It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many…

It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many ways these aren’t distinct things, so it’s not just trading in analogies. Both involve questions of individuals and populations. But we tend to stop where we should start. /1 https://t.co/j567zUCe9s

Making individual cars much safer in collisions is like targeting immunity in individuals, against infectious disease. It will save lives. People can end up maimed and traumatised, but they’ll be alive, and many will have only minor injuries. /2 https://t.co/YWskBoQcjh

At the same time population measures are taken, to make it less likely these (safer) cars will ever collide. Roads are re-engineered. Similar to air and water being cleaned, to prevent infectious disease. Population-level measures. /3 https://t.co/JbcrdyGNdf

I’ve previously Tweeted about how separating individual and population measures is in fact a misunderstanding of these as two distinct things. Immunity for example is mostly useful to the extent it stops population spread of a disease. /4

Without that, the pathogen can continue to evolve, undermining the same immunity. Similarly, making cars safer also makes it less likely people will have accidents in them, harming others. What is best for populations is also best for individuals, there’s no binary. /5

Which brings me to the bit about us stopping where we ought to start. Because whether you look at road safety or infection, real progress in human affairs is rarely refining a framework you’re already living inside. The framing tends to be invisible. /6

In both of these cases, the elephant in the room is mobility. And in our case as a culture, hypermobility. All of our actions on road safety and infectious disease tend to assume that our hypermobility is a given. It’s that hypermobility that generates and accelerates risk. /7

Not just movement itself, our obsessive travelling. More important is the dislocation it’s merely a symptom of. The refusal to occupy space in a meaningful way. The forgetting of PLACE, transformed into spaces we just move through, at increasing speed and regularity. /8

Both of these areas of risk become much less so if we just stay home. Much more often. If we rediscover what home actually means. It’s not an address, a locator in movement culture. It’s much deeper than that. It’s understanding what it means to be grounded. /9

To understand why place is sacred to most cultures, except ours. That’s why we obsessively travel to other cultures, to consume the magic of place they create, which we’re now incapable of creating in our own countries. We destroy places in our travel. ‘Seeing the sights’. /10

We choose to live with a pandemic because we refuse to restrict hypermobility. And this isn’t just OS travel, it’s basics like refusing to align work and home inside our own culture. The hypermobility of commuting, for example. /11 https://t.co/xOQ76dVqQw

We’re an old, imperial culture. Movement, dislocation and accumulation is what defines most empires. That framing is lost on us, we simply don’t understand that it’s our old imperial need to be constantly moving and accumulating that in turn drives our modern hypermobility. /12

The idea of staying put, of being grounded, is alien to us. It doesn’t compute. And so we spread disease with abandon. Pathogens occupy space too, in ecosystems like us. By disrupting ecosystems with our hypermobility, we set them loose. /13

They become decoupled from the complex place-based controls that usually keep them in check with other organisms. Until Western culture realises that it has no idea of what place even is any more, none of this will improve. /end