Biggest threat Covid-19 epidemic poses is not our regression to survivalist violence, but BARBARISM with human face RT Website March 19,2020
What reality? Alenka Zupančič formulated it perfectly, and let me resume her line of thought. These days we often hear that radical social changes are needed if we really want to cope with the consequences of the ongoing epidemic (I myself am among those spreading this mantra). But radical changes are already taking place.
The coronavirus epidemic confronts us with something we considered impossible. We couldn’t imagine something like this to really happen in our daily lives – the world we knew has stopped spinning around, whole countries are in lockdown, many of us are confined to one’s apartment (but what about those who cannot afford even this minimal safety precaution?) facing an uncertain future in which even if most of us survive an economic mega-crisis lies ahead…
What this means is that our reaction should also be to do the impossible – what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing world order.
The impossible has happened, our world has stopped, and now we have to do the impossible to avoid the worst. But what is that ‘impossible’?
I don’t think the biggest threat is a regression to open barbarism, to brutal survivalist violence with public disorders, panic lynching, etc. (although, with the possible collapse of health and some other public services, this is also quite possible.)
More than open barbarism I fear barbarism with a human face – ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimized by expert opinions.
Survival of the fittest
A careful observer easily noticed the change in tone in how those in power address us: they are not just trying to project calm and confidence, they also regularly utter dire predictions – the pandemic is likely to take about two years to run its course and the virus will eventually infect 60-70 percent of the global population, with millions dead.
In short, their true message is that we’ll have to curtail the basic premise of our social ethics: the care for the old and weak. In Italy, for instance, it’s already been proposed that if the virus crisis gets worse, patients over 80 or those with other heavy diseases will be simply left to die.
One should note how accepting this logic of the “survival of the fittest” violates even the basic principle of military ethics which tells us that, after the battle, one should first take care of the heavily wounded even if the chance of saving them is minimal. (However, upon a closer look, this shouldn’t surprise us: hospitals are already doing the same thing with cancer patients).
To avoid a misunderstanding, I am an utter realist here – one should plan even medicaments to enable a painless death of the terminally ill, to spare them the unnecessary suffering. But our first priority should be nonetheless not to economize but to help unconditionally, irrespective of costs, those who need help, to enable their survival.
So I respectfully disagree with Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who sees in the ongoing crisis a sign that
“our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything — the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions — to the danger of getting sick. Bare life — and the danger of losing it — is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them.”
Giorgio Agamben
Things are much more ambiguous: it DOES also unite people – to maintain a corporeal distance is to show respect to others since I also may be a virus bearer. My sons avoid me now because they are afraid they will contaminate me (what is to them a passing illness can be deadly for me).
Personal responsibility
In recent days, we hear again and again that each of us is personally responsible and has to follow the new rules. The media is full of stories about people who misbehaved and put themselves and others in danger (a guy entered a store and started to cough, etc.). The problem here is the same as with ecology where the media again and again emphasize our personal responsibility (did you recycle all used newspapers, etc.).
Such a focus on individual responsibility, necessary as it is, functions as ideology the moment it serves to obfuscate the big question of how to change our entire economic and social system. The struggle against coronavirus can only be fought together with the struggle against ideological mystifications, plus as part of a general ecological struggle. As Kate Jones, the chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, put it,
the transmission of disease from wildlife to humans is “a hidden cost of human economic development.” … There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones,”
Kate Jones
So it is not enough to put together some kind of global healthcare for humans, nature should be included into it – viruses also attack plants which are the main sources of our food, like potatoes, wheat and olives. We always have to bear in mind the global picture of the world we live in, with all the paradoxes this implies.
For example, it is good to know that the lockdown in China because of coronavirus saved more lives than the number of those killed by the virus (if one trusts official statistics of the dead):
“Environmental resource economist Marshall Burke says there is a proven link between poor air quality and premature deaths linked to breathing that air. ‘With this in mind’, he said, ‘a natural – if admittedly strange – question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from Covid-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself. Even under very conservative assumptions, I think the answer is a clear yes.’ At just two months of reduction in pollution levels he says it likely saved the lives of 4,000 children under five and 73,000 adults over 70 in China alone.”
Marshall Burke
It is not a utopian communist vision, it is a communism imposed by the necessities of bare survival. It is unfortunately a version of what, in the Soviet Union in 1918, was called “war communism.”
As the saying goes, in a crisis we are all socialists – even the Trump administration considers a form of UBI – a check for $1,000 to every adult citizen. Trillions will be spent violating all the market rules – but how, where, for whom? Will this enforced socialism be socialism for the rich (remember the bailing out of the banks in 2008 while millions of ordinary people lost their small savings)? Will the epidemic be reduced to another chapter in the long sad story of what Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein called “disaster capitalism,” or will a new (more modest, maybe, but also more balanced) world order emerge out of it?