19
SOCIETY
What if the virus can
teach us to change?
By Colum McCann
The voices
that really
matter will be
the ones that
come from
underneath,
not aboveIn 1858, the UnIted StateS of amerIca waS connected
to the rest of the world by an underwater cable that stretched
from the wilds of Canada to the wilds of Ireland. The first
public message that pulsed transatlantically was between
President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria. The New
World and the Old World had been joined. It was considered
one of the great undertakings of the 19th century.
The favorite word of the entrepreneur behind the trans
atlantic cable, Cyrus West Field, was faster. In his eyes, time
had been annihilated. Space had been shifted. He knew that
information was the commodity of the future.
These days, 1.2 million km of submarine cables lie under
the sea. Despite the idea that we operate in a figurative cloud,
the vast majority of the world’s information is carried not
by satellite but by a set of wet, cold, fragile tubes, which can
sometimes be ripped up by an errant ship anchor.
Even today, we probably know less about the bottom of
the sea than we do about the galaxies above us. And now
our cables—our moral cables, our social cables, our political
cables—have been ripped up cataclysmically.
Covid-19 is, like most things, so much more than one thing:
it is an annihilator of time, for sure, but it is also— bizarrely,
in our exponential age—a creator of time as well.
Yes, time is compressed, and information comes at us
with blinding, mindnumbing speed. Everything is faster,
smaller, cheaper, incomprehensibly reduced. A message
bounces from Wuhan to San Francisco far quicker than
a heartbeat (and far quicker than any virus). We can zoom
into a living room so that halfway around the world is now no
more than next door. We are reminded
constantly that we are incredibly tiny:
it is as if we can look at ourselves from
above and see the little molecules of
our meaninglessness bounce. Who
could have accounted for the massive
new fear that pulses within us? Who
would have thought that we would
be voiceless while democracy is
increasingly threatened? Who could
have thought that the crusade against
science by those in power would
condemn so many to die?
At yet the same time—or even in
between time—we have become so
very huge in our tiny rooms. We realize
that our lives actually matter, not only
to ourselves but to others too. Our
breath matters. Our masks matter. Our
handwashing matters. We stay at home
to save the world. Or we go out (as
doctors, nurses, delivery drivers, police,
pharmacists) to save the world too.
Suddenly time has a different
complexion: it registers differently.
Everything that once seemed so vital—
the need to get the train on time, the
need to get the essay done—seems
insignificant. Only the truly significant
is significant: the phone call to a loved
one, the medicine that needs to be
taken, the need to stay alive and of
course the need to keep others alive too.
But what if this virus, which makes
us tiny and epic both, can teach us a
little about holding contradictory ideas
once again? What if it can allow us to
see that we’re not as stupid as our po
litical parties want us to be, or as uni
directional as our TV channels seem to
think we are? A purple America is a far
more interesting one than the red or
blue one that some insist on.
What time demands now is a new
form of contrapuntal thinking. We do
not need to simplify. We need to scuff
things up. We need to be brave enough
to reach across the aisle. And the voices
that really matter will be the ones that
come from underneath, not above:
the vast swell of young people who
have been warning us about our
behavior for the past couple of years.
We will need new voices to splice these
shattered cables back together again.McCann, the co-founder of Narrative 4,
is the author of the new novel Apeirogon