So what’s it to be – business as usual or a step towards that elusive brave new world?
These days carry a mixture of hope and uncertainty. The lifting of restrictions brings the immediate hope that light is piercing the darkness, even if it is a temporary thing marking a mere interval. Nevertheless it is hope.
But when the house-lights come on signalling the end of the horror show, will they simply illuminate the familiar as we return like automatons to the grind and grime of ‘as you were’?
There is uncertainty about the kind of future that will emerge, and the prospect that nothing of substance will have changed is very real.
All ages have their traumas and these can result in regression or progress.
The Second World War brought us the horror of motorised and atomic warfare, along with industrial-scale genocide.
In the aftermath of the madness the world turned its energies towards re-civilising itself in an age that saw the dismantling of colonialism and the growth of international co-operation through bodies like the UN.
That body became a power for global good and a champion of peace, justice and human rights in the world.
In Europe there was the beginnings of the European project.
While still evolving it has been, on balance, a power for good in improving the social, economic and political lives of people across the continent.
This reputation is somewhat sullied by the Union’s despicable policies in relation to migration along its southern shores.
So, will it be progress or regression once the spectre of Covid-19 is lifted or will the virus continue to ride shotgun on us, forcing us to keep a cap on our addiction to living frenetically?
Those with a vested interest in light-touch regulation, small government and exclusive access to the top are probably a little uneasy in their Guccis after these Covid days. They fear that the period of enforced reflection might have caused the great unwashed to expect a better life, realising that there is more to existence than the tyranny of the clock and the avarice of consumerism.
I somehow suspect that those hoping for a swift return to the status quo are quietly confident that the unforgiving law of the market will rise again to pack the M50 with white faces and hypertension.
They anticipate that the grim attraction of unbridled growth will soon strap the middle classes back into their places at the hub of the treadmill.
There the tedium will continue to blind them to the obscenity that a few are living high off the energy being generated by their efforts.
Meanwhile the grinding poverty of those unable to get near the mill will continue to go completely unnoticed.
One can hope that things will change but experience tells me that such hope can be as ephemeral as the dew.
I didn’t quite come of age in the 1960s but I do remember that decade and I do remember how the language of the time and the sense that a brave new world was dawning washed into the early ’70s.
However, what has been happening in America over the last
Broken dreams:
few weeks illustrates how little has really changed.
It is almost 155 years since the abolition of slavery in the US, 57 years since Martin Luther King spoke of his dream at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington; it is 56 years since June 2, 1964 when President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and in that time, even though America elected its first black president, so little has really changed.
Prison
Blacks in the US have one tenth the wealth of white people, are 20pc more likely to be unemployed and their average weekly wages are 22pc lower than white people’s. A recent study by the University of Chicago shows that on any given day 7 to 8pc of young black American men are in prison.
In this country, while our legislation in relation to equality and anti-racism is admirable, the practice on the ground is far from perfect and the reality of everyday racism is shameful.
No matter how many opportunities offer themselves, the brave new world always seems to elude us.
What is it that causes us to fold our arms in the face of opportunity?
Is our fear of the other and of what we might lose so paralysing that it blinds us to the possibilities of embracing new things and experiencing transformation?
Even when an epoch-changing event like a pandemic bends our binding orthodoxies and rattles our excuses for avoiding change, why do we just want to go back to the way things were?