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The disavowal of the Covid-19 pandemic

I was struck by how the coda to On Wanting to Change by Adam Phillips, published in 2021, captured an issue which I have repeatedly returned to over the last few years. From pg 139 written, one assumes, the height of the pandemic:

‘Plagues’, Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks in passing in The Rise of Christian Europe, ‘can be of decisive importance in history.’ Whether or not the COVID virus is a plague, or like one, we are in the gradual process of discovering both what kind of decisive change it has brought to our lives, and what kind of decisions we want to make about our lives in the light of it. It is very difficult to know what kind of Europe – indeed, what kind of world – we will be left with in the aftermath of this devastation. But we can be sure that, despite people’s wish and capacity to return to so-called normal life, the shock waves, the after-effects of this virus, will be felt for generations to come. Those of us who lived through it will become, among other things, the ones who lived through it.

There has been the managing of day-to-day survival, and then there is, and has been, the wholly unpredictable and deferred effect of the trauma.

To say I shared this view would be an understatement. To what extent did we overestimate the “shock waves, the after-effects” and to what extent are they being disavowed? I think it’s a combination of the two. There was a snap back effect which I found sufficiently sociologically implausible that it led me to examine the relative weight I accorded to social order rather than social change. There’s just a deep psychosocial commitment to continuing as we have done before. But the comforts of inertia are much more pronounced when facing what is beyond that inertia would be slightly terrifying. Indeed he actually says that “we must resist the temptation to get back to normal, now we can see more clearly what normality has involved us in” (pg 140-141). In foregoing that temptation, the disavowal and the overestimate meet together because the shockwaves are evaded precisely by a determined insistence on returning to ‘normal’.

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