From corona anxiety towards a new Enlightenment – Why a return to normal is no meaningful option

Par Guido Palazzo

Why do societies collapse? Jared Diamond (2005) finds a rather simple but frightening explanation. When we are in a crisis and we do not know what to do, we tend to reinforce established routines. Sometimes, those routines make things worse. They might even be the driving force of the crisis and as a result, societies collapse. The dominating routine of the modern Capitalist society is consumption. This activity of modern human beings is so defining for our society that in moments of crisis, more consumption is perceived as the appropriate solution. In reaction to September 11 as well as to the financial crisis of 2008-09 politicians incentivized and motivated citizens to go shopping in order to restart the economy – and they shopped. The pattern holds also in the Corona crisis: In its Guangzhou flagship store Hermès made 2.7 million USD in sales just on the weekend of the reopening at the end of the quarantine (Lerma, 2020). Previous crises even ended with higher levels of consumption as Schmelzig (2020) showed for the bubonic plague in the middle ages, where city states like Venice had to impose severe tax on luxury goods.

Today, consumption is a dangerous default since it is the driving force of the much bigger ecological crisis (Otero et al., 2020) that has been preliminarly eclipsed by the urgency of the pandemia. Already in 2009, Rockstroem and colleagues have identified the nine biggest ecological risks, arguing that some of them were transgressing irreversible thresholds. One decade later it seems that the ecological crisis has accelerated. If we just pick four bits of information, all published in October 2019: A study of the US War college predicts that the US army and the US infrastructure could collapse over the next two decades due to global heating (Brosig et al., 2019). A study published in Nature (Seibold et al., 2019) finds that up to 78% of insects have disappeared in Germany in just one decade (2008-2017). The governor of the Bank of England warns that financial markets might abruptly collapse because of global heating and that companies that fail to adapt their strategy to the changing environmental conditions will go bankrupt. Finally, over the last 50 years, one in four birds has disappeared in the USA according to a study published in Science (Rosenberg et al., 2019). The climate crisis will not change our planet slowly over time but with a high probability it will arrive with the same cataclysmic and disruptive impetus (Trisos, Merow & Pigot, 2020) as the corona virus. Bruno Latour (2017) argues with regards to the coming problems: “As horrendous as history has been, geohistory will probably be worse since what had remained quietly in the background up to now – the landscape that had served as the framework for all human conflicts–has just joined in the fight”. In the current pandemia, humankind watches helplessly, while nature is acting. Consider this situation a test run.

We know about the link between the ecological crisis and our way of life since a few decades already, but we obviously have a very flat learning curve. Humanity burned more fossils and produced more CO2 after Al Gore’s first book on the climate (1992) than in the entire human history before (Nova, 2020). Why are our routines so “stubbornly persistent” (George et al., 2016: 1880), given that we know that infinite growth on this finite planet is not possible and potentially leads to collapse? Why do we invest all our energy in the current pandemia to keep the machine going by saving shareholders and waiting for the consumption machinery to jump start as soon as possible? The Fridays For Future Kids and the Extinction Rebels, two movements that mobilized millions of people in 2019 around the world had started to convince to us already before corona that normal was the problem. In this pandemia, what we certainly do not need is a return to this normal. A societal transformation towards a more sustainable society requires a thorough understanding of the mechanisms that keep us from changing our routines and that let us stubbornly sleepwalk into trouble.

My proposition is very simple: Societies are guided by narratives in which values and beliefs about the world are transmitted, reinforced and enacted. It is with reference to such powerful linguistic patterns that Orwell has argued that “words [are] like cavalry horses answering the bugle [they] group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern (Orwell, 1946)”. We act without thinking, following the signposts of the metaphors we live by (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The narrative of our pre-corona normality is neoliberalism. This narrative contains a series of assumptions about the world and makes particular normative claims that might help to understand not only the behavioral dynamics behind the ecological crisis, but also our current reactions to the pandemia. It can be summarized as follows (Gonin, Palazzo & Hoffrage, 2012):

Neoliberalism is based on the idea that human beings are egoistic utility maximizers. Some economists like Williamson go even further and argue that we are opportunists who break contracts whenever they can and thus need to be kept under strict control. From a neoliberal perspective, society is nothing but an aggregation of those individual interests that have to be protected against the government and that manifest first and foremost in the freedom to own property. There is no common good. Today, property owners are shareholders, whose right to maximize profit trumps all other rights. This simple interest in profit maximization should be considered the only social responsibility of corporations because free markets (as unregulated as possible by as weak governments as necessary) will transform those egoistic interests in welfare for everybody. Welfare will trickle down. Abracadabra. The “magic of the market”, as Ronald Reagan called it. On those markets, we engage in a Darwinian struggle for survival because competition is supposed to be the dominating human drive. Michael Porter’s five forces represent this idea very well: The corporation is surrounded by actors who want to take something away from it (from suppliers to governments and customers) and it has to fight back. In the neoliberal narrative, resources are endless and the ability of the planet to absorb side effects is unlimited. Infinite growth is natural. Progress manifests in a combination of always more efficient production processes and always higher levels of consumption with the latter being the key to happiness. Already in 1955, the economist Victor Lebow summarizes this narrative in an article in the Journal of Retailing: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.”

