In the midst of the global crisis, which is perceived as the greater concern, ordinary life and suffering goes on. As Bertolt Brecht once commented, people don’t stop making love during wars. And now we, privileged in so many ways, have only the tiniest taste of what refugees and those in war zones at the edges of Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, and many other hellish places have been experiencing in extremis, some for decades now – queuing for basics like clean water, any morsel of food, and any remnant of health care. Their stories are still to be told.

A colleague’s old Italian father dies of complications from motor neurone disease. ‘The old lavotore works all his life and we can’t even give him a decent funeral,’ the son laments. Another friend’s only son, only child, is rushed into Emergency in a critical condition, unrelated to Covid-19: this father is spending five hours a day at the hospital. In Singapore, a performer friend recovers in hospital from knee reconstruction. In Melbourne, where I am staying throughout the crisis, an esteemed colleague and friend is also in hospital about to have a gall bladder removed. In Chicago, a producer mate had to cut short a long trip in Greece and Europe because she busted her kneecap. She too has become accustomed to isolation:

We are in Shelter in Place or Stay at Home or some such expression. Our Governor just called for it yesterday, beginning today, and I am enormously relieved that he is taking action along the lines of the Governors of NY and California. No one can wait for or depend on that monster of a president who will go unnamed. He will kill us all.

On Long Island a friend is taking meals around to ‘old lesbians’ living nearby. In New York, Jack is sitting on his Brooklyn balcony overlooking the Empire State – he’s drinking tequila. In Paris, the boys are together at length for the first time in years, taking lunch in the garden each day. We wonder what they’re eating, since the market to which they are devoted is closed. In Berlin, an older wiser friend is also thankful for her garden: ‘Of course having experienced different catastrophes in my lifetime it allows maybe another attitude towards today’s problems, but the sheer boundlessness today is worrying.’

In Vienna the couple and two kids are moving apartments. In Cambridge there’s a beautiful garden, almost an orchard, where the older friends contemplate the approach of spring. In Adelaide my second cousin, a young doctor working in obstetrics, is delivering babies: there are so many babies still entering this world, so different from our norm, yet it will be the only one they know.

How can anyone possibly resent the simple imposition of staying indoors – unless you’re there because you’ve lost your job and you don’t know how to feed this family you’re suddenly close-quartered with? We feel for those households where tension has already been high; we are aware that domestic violence is on the rise. By any comparison, so many of us are feeling fortunate, not taking our privilege for granted. For us there are the words we have waited to devour for years; and those we return to – our ‘bibles’.

Here is Italo Calvino, from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh:

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draughtsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

And here, from Brecht’s Poems 1913–1956 (edited by John Willett and Ralph Mannheim), is ‘On a Chinese Carving of a Lion’, translated by Willett:

The bad fear for your claws
The good enjoy your elegance
This
I would like to have said
Of my verse

But Michael Morley emails me that Tom Kuhn’s version (‘On a Chinese tea-root Lion’, from The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, 2019) is closer in line length and rhythm to the original German:

The evil fear your sharp claw.
The good take pleasure in your grace.
That
I’d like to hear said
Of my poem.

There are new discoveries, too: in my case Brian Walker’s Finding Resilience (CSIRO Publishing, 2019). Brian’s most recent, more personal follow-on from Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice (both with David Salt and both part of my small collection of bibles) is a joy to read. The tragedy in reading it is knowing that the science and the wisdom have been there for so long yet so few have taken advantage of it – it couldn’t be more poignant now. Brian’s definitions of resilience, a word about to be much over- and misused, have never been clearer:

Resilience, then, is the capacity of an organism, an ecosystem, a business, a city, to absorb a disturbance by re-organising so as to keep functioning in the same kind of way and not cross into a different state of the system with a different identity, or even into a different kind of system. In essence it’s about learning how to change in order not to be changed

The desires that drove British voters to Brexit (but let’s not get carried away – about twenty-five per cent of the population made the decision – democracy is a strange beast) and American voters to Trump (though Hillary Clinton won three million more votes … yep, that’s democracy too) and Australian voters resisting the Labor Party’s cautious tilt towards economic reform in the interests of sustainability had one thing in common. Most people don’t like change. Change is surely the most fundamental fact of life on earth, yet humans build houses, monumental structures, walls, and equally impervious institutions to create an illusion of permanence. It seems difficult for people to accept that the way we organise societies, and the way we relate to the natural environment, must be matters of constant change. Pandemics have several times wrought major change. Yet in all things, humans appear to treasure the status quo above all. In the United Kingdom, older Brits wanted it to be the way it was in reconstruction after the war – same as America. They wanted to be great again, not admitting this was impossible. Something similar operates in Australia – there’s myopia with regard to long-term sustainability. Brian Walker writes:

Nobody likes fundamental change and one of the hardest parts of transforming is getting past the resistance to it, past the state of denial that it’s necessary. But it’s a case of the first rule of holes – when you’re in one, stop digging. Find or create something else to do. Sometimes it takes a crisis for this to happen.

