Esquire, an internet newsletter for fifty year old men who want to be thirty, has an interesting article about the future of the West, speculating up to the point when the corona virus is stopped by immunisation. It selects ideas over the next year or so from various professors and analysts about the likely consequences of the virus in western society.
It is worth noting that definite assumptions frame the main arguments in the article; such as the general spread of immunisation being only available by the end of 2021 and the deep economic downturn that will follow vast government spending coupled with the sharp decline of economic activity. But these assumptions do not feel unreasonable. The reflections offered by Esquire's available 'experts' seem consistent with the framework suggested. And their predictions are worth reviewing.
There are some interesting, if minor, judgements made, such as the the likely revival of local produce for sale, meaning that supermarkets will lose strawberries in winter (and all their other flight based food.) And the absence of new TV programs - as the pandemic ebbs and then flares up again - is bound to shift the population to a younger demographic - as more babies arrive and more elders die earlier. Daily life will be more local, slower and more communal. But behind the list of speculative possibilities (the final end of the high street, the reduction of international travel etc) there is a shared view among Esquire's commentators that the whole of society is going to change, not least because the corona crisis is speeding up what is already an inevitable change in society.
This is where there are at least two problems facing Esquire's soothsayers. First, a great deal of the evidence for a substantial change in society, at least in Britain, appears to boil down to the apparent revelation that a right wing (Brexiteer) Tory government has turned its fundamental economic principles on its head. And it is true that huge amount of the government's access to wealth has not just supported business, it has also been marshalled on behalf of key social services and lost wages. Our Esquire visionaries seem to share some of the approach of the French, world wide intellectual Picketty's - new book, 'Capital and Ideology', which slams current capitalism in respect of its constant and increasing miss-distribution of wealth in this period and across earlier points in history. Picketty demonstrates in an unquestionable study of the evidence, that such surges of wealth gathering tended in the past to break countries up.
Alas, basing the idea that Boris's Treasury's policy and Britain's access to loans are speeding up a redistribution of wealth, or even suggesting a direction towards a redistribution of wealth, is frankly ridiculous. £330Bn of loan guarantees are to be made available for business. Small firms get £32Bn. Covering lost wages is assessed as a cost of £78Bn (see City economists 'Capital Economics'). £7Bn goes to plumping up Universal Credit and the five million self-employed are to share an estimated £7Bn also.
The peons of praise sung by Tory grandees about the NHS have yet to pinpoint the slightest gain or improvement for the service over the medium to longterm. Besides the appalling failures with testing, proper safety clothes for NHS workers and the failures to link up with EU bulk purchasing of oxygen masks (£1.54 a mask) - Boris and his predecessors cheerfully broke up any of the service's pandemic preparations. Dissolving hospitals, now desperately re-stocking, offering the smallest ratios of doctors to population of all the main European countries, now being brought back from retirement, and so it goes on. Not one Tory cavalier has apologised about the destruction of the NHS in the last decade. Not one has said anything about the future of the NHS. And yet the NHS is the critical fulcrum of the corona disaster. It is what will save a coherent society or, if it fails because of its history, it will break it.
Like Picketty, although without any of his brilliant tenacity or scholarship, our Esquire experts not only misunderstand Boris's intentions for the future, but also fail to realise how the dramatic changes in western and British society could emerge. Picketty focusses in history the separate regions and countries destroyed by their dominant effort of accumulation of wealth. But now we have globalisation. Wealth accumulation is the main trigger of international capitalism, not just regions and nations. Conditions today show that change in ecology, in building international movements, in the reconstitution of wealth and a new democracy are painfully ready to be born. But it is this second point that constitutes the deep, dark hole in their thinking. Society will not melt into its new colours. It will have to consciously fought for, pulled into the light by human struggle and consciously remade.