Angela Moore asked Tim Butcher:

Do you think Covid 19 is a wake-up call for us humans? Will it altermately make the world a better place ? Is it possible to stop the greed for wealth and curb the birthrate? Or have we gone down the wrong road too far?

Tim Butcher I do see Covid in those terms, as proof of what happens when humanity overreaches itself, a natural correction to the excesses not so much of overpopulation, more of overestimation of humanity’s worth. The casual way humans rub up against nature, despoiling soils, deforesting habitats, reducing diversity occasionally comes with a price. Covid is that price, the price for blind complacency at humankind’s primacy.
The driving features of humanity’s progress are too often forgotten, the importance of sharing, community, communal values, togetherness. Covid will only be defeated if we recall and revitalise those features. We are being forced to do it to some extent: no longer enslaved to office hierarchy, equalised by the shared experience of being forced to stay at home, our pyjama-clad lower halves dodging the all-seeing eyes of our Zoom screens. But our faith in infinite, eternal choice, the sacred cow of market-driven economic growth, has to be challenged now, our choices are more limited: Which friends? Which family members? Which behaviours? Which things do we do without? A society that has forgotten the cardinal importance of the us, enshrining instead the false idol of the me, has led to the inequalities and greed that delivered us to the virus. It is only if we re-engage with we that we will recover. The virus recognises not the high walls of the rich man.

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