I wonder what it would be like if we somehow could know the knock-on impact beyond the immediate, for good or for bad, of our actions (or inactions). Perhaps not all at once: just one action at a time would be instructive enough! The impact of some actions would just gently dissipate, leaving no lasting trace. The impact of other actions might be described by what is known as the butterfly effect – something unexpectedly big happens because of some small change. Other actions might leave a lasting impact on an individual with a consequence that only reveals itself years down the line. And there are other possibilities too. And, generally, we just don’t know which are which at the time.

It would be nice to visualize such a thing with a fancy graphic – to see our action spread out like ripples or coloured particles into the world. Sometimes it might be clear – e.g. we voted in an election won by a single vote. And then that elected representative, votes to change the lives of many. Or we can ‘see’ the money that we spend spreading out across the economy and around the world, with human impact at the end of various transaction chains. Thinking systemically this way is the root of the Fairtrade movement and other attempts at being an ‘ethical consumer’.¹ Or again, simply that we smiled at someone lifting their mood so they didn’t then hurt themselves or someone else.

Alternatively we can acknowledge life’s complexity and simply try to ‘roll with it’, as this familiar Taoist story shows:

This story considers how we interpret a particular situation, and as we can’t really know what is coming to us next, it cautions us against declaring either triumph or disaster. The farmer is presented as a passive recipient of events, who attains equanimity by not letting those incoming events overly perturb them, and perhaps also makes the best of them. It remains a good approach to much of living. My original query however was to view each of us as active participants whose impact we normally cannot fully discern on wider events, even though it may well exist.

Now consider our current coronavirus situation. Some of us may have had the virus (whether we knew it or not), and unknown to us, may have passed it on. Perhaps we have been part of a chain of transmission that has caused a fatality. Or simply caused someone else to act differently in some way, with a resulting knock on effect. Our current social distancing and lockdown seek to break such chains of transmission, in a statistical fashion because we can’t, up to now, know for sure everyone who is and isn’t infectious all the time. But a key thing is that we know that such chains of transmission exist. We have explicitly acknowledged that we are part of a system where our actions or inactions can have life or death consequences. And we have taken action (lockdown/social distancing) at the urging of our Government who have also acknowledged that system. And – tangentially – we should note here that the coronavirus pandemic is far from being the only such system we could acknowledge, should we decide to.

So far in our history, for all the horrors of disease, there has often remained an element of ‘ignorance is bliss’ regarding transmission – we haven’t generally have the burden of knowing for sure that we had infected someone, or they us, even if we often strongly suspected. Now, with Covid-19, we are moving much closer (with very good intentions) to being able to work out the consequences of an individual’s behaviour on those around them, and beyond into wider society. This is coming through a raft of different testing technologies and the intention of Government to implement ‘Track and Trace’, particularly using mobile phone technology. This may be extremely beneficial in control of the virus. It may also have the civil liberty issues that have been raised in public debate. But what interests me here is that it exposes significant pathways within a very complicated system so that we are no longer ignorant of who caused what, with all the potential for guilt and blame that up to now we have avoided. Of course it enables us to take responsibility and that should largely be viewed as a good thing, but whether we are ready as individuals and as a society to handle this information, should ‘Track and Trace’ become a fixture within a future society where Covid-19 is quite possibly endemic, is something I will watch with interest.

Spirit of Life, help us as individuals and as a society to adapt to the different type of information that our current situation brings us. Help us to be able to discern the information we truly need from that which is simply nice to have and to use it with care and integrity. Amen

[This formed Upper Chapel’s Wednesday lunchtime reflection on Weds 20th May 2020 and was originally distributed by email due to Chapel closure under Covid-19 restrictions.]

¹ There’s a website: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ which might be of interest. Years back I subscribed to the print version of the EC magazine but, for all that I like the idea, I found bringing such thinking into every purchase quite exhausting!