Living through history: coronavirus and the world tomorrow

It’s the dream that fires revolutions and hot-takes alike: tomorrow everything will be different. Sometimes it is; more often the dawn breaks while everything else remains largely intact.

In the midst of a global pandemic moving at bewildering speed, it can feel as though there’s little to hold on to. Easy therefore to give up trying, to sink into the happy certainty that ‘this changes everything’ (probably in the way you always imagined). And indeed, it could. Perhaps tomorrow everything will be different. But while there will clearly be a strong impact on things like the way we work and the function of the state, as the historian Glen O’Hara noted on CapX last week, other pandemics have failed to reshape our world in the way we expected. Coronavirus could be a revolutionary moment, but it could also be ‘a turning point around which history failed to turn’.

Change is more often incremental than explosive. Instead of being a particular point, or a moment of rupture, it’s just as likely that coronavirus will feed into pre-existing debates and societal fractures, accelerating some trends and providing argumentative ballast for others, with the example of the crisis marshalled on either side of the trench.

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Πηγή: capx.co