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Opinion | Will the coronavirus cost Trump a second term? Will it kill neoliberalism? Tread carefully when turning to history for answers
- Because the world has changed so rapidly, we can only draw partial lessons from history
- The present crisis could be best understood as a continuation of the global financial crisis of 2008. If the same remedies are applied, the future will not be pretty
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
In the desperation to try and understand the pandemic, there’s been an outbreak of people making startling historical claims.
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During a crisis, what little predictive power the social sciences have tends to evaporate. Perhaps this is why we’ve seen the Covid-19 crisis compared to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Or, at the other end of the extreme, like philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the Gulf War, it has been asserted that the Covid-19 pandemic is not happening.
The uncertainty is also a consequence of the fact that, alongside just-in-time supply chains, one of the defining features of the 21st century is communication technology.
Social media facilitates the sharing of X-rays of fibrotic lungs, photos of mass graves and decontextualised infographics. It encourages an atmosphere of constant low-level panic. This leaves people struggling to understand how the world is changing and what their response should be.
As historians, we’re interested in how historical analogies can be used in scenario planning in the widest and most ambitious sense. We suggest that we can help build an analysis of the future by stitching together composite stories from the past.
To find practical responses to the pandemic, politicians, policymakers and commentators have already turned to the archives. Although it wasn’t called that, “social distancing” was a policy implemented during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920.
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