To frame then what this blog entry is about, it is essentially about my dive into trying to understand human behaviour around how people select to follow health guidelines during Covid-19. Now to be clear my discussion below will be interwoven with other thoughts which have been dancing across my consciousness in recent times. I have decided to structure the writing around a series of words, and hence the title of the entry. Although it may sound rather negative, I hope that you can observe my undercurrent of hope.
I begin with Fear. To begin with fear is both obvious and also rudimentary. Much of our behaviour as humans is driven by what we fear. Fear is a straightforward way to control people often used by people in positions of power. We are positioned in society to think that there is always an us versus them, that if we belong to a tribe where people are just like us we do not have to fear the other whom we do not know or whose view on life we cannot identify with. Once you remove the illusion that there is something to fear from what you do not know, it is like signing a torch down a dark alley only to see at the end that someone has painted a flower on the concrete wall. We fear what we do not know, and we are controlled by that fear to never shine the torch. So much of the rhetoric around Covid-19 in the media has been based on fear. I will never forget a YouTube video which went around in early April of this year made apparently by a doctor on how to deal with your grocery shopping when you returned home. I watched the first three minutes and had to turn it off as I could not endure the messaging. Now to clarify I completely understand that there was so little we knew about Covid-19 when it first emerged, and scientists were working around the clock to offer guidance. That said this video was scripted to stoke fear and anxiety around one of the simple pleasures that life has to offer – food. The video is just one example of so much mainstream media which insisted on having people frame their behaviour around fear. The biggest single drawback of a behaviour based on fear is that it leaves no room for a person to have any consideration for others. Fear speaks to the consumer culture, we are ensnared in where the narrative is, ‘I must have’ ‘I must keep up with the Jones’ ‘I want’. To ‘the need to have’, I do believe there has been some shift as people realise that they can survive without when the access is removed. As the background noise of ‘I need’ has eased I have noticed a new phenomenon in Vancouver – the tenuous possibility of friendliness. I love living in Vancouver as I have attested to in previous blog entries, but as many big cities it is certainly not known for its friendly banter amongst strangers. The evolutionary biologist Brian Hare believes that our species of humans (homosapiens) survived when other humans didn’t because they learned to be friendly. It may sound farfetched but just pause for a moment and think about how much your day is when someone smiles at you, holds in the door or helps you reach something on a shelf – simple actions but so powerful. To me these simple acts of friendliness are how we can make small steps in addressing the fear of the ‘other’.
As someone who thrives on seeing the light-bulb moment on my students faces, I have struggled with ‘Zoom teaching’, and look forward to the day when I can sit in my office at UBC and eavesdrop on the debates students have outside my door on a challenging concept they learned in class. My personal experience aside, the word I have heard most frequently from many is the pleasure of the sense of autonomy they have felt from working from home without someone looking over their shoulders. Of course, we all miss the spontaneous interactions we enjoy with colleagues and the dance which is the workplace with all its prescribed moves, but when you empower a person to take responsibility for something there is no greater gift. It is the moment a parent lets go of the back of a child’s bicycle and the child keeps going realising they can do it on their own. It is the moment your grandmother talks you through her pavlova recipe and you succeed in making it yourself. It is the moment you take hold of that fear of being vulnerable and say, ‘I am not ok I need help’. In all of these moments it is about an achievement, but most importantly it is the autonomous sense of the moment. There does not to be a constant agenda or mandate to be met. Each of us is different in how we navigate our lives, our emotions, our achievements, and there is no greater feeling than ‘owning’ that specific moment. People working from home over the past nine months had the opportunity to structure their day, and get their work done without the fear of not meeting someone else’s criteria. There it is again that word fear – it creeps in everywhere! To use the analogy of a sports team, the team will perform best if every member of the team is valued and given an opportunity to ‘shine’ as part of the whole. We are too quick to reward individuals who are overconfident, manipulative and self-centred, and modern workplaces have been constructed for the most part around a sense of ‘clawing the way to the top’. Some say the physical office has changed forever due to Covid-19, I suppose only time will tell, but what I do hope is that we do not return to a time of corner offices for the Big Brother manager and a loss of autonomy. Cal Newport, a computer scientist contends that long-term functional remote working is only possible if we deal with our management problem. I acknowledge with the word autonomy that many parents (mothers especially) have suffered immensely during the lockdown from being overwhelmed with childcare responsibilities as well as the need to work.
