Pre-preface (16/05/2020): I now recognise that I should have paid more attention to Bill Gates’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein before I wrote this. Though I still think his foundation’s work has been important, I hope that Gates’s other behaviour is fully investigated by professional journalists and the legal system. Furthermore, I believe that the allegations regarding his behaviour toward his own staff are well-substantiated and, if true, speak of an abuse of employer power on his part. Accordingly, he should be expected to resign from his position of responsibility within his foundation.
Preface
I was like, 80% of the way through the process of writing this piece before it struck me that “zeitgeist” (literally “spirit of the times”) was the phrase I was looking for, so I haven’t had time to explore its use in either nineteenth century critical philosophy or in that one George Carlin documentary. In case I turn out to be repeating or contradicting their ideas, I should clarify here what I mean by the term.
I use “zeitgeist” to refer to the set of dominant ideas produced by the unique social conditions of a given time period. An idea like “democracy is good” doesn’t count, even though its dominance in western culture is probably partially a consequence of living in a democracy, because that condition is not unique to our time. You could say that zeitgeist is to ideas as fashion is to culture. Just as the practice of wearing underwear, for example, is too central to our culture to be considered a fashion trend, so too are the basic principles of society too central to be considered a part of the zeitgeist. So my basic assumption here is that there is some flexibility in what the dominant ideas of society are.
Whose time has come?
Anyone who tries their hand at politics quickly becomes familiar with the strange fluidity of public opinion. On the one hand, seemingly iron clad consensus around ideas like “racism is bad” will, much like T-1000, dissolve in the face of meaningful political action, only to reform again once pressure stops being applied. On the other hand, the legal status of homosexuality has gone from “criminal illness” to “insignificant personal trait” in the course of a few decades. The question of why these things work out the way they do is both impossible to answer and eminently worth asking – the good ones always are.
What can be said with confidence is that the zeitgeist changes with society, constantly informing and being informed by political, cultural, economic and social trends. Back in the 2000s, concerns about the Iraq war, the Bush presidency, and climate change placed ideas of objective truth and rationality at the centre of the zeitgeist. The election of a sober intellectual like Barack Obama was supposed to be the solution to this problem, but he and his agenda ran into the barriers of racism and inequality, and the zeitgeist moved accordingly to issues of identity politics. By the time governments which embraced the ideas of the new movements for equality took power, coronavirus hit, and this is driving a further shift in the zeitgeist. The political projects which succeed over the coming years will be those which are best placed to participate in this new zeitgeist.
Climate of Ignorance
A decade before the coronavirus outbreak, three factors led progressive thinkers to place scientific rationality at the centre of the zeitgeist.
The first factor was the ascendancy of the Bush administration (and to some extent that administration’s failed education policy) and a panic over religious extremism which encouraged progressive thinkers to set themselves against an imagined culture of anti-intellectualism by identifying with the rationality and empiricism of science. Culturally, this was manifested in the popularity of atheist public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, in the smug satire of Little Britain and South Park, and in the overlap between these phenomena in Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher.
Simultaneously, the emergence of climate change as a potentially apocalyptic threat to humanity which could only be addressed using newfangled renewable technologies gave a sense that scientific rationality could be our salvation
These phenomena had a nexus in the responses to climate denialism. Today’s climate change deniers are treated with the same dismissive indifference as anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, but during the Bush era, climate change denial sat side by side with the Iraq war as the unifying cause of oil companies, the Bush administration (which had opposed environmentalist Al Gore in the 2000 election) and conservative media. This was why Barack Obama could position himself as the candidate of Hope and Change by placing climate action and sober rhetoric at the centre of his campaign for president. For his contemporaries, Obama’s victory in that election represented a triumph over ignorance just as much as racism.
