Coronavirus is not a great turning point in human history

Looking back over the last two months, it is extraordinary to think about how quickly the normal rhythms of life can be disrupted and altered. The freedom of movement that characterised decades of globalisation has been curbed, the economic activity that drove it has been systematically stifled.

There is a new normal. The deluge is upon us. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has exposed weaknesses in our global supply chains, forced states to introduce coercive restrictions to everyday life, and shaken confidence in the idea of globalism itself.

It has now become a truism of our politics that these events are extraordinary, and that the world will be transformed by them. It is now common for commentators and analysts to remark on just how radical a shift in the tides of human history the present moment is. The refrain that “the world will never be the same again” has become a cliché.

As with all such clichés, it is true in a sense – and yet it is not the full truth. It puts a caricatured gloss on a complex reality. The truth is that the world changes all the time, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly.

The Bolshevik revolutionary, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, put it well in a now infamous phrase, when he said: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

For thousands of years the pivots and twists of history have produced change. The experience of transformation was not invented with the storming of the Winter Palace in Moscow, and nor was it first dreamed of in the fertile, utopian minds of the French revolutionaries.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, was quoted by Plato as declaring of the natural world: “Everything changes and nothing stands still.” Echoing this across the millennia, the natural philosopher Francis Bacon urged that “time is the greatest innovator”, which “innovateth greatly, but quietly, by degrees scarce to be perceived.”

Change, in its own way, is a constant, even if it is inconsistent. And it is in the quiet changes of degree as much as the dramatic revolutions which fill our headlines that great transformations in the course of events take place.

In the current crisis, there is continuity even amid radical disruption.

In the UK, the excoriating censoriousness directed at those perceived (often wrongly) to be breaking social distancing measures is not a new phenomenon. It is a manifestation of the legalism inherent in so much of our social and political discourse. It is only the latest episode in the wave of social authoritarianism that has invaded our public sphere and academies, cancelling university speakers and hectoring those who challenge progressive orthodoxies.

Then there is the great enthusiasm with which many in March were urging the government to introduce a hard, immediate lockdown. This is unsurprising in a political culture in which we have been ceding our civil liberties to the state for decades.

We in Britain were already the most surveilled state in Europe, with more CCTV cameras per capita in London than in any of the capital cities of our continental neighbours. The Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 has already introduced measures that allow for emergency powers to be exercised by our government in order to fight terrorism, enabling the suspension of several statutory freedoms in the name of protecting the state.

In such times, we ought to guard the warning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse, in which all mankind “ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty.”

This imperceptible erosion of civil liberties, the eagerness to ask the state to step in, and the tendency to seek solutions from authority, were gaining ground globally even before the Global Financial Crisis. We have become more used to the strong hand of the state stepping in to guide the free hand of the markets.

On an international level, it is fashionable to speak of this as the end of a “liberal world order.” But the “liberal order”, insofar as it ever existed, was never uncontested.

There continued to be wars, genocides, power politics and illiberal persecutions, even after the liberal dawn of 1989-1991 at the end of the Cold War. There were rogue states that raged against the system and liberal states that preached humanism and civility while sanctioning persecution and permitting barbarism.

The liberal mission was blasted apart in the Iraq War, and shattered upon impact in the hills and valleys of Afghanistan. The liberal ethic was smothered in the dark corridors of Guantanamo Bay.

The struggle for mastery between countries was altered and commuted – it did not disappear. The forces of illiberal order did not all come crashing down with the Berlin Wall. Beyond the minds of theorists writing from the comfort of the western press and academies, there never was a golden age of universal liberal harmony. There were always cracks in the liberal Leviathan – it is just that we are now far less complacent about them.

As 2020 dawned with borders being re-enforced and amid an ongoing US-China trade war, the world was aware that the globalised giant has feet made of precarious clay. The outbreak in Wuhan has merely thrown the fissures into sharper relief.

All of these tensions have been brought to the surface by the global pandemic. None of them were created by it. The Covid-19 crisis has quickened tendencies that were already reshaping geopolitics and restructuring the world economy. It did not conjure them into being.

The coronavirus crisis is not a great turning point in human history, even if it represents a new chapter, a quickening of the tides. It has served to amplify and accelerate the slow and great transformations already taking place. Great, if less visible, innovations had been rumbling beneath the surface for far longer. The current crisis has been the locomotive of history rather than its moving spirit.