At the start of November new stricter restrictions were outlined by our provincial health officer in BC. The main culprit of our second wave was said to be weddings and large social gathering especially in one of health region – there are five health regions in BC. The health region in which the cases were rising fastest borders on Metro Vancouver and is the most ethnically diverse of the five regions with the highest number of recent immigrants to BC. There was a lot of Canadian style polite debating on the radio about whether the messaging was getting out properly due to different language barriers. Dr. Bonnie Henry, our provincial health officer, would not ‘point her finger’ but kept encouraging people to stop the house gathering. My initial reaction was frustration. You can criticize me, and we can certainly debate this, hopefully face-to-face in the not too distant future, but I do not believe the multicultural model as adopted in Canada and Ireland works. My critique is nothing to do with immigration or not feeling incredibly blessed to be part of such a diverse society, it is based on my observation in the different places I have lived and been a ‘guest’ is that multiculturalism does not propagate a sense of belonging or ownership of a society. Multiculturalism as it exists in its current form leads to the situation of ‘us versus them’ and fear. There is nothing for people from different backgrounds to feel a part of and so they hold onto, sometimes the very worst of, their own cultural identity. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about religious tolerance as I find it fascinating that people who immigrate to North America (and I acknowledge that the US is not based on a multicultural model) tend to become much more religiously extreme than the role religion plays in the country where their ancestors came from. Religion becomes a really important aspect of their identity and is used as a way to ‘other’ themselves from people they do not agree with. We are seeing this across Europe as well with the rise of fundamentalist Islam. My ‘rant’ so to speak on thinking about multicultural ideals and how they were playing out in Covid-19 lockdown lack of adherence to rules, was that different people felt entitled to continue their way of life because it is their right in a multicultural context. I found myself festering on this thought for a few weeks and disliking where my mind went and the feelings that came up for me. I processed my thinking, and I of course have no answers but more two points which stay with me. The first is that the biggest issue with multiculturalism as a failed model, is that it is still premised on the continued existence of a settler colonial structure (in North America and Australia) or a traditional structure (in Europe) so of course people fight hard to maintain some autonomy of who they are. The second is a failure of the neoliberal system as is (I always manage to bring it back to economics!). As I said the health region with the highest cases is the region where most recent immigrants to BC live as it is the most affordable in the Lower Mainland, and these are also the people who work many of the low-paid services jobs that have continued to be essential and hence has put many of them at great risk. So I still maintain multiculturalism if a poor model for a society, but in recent weeks I have turned to thinking more specifically on the failure of liberalism.
People around the world were first shocked by Trump’s election in 2016 and then shocked that more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. I am not. Trump is a symptom not a driver of where we find ourselves today. Covid-19 has thrown wide open so many undercurrents of the massive inequalities that societies all over the world are experiencing. Some argue that selfishness if killing liberalism and that only through self-sacrifice and placing collective interests at the heart of discussions can we save liberal democracy. I have two reactions to that: firstly, liberal democracy in its truest form has never existed, especially not in North America. My second reaction, is what the ‘hell’ is the collective good?! Our fears have driven us so far apart from one another as human beings that we have lost sight of what it truly means to be part of a collective, to do something not because it will get ‘me’ ahead but simply because it adds to a cause bigger than me. Liberalism is not a doctrine like communism where there is a prescribed text to be followed, rather liberalism is based on tolerance and a belief that ultimately people should be given the right speak and act as they wish (John Stuart Mill –On Liberty). I find this idea absurd, the notion that every human should spend their life going about saying and doing exactly as they wish – how selfish is that. Unfortunately, coupled together with industrial capitalism that is exactly the world we find ourselves in today. The system is designed in such a manner to encourage the individual to strive for themselves and to stop at nothing. There is no common good here. I see it so acutely with the behaviour of so many during the Covid-19 restrictions, their behaviour indicating no thought to others but only for their self-gratification. It is a dark thought, but if you know me at all you know that I do believe in humanity. I have hope …
That hope comes from tolerance. What Covid-19 has done for the world is that it has united us all within one experience, even given the vast distances and realities of where we are each based. Covid-19 has made us all so aware of our own fragility. Although Covid-19 has by no means affected people in the same way given the vast inequalities we have in our societies, it has given the world a common experience. People have become more aware of their neighbours here in Vancouver. Groups started up within days of the pandemic to support people who needed help. We have all become acutely aware of the massive disparities in our wealthy societies where some people have nothing. It is from this acknowledgement of a common experience that tolerance can grow – we are not so different after all.
And so I end with empathy. A society with true acceptance and a belief in a shared common good can only exist if we have empathy for one another. This does not mean that we all have to have the same beliefs, desires or ways of being in the world, but it does mean that we can accept that we are part of something bigger. It is the moment a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim sit down together and realise that in actual fact their beliefs are not different. It is two friends who can have wonderful political and social debates but have entirely different tastes in music. It is recognition that ultimately people want the same things for themselves and their families. My deepest wish is that Covid-19 has given us greater empathy for each other as we all navigate the strange reality which 2020 has brought us. If we empathize with someone guess what emotion is thrown out the window – yes - fear!
I am fostering a hopeful present and so I end with a word a good friend used in a conversation we had recently about navigating the complexity of human relationships – TEAM. If we think of ourselves as part of different teams, our romantic relationship, our extended families, our friendships, our workplace and then scale it out to thinking about more and more people as part of that team. It is a great analogy to think of us as working together towards something rather than battling each other. As part of a team we can face Covid-19, climate change, and other future challenges. I live and ‘fight’ in hope for the team(s) I believe in…
1 comment:
Great and thoughtful blog. I agree with you on the value of empathy and tolerance.
Not totally convinced about seeing ourselves as teams. Using sport metaphors and terminology dominates writing on organisations and does have some value. But sports is about collaborating to achieve goals/objectives but is also about competition and winning - in sports, regulation time ties require overtime until one team 'beats' their adversary.
Community is for me a better concept of sharing and conotates shared ownership, shared accountability and working together based on a shared set of values.
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