Everywhere people express frustration at how long it is taking for us to get back to normal in the face of the COVID pandemic. To which I say – not so fast.
Normal is, in many ways, what made us so vulnerable to COVID, more than any other developed nation. For people in the United States, normal means:
- A population that is obese, diabetic, or already suffering from chronic inflammation, like a forest full of dry undergrowth ready for the fire of COVID to sweep through.
- A health care system where millions of people are uninsured, and where insurance is tied to employment, so that sick people have to go to work, and risk spreading infection, to stay insured.
- An economy where much of the population lives paycheck-to-paycheck, so that keeping them alive and housed during a lockdown requires a massive infusion of taxpayer funded debt to prevent an economic collapse.
- Living situations where people are packed into nursing homes, prisons, and unaffordable housing, making transmission easier.
- Political gridlock so bad that we cannot intelligently discuss, let alone solve, pressing problems like defeating COVID and protecting the economy.
Do we really want to go back to that? Is that the best we can do? Is it even consistent with what we value – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
We would do well to recall that the word “normal” has two meanings. It means “common” (what we might call Normal 1) but it also means “right” or “appropriate” or “healthy” (Normal 2). Over seventy percent of men 55 and older have blood pressure of 130 or higher, which makes it Normal 1, but blood pressure must be 120 or less to qualify as Normal 2. In much the same way, it is easy to come to think of what we see around us as the way things should be, or even must be.
In Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich suggests a framework for preventing Normal 1 from overwhelming Normal 2. This, he suggests, is difficult because the tools and systems that we use to create goods and services have an innate tendency to grow beyond our capacity to control them. We tend to assume that more is better. Too often, it is only when we stop and look back that we see that, not only has our technology not solved the original problem, it has created new, and worse, problems. The solution, he says, is to limit our tools from the outset, to maintain a balance between what technology can do and what is Normal 2 for human beings.
For examples of how an overproducing technology creates harm, you might look up articles on the high cost of cheap clothing (loss of jobs here, worker exploitation there, full landfills), or the high cost of cheap food (obesity, diabetes, malnutrition, destructive agriculture). Or you might look to the many ways in which we have been frustrated in our dreams that technology will make our lives better. We have faster cars, but spend more time commuting. We have exponentially increasing opportunities to be distracted by people on screens, but less time to interact with actual people – are you not entertained?
If our only goal is a high and ever-increasing GDP, then it doesn’t really matter what we are making, so long as we are making a lot of it. And for that to happen, we have to be ready to fulfill our real job in this economy — consuming goods and services, even if that means going into debt to do so. But should we accept that as normal? Is that a life worthy of a human being?
A lawyer friend once told me about the Vermont farmer who said: “You can fill a feed bag with manure and still say it’s full.” Illich would say that what matters is not how full the bag is, or how big, but what is in the bag. He would say that the bag should contain things that enable people to live together happily and productively. And if that means that the bag will be smaller – and he thinks that it certainly will, it is a price well worth paying.
The COVID pandemic has forced us to behave differently, and to appreciate people more. The slowdown in economic activity has given us an opportunity to think about what ought to be in the bag, and how much of it we want. Better, it provides an opportunity to think about whether we really need the things we want, and to reflect on the unintended damage that can result from our wanting. We still have to figure out how to talk with each other about this. Many tools are already available; the Lambeau Forum is intended to provide another. But whatever tools we use to extricate ourselves from the normal mess we have created, we will need to pay less attention to the voices on our screens and more to the voices of the people around us.
Joe Biden promises to Build Back Better. Illich reminds us that better is not just bigger, faster and more expensive. Better can be smaller, and must be more sustainable and more human. When the pandemic is over, the doors to the bullet train will open again. But Illich asks: wouldn’t it feel good to walk where we want to go instead?
