Forward Echoes, Echoes Forward

At the risk of oversharing, I have shingles.

I’m fine, I’m on antivirals, but it got me thinking about the past and the future and the interrelation thereof.

The reason I have shingles is because I had chickenpox as a child. If you’re unfamiliar with the relationship between the two it’s quite straightforward (and to my mind somewhat disconcerting): the virus that gives you chickenpox (varicella-zoster), usually as a child, never clears your body. Instead it sits dormant in your central nervous system (brain, brain stem and spinal cord), ready to re-emerge when your immune system is somewhat supressed, which can be due to a myriad of causes: a viral or bacterial infection, stress, or even as a consequence of your body struggling through a heatwave. In my case, I’m not sure what triggered it, but I did just suffer through ten days of 40C (104F) or higher temperatures without air con. I’m careful with these things, but also possible I had an asymptomatic covid infection (there’s a summer wave).

So who knows. The point being, chickenpox is not a one-and-done like many parents who shrug off an infection in their child as ‘good to get it over with’ believe. Or those who send their children to chickenpox parties for the same reason. It’s more like a one-and-forever. Get the virus once, be at risk of its re-emergence forever. Which is not great. (Unfortunately, I’m too old to have had the chickenpox vaccine as a child and I’m too young to be eligible for the shingles vaccine).

I don’t suppose many parents are worried or even thinking about what a chickenpox infection in their kid might do to them as an adult (if they even know it will do anything, given the poor and degrading public health information landscape). But most will be relieved when their child comes through unscathed, and move on with life.

Now here I am, thirty years later, suffering the consequences of something long forgotten, an event in my relatively deep past. The truth is, so often we humans conceive of events as being discontinuous, isolated, and not shaped by past occurrences or contexts. Events are viewed as random items of chance drawn from a hat, rather than contingent on decisions that came before.

How often do we see this in the reporting of global events? Israel was attacked on October 7th completely out of the blue, entirely unprovoked. Nothing prior to that could explain it (a few weeks after October 7th I wrote about what I called the causality denial surrounding the attack here). We can also apply this to September 11th, which had its genesis thirty years earlier in the arming of Bin Laden and the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Or the invasion of Iraq, a supposed one-and-done on the geopolitical level that the architects imagined could be concluded in a few weeks. The invasion instead set the stage for a decade of civil war, mass death and the rise of ISIS/ISIL. We can apply it to the pandemic, a thing that just happened, a random virus popping out of nowhere without being preceded by causal events. We can also apply it to historic wildfires and floods which are often thought of, and reported, as standalone events, acts of God without any contributing factors.

And how frequently do we see it in policy and legislation? So often a law is argued for on a relatively narrow basis, informed by current events, yet ends up, years or decades later, being applied in ways that broaden and betray the stated intention of the law.

The UK’s terrorism legislation is a good example. Passed without much controversy in the 2000s to stop suicide bombers, the law is now being applied to arrest grandmothers in wheelchairs on suspicion of terror offences. Another good example I wrote about recently is the UK’s online safety act. Argued for and passed with little disagreement as a way to stop kids accessing porn, it has quickly been interpreted much more broadly and is locking people out of news websites, YouTube and Reddit.

Perhaps it’s wilful naivety, perhaps it’s malignant intent. But so often we see our present being negatively shaped by events or laws that have echoed forward in what appear to be unintended ways. Crucially, these events and laws are always at the time deemed perfectly sensible, and any opposition is considered hysterical and neurotic by the technocratic adults in the room. From the invasion of Iraq to the dangers of unrestrained covid infections to the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Hubristic overconfidence and righteousness leading to death and catastrophe has been a constant. Most of twenty-first century history appears to fall into this category.

And as my rash spread and my blisters puffed, I wondered if anything could explain this propensity to disregard or discount the future in favour of the present. And it turns out there are numerous theories in social psychology that do just that.

One is known as event segmentation theory, which describes the process by which humans find it easier to make sense of the world by parsing the totality of experience into discrete events with a defined beginning and end. It’s difficult to hold in your mind an understanding of the world (and your life) as an essentially continuous experience in which the past informs the present, the present is informed by the past, and also informs the future. It’s easier, cognitively, to splice things up into digestible chunks: consigning the past to a singular event that is ‘over’ enables a greater feeling of control and agency over our future.

Another theory is fundamental attribution error, a cognitive bias which explains the tendency to underestimate historical causes and overweigh immediate features when explaining outcomes. This bias leads us to see each event as a fresh start rather than preceded by stimulating factors. Shingles, October 7th, 9/11, mass migration, the election of Donald Trump as president. These are not mere moments in time, but deeply embedded in a prior chain of causality.

And now today, how many people believe a holocaust is just a moment in time? A bad thing that won’t inform the future but will just, at some unspecified point in the future, simply be over. Both these theories suggest a lot of people will want to think about Gaza in this way, will want to parcel it off and not dwell on the ramifications. In reality, the erasure of Gaza and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people will echo profoundly for decades into the future. International law will be judged and shaped by it. Politicians will sink or swim based on how they reacted to it. The liberals who tied themselves so closely to Israel just do not seem to understand this. They don’t seem to realise that Gaza will be on their gravestones. Right-wing politicians in favour of genocide do know this, and wear it proudly. Many of their supporters agree with mass murdering Muslims. But liberal centrists will be dragged by Gaza to political and moral depths from which they will never recover.

The truth is, many of our greatest threats stem from an unwillingness or refusal to consider the consequences of current behaviour and actions on the future. Our elites are plagued by a technocratic overweighing of needs, driven by capitalist and imperialist requirements, in the immediate present. As a result, we are often prevented from accurately assessing what lies in store for our future.

The underlying conditions of destabilisation that are rocking our world - climate breakdown, militarism, the surveillance state, AI, the erosion of public health, environmental pollutants and plastics - are outgrowths of the same cognitive biases. All began and are sustained by what in the moment are considered eminently sensible politics, from fossil fuel expansion to ‘living with covid’ to a public and private square saturated with surveillance technology.

The rearming of an increasingly nationalist Europe also falls squarely into this category. A policy sold to us as a wise and rational response to Russia, with anyone pointing out the dangers of a militarised, hyper-nationalist Europe written off as an hysteric. The lessons of world war two not so much ignored but laughed at as entirely irrelevant to what are considered changed conditions. But the changed conditions of what? Human behaviour? Cognitive biases? These are all very much as they ever were.

AI is another. In the race for those elusive neoliberal efficiencies, governments are embracing AI without making plans for what happens to the people replaced by AI, or what happens to a planet whose air, water and resources are eviscerated to power AI. This is without touching on the apocalyptic end-time scenarios of so-called super-intelligent AIs going rogue on humanity, a prospect some experts are increasingly vocal about.

Ditching all covid protection measures, failing to upgrade air filtration systems with technology that can kill viruses, thugging it out and ‘living with covid’ is another. Now we’re seeing the results, in the data, and anecdotally, on the message boards. The covid positive subreddit is a complete shit show, a total public health train wreck. People in their twenties describe themselves as racking up nine or ten infections. Previously fit, young and healthy people now complain of being riddled with chronic health issues. The normalisation of covid, the selling to us of the virus as a one-and-done, and of vaccines as the panacea, has opened the door to a future that some warned about, but were written off as hysterical when we did so.

Events, dear reader, precede events.

What happens to our world is not a coin toss, not a rabbit from a hat.

Existence is a continual stream of experience.

The past is the present, the present is the future. Everything echoes forward, shaping our lives, determining our world.