Stuff: We put too much faith in big events to usher in real change

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Call it an illusion-less lockdown: many people, especially the relatively well-off, have greeted our latest confinement wearily, prosaically, without the odd, feverish mix of fear and anticipation that last year’s big one occasioned.

Without the sense of hope, too. Last year almost everyone – in my circles at least – was proclaiming that coronavirus would “change everything”, that we couldn’t revert to the “old normal” of environmental pollution and egregious poverty, that we would “build back better”. No-one believes that now.

It gives me no pleasure to say I never really thought a revolution was close at hand – though even I have been surprised by just how little has changed. Carbon emissions are still rising, as are state house waiting lists. We basically got our old world back, plus some homeworking.

I was mulling this over recently on one of my late-evening lockdown walks through Wellington’s Kelburn, the cold and clear night so quiet I could hear every drop of water gurgling in the drains and the “skrark, skrark” of kākā echoing across the valley. This was the peacefulness, the space for birds to flourish, that so many of my friends mourned when the last lockdown finished. It went quickly, and will go quickly again this time.

What have we learned, 18 months on, as to why so little changes? Pandemics are poor catalysts, for one thing. Change is motivated by an enemy, a thing to counter – but you can’t mobilise politically against a virus.

The most that one could have said, when trying to foment change, was that the coronavirus stemmed from our relentless incursions into nature, signalling a relationship that needed to be rebalanced. But even that’s unclear: Covid-19 could have escaped from a Wuhan lab. (Just because Trump pushed that argument in bad faith doesn’t mean it’s false.)

When it comes to sparking change, the global financial crisis, with its clear villain – the multinational banking industry – should have been a better bet, but back then too many people were still dreaming the dreams of the 1980s, too few people ready for real change.

It’s true that, when Covid-19 hit, governments suddenly looked good (well, some of them). If, in some libertarian dystopia, businesses had had to cope with the pandemic by themselves – forced to shut down as infections spread like wildfire, but with no support from the state – they would have been toast. Even the National Party’s pollster, David Farrar, thinks New Zealanders will be much more tolerant of the big state in future.

But many Kiwis, unsurprisingly, also associated the big state with a big constriction of their lives. The vibes weren’t all good. Hence the lack of any substantial redrawing of the boundaries between government and business.

And, also unsurprisingly, people wanted normality back. Behavioural science doesn’t tell us exactly how long it takes to form new habits, but it’s generally more than six weeks.

Ironically, if the first lockdown had lasted longer (and thank goodness it didn’t), we might have seen bigger shifts in our basic social and economic structures. One of the reasons Anglosphere politics became more egalitarian in the 1950s was the shared misery of World War II. But that lasted six years, not six weeks.

In any case, some countries have now had extended – though also chaotic – lockdowns, and their politics are becoming more inegalitarian, more atomised, more vindictive. Change needs solidarity, not just suffering.

Here, it might have been different if the Government had really tried to transfer the “team of five million” and “Unite against Covid-19” messages from pandemic to everyday politics. Instead it stuck to its cautious course, intent on hoovering up every last available centrist voter. As a result, there was no springboard towards structural change. “The public has just banked that [Covid] success,” as one minister told me late last year.

But perhaps we put too much faith in big events anyway. Last year I couldn’t understand the mourning for the post-lockdown drop-off in birdlife: there’s so many birds about anyway. I live on the edge of Wellington’s CBD and often there are kākā flying past my window, some of them heading for the centre of town.

This truly amazing fact results from no calamity. Rather, it reflects decades of slow, patient, far-sighted conservation work, by the founders of Zealandia but also by the unsung heroes of the regional council, whose trapping of rats and possums is partly responsible for the extraordinary flourishing of native birdlife we now see around town.

If, then, you genuinely want a country with lower carbon emissions and fewer children in poverty, as I’m sure most people do, the best course of action is to find a cause you believe in and start chipping away. Don’t wait for a catastrophe to create the change you want to see in the world.