As some conservative commentators have observed, there are striking similarities between woke militants and the Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917. But what is unfolding, in the US and to a lesser extent in other countries, is at once more archaic and more futuristic than a twentieth century revolutionary coup. The current convulsion is an outbreak more closely akin to the anarchical millenarians movements that raged across Europe in the late Middle Ages, whose vision of redemption from history was shared by America’s founders, who carried it with them to the New World.
Nevertheless, Bolsheviks and woke militants do have some
things in common. In late nineteenth century Russia, under the influence of
their progressive parents, a generation of educated young people was convinced
of the illegitimacy of the Tsarist regime. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) is a
vivid chronicle of the tragic and farcical process by which progressive
liberals discredited traditional institutions and unleashed a wave of
revolutionary terror. Not only Tsarism but any form of government came to be
seen as repressive. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it, “I got entangled
in my data…Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited
despotism.”
The woke generation have learned a similar lesson from their
elders, this time about the failings of American democracy. Rejecting
old-fashioned liberal values as complicit in oppression and essentially
fraudulent, they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially
marginalising and economically ruining their critics. As in the show trials
orchestrated by Lenin’s disciple Stalin and Mao’s “struggle sessions”, woke
activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims. Like the
communist elites, woke insurgents aim to enforce a single worldview by the
pedagogic use of fear. The rejection of liberal freedoms concludes with the
tyranny of the righteous mob.
Yet the impulses that animate the woke uprising are
different from those that energised Lenin or even Mao. For the Bolshevik leader
— an authentic disciple of the Jacobin Enlightenment, or so he always insisted
— violence was a tool, not an end in itself. In woke movements such as Antifa,
on the other hand, violence seems to be mainly therapeutic in its role.
One may abhor the type of society Lenin aimed to construct
as much as the methods he adopted to achieve it, as I do myself. Tens of
millions were enslaved in forced labour camps, executed or starved to death in
pursuit of a repellent fantasy. Even so, Lenin attempted to fashion a future
that in his view was an improvement on the past.
Woke activists, in contrast, have no vision of the future.
In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary
performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power. Yet their
difference from Lenin goes deeper. Rather than aiming for a better future, woke
militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is
their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation
bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.
The key scenes in the woke uprising that followed the
killing of George Floyd are rituals of purification in which public officials
have washed the feet of insurgents, and acts of iconoclasm in which public
monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to
sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different
future.
The only concrete measure proposed has been to defund and
disband the police. As some of the insurrectionaries’ placards have proclaimed,
there will be no more police violence when there are no more police. Once
repressive institutions have been methodically dismantled, a peaceful anarchy
will prevail. As could have been foreseen by anyone with a smattering of
history, outbreaks of mass looting in Chicago and other cities have not borne
out this confidence.
New, ‘transformative’ systems of law enforcement will
confront problems not unlike those faced by the police forces that have been
dissolved. ‘Autonomous zones’ of the
kind that have been announced in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis will need to
resolve disputes and enforce their decisions. Local warlords and prophets —
some of them no doubt armed — will become arbiters of public safety. When they
overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security,
vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or
unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities
may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy.
The history of the medieval millenarians illustrates this
process. They were antinomians, heretical believers who anathematised the
Church and considered themselves released by divine grace from any moral restraints.
While asserting their superior virtue, their signature practice was
self-flagellation. Forgiveness — whether of themselves other others — was
notably absent.
As Norman Cohn writes in his seminal study The Pursuit of
the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the
Middle Ages (1957), “in Germany and southern Europe alike flagellant groups
continued to exist for more than two centuries.” Probably originating in Italy
in the mid-thirteenth century, the flagellant movement reached a peak in
Germany in 1348-9 when it was inflamed by the Black Death. There, as in other
parts of Europe, the flagellants turned on sections of the population they
accused of conjuring up the pestilence, particularly Jews, many of whose
communities were wiped out.
Two hundred years later, the Anabaptist prophet Jan
Bockelson seized control of the city of Munster, turning it briefly into a
communist theocracy in which forcible baptisms and public executions became
daily spectacles. Bockelson’s rule ended when, after a long siege, the city
fell to armies acting for the Church. He was tortured to death in the town
square.