Less Hope, More Change
But from the very beginning of Obama’s presidency, it became clear that ignorance would not be the primary obstacle to progress. Within a month of Obama’s inauguration, backlash to the election of America’s first black president emerged in the form of the racist “Tea Party” movement. Any Republican seen to give Obama an inch would be defeated in their next election by a more merciless Tea Party candidate. Republican leadership, sensing which way the wind blew, voted en bloc against every bill Obama had the temerity to try passing, from climate change to healthcare, and Republican backbenchers followed suit whether it was in the material interests of their constituents or not. Progressive thinkers stopped believing that if they could just get the right information into the hands of voters, the path of least suffering would be revealed. Republicans knew perfectly well what they were doing. Politics isn’t about information, politics is about power.
As progressive thinkers, including me, came to put more emphasis on progress and less emphasis on thinking, we consigned climate change to the graveyard of unwinnable battles and turned our attention to the more purely political problems of identity. When climate re-entered mainstream discourse in 2018, it was under the rubric of “climate justice”, a political concept for a political issue. The new climate movements are also characterised by an enthusiasm for massive government spending, which is in turn part of a broader response to the austerity politics of ten years ago, and which I’ve talked about elsewhere (see Further Reading). Both of these ideas are embedded in the concept of The Green New Deal, which reframes climate change investment as being about infrastructure (and thus about society) rather than being about R&D (and thus about science). The implication in all these discussions is that the central innovations needed to solve climate change have been made – if we could just get governments to spend the trillions of dollars needed to halt the crisis, there wouldn’t be any crisis to speak of.
Enter the Coronavirus
The challenges presented by the pandemic are as novel to us as the questions of identity politics were to those leaving the Bush era. Many commentators have noted COVID’s disparate impacts across society, with vulnerable populations being more likely to get infected and die, and with progress for women in the workplace being set back by increased childcare responsibilities during school closures. These are tragedies which deserve to be recognised, and I will be writing about them later in the week, but they say more about the nature of the pandemic than about how to properly reckon with it. Whether you’re a white collar professional working comfortably from home or an exhausted nurse being put at risk of infection every day, the solution to your problems is the same: suppress the virus. Identity touches everything, but identity isn’t everything.
There are a million questions which need to be answered so that we can arrive at a point where the pandemic is no longer priority number one, and it’s worth laying some of them out in front of us here:
How infectious is this virus?
How harmful is it?
How does the virus spread?
How much has the virus spread?
How do we stop the virus from spreading?
How do we tell people what we know about the virus?
How hard do we need to work to tell them?
What are the costs of suppressing the virus?
What are the costs of failing to suppress the virus?
How do we trade those costs off against each other?
How can we reduce those costs?
How do we offer relief to those facing the costs of suppression?
How much relief should we offer?
How do we test for coronavirus?
How many tests should we produce and administer each day?
Who should we be testing?
What should be our advice to people who test negative/positive?
How do we treat coronavirus?
How do we develop a vaccine?
What is the quickest and safest way to make sure it works?
What are the trade offs between speed and safety?
How should we make those trade offs?
How many vaccines do we need to manufacture?
How do we manufacture that many vaccines?
How should the vaccine be distributed?
How should we split funding between education, relief, testing, treatment, and vaccines?
Who should we be vaccinating first?
How do we make people get their vaccines?
What should be our advice to people who have received the vaccine?
Who needs to be vaccinated before we stop trying to suppress the virus in other ways?
What should we do next?
This list is obviously incomplete and somewhat arbitrary, but I think there are three useful observations to be made about these questions. First, there are a lot of them. Coronavirus is a hyperobject, so pervasive in every facet of life and society that it’s impossible to reckon with the entire thing at once. Like identity, it isn’t everything, but it touches everything. Second, many of these questions resemble each other in important ways – they are questions of economics, public health, supply chain management, social psychology, and, of course, science and epidemiology. Finally, morality and identity do enter into these questions, but mostly as second order issues. For example, conversations about whether to open up schools, dining and public transport require value judgements, but only once you’ve already failed to suppress the virus – Japan and South Korea are having no problems navigating these issues right now.
In other words, Coronavirus has changed the zeitgeist, different questions are being asked, and different answers will be demanded of us.