The end of the Socialist experiment in 1989 reinforced the impression of the superiority of those ideas and led to the globalization of the neoliberal narrative both for production (globally stretched supply chains) and consumption (globalization of Western mass consumption). It was “the end of history” as Francis Fukuyama triumphantly claimed in the 1990s. The best of all possible worlds had been achieved. However, globalization took away one decisive element of the neoliberal narrative: Within the postwar nation state world, the law was perceived as the limit to profit maximization. Under the postnational constellation, such limits disappeared for globally operating companies. They could achieve even higher profit margins by operating in globally stretched supply chains. The question is, why such higher profit margins exist. A superficial economic answer would probably be that they exist because of variations in salaries, tax or other cost factors. While this is certainly true, the deeper truth is that higher profit margins exist because companies with headquarters in stable developed countries, work with suppliers in corrupt, fragile, repressive and underdeveloped countries with dysfunctional regulation. Higher profit margins result from the exploitation of humans and of nature in such contexts. Externalities. As a result, consumers in developed countries can buy and replace stuff at an accelerated speed and always decreasing prices. A vicious circle for the planet, a paradise for shareholders, a role model for underdeveloped countries. Globalization has aggravated our problems by contaminating the whole planet with the virus of the neoliberal narrative.

Over recent years this narrative has begun to collapse in slow motion in front of our eyes in basically all its elements. The corona pandemia is not creating, but only accelerating this process of disenchantment. Any narrative at one point gets disenchanted and replaced. While the ancient Romans believed in the story of Romulus and Remus, the early Christians laughed about their irrational superstition. Voltaire and the other representative of the early Enlightenment laughed about the Christians, considering their belief irrational superstition. Now it is our turn. We strongly believed in self-regulating markets and now we find out that there is not much more evidence for this idea than there was for the story of the twin brothers in ancient Rome. It turned out to be just another constellation of beliefs, for which we temporarily suspended our critical faculties. The “suspension of disbelief” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge called this in 1817, referring to the willingness of a reader to believe in something that is not logical and hard to believe but necessary to keep the story going. For the joy of the story, we ignore the implausibility of a particular narrative. Until it gets disenchanted and replaced and the cycle starts again. The power of the suspension of disbelief is visible in the way children get upset once you change the version of the fairy tale you have told them many times in tiny details. They will protest, because they make truth claims from within the story.

From within our story, we will not solve our ecological problems. Our crisis is a narrative crisis and it will not be solved by new technologies, but by new stories and new metaphors that enable us to see the world from a radically different perspective. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world » as Wittgenstein argued in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6). We are facing a problem of semantics, of zombie metaphors and a failure to understand new challenges within the limits of our language. How we live and work, produce and consume, assign value and make decisions will have to be fundamentally different from the pre-corona crisis because after this crisis is certainly before the next one. Going back should not be an option.

When a pandemia strikes, the institutional order of the affected societies rarely survives. While such an institutional collapse or disruption might not necessarily result from the pandemia itself, it definitely pushes systems, which are already in crisis over the edge of the cliff: The Roman Empire collapsed in a pandemia (Harper, 2017). The medieval bubonic plague ended the feudal system in Europe (Bridbury, 1973). The conquistadors defeated the Latin American empires not with their handful of soldiers but with infectious diseases for which the immune systems of the locals were not prepared (Crosby, 1967). And finally, most recently, there was the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed between 20 and 100 million people. It coincided with the end of the first world war and strongly influenced the dynamics of the 1920 and 1930s that eventually led to the second world war (Spinney, 2017). 

In contrast to our various ancestors, we have a deep understanding of the driving forces of our crisis and with this higher order reflexivity (Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1994). We could use the corona crisis as the starting point for turning our grand challenges into a successful Grand Transition. However, this transition requires a clear, consistent and motivating vision of where we want to go and how we want to change our institutional order and our behavior, the values we want to live, the relationship we want to have with nature and with each other both globally and locally. This transition requires a new Enlightenment movement. Against the problems created by the pandemia, against the much more threatening ecological crisis and against the possible endarkenment of the returning specters of nationalism, populism and Fascism we bet on the hope that change, after all, is possible.