New World Same Humans #38
The pandemic is an Overview Effect moment: after experiencing it, we should never see our world the same way again.
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Back in the early days of the pandemic we were obsessed with the question: pause or Great Reset?
It’s a somewhat exhausted phrase now. But it still forms the primary framework via which we seek to understand the longterm significance of the virus. This week, I propose a new way of looking at what has happened. One that I think can supersede the pause or reset question and replace it with a more constructive challenge.
Before we start, a reminder to watch out for a big announcement in this Wednesday’s New Week Same Humans!
Until then, find a quiet spot, lean back, and absorb this essay, which is called ‘The Overview Effect’.
📥 Fast Download: The Overview Effect
🤚 The pandemic has undone decades of our shared history. We’ve measured the impact of the pandemic via two metrics: worldwide deaths and economic damage. But that’s only a part of the picture. The annual Goalkeepers Report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation measures annual progress against the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Across every goal, decades of improvement have been reversed. Vaccination programmes have fallen to levels last seen in the mid-1990s; it’s taken 25 weeks to undo 25 years of work.
💡 We need a new way to understand this moment. We’ve asked whether the pandemic will mark a pause or a Great Reset. But this is a parochial question, more meaningful for citizens of affluent liberal democracies than anyone else. Millions in the developing world seek not a reset, but a resumption of advancements on education, health and more. We need a new conceptual framework. We should view this as an Overview Effect moment; specifically, one that changes the way we think about progress.
🚶♂️ Is there progress in history? Progress is a NWSH obsession. Underlying much of this newsletter is a question: is there progress in the course of human affairs; or is history only a directionless meandering about?
🌍 This is an Overview Effect Moment. The Overview Effect is a phenomenon reported by astronauts, who say looking down on Earth from space fuelled in them a new sense of the preciousness, fragility, and interconnectedness of human life. The reversals on global health, education and more should provide citizens of the Global North with the same kind of ethical epiphany. They force us to see the global picture afresh. From that vantagepoint, we feel compelled to accept that the changes in train before the pandemic did constitute a form of historical progress.
🏠 We can make the world a better home. Just as with its cosmic cousin, the Overview Effect provided by the pandemic is about a change of perspective; an ethical repositioning. It shows us that we can speak meaningfully of progress in the course of human affairs. That progress means making the world a better home for humans. It also tells us important things about the nature of progress. That it is always fragile. And that the world is interconnected, so that we must make progress together or not at all.
⏩ We need a Great Resumption of Progress. The Overview Effect supersedes questions about a pause or reset. That doesn’t mean that we in the Global North should ignore the imperative that lay behind the idea of a Great Reset: to find new and more sustainable ways of living. As the Overview Effect reminds us, if we wreck the environment we wreck it for everyone. But that reset is only one small part of what is needed: a Great Resumption of Progress towards a healthier, richer, fairer and more educated world.
🤚 The pandemic has undone decades of our shared history
We’ve measured the impact of the pandemic via two sombre metrics. They are worldwide deaths, which are at least 1.07 million according to Johns Hopkins University. And economic damage, which will be a loss to the global economy of $12 trillion by the end of 2021 according to a projection from the International Monetary Fund.
But now, a broader picture is emerging. Because the truth is that even those two measurements don’t capture the full scale of what 2020 has wrought. The annual Goalkeepers Report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, published last month, goes a long way towards filling in the rest of the picture.
The report measures annual progress against the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which include an end to extreme poverty, universal wellbeing, and gender equality. Previous editions have been able to celebrate decades of uninterrupted improvements on every goal. In 2020, all that changed. Across the board, improvements are being reversed.
Take education. According to the best data, hundreds of millions of children worldwide were still affected by school closures last month. That’s an educational catastrophe, and a looming crisis for progress on global gender equality, too: history suggests that when schools reopen in West Africa, girls are less likely than boys to return.
Or take vaccination programmes, which are often used as a proxy for how well national health systems are functioning. Globally, vaccination against common infectious diseases has dropped to levels last seen in the mid-1990s. It’s taken 25 weeks to undo 25 years of work.
💡 We need a new way to understand this moment
When the pandemic began we asked whether it would mark a pause or a Great Reset.
The Goalkeepers Report makes clear that this is a parochial question, more meaningful for citizens of affluent liberal democracies than it is for anyone else. For millions in the developing world, the pandemic has brought not a pause but a reversal of much-needed change on health, education and opportunity. And those millions seek not a reset but a resumption – and acceleration – of those changes.
To understand this moment, then, we need a different conceptual framework.
So here is one: we should view this moment not as a pause or reset, but as an Overview Effect moment. One that rewires our thinking on where we are in the human story, and where we go from here. One, specifically, that changes the way we think about progress.
🚶♂️ Is there progress in history?
Regular readers will know that progress is a NWSH obsession.
This newsletter seeks to understand the forces reshaping our shared future. And underlying much of that search is a question: is there progress in human affairs? Are we citizens of 2020, in any meaningful sense, ‘further forward’ than those of 1520? Or is the course of human affairs just a shapeless meandering, with no movement towards anything that might be called better than what came before?