Before I go on, though, I do want to note one other shift in the field of play: the political success of the centre left. In Ireland and America, these successes have been electoral – last year, left of centre parties won a majority of votes for the first time in the history of the Irish state, and Democrats now control both houses of Congress and the presidency. But the real leftward shift has come from the conservative parties. Obviously, Ireland’s Fine Gael party supported two huge referenda legalizing gay marriage and abortion, but they’ve also been embracing increasing social expenditures for years. In America, Republicans have abandoned their struggles against big government, the welfare state, and gay marriage, even as they have radicalised against democracy. To our East, the EU has also radically embraced levels of debt mutualisation and monetization which would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Even Boris Johnson seems to share most of the liberal elite conventional wisdom around rights for women and gay people, and the UK hasn’t been snoozing on COVID relief either.
To wit, progressives are beginning to move beyond the political problems of struggle, and towards the problems of government.
The Shape of Things to Come
To understand how these changes will affect the zeitgeist, let’s consider someone whose ideas have been in high demand during the current crisis: Bill Gates.
The accomplishments of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during this pandemic have been miraculous. Before the pandemic, they were funding research into mRNA vaccines, a technology which simply was not viable ten years ago. Once vaccines were being developed, The Gates Foundation funded the construction of factories to manufacture the vaccine. Large scale, rapid distribution of those vaccines to developing nations will only be possible because of the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization (GAVI), to which The Gates Foundation is the second largest donor (behind the UK, ahead of the US).
In other words, Gates has succeeded during the pandemic because he engaged with it on the correct terms: research and development, manufacturing, supply chain management. These are technical problems with technical solutions; the problems of government.
The Gates success story has its converse in the corresponding story of government failure. Governments around the world failed to prepare technical solutions to the technical problems presented by the pandemic. The result is that in the middle of the worst public health crisis in one hundred years, global society has found itself dependent for its survival on the benevolence of a single democratically unaccountable billionaire-funded charity. As progressives come to reckon with their failures during the pandemic, it will be this Gatesian worldview to which they reorient themselves.
It happens that just last week we were granted an insight into how this approach extrapolates out to other issues. In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates’s first book since leaving Microsoft, Gates presents a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 which places technological innovation at its centre. In theory, his arguments are completely compatible with the new climate movement as I’ve described it in the earlier paragraph: he emphasises that those in low income countries will be worst affected despite not having contributed to the problem, and he is enthusiastic about infrastructure spending of the kind prescribed by The Green New Deal. But underlying this agreement on the particulars is a difference in approach which sets him apart from the activist mainstream. Solutions which place technology at their centre implicitly boost the status of large tech corporations (and indeed tech investors like Gates himself) relative to the grassroots movements of the former zeitgeist. Such a shift in ideology will undoubtedly be seen as a threat by those with more purely left wing sensibilities.
This Gatesian technocracy is only one of the many possible zeitgeists that lie before us. Perhaps instead the pandemic will remind us of the central importance of society, leading to a new era of welfare state expansion. Or we could go in the opposite direction, becoming more isolated and individualistic in our values. Maybe, as Adam Curtis speculates at the end of his latest documentary, something completely new will happen. Whatever happens, we are not going to keep having the same tired arguments about privilege and power that have been going on since 2011. Most people have already made their minds up about questions of equality, one way or another.
An Aside
None of this is to say that progressives can’t think for themselves about all of this. After all, the struggles against elitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, racism, and sexism all existed long before it became fashionable in the 2010s for middle class, straight, cis, able-bodied white guys like me to join them, and those struggles will continue when the pandemic is over. I also don’t want to act as if the environmental movement just disappeared while I wasn’t looking at it, or imply that environmentalists haven’t carefully and rigorously arrived at their opinions about technology and innovation. What I do want to say is that the social, political, economic and cultural backdrops against which those opinions are expressed is rapidly changing, and this will have major consequences for what ideas become dominant in the years to come. Zeitgeist is about society’s demand for ideas, not progressives’ supply of them.
What Are We to Do?
