In Riehen, just a few kilometers from Basel, resides the Fondation Beyeler. It is a collection of contemporary art in a building designed by Renzo Piano in a small town of decades-old pristineness. The retrospective of the American painter Edward Hopper shows people in their architectural environment and solitude. People, mostly alone, in strange, listless environments of the 1950s. At first glance, they are barely comparable to today’s exhibition visitors who constantly taking out their cell phones, communicating attentively and unattentively, observing the paintings, taking pictures, casually flipping through books, looking out the window, and buying postcards. There is no boredom far and wide, instead there is distraction in abundance with anything and everything. Yesterday was different even then. 

There are historical turning points everyone can remember the moment that they experienced them. A mild winter day in Berlin, I am on my way to the office. Everything is peaceful, everything seems to be under control, just like always. A work day in a big city with many people. The infrastructure buzzing, unnoticed. People pursuing their daily tasks, thinking of yesterday and tomorrow, maybe about soccer, going to a restaurant or a movie theater in the evening, expecting their parents. Barely anybody listens to the stream of news. The catastrophe is heralded casually and hardly visible. A horror film begins this way.

Today we know that even democratic governments with a multifaceted media landscape can actively seize the wheel of history. When it’s ‘do or die’ even the scientists and experts are asked again and the whole ballyhoo is silenced.

Then, within days, borders are closed, lockdowns are ordered across entire continents, air traffic and railway service are suspended, human populations are frozen, privatized. Hospitals are built and medically trained staff acquired, companies nationalized, entire industry sectors and regions are scrapped.

The world is sent into a recession, and perhaps simultaneously stimulated with billions and billions of euros for aid, protection, and developmental programs. At least in wealthy countries. Generations will work it off. At some point these mega crises will be overcome. Because people, for the most part, cooperate, research, learn, hold together. They are pragmatic and more or less do the right thing. They help each other, and are able to adjust to changed conditions.

Even we were able to relocate to home office within a few days. We are now consolidating our self-organizational skills and using our collective strengths as well as we can.  We are more attentive to one another and are learning more than before. It is quite possible that we will not give up the video conferences, working more independently, reduced travelling activities, or the new communication possibilities.

Isn’t it surprising that over seven billion people on five continents, with more than 5000 different languages, across cultural, regional, and linguistic differences, are able to act more or less collectively as a matter of principle? This gives me the courage to think about a better world after the crisis. What could it look like? I wish that this impressive cooperation during the crisis can be an example for more radical changes afterwards. That, for example, the increase of carbon emission can be stopped within a much shorter span of time. Many are excited to see the satellite images of China and Northern Italy that show clean skies, Shoals of fish are visible once again in the canals of Venice. Dolphins returning to swim in the harbor of Cagliari. Of course, this is not the result of a rebuilt system, but it gives hope. That sustainable economies and CO2 neutral cities and countries can be established in a far shorter time than business associations and governments have led us to believe. That our mobility can be transformed into a sustainable and socially acceptable system much faster than business associations and governments have asserted. That we can create a much better and sensible world in a much shorter amount of time than business associations and governments have held for possible. We already know how to do it. It has been proven by the recent radical decisions that have been implemented in next to no time that it can be done.

From this perspective the way we work, live, do business, use the world, treat other living creatures, and move around, is a disaster. And it can be history in no time. In today’s competition and performance society the dominating idea of humankind is the digitalized Homo Oeconomicus, the individual utilization-maximizer. Cities have mostly been designed for this person. But the human world actually exists in between people. This is exactly what the crisis has so clearly shown us.

It makes no sense if companies recklessly become innovation and efficiency machines just for profit.

It makes no sense if professional life is only made up of goals and numbers, milestones and deadlines.

It makes no sense if cramped apartments are situated in soulless venture properties where neighbors are strangers to each other.

It also makes no sense if street deserts in the middle of the city center, as big as football fields and as expensive as Opera houses are reserved for cars. Cars that become a source of pollution, noise, and in general threat to life.  

What I mean is, we must turn away from these defective developments. Wealthy countries have turned into societies of surplus that do not satisfy human needs. Especially now we can see that these high-consumption societies need to be dismantled in order to raise the quality of life. Less eating, less distraction and dispersion, less consumption, less mobility, fewer possessions, pursuing less, less environmental waste. And instead more attention for one another, togetherness, laughing, meditating, cooking, experiencing silence with each other, reading books with friends, being there for each other, being present.

Neither the lonely people in Edward Hopper’s paintings from the 1950s nor the visitors of the Fondation Beyeler, overwhelmed with distraction, can be taken as examples. Powering down, unwinding, less contacts, less stress, less output, less performance society, more family life, togetherness, more attention for one another, the neighbors, friends. Are you doing fine? Are you getting on well? Can I help? None of this works without love.