Future Shock

There is a tendency to attribute secular shifts to shocks. Major changes are deemed to be sudden responses to unexpected events, rather than the slow working through of trends that have been decades in the making. A contemporary example is Brexit, which despite the high drama of the last four years has been in the post since the mid-80s and won't fully work itself out till 2040. In popular British history, the daddy of all shocks (though definitely not a surprise) was World War Two, though its social and economic ramifications weren't as great as those of the Great War. The NHS is seen as a response to the popular mobilisation of wartime rather than the logical conclusion of a process of health reform that began in the 1920s, while you could easily be forgiven for imagining that there was no welfare state prior to 1939. The Attlee government is taken to mark the point at which the British Empire began to fragment, essentially because of Indian independence in 1947, despite the administration's actual reluctance to begin decolonisation (motivated not just by racism but by a desire to generate export dollars from colonial ouput in order to pay off US war loans). In fact, the Empire had been creaking at the seams since the Treaty of Versailles acknowledged national self-determination.

This tale of the war as a disjuncture has been challenged by many revisionist historians over the years (and notably by David Edgerton recently), but apart from the attraction of just-so stories or simple cause-and-effect, what the tendency to subscribe to such narratives highlights is the difficulty of thinking outside the framework of historicism and its clean breaks: acknowledging that the twentieth century is still happening somewhere (e.g. the "Red Wall") and that the twenty-first arrived in some respects forty years ago (when kids in those northern small towns were listening to Duran Duran or Cabaret Voltaire). As William Gibson famously put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". This has a particular resonance today as we wonder what lasting impact the Covid-19 pandemic will have on society, from the imagined desertion of cities to a life lived largely online. I am sceptical about many of the predictions. An early, preventable death from the virus is a shock to the individual, but it doesn't follow that deaths in aggregate will constitute a shock to society (even if the excess is steadily advancing towards the total civilian casualties in WW2 of 67,000).

People have been moving out of cities for some years now, as unaffordable property prices and improvements to transport make commuting easier (it may not feel easier if you're crammed on a train into London, but that the train is packed despite steady increases in capacity is telling). Likewise, working from home has grown since the hyperbole of digital cottagers in the 1990s. The numbers who work remotely full-time are still quite small, but part-time remote working has become normal among middle class professionals. The pandemic lockdowns will have accelerated this trend, but without Covid-19 we would probably have seen an inflexion point in many sectors of the city-based economy around now anyway. For example, the slow death of high-street retail started years ago, reducing car usage is well-established public policy, and new office developments have been trending downwards since the building booms of the 1980s and 90s. It's worth noting that the latter slowing pre-dates the 2008 crash as well as Brexit, though both will no doubt be cited as reasons for the City of London's relative decline over the coming years.

The pandemic is primarily a demand shock - a fall in consumption that has pushed up savings and exerted further pressure to keep interest rates low or even negative - but many commentators think that the consequences will turn out to be "scarring" on the supply side, or hysteresis. This can take a material form in the case of capital goods that are left "stranded" if society fundamantally changes - e.g. empty office blocks - but it can also take the form of abandoned human capital, such as workers having to change not just jobs but sectors, thereby seeing skills built up over many years going to waste and capabilities reset to zero. As FlipChartRick recently put it, surveying a perfect storm of shocks, "The combined effect of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Brexit and the Covid pandemic have left our economy permanently scarred." I think this is a questionable claim when viewed objectively (you could as plausibly argue that the greater scarring occured in the 1980s, when we committed to a service economy locked in to lower trend growth), but it obviously meets an emotional need for the road not taken: the future will be worse than it might otherwise have been. 

Capital waste is endemic to capitalism. That, after all, is the fundamental argument for planning, which even the most neoliberal governments still accept the need for in many areas. You only have to look at the sorry history of Britain's railways, from the over-capacity of the nineteenth century "mania" through the long-delayed rationalisation of Beeching to today's farcical attempts to avoid the formality of nationalisation. In contrast, it is perfectly normal - even healthy - for people to acquire and then lose skills over their lifetime. To see this as "waste", or a poor return on investment, simply highlights the dubious ideological frame of "human capital" and its attempt to promote labour from an equally-dubious commodity to a financial instrument (it also contradicts the obsession with retraining and flexibility). We need to distinguish between physical capital (most obviously buildings) and humanity if we are to think straight. The transposition of the pathology of capitalism - its tendency towards crisis, its social disruption, its ecological destruction - onto humanity itself leads to the seeming paradox that we can neither envisage change yet are always imagining apocalyptic ruptures. 

As Frederic Jameson famously put it in his essay Future City, "Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world." What's rarely noted is that this observation followed a reference to Ursula Le Guin's vision, in The Lathe of Heaven, of buildings "melting". In other words, the world being addressed here is that of urbanity and its poets are less the cynical but optimistic cyberpunks and more the Ballardian pessimists. The disaster film, or the superhero film in which disaster is narrowly averted after much damage, has become as emblematic of our times as the zombie film and its chagrin over humanity's debased state was in the years before 2008. Central to this genre is the destruction of the city, which if you were to judge by Hollywood's ouput is a far more real threat than climate change. Even when the latter takes centre stage, it is the climate's effect on the metropolis that is usually focused upon, and not just because a flooded Manhattan is more cinematically engaging than a flooded prairie.

If we go further back in time, we can see the Romantic obsession with picturesque ruins as a response to the early stages of industrialisation, but perhaps more significant was the vogue for large-scale pictures of apocalyptic destruction in the Victorian era, such as the work of John Martin. These combined not only the violent sweeping away of the world but a clear moral message, most obviously in paintings such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The belief that the pandemic is a judgement on us all has helped to drive the "changed utterly" narrative, while the flowering of conspiracy theories, from the Great Reset to the belief that lockdown is disaster socialism in action, clearly reflects both a popular fear of capitalism and an elite anxiety about that fear. But just as we optimistically imagine a radically changed capitalism of home-baking and Ocado deliveries, or pessimistically dread a broken capitalism giving way to social carnage and xenophobic nationalism amongst the ruins, so we exaggerate both the ease with which a social and economic order can change and the vulnerability of the existing order in the face of shocks. This seems strikingly naive when viewed in the context of history, whether over the last century or the last decade.

The city will survive, but it will also continue to slowly change in composition and size, just as it has done over the last three centuries of expansion and temporary contraction. The global population continues to shift from the rural to the urban, and there seems little likelihood that meagcities will not continue to grow, particularly in Asia and Africa, regardless of how much high-speed fibre is laid. This spread of urbanity beyond the first world will make city-dwelling less attractive to many in developed countries (a phrase that will increasingly be meaningless, of course), but there has always been a constituency that demonised the urban and valorised the imagined bucolic. Without them, our suburbs would look very different. Pret will not disappear, it will simply open more branches on suburban high streets. Workers will still commute into cities, just not necessarily every day (and, who knows, perhaps the four day week will creep in via the back door of home-working). There will still be cars.