Negative Capability
The world is being turned upside down by the horrors of Covid-19. The trajectory of the pandemic is unknown, but it will touch every member of our society, infected or not. Every day brings a new sense of disbelief. Mortality weighs heavily on us all. The disease appears to double its infected population about every week. This means it will go from 50 people who are infected to 1 million people infected in about 14 weeks. That's the simple arithmetic of contagion.
At a moment of profound dread and uncertainty, people are being cut off from a soothing human connection. Globalization has fractured. A fenced-off world will now be a world more prone to conflict. Perversely, it will also be a world more exposed to pandemic disease, because a fenced-off world will also be a world of diminished cooperation and censored mis-information. The pandemic’s disregard for national borders underscores the permanent link between global interdependence and the need for a framework of cooperation. Our President, though, said that the WHO had "failed in its basic duty" in its response to the pandemic and summarily halted funding.
People need support, belonging, and hope. We are conditioned to live into the future, which is now a cliff. People need others to fill the gaps. Other individuals are sometimes our greatest joy. We need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, belonging, and the sense of a future. We need to rise above our immediate surroundings. Sickness shrinks the world.
Instead now distortions persist and are deeply polluted by the braying of demagogues, conflicting guidance from our leaders, and misinformation is distributed widely across many channels. Domestically, states may hold on to the powers of surveillance they have assumed during the crisis.
I find myself sidelined in isolation so far for the last 25 days in London and try to spend as much time with my two children, themselves learning their lessons on Zoom: they are not understanding the quantum of solace within us all. The things I love – the things I should love – are now that much clearer. The mundane is bright. Twenty-six days ago, I was in Nairobi where the fear then was visible and obviously people cannot stay away from work if they have no money. A threat you cannot see is still a mythology. Here I don’t talk to any neighbors and a walk to Moxon’s, the fishmongers, defines my lone outing, where I wait outside to collect fresh salmon. Food shopping is just rationing. Pay attention to the patterns of our existence that we always took for granted. Can we find meaning in our lives without being taught a lesson?
Like everywhere, the streets are empty, people tensely avoiding each other. Churches, temples, and mosques have suspended gatherings. Airlines grounded flights and now are in search of bailouts. Restaurants and other small businesses closed rapidly. Preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but fairness and a stable and equal health-care system. Hubei province in China, the epicenter of the pandemic, was also a manufacturing center of medical masks. Loneliness will drive the health crisis; a consequence of the hardships people will face everywhere.
I talk as much to my father, my principal sponsor, and my partner - all octogenarians. None of them can offer any guidance here that is comforting. Try to have a perspective I am told. Diseases have destabilized cities and societies many times over, but it hasn’t happened in a very long time, or to quite the extent that we’re seeing now. I worry as this pandemic moves into Africa and India. Isolation, closure, and collapse everywhere. “I told you” - Dostoyevsky warned.
Everything is reduced to what really matters. Health is not a purely individual concern. We are painfully reminded how change can be extreme, so unanticipated, and immediate. On the Global Health Security Index, a scorecard that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has faltered. Dr. Anthony Fauci, almost fired by our President this week, now is a household name everywhere. He says there could be 2 mm confirmed cases of covid-19 in America; there are already 2 mm cases worldwide.
Our President (a reality television star elected in good times, while losing the popular vote) has fallen out of his element in this crisis, signaling at first that he was prepared to backtrack on ‘social-distancing’ policies in a bid to protect the economy. Business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is delusional. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk and to somehow segregate the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals would be overwhelmed. A study from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans would still need intensive care. There were initially only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 [ventilated] patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic. Leaders know that with the change, there is a pattern.
The early, obvious lesson of this present crisis is exactly the opposite of the America First approach urged by the Trump Administration. It is the need to lower distance between trusted partners, to build stronger international health organizations outside the sclerotic structure of the United Nations, to encourage European unity as America did from 1946 until 2016.
