept comes back to me now. Any moves towards social reorganisation will involve questions of value, of what we think is important, and that's the Church's business. An initial list of people to invite might include the manager of the Co-Op, someone from the care agency based by the railway line, the local co-ordinator of Extinction Rebellion, one of the GPs from the surgery, all to discuss aspects of what change might mean from their point of view. If I never refer to this again, remind me!