Ringing in the new

Last month, Maria Branyas, the old­est woman in Cat­alo­nia and in­deed in the whole of Spain, and pos­si­bly in the whole of Eu­rope, hit the vir­tual head­lines when she sur­vived a coro­n­avirus in­fec­tion at age 113. (She had also got through the First World War – dur­ing which the ship tak­ing her and her fam­ily back to Barcelona from the United States was al­most bombed -; the 1918 ’flu pan­demic; the Span­ish Civil War; and, of course, Franco’s wretched four-decade dic­ta­tor­ship). This ex­tra­or­di­nary woman, born in San Fran­cisco in 1907 and now res­i­dent in the Pyre­nean town of Olot, broke the iso­la­tion of quar­an­tine by tweet­ing clear and co­her­ent mes­sages to all and sundry, in one of which she said, re Covid-19: “I be­lieve that noth­ing will be the same again... You will need a new order, a change in the hi­er­ar­chy of val­ues and pri­or­i­ties, a new human era.” She’s by no means the only per­son to think that the post-virus world will be com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the one we used to be used to. For ex­am­ple, Xavier Farràs, a pro­fes­sor at Barcelona’s Ramon Llull Uni­ver­sity, also sees major changes ahead, such as the as­cen­dance of Chi­nese-type meth­ods of so­cial con­trol and a huge in­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple work­ing at home. The Sloven­ian philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek agrees that there will be no re­turn to nor­mal­ity, and fore­sees the emer­gence of “a cer­tain form of com­mu­nism”. By con­trast, a good friend of mine in Lon­don thinks that hardly any­thing will change, ex­cept maybe a cer­tain re­luc­tance for peo­ple to pay a lot more for a cof­fee served in a café when they’ve got used to mak­ing their own at home for a sixth of the price (and the same goes for any other drink you care to men­tion). The French writer Michel Houelle­becq has stated pub­licly that ab­solutely every­thing will go back to nor­mal. For what it’s worth, I was firmly in the ’noth­ing will change’ camp until I stum­bled across an ar­ti­cle en­ti­tled ’Greed Is Dead’ in the Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment by the econ­o­mist Paul Col­lier, in which the au­thor points out that ’Eco­nomic Man’ – a term coined in the 1950s to de­scribe the type of per­son who does well in cap­i­tal­ist so­ci­eties by putting greed and self­ish­ness to eco­nomic ad­van­tage – is on the way out and in­deed, must be frog-marched to the door if the rest of us want to sur­vive. Re­cent stud­ies of the evo­lu­tion­ary ori­gin of suc­cess­ful human com­mu­ni­ties have shown that homo sapi­ens sapi­ens is a uniquely so­cial species that func­tions best when it’s able to weave a “vast web of kind­ness and mu­tual oblig­a­tions” (Col­lier dixit). In other words, ex­actly the type of web in which the suc­cess­ful cap­i­tal­ists of today would be un­able to avoid throt­tling them­selves to death. In a nut­shell, we are ge­net­i­cally pro­grammed to be proso­cial, to ex­change in­for­ma­tion and as­sis­tance with­out a profit mo­tive, and to thus de­velop the ’col­lec­tive brain’ we call cul­ture, which is es­sen­tial to fu­ture human progress. Need­less to say, any aber­ra­tion from this eth­i­cal model based on mu­tual aid is pre­cisely that: an ab­nor­mal­ity, a de­vi­a­tion, a mis­take. Our busi­ness model of the past cou­ple of cen­turies is thus a freak­ish wrong turn along which those who take it are given a li­cence to be bad, with fatal con­se­quences: wealthy cap­i­tal­ists, far from being so­cial suc­cesses, are as im­pos­si­ble to in­te­grate into a healthy so­ci­ety as are psy­chopaths. These re­cent dis­cov­er­ies are the re­sult of an in­creased over­lap­ping of sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines (by way of ex­am­ple, one of the sci­en­tists Col­lier quotes is a pro­fes­sor of ecol­ogy, bi­ol­ogy, so­ci­ol­ogy, med­i­cine, data sta­tis­tics and bio­med­ical en­gi­neer­ing), which have now made it pos­si­ble for us to take a much bet­ter look at the still fairly blurry Big (Human) Pic­ture. It could well be that the im­pact of Covid-19 will fi­nally en­able us to see it so clearly, we’ll be able to de­tect the devil in the de­tails – and deal with him.