Ben Ehrenreich writes from Barcelona that "Seen from across the Atlantic, the United States has seemed to be slipping into collapse for some time."

He cites the anthropologist Joseph Tainter to observe that as civilizations trend toward complexity they become prone to collapse. "Social complexity itself, Tainter argues, is subject to the law of diminishing returns: the solutions to yesterday’s crises quickly become hazards themselves." 
 

“When a deadly pandemic saves more lives than it steals

by forcing a pause in a still-more deadly system,

what sense does it mean to talk about benefit and loss?"

Then he makes a really profound observation: "By one estimate, the reduction in air pollution that accompanied the virus-induced shutdown of industry in China may have prevented as many as 77,000 premature deaths, more than can be credited to COVID-19. When a deadly pandemic saves more lives than it steals by forcing a pause in a still-more deadly system, what sense does it mean to talk about benefit and loss?"

"Momentous change does not occur without momentous loss. We are already experiencing both. (If we can learn anything from this) it should be that some things are worth fighting for, and fighting hard, and that the things that have been killing us for years should be allowed at last to die. In our restlessness and claustrophobia, in the loneliness of our homes and the relative calmness of our cities, it might not feel like it right now, but we have hard choices to make, and not much time. Before we can even touch each other again, we will have to decide whose hands we want to hold, and how to use the strength we can only find in one another. As always, we have a world to build."  

(The underlined emphasis is mine. The same quote reflects a statement made last Saturday by a member of a book club to which I belong: "I'm recognizing the role and responsibility of providing hospice for ideas and practices whose times have come to their natural end." )

Article: The End of Something: On Radical Change in a Time of Pandemic