The Coronavirus and Our Future | The New Yorker

each period,... had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system... of experiencing being alive... The virus is rewriting our imaginations. impossible has become thinkable... we’re entering a new world... learning ... a new structure of feeling... we’ve been overdue for such a shift... out of synch with the biosphere... yet... acting as though it were... 1990. ...

science has been mobilized to a dramatic new degree ... when disaster strikes, we grasp the complexity of our civilization... a technical improvisation science keeps from crashing down... We know [climate change] is leading us into a mass-extinction event... But we don’t act ... knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling... learning to trust our science... part of the new structure of feeling...

a food scare ... heat wave ... pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus... stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together... another sign of the emerging structure of feeling...

Memento mori: remember that you must die... mixture of dread and apprehension and normality ... part of our new structure of feeling... “Flatten the curve”... Knowing that we can act ... another thing that will change us... we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon... If we can ... save ourselves, then maybe we can ... save our children...

Society is not only real... We can’t live without it... We are societies made of societies... although we are practicing social distancing ... we’ve got to be social... to survive... this alienation and solidarity at once... seeing the tangible existence of a society of strangers, all of whom depend on one another...

The neoliberal structure of feeling totters. What might a post-capitalist response to this crisis include? ... There will be enormous pressure to forget this spring and go back to the old ways...