A long time ago, it seems. Time is a lie in this calculus. False hope is pricey.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
America’s individualism, exceptionalism, and pursuit of freedom equate to doing whatever one wants with an act of resistance meant that when it came time [to save lives and] stay indoors, some people flocked to clubs and beaches. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved not to live in fear. Others will suffer but differently than Americans. The Americanism that we all supposed to be positive all the time has been an obsession. We are all fragile and flawed, without the Instagram filters of cool certainty and perfect time. I am no longer sure that the best is yet to come. Covid-19 has formed itself into the framework of our reality: a disease everywhere and nowhere, imprecisely known and, as yet, untreatable.
Happiness is freedom from fear. We are all afraid now. Nobody can be prescriptively ‘joyous’ now - day by day, hour by hour. Existence is finite. This is hardly news..
American consumerism, comparison, and selfishness have run rampant destroying the community values we regard as vital to our moral health. This is a terrible indictment of so-called progress. We have convinced ourselves that democracy and capitalism have conjoined meaning, to give sense to our fictionalized, linear framework. With capitalism, we now attach a seductive, positive human virtue, ‘patient’, somehow promoting a fictional lastingness.
Leveraging ‘human capital’ was the American mythology, a panacea for prosperity. Turning a generation into ‘human capital’ provided capitalists with a constant supply of workers. Just because you can produce an unprecedented amount of value doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself under twenty-first-century American capitalism. Being viewed as human capital reduces people to no more than potential earners, with their value determined by their imagined future capacity to make money based on their current skillset and social position. It’s a way of reconfiguring young life into market terms. And in America, it has informed every stage, everywhere, of the millennial generation’s development: schools organized by competitive standardized testing; résumé-building extracurriculars only for the wealthy; zero-tolerance policies and the constant threat of prison for poor kids; monitoring and control of childhood behavior; prescription drugs, and little free time to play, all justified - by the myth - that turning yourself into better human capital guarantees a better future.
Sometimes we find ourselves, somewhere, unfailingly, and that point itself can be just so defining. Disasters do happen and Covid-19 reminds us that the natural world can surprise us, and very quickly. This pandemic makes it increasingly hard to hold on to the idea that the business of business is merely business, that we only need to worry about the health of the ‘free’ markets (which are now managed) and someone else will take care of everything else.
We must recalibrate our lives and common purpose. We should understand that our core values are more than just a set of inspiring words. Rather, they are a declaration of the underlying ethos that forms the foundation of our community. Understanding people whose values and motivations are utterly different to our own requires empathy. Most people conflate empathy with sympathy. Perhaps what we do need now is a recalibration – a rethinking – of our understanding of empathy – our sense of commonality and connection with others. One that is more emotionally honest.
The 2020s, I feel, will be a decisive decade for equity. Signs show it will also be a chaotic, unpredictable decade. Prioritizing coherence in our thinking steers change towards our goals even while navigating uncertainty and disruption. Establishing a business as a critical factor, if not in politics as we usually understand, then in what is a community of stakeholders. Cynics might argue that the current crisis makes ‘social’ and ‘sustainability’ issues irrelevant; optimists retort that this adversity is forcing us all to rethink our values and the purpose of business and finance. I’ve learned that having people fit into our culture and have compatible values is paramount. A coherent set of values amongst stakeholders with different horizons remains a missing link in navigating the growing unpredictability of a hyper-globalized world.
Coherence is the alignment of time, investment, and principles over time and across place. Seeking coherence is a strategy for steering ourselves towards goals, especially when time is short, resources are limited, and uncertainty and disruption abound. The movement towards values-aligned investing is an paramount example of a system seeking coherence. When a foundation is coherent, organizing principles (or values) are applied across its internal operations, its programs, and its investment strategy. Coherence is worth seeking because we feel peace when our work aligns with our values. Experiencing coherence builds a sort of ‘memory’ that allows patterns to replicate, in a time where we need to accelerate innovation.
We must find the desire to progress through this negativity and uncertainty that is now. It takes great capability to live each day now as it counts.