How we remember the pandemic will depend on how it ends. Yet there is one assumption that is already taken as self-evident: that the crisis will change the world. It seems perverse, given how Covid-19 has so violently shaken the planet, to imagine that things could simply revert to how they were. We assume that a world-historical moment such as this must reverberate for decades if not centuries. But what if its effects really are fleeting? What if the old order quickly reasserts itself? What if we forget?
It is not that far-fetched a proposition. The 1918 flu pandemic, at least until a resurgence of interest among historians and artists in the past 10 years, was largely written out of the history of the 20th century, its sweeping impact – between 50 and 100 million dead – customarily relegated to a footnote in the story of the World War with which it coincided. It receded quickly from public discourse in the 1920s and in the absence of memorials, museums or even a neat narrative arc that might have attracted novelists and film-makers, its place in collective memory quickly faded.
Even allowing for the capriciousness of public remembering, however, the Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to slip as easily from the mind. Thanks to its scale and the technologies at our disposal, it is probably the most extensively chronicled crisis in human history. While the larger ecological disaster we know is coming will shape our memory of this one, it will surely leave a mark on those who lived through it. So the question is less whether we will remember it than how.
Wishful thinking
To say that there can be no going back to business as usual is, for the moment, wishful thinking. We may wish for cities to become more liveable, for daily life to slow down and for the crisis to usher in a new era of co-operation and solidarity. It is certainly easier to imagine these things today than it was a year ago. But change on that scale would require the crisis to produce a fundamental shift in how people think, whereas much of the evidence so far suggests that, rather than forging a new sensibility, it has merely reinforced people’s existing views.
The liberal internationalist sees the horrendously unequal effects of the crisis as proof of the need for global institutions, whereas the nationalist looks at the competition for medical supplies and vaccines and finds an argument for nimble states free from the strictures of supranational bureaucracies. The left cheers the state for living up to its responsibility through large-scale interventions to keep people safe and supported, whereas the right looks at the development of life-saving vaccines by profit-chasing pharma companies as proof of the genius of free-market capitalism.
The budding autocrat observes China's swift top-down suppression of the virus with admiration. The democrat sees how Beijing has ramped up surveillance and shut down questions on the origins of the virus and feels nothing but fear. In much the same way, Covid-19 denialists are not recent converts from the school of scientific rationalism; they had clocked well before the pandemic that everyone was out to get them.
Accelerating trends
If this one follows the pattern of previous crises, it is more likely to accelerate trends that were already under way than to mark an abrupt rupture in itself. The world was turning inward before the pandemic struck. After the financial crisis, the growth in global trade had slowed and protectionism was spreading. Democracy was in retreat, autocrats were emboldened. Technology was enabling more and more people to work alone in front of their screens. In politics, the pandemic may (with any luck) have finished the careers of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, but it will have done so only by highlighting pre-existing incompetence.
It seems counterintuitive to think that a crisis like this, which so clearly underlined the need to remove barriers to transnational co-operation, could instead produce new ones. But so far that has been the pattern. Authoritarian regimes have seized on the crisis to crush dissent and develop more intrusive ways of spying on their citizens. Democratic states, including the United States and Hungary, have used it as a pretext to tighten broader controls and admit fewer immigrants. Across Europe, governments have sought to limit exports of food and medical products, to seal borders and assume once unthinkable powers over people's lives.
For a case study in how crises can be wasted, their lessons quickly forgotten, we need only look back to 2008 and the shock that was supposed to herald a fundamental rethink of the market economy. The rebalancing that many hoped for never materialised; instead most governments simply slashed their spending on public services. Viewed from the top floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, the world that emerged 10 years on looked reassuringly familiar.
The pandemic may not be forgotten, but to remember is not necessarily to learn, still less to change.