Heroes Not Zombies

Here in Europe the school year is starting and for most children they haven’t been to school since about March or April because of this pandemic. Although we know now that children under the age of 14 seem to be almost unaffected by COVID-19 there is a lot of anxiety about children spreading the virus through the community, and, perhaps more specifically, to the adults who work in the schools. So each country has been making cautious preparations for the re-opening of its schools, looking at everything from cleaning regimes, the use of hand gels and masks, and the way children spend their time in the school buildings.

Out of all this, at least in the UK, has emerged a concept of “bubbles”. The idea is to have children spend most of their school day with a small group of other children and teachers…..often much smaller than a regular class size. The same concept of “bubbles” has also been used for the wider community in the UK, with lockdown rules easing gradually to allow slightly more people to interact on a daily basis – two households meeting up, then three perhaps; limitations to the number of people who can gather in any one place but allowing particular groups or families to meet up and spend regular time together.

I think it’s an interesting idea. And, as this photo shows, a potentially beautiful one. This photo is of breaking waves on a beach in Western France where the land meets the Atlantic. The bubbles forming in the surf are just gorgeous, aren’t they?

It strikes me that this bubbles idea highlights a major issue for our societies and the way we organise our daily lives. It’s the issue of size. Mass gatherings, mass transport, mass tourism, have been shown to be amongst the most vulnerable points for us…..the circumstances which lead to most infections. The social distancing measures that each country has brought in have been based on the understanding that the more you keep people together in closed spaces the more the disease spreads.

So now we are seeing a huge increase in “home working”, and, it would seem, a large number of people find they actually prefer that to spending time every day packed onto buses or trains with hundreds of strangers, then working all day in the shared spaces of offices. People are learning to live locally, enjoying their local parks, shops, cafes etc now, instead of traveling long distances to share time with masses of strangers in huge workplaces, shopping centres and so on.

I’ve decided to re-read a book which made a huge impact on me when I young – “Small is Beautiful” by E F Schumacher. It’ll be interesting to revisit it in the light of what we’ve learned since it was written in 1974, and in the light of our experience of this pandemic. What I remember of the book is the key point that big is not best…..that we should try to create societies at human scales instead of around mass production and mass consumption.

Maybe the “new normal” will involve a lot less “mass” anything – maybe we will move towards a more human scale everywhere, overturning the industrialised principles of the last century to abandon so called “efficiencies of scale” (which have probably only ever been useful in the manufacture and delivery of products). Maybe we will start to create smaller schools, smaller classes, smaller hospitals, smaller communities. Maybe we will move towards more diversity and less uniformity.

We are more able to do that now. We now understand that complex systems are like vast interconnected networks of nodes and links. We know that the most robust and most resilient systems are diverse and adaptable. We know that distributed power and responsibility produces more sustainable systems and organisations than hierarchical, command and control, massively scaled ones.

Integration is the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well differentiated parts. It’s how the body works. Not with a command centre, but with interconnected, responsive, open networks. It’s how Nature works, through inter-dependent, diverse elements within ecosystems.

Is this our model for a “new normal”?

Human scale. Small. Diverse, open and healthily inter-connected? Can we see a future way to live in this beautiful image of bubbles?