The Coronation Charles Eisenstein
‘Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement.'
Charles Eistenstein’s essay is a monster at 9,000 words, though I urge you to set aside the time to read it. It will reward you richly.
The Covid 19 crisis provides us with opportunities to define which parts of ‘normal’ as a society we want to go back to. What jobs/air travel are really necessary for example? Also how do we restore full civil liberties, when we have so quickly and easily given them up?
Eisenstein posits that humanity is, at this point, at a crossroads with hundreds of paths leading out before us. One is that social distancing is institutionalised. Another that an agenda of totalitarian control is furthered, a situation that he suggests was underway before Covid 19. The migration of life from public to private spaces is becoming greater.. Covid 19
‘is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social…Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent.’
He argues that the figures released on the pandemic across the world can (and already have been at the time of writing this, by Sweden) be questioned on their rigour and accuracy. The statistics from the Diamond Princess cruise ship are a fascinating case in point, when set against many opinions on the pandemic. He does not pretend to have any accurate data, only that the data is potentially flawed. Nobody actually knows what is going on at the moment, and the most likely thing is that we never will.
Childhood mortality, suicide, drugs overdose, obesity, ecological collapse kill far more people than Covid 19, but humanity has not reacted in a comparable way to any of these.
So why has humanity radically mobilised for Covid 19 but not for any of these other emergencies. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing the above conditions.
‘Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet….Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene.’
It gives governments many excuses to tighten up control, which he argues is hardwired into civilisation’s DNA, accelerated by Enlightenment thinking, combined with a war mentality.
What is underpinning his thoughts is the issue of the right way to live and society’s attitude towards death:
‘The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. ‘Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes.
In this he references the only book I would recommend to any expectant mother, Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept.
Mainstream western society has no concept of dying well, only prolonging life at any cost. The idea that Covid 19 is a one off, or will end soon is ridiculous, so our response to it creates our future way beyond the next year to 18 months. So we face the temporary changes in our way of life becoming permanent.
‘…we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?’
What is more there are deaths happening not directly caused by the virus, but intimately linked to humanity’s response to Covid 19. These include depression, despair and chronic fear. Also the reduction in immunity caused by excessive hygiene that is sure to proliferate on an ongoing basis, a global case of OCD.
‘Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation….There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.’
He examines the clamp down on any holistic thinking, any talk of improving health through diet, supplements, yoga is now banished. Even though there is plenty of data out there to support its efficacy.
‘We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life…”How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”