And:

A really important development in the social science approach to crises and resilience, matching so well with the ecological approach, has been the recognition and emphasis of uncertainty, change and crisis as normal, rather than exceptional. The world is perceived as being in a constant state of flux.

In The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007), Naomi Klein argues that radical capitalism has followed major catastrophes. She quotes Milton Friedman:

… only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Paradoxically, it’s so close to what Brian Walker describes when he says ‘big disturbances are the drivers of real change’. Here I’m reminded of a passage I once quoted from Mein Kampf. I didn’t reveal the author’s name until afterwards. This drew an audible gasp from the audience: the author’s observations about unemployment during the German Depression were surprisingly insightful and sympathetic. But Hitler’s solution to the situation could not have been more horrific. Major crises drive major change, but the point is, what kind of change? Klein comments on Friedman: ‘Some people stockpile canned goods and water [we might add toilet paper!] in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas.’

Brian Walker has been saying for years that we have left it so late that the changes we need will cost us and that we will have to surrender some of the things we once craved and which we might have marked out as the deserved prizes of hard work and affluence. Early in the Covid-19 outbreak, I speculated that an upside might be the resurrection of the Australian manufacturing industry. As the crisis deepened, industry’s skills are being directed to making the things we need at this time. Why couldn’t we maintain this? Why not strive to make the country less dependent on others? Yes, the products might be more expensive. That’s why we have become so dependent on products from other countries, even those we supply with the raw materials – because they are so cheap. Surely, paying more would be a small price for independence and ongoing sustainability.

That hope folds into hopes for other major restructures, including steps towards the circular economy – less waste, more local – and the positive effects that could have on the environment. Many of those ideas appear in Klein’s most recent book, On Fire: The burning case for a Green New Deal (2019), and in Ann Pettifor’s The Case for the Green New Deal (2019). There may well be radical change after the crisis, but what shape will it take? Will it be the kind that kicks the inefficient and unsustainable old rattletrap back into some semblance of action, or is there a chance that the public might be convinced that a change of direction is needed: the creation of new twenty-first century jobs and an economy not based on greed or profit (the predatory behaviour of the stock market during this crisis has been sickening), rather than the false rhetoric of never-ending growth? As Brian Walker points out, the record has not been great for all those moments when that kind of redirection might have happened – the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the GFC, and, as Klein observes, Hurricane Katrina. In each case, what followed were short-term boosts for big business and private enterprise rather than long-term gains for humanity.

Can we hope for something different this time?

I could quote Brian Walker endlessly. Just get the book (you can buy it online from CSIRO Publishing). It’s an enjoyable and inspiring account – with its often very funny anecdotes and ever-generous acknowledgment of colleagues – of a scientist’s tales from the field. But it’s the final chapters, including ‘A Resilience Pathway’, that we need right now if we are to seize the opportunity this horror offers us.

The rumoured accusations in Australia of something starting to look like socialism in the government’s various stimulus packages provoke speculation. Will Australians get used to something more equitable? When the government decides it’s time to stop it, will the people say, ‘No, we think this way is more like an Australian fair go’, or will a majority still sense the relative lightness of their wallets and scream yet again, ‘Every man and woman and child for themselves – it’s the survival of the fittest!’ Not for long, we answer, not for long.

Here, in closing, is the last verse and chorus from ‘The Song of the Flow of Things’, from Brecht’s Mann ist Mann (translated by John Willett):

I spoke to many people and listened
Carefully and heard many opinions
And heard many say of many things: ‘That is for sure”
But when they came back they spoke differently from the way
they spoke earlier
And it was something else of which they said ‘That is for sure’.
At that I told myself: of all sure things
The surest is doubt

Don’t try to brush away the wave
That’s breaking against your foot: so long as
It stands in the stream
Fresh waves will be always breaking against it