Though not used commonly, clarity is a fairly well-known term. Singers use the word to describe a voice that is clear and pure, like a single sound from the violin that has little vibrato, sweet--and piercing. I’ve always been nuts about operatic sopranos, especially a voice like Kathleen Battle, a voice with a great deal of clarity. In contrast, a voice with a lot of overtones, like Jessye Norman’s, is considered a rich voice, a voice that can evoke a lot of emotions. These two singers tend to sing very different music. On the other side of the street, Kim Petras has a voice with a lot of clarity—practically no overtones. Piercing, and not. . . especially sweet.
Clarity is also a term that’s used to highlight weaknesses in business planning, priorities or processes. It reveals individuals’ and institutions’ true values.
The Covid pandemic has provided us with a great deal of clarity, both destructive and constructive. The pandemic has revealed that much business has been working without a sufficient net. Just-in-time processes, for example, have left many businesses without resilience. The government has also allowed social safety nets like health-care and, in some states, unemployment, to fray. It leaves those who are vulnerable and at the margins to suffer disproportionately. In contrast, the public has begun to appreciate the role of ordinary health care workers—low-paid workers who are under the radar most of the time, but are absolutely necessary in times of adversity like this.
The pandemic has also shed light on our decision-making processes—revealing a great deal of unrecognized bias. It has held up a mirror to the difficulty of making good decisions when there is no data. Or when data has been politically impacted—rejecting the role of good science. Constructively, many people are learning the importance of good data, and even becoming more familiar with data modeling—like curves that are supposed to flatten.
Shaking up the way we think
Covid-19, like the Bubonic Plague, is shaking up the way people think. That Black Death powerfully marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. By the beginning of the 14th century, Italy had several prosperous city states. Venice, Genoa, and Amalfi had trading networks and outposts throughout the Mediterranean and as far away as the Black Sea and Russia. Other Italian cities, like Bologna and Florence, welcomed peasants fleeing feudal lords to find freedom inside their city walls. They became artisans and developed a middle-class, much of which was portrayed fairly accurately in the second television series on Medici: the Magnificent.
During that plague, scholastic medicine was overthrown. The advice of scholastic doctors and their potions, the major ways of dealing with disease and medicine during the medieval centuries, appeared to be useless for the plague. But some doctors set aside the classical texts and gradually turned to empirical evidence. It was a revival of medicine which had been dismissed for a thousand years after the fall of ancient Rome.
A single writer, Giovanni Boccaccio, made dramatic contributions to the Renaissance in Humanism, the Italian language and the development of modern literature in its focus on the earthy, sexual delights of the Decameron. Written in Italian, rather than classical Latin, his book also ridiculed the scholastic doctors, made acute observations about real life and raised the common language—the vernacular—to the level of the classical Latin of academics and clergy. His prose provided a new model for writers and readers. Following his lead, writers turned to the vernacular. Martin Luther’s scripture translations into the vernacular German, not only created a much larger readership, but loosened the hold of the medieval church on that world. Readership created a new world, making insights available across boundaries and into different countries. Cities like London, which lost nearly half its population to the plague, rebounded to far greater growth and wealth with the widespread use of the vernacular. Looking back from our world, the vernacular is obvious, but in that world, it was a paradigm shift that impacted not only literature, but religion, politics, architecture and even economics, opening the doors to a middle class.
Not a Trumpian world
Under Trump, the Pandemic has strengthened all the worst, most stereotypical and irrational ways of thinking. Many of us are affronted by the refusal of so many to wear masks and maintain social distance, all exemplified by the Republican convention on the White House lawn. We seem to be in the grip of a horrible lack of reason.
But another way of looking at our world is analogous to the Bubonic Plague of the 14th century. As I wrote in a previous blog, the pandemic offers us an X-ray of American society, enabling us to see all the broken places. Lawrence Wright has written that it is possible we would do nothing about the huge cracks exposed by the pandemic: “the racial inequities, the poisonous partisanship, the governmental incompetence, the disrespect for science, the loss of standing among nations, the fraying of community bonds.”
Yet the clarity brought about by our abject failures makes it possible to confront them—and provides us with the opportunity to mend them. And those of us who lived through the crises of World War II experienced the greatest economic expansion in history. It was an explosion not possible without the shock and transformation wrought by that War.
In sum, pandemics wreak havoc--and open minds.