For Cohn, the study of medieval millenarians was an
essential part of understanding modern totalitarianism. It is also useful in
understanding the woke movement. Medieval flagellants and woke militants
combine a sense of their own moral infallibility with a passion for masochistic
self-abasement. Medieval millenarians believed the world would be remade by God
when Jesus returned after a millennium of injustice (millenarians are also
known as chiliasts, chiliad being a thousand years), while the woke faithful
believe divine intervention is no longer necessary: their own virtue will be
sufficient. In both cases, nothing needs to be done to bring about a new world
apart from destroying the old one.
There are some differences between the two movements.
Mediaeval millenarians attracted much of their support from illiterate peasants
and poor urban workers. The woke movement, on the other hand, is mostly
composed of the offspring of middle class families schooled in institutions of
higher learning. Like their medieval predecessors, woke activists believe
themselves to be emancipated from established values. But, possibly uniquely in
history, their antinomian rebellion emanates from an antinomian establishment.
The rise of the woke movement has not occurred as a result
of a takeover of American institutions by a dictatorial government. Key
American institutions have overthrown themselves, while Trump’s attempts to
assert dictatorial power have so far been ineffectual. It may be that the
scenes of anarchy that are part of the uprising will work in Trump’s favour in
November. At least a third of the American population is opposed to woke
values, a number that could increase substantially the more the uprising
involves public disorder. Equally, Biden may prevail by promising a more
peaceful future and find himself compelled to rein in the insurgency in order
to preserve some degree of public order. Either way America will remain more or
less ungovernable.
The foundational crimes of the American regime — black
slavery and the seizure of indigenous groups’ lands that followed the War of
Independence—are real enough. But so, in its continuing formative influence, is
the mythology from which America was born. A Lockean fusion of Protestant
religiosity with an Enlightenment faith in reason was the founding American
religion.
Throughout most of American history Lockean liberalism has
reflected the realities of power. Locke himself helped draft constitutions for
Carolina that legitimated slavery, and argued that indigenous peoples could be
suppressed on the ground that they had not cleared the wilderness and made
their land productive. On occasion — as in the Rooseveltian settlement that
followed the Second World War and made possible the civil rights movement in
the Fifties and Sixties — America’s divisions were partly transcended. For the
most part a redemptive myth has gone hand in hand with repression. The record
suggests this will continue. Icons will be smashed and antinomian passions
ventilated, while social and racial antagonisms remain brutal and intractable.
More than the faux-Marxian musings of postmodern thinkers,
it is the singular American faith in national redemption that drives the woke
insurgency. The self-imposed inquisitorial regime in universities and
newspapers — where editors and journalists, professors and students are
encouraged to sniff out and report heresy so it can be exposed and exorcised —
smacks of Salem more than Leningrad. Saturated with Christian theology, Locke’s
Enlightenment liberalism is reverting to a more primordial version of the
founding faith. America is changing, radically and irreversibly, but it is also
staying the same.
America’s ungovernability is morphing into a distinctive
pattern of governance, with power shifting to institutions that are dismantling
their traditional structures. Universities have become seminaries of woke
religion, while newspapers are turning into sermonising agitprop sheets. At the
same time mass unemployment and accelerating automation are stripping workers
of what remained of the bargaining power they exercised before the neoliberal
era.
The system that seems to be emerging is a high-tech variation
on feudalism, with wealth creation concentrated around new industries and most
of the population disenfranchised and dispossessed. While this metamorphosis
gathers speed, the American media are manufacturing fictional narratives of
national redemption.
America is on the way to becoming a semi-failed state. Its
soft power has collapsed, probably irrecoverably. Yet it does not follow that
it will cease to be a globally powerful actor. In a competition with
totalitarian China, an American regime that mixes authoritarian control with
zones of anarchy may have a comparative advantage. Classical totalitarianism is
as obsolete as classical liberalism, and American mercantilism may be more
resilient and innovative than Chinese state capitalism. A ruling elite shaped
by figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may prove more capable of deploying
new technologies than a communist emperor who has put China into a deep freeze.
