There has been a curious trend over the past year of COVID-related lockdown. People were driving a lot less in the pandemic, but the numbers of traffic accidents and fatalities on the road and among pedestrians are soaring. In Ukraine, for instance, traffic accidents were up by nearly 5% last year. Worse, they jumped by around 18% in January 2021 over the pre-pandemic January 2020.
In the US, road fatalities per 100,000 miles driven rocketed last year by nearly one-quarter, the largest increase since the non-profit National Safety Council began keeping records back in 1921. It is especially amazing since the technological advances and the popularity of SUVs are making driving a lot safer.
Now that traffic is nearly back to normal, traffic reports around New York City are a long list of traffic jams due to crashes and resultant police activity and rubber-necking. Actually, it’s a surprise there have been so few accidents: drivers now routinely speed, disregard red lights and do not signal when turning or changing lanes. People seem to think they’re alone on the road or rather, that no one else matters.
This is a direct result of the lockdown. Living alongside other people is a skill, and like any other skill, from playing the piano to ice-skating, we get worse at it if we don’t practice. Having spent the past year on our own, we have started to forget how to pay attention to other people and, what is worse, no longer see the point of it. Yet, it is a vital skill that ensures society’s survival — especially now, when there are so many of us on this earth and technology, being as ever a double-edged sword, provides plenty of ways to hurt others and to do self-harm.
In the 1970s, writer Tom Wolfe introduced the term “the ME Decade”, astutely identifying a trend in America toward individualism and the devil-may-care attitude toward the community. That was followed by the 1980s, known as the Greed Decade, when money-grabbing and obsession with wealth, which in traditional religion and morality had been lumped with the vices and human weaknesses, was proclaimed to be a virtue. Moreover, it was a specific kind of greed, which viewed taxation by the state as theft. The libertarian, anti-government and anti-tax philosophy became popular, providing an ideological underpinning to starving our collective enterprise of financial and other resources. The task of maintaining a civilized society, in which people are protected from disease and hunger, have a roof over their heads, and are given an opportunity for advancement, became correspondingly more difficult.
In America, that became the main fault line of the widening ideological divide of the past forty years. The Left, perhaps keeping its loyalty to its community-oriented social movements of the 1960s, fought a rearguard action against the libertarian, selfish, greed-driven Right. Hilary Rodham Clinton was ridiculed for using an African proverb as the title of her 1996 book, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child,” as was Barack Obama for stating “You didn’t build that” in his 2012 election speech — mean that no success can be achieved in a vacuum and every successful business is built in the community and therefore owes a debt to the system which the community creates.
The disintegration of American society into a collection of selfish individuals is largely responsible for America’s decline of the past two decades. The United States used to be a highly organized society, but today, getting America to do anything at all is increasingly akin to herding cats. The way the country exists today, it would not have been able to prosecute a military campaign on the scale of World War II — to say nothing of building a postwar global community that has not only survived to this day, but has expanded over the past seventy years.
Accordingly, when America was hit by a deadly pandemic, it was paralyzed into inaction. Its response has been among the absolute worst in the world — on par with or even worse than such underdeveloped countries as Russia, India and Brazil. The callous disregard for other Americans has been on full sorry display throughout that past year. Even today, after 30 million infections and some 550,000 deaths, Republican-run states refuse to mandate even the wearing of masks, a simple if inconvenient precaution to prevent infecting others and to stop the virus from mutating into new, more dangerous strains.
The United States was the worst case, and this will create a major challenge for the Biden Administration as it tries to combat the economic and social consequences of the pandemic. But other countries will face a similar set of problems. And again, technology is playing a crucial, and ambiguous, role in this social process. Technology has made remote work and study possible, while also providing entertainment and greatly simplifying shopping for goods and food during the lockdown. Thanks to technology, patients have been able to consult their medical professionals from the safety of their homes. The unprecedented speed with which a plethora of vaccines were developed and tested was also due to technological advances.
At the same time, even before the pandemic technology was responsible for people, especially young people, becoming isolated and shifting into the virtual world from the real one. The lockdown only exacerbated this trend. A young acquaintance recently complained that her generation could completely lose touch with one another and never develop social skills. Even before the isolation of the past year they had little desire to communicate face to face.
Highly organized East-Asian societies were able to beat COVID with relative ease, even though the infection started in China and quickly spread across its borders to neighboring countries However, young people in China, Japan and Korea have bought into the social network culture much more eagerly than their European contemporaries. Those countries were not locked down as much as the United States and Europe, but they are likely to encounter the same problem of isolation and social breakdown in coming years.