These days, that question is the subject of fierce debate between thinkers with opposing views of the human story.
On one side there are those, such as the superstar intellectual Steven Pinker, who say progress is undeniable. The world, says Pinker, is safer, healthier and better educated than ever, and what is that if not progress? On the other are those including the venerated British philosopher John Gray. They say that while our knowledge and technologies may advance, the only quality that really matters – our ethical sense – does not, and as such new technologies will always end up doing as much harm as good.
So who is right about progress?
🌍 This is an Overview Effect Moment
It seems to me that this moment compels us to take a new view of human progress. The sudden halt of global advances on health, education, gender equality and more makes for an ethical jolt that shocks those of us in the Global North out of our parochialism, and causes us to see the entire global picture afresh. In short, it provides a kind of Overview Effect.
The Overview Effect is a phenomenon reported among those who have looked down at Earth from space. Many astronauts say that their first view of the entire planet prompted a kind of personal ethical reinvention – fuelled by a new sense of the preciousness, fragility, and interconnectedness of human life. The Overview Effect doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know. Rather, it makes you feel a set of ethical truths in a new and more intense way.
I think that this moment, and the reversals it has engendered, should provide citizens of the Global North with the same kind of epiphany. When it comes to human progress, this is our Overview Effect moment.
Any informed citizen of the Global North has long known that sweeping changes are occurring in the developing world. But apart from a few engaged in the frontline struggle, it has been too easy to disregard those changes. Too easy to disregard advancements on, for example, vaccines and preventable infectious disease, because we take the eradication of those diseases in our own countries for granted. The same can be said for basic education, and the end of extreme poverty.
Across multiple and foundational domains of human life, we in the Global North have been liable to take our own gains for granted. And that’s skewed our view of the human story, and our collective thinking on the possibility of progress in human affairs.
The Overview Effect of 2020 opens our eyes to a less parochial, and finally truly global, view. For decades now we’ve been advancing a set of changes that have reduced suffering and improved welfare for hundreds of millions of people. Now we see those changes come to a shuddering halt, and then shift into reverse. Are we to believe that this is a morally neutral set of events? That what was happening before the pandemic can’t be called progress? Tell that to the millions in the developing world who won’t be able to vaccinate their children against common infectious diseases this year. Or those whose education has been prematurely ended.
Seen in this way, it becomes clear that we are – or were – in the middle of a great transformation. And it feels impossible, even perverse, to argue against the idea that this transformation constituted progress.
🏠 We can make the world a better home
Just as with its cosmic cousin, the Overview Effect provided by the pandemic doesn’t necessarily give us new information. Rather, it’s about a change of perspective; an ethical repositioning.
I think this epiphany not only helps us to conclude that we can speak meaningfully of historical progress, but also contains some important lessons about its nature.
The fierce debate between Pinker and Gray over progress is bedevilled in part by the tendency of those two thinkers to define progress differently, and then talk past one another.
The Overview Effect pushes us to embrace a view that is both global and practical; one that pays attention to human lives as they are lived. Seek the implications of that shift, and I think we can fruitfully redefine progress as change that makes the world a better home for humans. Such a definition overcomes many of Gray’s objections to the idea that progress is possible for humans.
But the Overview Effect also reminds us that this progress is fragile; it can be halted or reversed. And if we take our progress for granted, that only becomes more likely.
Last, by forcing us to take a global view the Overview Effect provides a powerful lesson in the interconnectedness of all things. New Zealand, points out the Goalkeepers Report, has had very few cases of coronavirus, but its economy is still shrinking. A global view reminds that the world is increasingly a single, interconnected system, such that a crisis in one place affects every place.
⏩ We need a Great Resumption of Progress
Progress means making the world a better home for humans. It is always fragile. And we make it together, or not at all.
Three powerful lessons to take out of 2020. Together, it seems to me that they supersede questions about a pause or reset, and instead establish a new and more valuable framework via which to understand this moment.
That doesn’t mean that we in the Global North should ignore the imperative that lay behind the idea of a Great Reset: to find new and more sustainable ways of living. As the Overview Effect reminds us, if we wreck the environment we wreck it for everyone. Environmental sustainability and progress are closely related.
But take the global view, and that reset can be seen to be only one small part of what is needed: a Great Resumption of Progress towards a healthier, richer, fairer and more educated world.
The great danger now, says the Goalkeepers Report, is that right when a unified global effort is most needed the powerful nations of Earth lose faith in such efforts, and instead seek to isolate themselves. The data provided by that report is our best shot at an antidote to popular consent for such a policy. We should make sure that everyone gets to see it that data, and has the chance, at least, to experience the Overview Effect of 2020.
This is ground control to Major Tom
Thanks for reading this week.
If the space tourism industry has its way, then one day soon we may all be able to experience the original Overview Effect. Until then, New World Same Humans will continue its quest to see clearly the changing world of today and tomorrow.
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David.