One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s
SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.
As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and
the UK, it should be clear that this is no passing storm. Here, as in the US,
woke militants have few, if any, definite policies. What they want is simply
the end of the old order. The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a
defining moment in the decline of the liberal west. Perhaps it is time to
consider how to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that
still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless
world that is being born.
The woke have no vision of the future. By John Gray.
The
deserted streets will fill again, and we will leave our screen-lit burrows
blinking with relief. But the world will be different from how we imagined it
in what we thought were normal times. This is not a temporary rupture in an
otherwise stable equilibrium: the crisis through which we are living is a
turning point in history.
The era of
peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide
production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less
interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a
stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual
than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways
may be more resilient.
The once
formidable British state is being rapidly reinvented, and on a scale not seen
before. Acting with emergency powers authorised by parliament, the government
has tossed economic orthodoxy to the winds. Savaged by years of imbecilic
austerity, the NHS – like the armed forces, police, prisons, fire service, care
workers and cleaners – has its back to the wall. But with the noble dedication
of its workers, the virus will be held at bay. Our political system will
survive intact. Not many countries will be so fortunate. Governments everywhere
are struggling through the narrow passage between suppressing the virus and
crashing the economy. Many will stumble and fall.
In the view
of the future to which progressive thinkers cling, the future is an embellished
version of the recent past. No doubt this helps them preserve some semblance of
sanity. It also undermines what is now our most vital attribute: the ability to
adapt and fashion different ways of life. The task ahead is to build economies
and societies that are more durable, and more humanly habitable, than those
that were exposed to the anarchy of the global market.
This does
not mean a shift to small-scale localism. Human numbers are too large for local
self-sufficiency to be viable, and most of humankind is not willing to return
to the small, closed communities of a more distant past. But the
hyperglobalisation of the last few decades is not coming back either. The virus
has exposed fatal weaknesses in the economic system that was patched up after
the 2008 financial crisis. Liberal capitalism is bust.
With all
its talk of freedom and choice, liberalism was in practice the experiment of
dissolving traditional sources of social cohesion and political legitimacy and
replacing them with the promise of rising material living standards. This
experiment has now run its course. Suppressing the virus necessitates an
economic shutdown that can only be temporary, but when the economy restarts, it
will be in a world where governments act to curb the global market.
A situation
in which so many of the world’s essential medical supplies originate in China –
or any other single country – will not be tolerated. Production in these and
other sensitive areas will be re-shored as a matter of national security. The
notion that a country such as Britain could phase out farming and depend on
imports for food will be dismissed as the nonsense it always has been. The
airline industry will shrink as people travel less. Harder borders are going to
be an enduring feature of the global landscape. A narrow goal of economic
efficiency will no longer be practicable for governments.
The
question is, what will replace rising material living standards as the basis of
society? One answer green thinkers have given is what John Stuart Mill in his
Principles of Political Economy (1848) called a “stationary-state economy”.
Expanding production and consumption would no longer be an overriding goal, and
the increase in human numbers curbed. Unlike most liberals today, Mill
recognised the danger of overpopulation. A world filled with human beings, he
wrote, would be one without “flowery wastes” and wildlife. He also understood
the dangers of central planning. The stationary state would be a market economy
in which competition is encouraged. Technological innovation would continue,
along with improvements in the art of living.
In many
ways this is an appealing vision, but it is also unreal. There is no world
authority to enforce an end to growth, just as there is none to fight the
virus. Contrary to the progressive mantra, recently repeated by Gordon Brown,
global problems do not always have global solutions. Geopolitical divisions
preclude anything like world government. If one existed, existing states would
compete to control it. The belief that this crisis can be solved by an
unprecedented outbreak of international cooperation is magical thinking in its
purest form.
Of course
economic expansion is not indefinitely sustainable. For one thing, it can only
worsen climate change and turn the planet into a garbage dump. But with highly
uneven living standards, still rising human numbers and intensifying
geopolitical rivalries, zero growth is also unsustainable. If the limits of
growth are eventually accepted, it will be because governments make the protection
of their citizens their most important objective. Whether democratic or
authoritarian, states that do not meet this Hobbesian test will fail.
