[ad_1]
“I’m a wildcard, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker, I have my lovely love.” To relax, the District of Columbia health authorities infuse this vaccination center on the banks of the Potomac with the soft rock styles of the Steve Miller Band. There I am, after the jab, with a whipped left deltoid, so calm as to take for granted the wonder that changes the world of Pfizer, as it teaches my cells new tricks. But then I’ve gotten used to the feats of the private sector over the last year. We all have it. And that is the problem.
If someone had given you a preview of the next twelve months in April 2020, what would have caught the attention of global supply chains: how well have they done or how well? The physical confinement of much of the planet’s workforce “should have ended the lives of consumers as we knew it. Instead, my Amazon order history over the past year is a full sou earphones, electric corkscrews, masks, Burgundy glasses, phone chargers, Richard E Grant memories, hypoallergenic bedding, Sonos speakers, masala chai and ink cartridges, with a mode if not average delivery time 48 hours.Apple got a MacBook for me in 90 minutes.There is nothing missing, it hasn’t even been rationed, neither in restaurants nor in supermarkets, and my tastes tend to be baroque.
They are not unique wonders for a nation that makes a customer deity. While Europe was closed to a point and for a duration that Americans struggle to understand, it also values its availability of things. “They have it all,” reports a friend, who was heading to the main food groups at a reopened tapas restaurant in Marylebone. “Argentine rosé, quince cake, milk candy. The private sector has outdone itself.
And he has done so, in profound ways. Last year he fell into the opinion received as a punisher for globalization. Scarcity, some of them in goods such as life or death as personal protective equipment, justified this view from an early age. The most recent crisis of semiconductors and other business-to-business appliances is a problem for recovery. But the fact that it is easy to name most of these pinch points demonstrates their relative awareness. Relative, that is, both to the sum of products in the world and to popular expectations when the pandemic began.
In most problem areas, supply is tight with skinny demand, which is why masks are no longer rare on truffles. And even while the blockades were maintained, they did not prima facie discredit the whole system. For that, you have to believe that things would have been better in a more autarkic world. You have to believe that nations would have stored essential elements or the means to deal with a contingency that occurs once a century. What a sweet faith.
The immediate lesson of the pandemic was the fragility of modernity. The ultimate lesson may be your underrated endurance. We have lived and, in too many cases, we have not been able to live, a world historical trauma. But we have also seen miracles of robustness and ingenuity, which go far beyond bioscience to the very curve of economics. It is not complacent to say so. The opposite, pessimism about the system, is the real invitation to future problems.
In the first episode of Civilization, Kenneth Clark in his most languid moment gives some reasons for the fall of the ancient world before devoting himself to one. “Confidence,” or rather his loss, is what he says he undid Rome. Without the “belief in its philosophy,” a culture becomes suggestible to external subversion, to its own foolish experiments, or simply to decay by negligence.
Globalization, though Clark would have hated the term dried up, has been the philosophy of most of the world for most of my life. After a year-long stress test during which he scored more respectably than all, but the most serene optimists could expect, the result is Buy American, Just-in-Case and the combination of a farce pretty in the Suez Canal with some internal disease of the world order. As trust decreases, don’t make sure the result will be a wisely reformed system or anything as consistent as that system.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
Carry on @FTLifeArts on Twitter to learn first about our latest stories
[ad_2]
Source link
