It is almost self evident that no punishment seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of virtue, of goodness, of patience and peace for those who have been trained by it. It is also self evident that what we are currently living through, is also unpleasant and is a directionless kind of collective punishment which is being visited upon the world. What is not evident at all, is what if anything, that people are going to learn. As far as I have seen, the new normal looks exactly the same as the old normal, except with slightly different infrastructure. So it goes.
Small architectural design features like wine windows and dwarf doors which appeared in Europe from about the 1300s onwards in response to the Black Plague probably aren't coming back, but it was interesting to see how plexiglass screens appeared in supermarkets, buses, and banks, more or less instantly. Those plexiglass screens make things doubly more difficult when you consider that people who are on both sides of them are both wearing masks.
We don't have city walls any more because cities are massive and populations equally so; so the defensive features of ancient cities such as walls and gates which were used to shut out unfriendly enemies, unfriendly diseases and in the case of inferior insulae in the ancient city of Rome unfriendly poor people.
What we do have which marks out this particular plague, is the appearance of green ticks and marks indicating where one should sit and stand. Speaking as both a first born child which makes me prone to follow rules and as a satirical misanthrope, I rather like the idea that one's own personal space is demarcated and visible.
In the before times, some of my personal peeves were people who would nudge you with their shopping trolley to move forward while in a queue, people who do not understand the unwritten rules of bus queueing, and people who take it upon themselves to assume that because they are in a hurry that their can assume permission to push in ahead of you in a queue. Now that we live in an age where the space on the ground is marked and you can move through the queue like frogs moving from lilly pad to lilly pad, or like actors in the art of thesp who stand upon taped marks behind the praesidium arch of the stage, this is still open to impatience but is vastly improved.
I expect that at some point in the future when this pandemic becomes endemic and that we actually will be able to live with the virus instead of dying from it, that the great masses will again return to the trains and buses. I have quite enjoyed my space and serenity travelling in practically empty trains but I know that that was only for a time. What I expect when the masses return to mass transit systems, is that the new normal will look identical to the old normal. Trains and buses will again become full and there will always be those select few who refuse to know how queues, waiting, and politeness works in offering up one's seat. There will likely be a few people who have like having the extra space and this time will have trained them that taking up space with their bags is actually a public health measure rather than an act of selfishness.
As for the change in architecture which happens inside humans, although throughout the pandemic, we’ve had the news try to celebrate essential workers, uplifting local businesses (and companies like Google, Officeworks, and Woolworths all market this as a virtue), you would expect that this would translate into a better sense of appreciating what we have. Sadly, it does not.
If my reading of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, and The Truth, from a hundred years' ago during the 1918-20 flu pandemic is anything to go by, any sense of public philos and altruism is probably not going to last.
The 1918-20 flu pandemic was immediately followed by the 'roaring twenties' where people made monumental efforts to leave the pandemic with gay abandon and were keen to put it behind them as soon as possible. If that experience is to teach us anything it is that society will probably be less concerned with what other people and that the new normal will be just as brutish and boorish as it was before.
Companies like Doordash, Menulog, and Deliveroo, are already training people to think of others in the world (who get paid as little of a pittance as Uber and Lyft drivers) as little more than dancing sandwich monkeys. Push button on your app and then someone who is even below having a name, arrives with a sandwich. They then disappear and you never have to deal with them ever again; which means that there are zero consequences for how you treat them. Helpfully, we've been redesigning economic over the past 40 years so that an even smaller select few live in Magic Land and the rest have to scrobble for toilet paper.
I would like to say that in eighteen months' time that there will be production of civic virtues of goodness, of patience and peace etc. in people who have lived through this pandemic but I do not think that the new normal will be markedly different from the old normal. People's impatience in a pandemic seems to produce works of immediate panic when the pandemic yells itself into existence and then produces works of complacency once everyone has forgotten about it as soon as it’s ended. The physical destruction of assets and infrastructure is a widespread and visible sign that calamity had been and gone and demands a collective effort to rebuild everything. A pandemic does none of this and since the produce is invisible, it seems to me that it is only fleeting because of this fact.
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