***
The
pandemic has abruptly accelerated geopolitical change. Combined with the
collapse in oil prices, the uncontrolled spread of the virus in Iran could
destabilise its theocratic regime. With revenues plunging, Saudi Arabia is also
at risk. No doubt many will wish both of them good riddance. But there can be
no assurance that a meltdown in the Gulf will produce anything other than a
long period of chaos. Despite years of talk about diversifying, these regimes
are still hostages of oil and even if the price recovers somewhat, the economic
hit of the global shutdown will be devastating.
In
contrast, the advance of East Asia will surely continue. The most successful
responses to the epidemic thus far have been in Taiwan, South Korea and
Singapore. It is hard to believe their cultural traditions, which focus on
collective well-being more than personal autonomy, have not played a role in
their success. They have also resisted the cult of the minimal state. It will
not be surprising if they adjust to de-globalisation better than many Western
countries.
China’s
position is more complex. Given its record of cover-ups and opaque statistics,
its performance during the pandemic is hard to assess. Certainly it is not a
model any democracy could or should emulate. As the new NHS Nightingale shows,
it is not only authoritarian regimes that can build hospitals in two weeks. No
one knows the full human costs of the Chinese shutdown. Even so, Xi Jinping’s
regime looks to have benefited from the pandemic. The virus has provided a
rationale for expanding the surveillance state and introducing even stronger
political control. Instead of wasting the crisis, Xi is using it to expand the
country’s influence. China is inserting itself in place of the EU by assisting
distressed national governments, such as Italy. Many of the masks and testing
kits it has supplied have proved to be faulty, but the fact seems not to have
dented Beijing’s propaganda campaign.
The EU has
responded to the crisis by revealing its essential weakness. Few ideas are so
scorned by higher minds than sovereignty. In practice it signifies the capacity
to execute a comprehensive, coordinated and flexible emergency plan of the kind
being implemented in the UK and other countries. The measures that have already
been taken are larger than any implemented in the Second World War. In their
most important respects they are also the opposite of what was done then, when
the British population was mobilised as never before, and unemployment fell
dramatically. Today, aside from those in essential services, Britain’s workers
have been demobilised. If it goes on for many months, the shutdown will demand
an even larger socialisation of the economy.
Whether the
desiccated neoliberal structures of the EU can do anything like this is
doubtful. Hitherto sacrosanct rules have been torn up by the European Central
Bank’s bond buying programme and relaxing limits on state aid to industry. But
the resistance to fiscal burden-sharing of northern European countries such as
Germany and the Netherlands may block the way to rescuing Italy – a country too
big to be crushed like Greece, but possibly also too costly to save. As the
Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte said in March: “If Europe does not rise
to this unprecedented challenge, the whole European structure loses its raison
d’être for the people.” The Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic has been blunter
and more realistic: “European solidarity does not exist… that was a fairy tale.
The only country that can help us in this hard situation is the People’s
Republic of China. To the rest of them, thanks for nothing.”
The EU’s
fundamental flaw is that it is incapable of discharging the protective
functions of a state. The break-up of the eurozone has been predicted so often
that it may seem unthinkable. Yet under the stresses they face today, the
disintegration of European institutions is not unrealistic. Free movement has
already been shut down. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent
blackmailing of the EU by threatening to allow migrants to pass through his
borders, and the endgame in Syria’s Idlib province, could lead to hundreds of
thousands, even millions, of refugees fleeing to Europe. (It is hard to see
what social distancing might mean in huge, overcrowded and insanitary refugee
camps.) Another migrant crisis in conjunction with pressure on the
dysfunctional euro could prove fatal.
If the EU
survives, it may be as something like the Holy Roman empire in its later years,
a phantom that lingers on for generations while power is exercised elsewhere.
Vitally necessary decisions are already being taken by nation states. Since the
political centre is no longer a leading force and with much of the left wedded
to the failed European project, many governments will be dominated by the far
right.
