Ivan Krastev’s
Is It Tomorrow Yet? is a long essay published as a short book in which, with characteristic wit and insight, he grapples with what he calls the paradoxes of the pandemic. For Krastev, a Bulgarian public intellectual based at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, epidemics do not only transform society, they also reveal the truth of who we are and how we have been living. “Fear of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic inspired a state of national unity that many societies have not experienced in years, but in the longer term it will deepen existing social and political divides,” he writes. I hope he’s wrong. It’s true the renewed sense of solidarity we experienced in the spring – consider those 750,000 people in the UK who responded within a few days to the government’s appeal for volunteers to support the NHS – had dissipated by midsummer.