One of the few benefits to emerge from this pandemic is that the world’s population has been given a crash course in complexity. If nothing else, many people may have learned why it makes sense to plot infection rates on a logarithmic scale, and a few may even have learned to use the word ‘exponentially’ in its true sense, rather than as a synonym for ‘a lot’.
I hope this proves an enduring lesson. Because, in truth, very little in life can be understood properly without first understanding such concepts, since barely anything involving humanity changes in a linear way.
The reason change may happen slowly, then fast, then more slowly — before sometimes reversing — is because the adoption of new ideas and behaviours spreads much like a virus: by contagion. You will see similar ‘sigmoid’ patterns in everything from drink-driving behaviour, to attitudes to homosexuality, to the use of new technology.
Behaviour is contagious because we catch it from other people. Much of what we do results from unconscious mimicry of others around us. As in virology, people’s susceptibility varies. If you do not own a microwave now, it is unlikely that you will ever buy one — you are effectively immune. Sometimes, too, a behaviour spreads rapidly at first, but dies off equally fast — as with leg–warmers, deely-bobbers and wine boxes. The spread of certain ideas may also remain confined to particular environments: outlandish strains of identity politics thrive in the hothouse setting of a university but fail to make the leap to everyday pub conversation. Just as the Spanish flu of 1918 would have been far less devastating without the mass movement caused by the end of the first world war, it is possible that video-conferencing and flexible working would not have become popular for another 20 years without the peculiar conditions created by Covid-19.
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