World uncertainty and doubt is nothing new
Cataclysmic events change people, their attitudes and behaviours. We know the future is being reshaped even if we do not fully know how or why. Covid-19 is one of those events and it’s not fully played out yet.
Recently I reflected on what other cataclysmic events have changed the world around me.
The Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962 happened when Iwas 10, and I was convinced we were all going to die. The Soviet Union had secretly put nuclear missiles into bases in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida, capable of reaching and destroying New York and Washington.
President John Kennedy threw up a naval blockade and told Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the missiles had to go. Khrushchev refused and there was a very tense standoff as both nations prepared for war. A backdown was arranged and the doomsday clock moved back from one minute to midnight. My generation feared a nuclear holocaust.
The collapse of world stock markets in 1987 meant millions of people lost billions of dollars and the lavish party that was the 1980s was over, leaving hundreds of thousands broke, out of work, homeless, in debt and in despair.
Easy monetary policy and lax regulatory controls helped fuel a boom across the world and, when it was over, the world cried, but we learned a lot about greed, our own and that of others’.
Another major shift in my lifetime was the collapse of communism, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I could remember its being built in 1961, dividing a city itself locked inside a communist state we called East Germany.
Back then the world was divided into two great power blocs flush with nukes on land, under the sea and in the air. Their armies faced each other in Europe. In the 1950s there was much debate in both blocs about the desirability of striking first before the other guy did. By the 1970s both sides had enough nuclear weapons that each could still destroy the other whoever struck first. This was Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD, and it brought a strange kind of stability.
The collapse of communism across Europe did not lead to global democracy, as many Western liberals had hoped or believed. Rather it released all the ethnic and nationalistic tendencies that brutal communist regimes with their police states had kept bottled up.
Hence the wars in the Balkans, and the uprisings in parts of the old Soviet Union like Chechnya and the Caucasus. Despots like Saddam Hussein were emboldened, and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda flourished.
The world quickly became less safe and conflicts are now abundant in the Middle East and Asia. Ending communism did not bring peace and harmony. There was a serious shift in the geopolitical balance, the consequences of which are still being played out.
There were other events: the doubling and then the redoubling of oil prices in the 1970s sent developed economies into amassive recession combined with rampant inflation which sent unemployment soaring and caused massive social unrest. Governments of all political shades fell as voters took revenge.
There is more. The rampant power of technology in all its forms from gigantic data-collecting systems to instant communication to anyone with amobile phone not much bigger than a packet of cigarettes, not to mention artificial intelligence.
It’s hard for a small nation to steer a sane course.
The sharp decline in, but never it seems the end of, poverty in the world, the rise of China (and perhaps soon India), the relative decline of the US, Europe and even Russia, and the never-ending instability of the Middle East all have their effects on ordinary citizens and their sense of wellbeing and security. It’s hard for a small nation to steer a sane course.
The more recent global financial crisis of 2005-08 damaged many people’s savings and lowered faith in markets.
There was global panic in the 1980s about herpes, an incurable sexually transmitted disease, and then about Aids, a condition once associated with drug use and homosexuality.
The world has accommodated both of those, and after the GFC was over the world economy has prospered. Until now.
I don’t doubt that we will survive Covid, but how long it will take to vaccinate most or all of the world’s population isn’t clear.
For me, the ability to travel is a handy metaphor for life the way it was before February 2020 when Covid became aworldwide menace. Certainly, travelwill scarcely be possible on any large scale unless and until both the hosts and the travellers are certifiably from Covid-free countries.
We will likely not see again the past we once knew. The shape of the future is still evolving from a range of fluid possibilities. Uncertainty, doubt, and confusion will be abundant.