Apollo’s Arrow: The Coronavirus Context
Good morning everyone
Thank you for all the messages I received in response to last week’s letter on burnout. It is clear from the number of messages that I received that everyone is taking strain. I will take cognizance of this as I write to you over the next few weeks.
Today we zoom out to look at the context in which we are living, working, and trying to imagine our futures. The context of the coronavirus.
I have chosen Nicholas Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow as the lens through which to do this. I chose Christakis because he is both a physician and a sociologist. It struck me that someone who works at the interface of social systems and healthcare was well placed to give a comprehensive overview. He is also the director of The Human Nature Lab at Yale University, that focuses on “ways to intervene in social systems to make them better, to improve our health, wealth, and civic life”.
Seems like the right person for us.
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Christakis gives a comprehensive overview of how different plagues have started and ended, the impact of different public policy interventions and how vaccines are created. It’s all fascinating and way outside my scope of competence. I’ve chosen not to reflect those here lest I add noise to already overwhelming debate. However, it is well worth reading for a comprehensive overview that is removed from the noise of the day. He tells it as it is without trying to demonize, placate or encourage. I find it a powerful perspective.
In the chapter, ‘An old enemy returns’, Christakis notes that, “Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.”
He quotes John of Ephesus on the plague of Justinian, “The entire city came to a standstill as if it had perished…Thus everything ceased and stopped”. Sound familiar? This was approximately 1,500 years ago.
The point is a simple but powerful one. The world has rhythms that take no cognizance of our desire to control them. They will come and they will fade. The best we can do is build resilience.
Indeed, as Christakis points out, a big part of the stumbling response to the coronavirus were a consequence of healthcare systems oriented to efficacy and profitability, without paying attention to the need for robustness. We forgot. We forgot the world is a complex place that needs interlocking capabilities for resilience.
Coronavirus has exposed our endless efforts to control through understanding and yet he says, “one of the greatest mysteries of pandemics is why some regions are stricken and others are spared…most of the variation will be due to chance – like that seen in photographs after a tornado where many houses are blown apart right next to a few that are unaccountably left standing.”
In part life is always imponderable. We spend enormous efforts trying to understand to control. Even worse we attribute false causation, often through the lens of our preconceptions or prejudices. The history of plagues is the history of creating outsiders and ‘carriers’. All desperate misplaced attempts to give us back a sense of control. We’re better off spending that energy elsewhere.
We want answers and we want them now. Yet, pandemics have their own timescales. The emergence of knowledge has its own. We want answers now, to know, for example, how long immunity will last.
Christakis notes, “There is simply no way to accelerate the acquisition of such knowledge. We simply have to wait for time to pass.” It is about accepting ambiguity and building the patience and stamina to wait for clarity.
And if time is what we need, then best settle in for the marathon. Christakis estimate that vaccine or not, the pandemic will start to dissipate in mid-2022 and the socio-economic effects will linger until 2024.
Our world has become geared to respond immediately to the pinging and vibrating of alerts. We have become indoctrinated with the allure of instantaneous feedback. We won’t get it here. Knowledge and normality will take time, so manage your expectations, manage your resources. We’re here for a while longer.
And yet, it is not all gloom. The most effective controls came from an array of nonpharmaceutical interventions – wearing masks, social distancing, reducing social contact – this was something we all contributed to slowing the pandemic. Indeed, this has always been the way plagues were managed. There is much wisdom in the past. It’ll do us good to remember that. There is a humility in the realization that social action can be at least as effective as technological solutions.
Governments made available unprecedented funding. We all worked in different ways. Scientists collaborated with a hitherto unexperienced level of intensity. In that regard, “The pandemic functioned as a kind of object lesson: See? See what is possible?”
And perhaps that is something we can hold onto – the imagination for what is possible and the will to bring it into being can birth all manner of new freedoms.
And so, as you devise your personal and organizational strategies think about where you could slow things down, where you might delay taking decisions, how you might deepen the capacity to hold complexity, how to embrace the fact that two seemingly opposing truths may both be true, to find areas where you can give control to yourself and your people and finally, to find values that speak of building, of hope, of connection and to act systematically into them.
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When Petrarch wrote of the Black Death, he spoke of people feeling ‘lonely and bereft’. Christakis shares data that showed a quadrupling of psychological distress in USA between 2018 and the start of April 2020. There is no doubt that these trends will play out in every country in the world and will continue to intensify for much of the world during 2021.
The most powerful way I can put this is, ‘care for yourselves’. Care for yourselves in whatever makes sense to you. Certainly, moderate expectations, slow the pace, breathe deeply, listen to yourself and listen to others.
Christakis notes that “we felt sadness and grief; responded with anxiety, fear, and anger; and tried to hide the truth from one another and even from ourselves.”
These are all-too-human responses. Know that. Forgive yourself when you do react with fear and anger. Forgive others when they don’t meet your expectations. Find the quiet places from where you can admit the fear and the sadness, and not need to fix it. It’s okay to be sad in this time. It is a sad time.
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As I’ve written today, I am conscious of what a heavy missive this is. I had deliberately sought out Christakis because I felt that in confronting the honest hardship of this moment, we enable a deeper understanding, deeper connection, a more soulful collaboration with colleagues and loved ones. In the honesty, one can be freer. I hope that it provides a foundation for vulnerable connection with each other, for in the vulnerability new possibilities will emerge.
And so, the last lesson for today comes again from history. As we look back, we see that each moment like this has been followed by an exuberant rebirth.
WW1 and the Spanish Flu was followed by the Roaring Twenties, a time of massive creative ferment, of celebration of life and all that it offers. That time of exuberance is coming. It is a few years off, but if history unfolds as it always has, it will come. It will be a time of great joy, so make sure you’re ready.
Christakis shares with us the words of Agnola di Tura who said after the Black Death had subsided, “And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing.”
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Yours in friendship
Karl
PS: My clients are people who want to have significant impact, live joyful lives, and build a humane world. If you’d like to work with me, you can find out more from my website.
(This letter was first published on 21 February 2021)