David Quinn
We should dream certainly but we should also be realistic, writes David Quinn
Let Us Dream is the latest book by Pope Francis. More accurately, it is a distillation of conversations the Pontiff had with Catholic journalist and writer Austen Ivereigh, who will be familiar to many readers of this paper.
Pope’s reflections
Let Us Dream consists of the Pope’s reflections on the Covid pandemic and what the world may look like when it is all over (whatever ‘over’ will look like in this context, because Covid-19 will not completely disappear). Like many other world leaders, Francis sees the pandemic, for all the suffering it has caused, as an opportunity for a ‘great reset’, and to ‘build back better’, to borrow phrases used by other world leaders such as US President-Elect, Joe Biden.
In Let us Dream, Pope Francis recounts three previous times in his life when he was forced to take time out from his normal routine and was given time to reflect on himself.
The first was when he was a young man and needed life-saving surgery in hospital during which one of his lungs was removed.
The second is when he lived for a while in Germany in 1986 to improve his German and do research. He found himself very cut-off and lonely during that time.
The third period was when he was sent to Cordoba in Spain between 1990 and 1992 to reflect on his much-criticised leadership of the Jesuit province in Argentina during part of the military dictatorship there. He was often attacked for his harsh style.
In each case, Pope Francis said, he learnt certain lessons and emerged a spiritually more mature person.
The various lockdowns forced upon us by Covid, says Pope Francis, have been opportunities for both ourselves as individuals, and the world as a whole, to reimagine our own lives and that of the entire planet. Can we ‘build back better’?
One thing that has certainly happened is that families have spent much more time together. Especially in the first lockdown, we all had to work from home if we could, and schools and universities were closed.
Many will have found this a strain and the full toll on mental health still remains to be seen. We are not made to live at close quarters all the time. We like to be part of different groups, including those we find at work, or school, or college or in our neighbourhood.
It is also very likely that many more people will continue to work from home much more and go into the office much less”
At the same time, it has been an opportunity for husbands and wives and their children to come closer together without the strain of often long commutes to work and to do more things together.
Again, it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of all this will be on families. It is likely that in some cases, underlying relationship problems will have come to the surface and gotten worse, while in other instances they will have been solved.
The lockdowns will also give many of us a renewed appreciation of the things we can’t do, but miss, like going to Mass, attending a sports fixture, eating out, going to a local pub to meet friends, calling to one another’s home without worrying that we might pass on the infection to someone or catch it ourselves.
It is also very likely that many more people will continue to work from home much more and go into the office much less. This will be a boon in some cases for those workers and for local shops and restaurants, but might prove to be disaster for towns and city centres.
Many people will also have grown used to online shopping. What will this do long-term to retail shopping and all the people employed by the sector?
Advocates of the ‘great reset’ say the pandemic has shown us how interconnected the world is and how much we need global cooperation to solve problems. That is true, but the same interconnectedness also allows the virus to spread very fast from Wuhan in China where it originated and caused countries to begin closing borders to one another, including in the EU where free movement is supposed to be guaranteed.
National rivalry
We have also seen plenty of national rivalry and one-upmanship with China boasting it has responded to the virus much better than the US. (It is a police state, after all, with vastly superior means of controlling its citizenry). Closer to home we have been boasting about how we have handled the virus compared with the UK, although once again we should be very careful about comparing ourselves with a very different country with an older age profile and much greater population density. Even Northern Ireland is almost twice as densely populated as the Republic.
And while the response to the pandemic has inspired cooperation and altruism, it has also provoked plenty of anger and finger-wagging as we have seen plenty of times when people are perceived to be breaking the Covid rules.
What the effect of all this will be on politics remains to be seen. The economic downturn could easily lead to more voter anger, fragmentation and a further turning away from mainstream parties and towards, in some cases, the extremes.
The ‘great reset’ could go either way at this stage”
In the case of the Churches, it is quite likely to accelerate their decline in many Western countries, including Ireland. Many may not come back to Mass when life returns to something like normal, or whatever the new normal turns out to be.
Certainly, this extraordinary year should be taken as an opportunity, at both the individual and societal level, to do certain things better, and while we should dream certainly, we should also be realistic. The ‘great reset’ could go either way at this stage. It could make the world better or worse.