These transitions are treacherous territory for progressive ideas. At their best, they can open up new and exciting ways of looking at the world. The zeitgeist of technocracy could be a force for policy experimentation and adaptation tomorrow just as the zeitgeist of identity politics was a force for liberation and decency yesterday. But in the past there has been another term for a move away from identity politics: backlash. If we forget the lessons of the past decade as we move into the next, we are dooming ourselves to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s-2000s, where intense cultural resistance to movements for equality held back the cause for decades.
But nor can we be complacent in our thinking as we move through a changing landscape. There will be people who look at everything which has unfolded over the last year and say, “All of this simply confirms my prior beliefs about how the world works.” Those people will be to the next decade as Dawkins and Gervais were to the last: object lessons in the perils of prioritising the feeling of being right over the rewards of learning from one’s mistakes.
It is this spirit of intellectual vulnerability – standing by your convictions when you know you’re right, letting in doubt when you might be wrong – that we must carry with us into the years to come. To that end, this will be the first of five posts going up over the next few weeks about the lessons I’ve learned during this pandemic. Next, I’ll talk more about intellectual vulnerability my relationship with it. After that, I’ll make the case for paying attention to the EU. Then, I’ll discuss what I believe to be the most important failure in attitude in the policy response to this crisis. Finally, I’ll be ruminate on the nature of crises in general.
Until then, let me leave you with this thought from Caitlin Moran:
“When in doubt, listen to David Bowie. In 1968, David Bowie was a gay, ginger, bonk-eyed, snaggle-toothed freak walking around south London in a dress, being shouted at by thugs. Four years later, he was still exactly that - but everybody else wanted to be like him, too.”
The zeitgeist is changing, whether you’re ready for it or not. Seize the day!
Further Reading
Who and what will rise and fall in status? - short blog post by Tyler Cowen from last March – I disagree on some of the specifics, but the basic premise is what inspired this post
Insight – Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci’s Substack – Tufekci has consistently been ahead of the curve on three of the major issues which have dominated public discourse for the last ten years: the role of social media in politics, the nature of Trump’s authoritarianism, and coronavirus. There are few better role models for thinking carefully about the modern world.
Austerity: The Story So Far – somewhat longer blog post by me from last October – another history-of-an-idea which I wish was relatively more widely read compared to some of my other posts
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: 500 page book by Naomi Klein – Of the books I have never read, this is probably the one which has influenced my thinking the most. The new zeitgeist might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing!
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women - Book by Susan Faludi – I feel like a lot of people don’t remember how fresh the feminist movement felt ten years ago. Here’s a great document of feminism’s dark ages. As in the actual dark ages, a lot of things were in fact happening, but they didn’t get that much mainstream attention.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need – 125 page book by Bill Gates – It’s good, actually. See also Bill McKibben’s negative review, which I think was unfair but which gives you a sense of the ideological conflicts at play
H. Res. 109: Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal – 14 page Resolution of the U.S. House of Representatives - Word-for-word, probably the most powerful document for understanding where the progressive movement stood in 2019.
Obama at the Hamilton Project, 2006: “This is not a bloodless process”- Textual analysis of a Barack Obama speech from Naked Capitalism – Great insight into what Obama represented at the time of his election
A Promised Land – 700 page book by Barack Obama – Clear-eyed document of the role of race and power in shaping the Obama presidency. Obama will likely prove to be a valuable historian of the 2010s.
Our 2021 Annual Letter: The Year Global Health Went Local – This year’s annual blog post from Bill and Melinda Gates – These things are always kind of a snooze fest, but if you’re interested in learning about how Gates sees the world, this and the various podcast interviews he’s been doing are a good source.
Republicans’ unhinged moderation – Blog post from Matthew Yglesias’s Substack – Behind a pay wall but I think you can get a free trial. The gist is that in becoming more interested in power for its own sake, the U.S. conservative movement has allowed its actual policy ambition to shrink. As you may have observed, I believe that trends from America tend to get exported throughout the West, and this is no exception. For more on economic policy shifts, see my austerity piece cited above.