An
increasing influence on the EU will come from Russia. In the struggle with the
Saudis that triggered the oil price collapse in March 2020, Putin has played
the stronger hand. Whereas for the Saudis the fiscal break-even level – the
price needed to pay for public services and keep the state solvent – is around
$80 a barrel, for Russia it may be less than half that. At the same time Putin
is consolidating Russia’s position as an energy power. The Nord Stream offshore
pipelines that run through the Baltics secure reliable supplies of natural gas
to Europe. By the same token they lock Europe into dependency on Russia and
enable it to use energy as a political weapon. With Europe balkanised, Russia,
too, looks set to expand its sphere of influence. Like China it is stepping in
to replace the faltering EU, flying in doctors and equipment to Italy.
In the US,
Donald Trump plainly considers refloating the economy more important than
containing the virus. A 1929-style stock market slide and unemployment levels
worse than those in the 1930s could pose an existential threat to his
presidency. James Bullard, the CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, has
suggested the American jobless rate could reach 30 per cent – higher than in
the Great Depression. On the other hand, with the US’s decentralised system of
government; a ruinously expensive healthcare system and tens of millions
uninsured; a colossal prison population, of which many are old and infirm; and
cities with sizeable numbers of homeless people and an already large opioid
epidemic; curtailing the shutdown could mean the virus spreading
uncontrollably, with devastating effects. (Trump is not alone in taking this
risk. Sweden has not so far imposed anything like the lockdown in force in
other countries.)
Unlike the
British programme, Trump’s $2trn stimulus plan is mostly another corporate
bailout. Yet if polls are to be believed increasing numbers of Americans
approve of his handling of the epidemic. What if Trump emerges from this
catastrophe with the support of an American majority?
Whether or
not he retains his hold on power, the US’s position in the world has changed
irreversibly. What is fast unravelling is not only the hyperglobalisation of
recent decades but the global order set in place at the end of the Second World
War. Puncturing an imaginary equilibrium, the virus has hastened a process of
disintegration that has been under way for many years.
In his
seminal Plagues and Peoples the Chicago historian William H McNeill wrote:
It is
always possible that some hitherto obscure parasitic organism may escape its
accustomed ecological niche and expose the dense human populations that have
become so conspicuous a feature of the Earth to some fresh and perchance
devastating mortality.
It is not
yet known how Covid-19 escaped its niche, though there is a suspicion that
Wuhan’s “wet markets”, where wildlife is sold, may have played a role. In 1976,
when McNeill’s book was first published, the destruction of the habitats of
exotic species was nowhere near as far gone as it is today. As globalisation
has advanced, so has the risk of infectious diseases spreading. The Spanish Flu
of 1918-20 became a global pandemic in a world without mass air transportation.
Commenting on how plagues have been understood by historians, McNeill observed:
“For them as for others, occasional disastrous outbreaks of infectious disease
remained sudden and unpredictable interruptions of the norm, essentially beyond
historical explanation.” Many later studies have come to similar conclusions.
Yet the
notion persists that pandemics are blips rather than an integral part of
history. Lying behind this is the belief that humans are no longer part of the
natural world and can create an autonomous ecosystem, separate from the rest of
the biosphere. Covid-19 is telling them they cannot. It is only by using
science that we can defend ourselves against this pestilence. Mass antibody
tests and a vaccine will be crucial. But permanent changes in how we live will
have to be made if we are to be less vulnerable in future.
The texture
of everyday life is already altered. A sense of fragility is everywhere. It is
not only society that feels shaky. So does the human position in the world.
Viral images reveal human absence in different ways. Wild boars are roaming in
the towns of northern Italy, while in Lopburi in Thailand gangs of monkeys no
longer fed by tourists are fighting in the streets. Inhuman beauty and a fierce
struggle for life have sprung up in cities emptied by the virus.
