Lost me, right at the first sentence:
"Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science."
Oh yeah? What about the inevitability of death itself? The ubiquity of stupidity? Those seem pretty global to me.
The author rang the same alarm-bell, when he talked about climate change in 2012:
“There is no serious scientist alive who questions the severity and implications of this climate crisis".
So is he saying this pandemic dwarfs climate change in scale? Or is he just spewing nonsense?
Answer: he's super-serious.
"The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century"
Oh, but wait. In 2002, writing about 9/11, he said...
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was asked at a lecture in Los Angeles to name the seminal event of the 20th century. Without hesitation I suggested the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. Two bullets sparked a war that destroyed all faith in progress and optimism, the hallmarks of the Victorian age, and left in its wake the nihilism and alienation of a century that birthed Hitler, Mao, Stalin and another devastating global conflict that did not fully end until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989."
The question then turned to 9/11, and it struck me that 100 years from now that fateful date may well loom as the defining moment of this new century, the day when two worlds, long kept apart by geography and circumstance, came together in violent conflict.
:rimshot: