I’m starting to see articles speculating on what might change as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Some note that the changes following the 9/11 terrorist attack in NYC and the 2008 financial crash weren’t particularly positive. They didn’t change the trajectory the U.S. was already on. After 9/11, there was heightened monitoring of movement through airports, increased surveillance of citizens and long-term war. With the 2008 financial fallout, there were corporate bailouts with few financial controls and plenty of personal bankruptcies that tightened lending to individuals and made them renters instead of homeowners.
The same thing will happen with this pandemic if we act from the same basic underlying assumptions, or logics, of mainstream American culture.
Ways to Think About Cul
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ture
There are many ways to describe culture and I’m going to take a few liberties with two models to make my point in this post.
A Management Science View of Culture
Emeritus MIT Management professor Edgar Schein’s model for organizational culture is fairly straightforward and can apply to societies. Schein describes 3 levels of culture based on the extent to which you can see it. The surface level is artifacts and behaviors—symbols like the flag, for example, the constitution, laws, policies, the ways we build cities, the transportation we use, and the processes for how we get things done.
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The next level is espoused values—what we say we believe and the rules and norms we say we follow. It’s who we say we are, for example American grit or the land of opportunity, or compassionate and caring.
Below the surface is where things matter a lot—those deep, tacit beliefs drive our behavior and decision making. They’re so solid, so engrained, we rarely if ever question them. They give us certainty about the world and the assurance that we know how to navigate it. That profit motivates innovation, for example, or that individuals should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, or family is the most important, or I have the right to defend myself.
A Shamanic View of Culture
Shamans too look at layers of human life—which includes culture. According to shaman Jon Rasmussen, there’s 4 layers—the literal, meaning the material world, including our bodies and the systems we create and products we build. That’s the surface. The psycho-spiritual/mind is something akin to the espoused beliefs, It’s how we process information, perceive and make meaning. While shamans, like organizational change managers, must work at all levels to create substantial, lasting change, it’s the two deepest levels where the most powerful work can be done.
Without change at the mythic and essential energy levels, the surface level changes won’t hold. The mythic is the images, stories and symbols that influence us usually without conscious recognition. It’s similar to Jung’s collective archetypes. We typically tap into it through ritual, art, music or dance. The essential energy layer is the soul. It’s where the blueprint lies for what we see on the other layers. Not only are the energetic and the mythic typically unquestioned and taken-for-granted, the energetic layer isn’t even part of secular mainstream Western culture. How we can access this layer for systems and culture change is a key question I have. But it’s a digression at the moment.
Intentional Change Takes Intentional Questioning
The point is, if we don’t unearth and intentionally question basic assumptions motivating our society and how we live, even if something changes after the pandemic, it’ll just be a different version of what we already have. There will be no fundamental change. The same, or worse, problems will recur at some point.
But, this kind of questioning creates huge anxiety and fear. Because we need the certainty of our taken-for-granted world to feel secure. That’s at least part of why presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders draws such heat. He’s pointing out the destructive parts of the way we’ve organized society and proposing new ways as a remedy. Those new ways rest on very different assumptions about how the world should be and our place in it.
So, what will change following the post-COVID19 pandemic? Surely, there will be tweaks. I think major change depends on whether we’re willing to honestly question what worked, what didn’t, why and related cultural assumptions while mitigating the fear and anxiety doing so causes. Then we can intentionally consider whether it’s time to re-make our world and how we might do it.