The Fragility of Democracy IV: Fear and hope

‘The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms.’

It was at some point during the first UK lockdown that I read The Machine Stops, a dystopian story published by E M Forster in 1909. In what was an uncharacteristic work of fiction for the Edwardian novelist, Forster hit on an accurate description of life for many in 2020, a society composed of people living separately and fearful of the outside world. ‘In each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas,’ he wrote, describing the hive of underground chambers where everyone lived. His heroine Vashti has the physical characteristics of someone who spends her life inside: ‘a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus’. She conducts her lectures on music remotely, maintaining a network of global contacts via something that sounds remarkably like the internet.

At the beginning of 2020 I couldn’t possibly have predicted how prescient this would sound. In January, The Guardian ran a piece about how China was pioneering lockdown as a response to the emergence of Covid-19: ‘While sweeping measures are typical of China’s communist government, large-scale quarantines are rare around the world, even in deadly epidemics, because of concerns about…