As a number
of commentators have noted, a post-apocalyptic future of the kind projected in
the fiction of JG Ballard has become our present reality. But it is important
to understand what this “apocalypse” reveals. For Ballard, human societies were
stage props that could be knocked over at any moment. Norms that seemed built
into human nature vanished when you left the theatre. The most harrowing of
Ballard’s experiences as a child in 1940s Shanghai were not in the prison camp,
where many inmates were steadfast and kindly in their treatment of others. A
resourceful and venturesome boy, Ballard enjoyed much of his time there. It was
when the camp collapsed as the war drew to a close, he told me, that he
witnessed the worst examples of ruthless selfishness and motiveless cruelty.
The lesson
he learnt was that these were not world-ending events. What is commonly
described as an apocalypse is the normal course of history. Many are left with
lasting traumas. But the human animal is too sturdy and too versatile to be
broken by these upheavals. Life goes on, if differently than before. Those who
talk of this as a Ballardian moment have not noticed how human beings adjust,
and even find fulfilment, in the extreme situations he portrays.
Technology
will help us adapt in our present extremity. Physical mobility can be reduced
by shifting many of our activities into cyberspace. Offices, schools,
universities, GP surgeries and other work centres are likely to change
permanently. Virtual communities set up during the epidemic have enabled people
to get to know one another better than they ever did before.
There will
be celebrations as the pandemic recedes, but there may be no clear point when
the threat of infection is over. Many people may migrate to online environments
like those in Second Life, a virtual world where people meet, trade and
interact in bodies and worlds of their choosing. Other adaptations may be
uncomfortable for moralists. Online pornography will likely boom, and much
internet dating may consist of erotic exchanges that never end in a meeting of
bodies. Augmented reality technology may be used to simulate fleshly encounters
and virtual sex could soon be normalised. Whether this is a move towards the
good life may not be the most useful question to ask. Cyberspace relies on an
infrastructure that can be damaged or destroyed by war or natural disaster. The
internet allows us to avoid the isolation that plagues have brought in the
past. It cannot enable human beings to escape their mortal flesh, or avoid the
ironies of progress.
What the
virus is telling us is not only that progress is reversible – a fact even
progressives seem to have grasped – but that it can be self-undermining. To
take the most obvious example, globalisation produced some major benefits –
millions have been lifted out of poverty. This achievement is now under threat.
Globalisation begat the de-globalisation that is now under way.
As the
prospect of ever-rising living standards fades, other sources of authority and
legitimacy are re-emerging. Liberal or socialist, the progressive mind detests
national identity with passionate intensity. There is plenty in history to show
how it can be misused. But the nation state is increasingly the most powerful
force driving large-scale action. Dealing with the virus requires a collective
effort that will not be mobilised for the sake of universal humanity.
Altruism
has limits just as much as growth. There will be examples of extraordinary
selflessness before the worst of the crisis is over. In Britain an over half-million
strong volunteer army has signed up to assist the NHS. But it would be unwise
to rely on human sympathy alone to get us through. Kindness to strangers is so
precious that it must be rationed.
This is
where the protective state comes in. At its core, the British state has always
been Hobbesian. Peace and strong government have been the overriding
priorities. At the same time this Hobbesian state has mostly rested on consent,
particularly in times of national emergency. Being shielded from danger has
trumped freedom from interference by government.
How much of
their freedom people will want back when the pandemic has peaked is an open
question. They show little taste for the enforced solidarity of socialism, but
they may happily accept a regime of bio-surveillance for the sake of better
protection of their health. Digging ourselves out of the pit will demand more
state intervention not less, and of a highly inventive kind. Governments will
have to do a lot more in underwriting scientific research and technological
innovation. Though the state may not always be larger its influence will be
pervasive, and by old-world standards more intrusive. Post-liberal government
will be the norm for the foreseeable future.
It is only
by recognising the frailties of liberal societies that their most essential
values can be preserved. Along with fairness they include individual liberty,
which as well as being worthwhile in itself is a necessary check on government.
But those who believe personal autonomy is the innermost human need betray an
ignorance of psychology, not least their own. For practically everyone,
security and belonging are as important, often more so. Liberalism was, in
effect, a systematic denial of this fact.
An
advantage of quarantine is that it can be used to think afresh. Clearing the
mind of clutter and thinking how to live in an altered world is the task at
hand. For those of us who are not serving on the front line, this should be
enough for the duration.
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