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Editorial | Shaping our brave virtual world

Note: To bring our readers voices from around the world on the COVID-19 pandemic, the St. Louis Review offers occasional editorials and opinions from other dioceses. The following opinion was printed by The Tablet, a London-based international Catholic weekly.

There is no “normal” to which the world will return after the coronavirus pandemic has burnt itself out. Too much has changed, and human nature is adjusting to a new reality. The key to this is the role of the internet in its many manifestations, combined with the gradual unwinding of the globalization of the world economy and the reversion across the globe to the preeminence of the nation state. There is a certain irony in this, as the coronavirus knows nothing of international borders and boundaries, and the internet itself is an expression of globalization.

As many people are forced to work from home, there is a renewed sense of “home” as a place of security and identity. And that includes a rediscovery of the importance of family and neighborhood. But it can also be a place of tension, even violence. Those who lack either or both of those support networks, especially those deprived of participation in the internet, are emerging as the new poor.

The human being is a social animal; the hermit is the exception. To be deprived of social connections for any length of time is to risk being diminished in one’s humanity. This is indeed a psychological danger in the “social distancing” that governments have been forced to impose, particularly if it goes on a lot longer. On the other hand, the internet itself appears to have brought people closer together. These paradoxes need exploring more deeply.

The regular streaming of church services over the web — where a live camera and microphone transmit the prayers and actions of the celebrant — is a new phenomenon that is turning out, against expectations, to be largely successful and popular. It has the vertical dimension, so to speak, but lacks the horizontal dimension — the sense of connectedness of a real congregation.

The standard exchange at Mass — “the Lord be with you … and with your spirit” — has taken on a new significance by its very absence. There is a need for both research and innovation in this area, maybe into the use of video-conferencing software.

The internet opens up a range of possibilities, for instance for Church government. Were a pope to die or resign in the middle of a pandemic like this one, the next conclave would have to be held, of necessity, by means of the internet. Synodality — where a Church engages in collective thinking with wide participation and discussion — could be given new life once electronic possibilities are available.

But again, a purely atomized audience of separated individuals is less than the sum of its parts. Both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions have to be catered to.

If the internet is allowed to become a vehicle for enhancing the common good, specifically by the promotion of solidarity and subsidiarity, it would come closer to fulfilling the idealistic visions of its originators. They wanted it to promote the idea of community.

It is characteristic of governments, as the pandemic has painfully demonstrated, to move too slowly in response to new challenges. They are perennially behind the curve. And the bigger the entity, the more sluggish it is. This may be why the nation state has come back into fashion — why, for instance, the countries of the European Union have failed to find a way of sharing the costs of coping with the virus and why each nation has preferred to be left to its own devices in its epidemic countermeasures.

In the United States state governors have largely taken the initiative. They too, like President Donald Trump, are “governing by internet.” Being closer to the local communities that elected them, they fulfill the impetus behind subsidiarity — that decisions should be taken as close to the people affected by them as possible.

And if they make mistakes, as some have, it is to the local community that they are answerable.

So, from home schooling to national government, the coronavirus pandemic has triggered ingenuity and innovation in the use of social media, and those aspects of human nature that are open to outside influences are adapting accordingly. There are gains, therefore — but there are also losses.

There are tragedies on a catastrophic scale in the modern world that long predate the arrival of one dangerous virus, such as in Syria and Yemen, which it is about to make worse. If information technology could alleviate these tragedies too, the world would indeed be a better place after the pandemic. The starving children of Yemen need a voice. The internet must give them one.

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