Many of us remember the last major catastrophe to reshape the world and destabilise our sense of global security. On September 11, 2001, people all over the world were glued to their screens, watching as history unfolded in vibrant expressions of anguish, anger and eventually solidarity.
The upshot was a series of conflicting strategies about how best to move forward in light of what was then the ‘new normal’. It is not difficult to see why the current pandemic has magnified those concerns, in many unexpected ways. While the effects of 9/11 were felt most in international travel, the coronavirus has pushed us somewhat further.
Social distancing and sheltering at home have made it even clearer that our vulnerability is not, and never has been, limited to external threats.
For this reason, while empowering our communities to take urgent action, the popular rhetoric of a ‘war against the virus’ misses the mark in some important ways. Why? Because this situation calls for individuals to take an unprecedented level of interest in the well-being of their neighbours.
It sometimes sounds like an empty platitude but the Golden Rule has long figured in the philosophical and historical traditions of humanity.
Doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves is a shimmering thread that encircles our social lives.
However, it is now clear that this principle has consistently been at odds with the business-first credo that dominates international governments and has done so for decades.
Our response to the outbreak is therefore an indication of far deeper disease, troubling the body politic. Long before a strand of RNA turned our world upside down, the underlying tension between civic responsibility and individual desire were front-and-centre.
Which is why the government calling for care, effectively appealing to the ‘better nature’ (baldly said, the conscience) of people in Malta, is somewhat ironic.
The restructuring of our society has pulled out many of those roots that tethered us together, that instituted those communities of care. Not simply in terms of time spent with family rather than at work, or social contact rather than atomised self-isolation.
The narratives that underpin Maltese society have progressively placed economic ambitions above the common destiny of our islands, to the detriment of its ecology, built environment and cultural heritage. If everything is for sale, then it follows that nothing is priceless.
What the coronavirus has initiated, in a way that nobody could have foreseen, is a re-evaluation of the logic that led us to a place where individuals, families and communities are radically disconnected from one another’s authentic needs and aspirations. Perhaps this is why so many people are positively impressed by the grassroots outpouring of camaraderie on social media.
Which is not to say that these expressions of support are not admirable, far from it. However, the fact that they had become such a rarity as to now seem remarkable must give us cause for concern.
If we are to harness whatever opportunities arise, in the aftermath of the economic, social and political transformations that will undoubtably follow the coronavirus in Malta, then there would be no better place to begin than within this unprecedented lull.
To use this time to ask ourselves what it is about our experiences, living together as the people of Malta, that deserves to be carried forward into our collective future?
And what lessons from our past are we now in a better position to understand, and hopefully, never to repeat again?