Social cohesion must prevail during these difficult times
As a teenager, I learned to type on a gunmetal Underwood clunker. It sat atop a thick felt mat on a narrow table beside my grandmother’s bed. Before I opened the teach-yourself book, my dad tested the ribbon.
He wound a sheet of paper into the roller. The round buttons of the keyboard ticked at breakneck speed as lines of print accumulated on the page. Leaning over, I watched as he tapped the same sentence, error-free, over and over. It read: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
I realized that sentence was what U.S. students like him practised in high school typing class and then did following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Canada in spring 2020 might be a similar place, where people trust leaders to make the right decisions and then do their part to advance a shared social project. This vision of social cohesion summons the better angels of our nature in order to slow and, we hope, defeat a fearsome virus.
Plenty of evidence supports that optimism. Workplaces not providing essential services have gone online or closed. We’ve stopped socializing in person. Neighbours offer to help one another. In every way possible, we act on the basis of common knowledge that the threat to public health is very real and very dangerous.
But herein lies the challenge. How meaningful in this time and place are conventional concepts like common knowledge and public health? What’s traditionally called common knowledge seems increasingly uncommon in an age when sources of data and perspectives vary widely in quality, and some are not shared beyond a specific target audience.
Instead of the relatively few print and broadcast media outlets that informed citizens in democratic systems during earlier crises, we face a plethora of voices that excel at narrowcasting their messages.
Anyone with internet access, and not just trolls in Russia, can disseminate ideas that directly contradict the guidance of our duly elected leaders. During previous states of emergency in democratic societies, conflicting perspectives clearly existed but were much harder to learn about and disseminate.
The concept of public health may be even more endangered. Let’s be clear: This is the first pandemic to unfold since the concept of public welfare — meaning a state of collective or joint well-being that is more than the simple sum of individual interests — came under direct siege beginning in the 1970s.
What are the consequences of that ideational shift?
First, Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “There’s no such thing as society” rendered authoritative a view that every individual and family can make autonomous decisions without concern for other individuals or families, let alone a larger public good;
Second, declining levels of social deference that are reflected in a suspicion of subject experts have reduced our willingness to accept what trained specialists say constitutes a threat, or what constitutes responsible behaviour. Low rates of childhood vaccination in North
America help to illustrate how these patterns have played out;
Third, the rising tide of wealth and income inequality that the Occupy movement highlighted has eroded further our reservoir of social caring. If the people in charge only protect the very affluent one per cent, as critics maintain they did in the 2008 financial crisis, then limited reasons exist for the other 99 per cent to feel much social solidarity, let alone do what’s asked of them in 2020.
In a drawer next to that old typewriter, I found grainy black and white photos of emaciated people wearing striped pyjamas. They were prisoners at Buchenwald — their images captured the day after U.S. soldiers entered the concentration camp in April 1945. As the only Jew in his army evacuation unit, my 21-year-old father was too shaken to hold a camera. One of his buddies took the photos.
The important lesson here is crises can become cauldrons for goodness, for understanding and coming to the aid of others.
Since unbridled individualism risks corroding the ties that bind us, even at the best of times, l hope we as citizens will be inspired by the positive actions of earlier generations.
Let’s commit to reinforcing the constructive work of leaders in our democratic institutions. At the same time, we need to recognize and address the powerful forces that limit their effectiveness.