Coronavirus is demanding we hit reset on all our beliefs. Will we?
The rapid spread and severity of coronavirus have shattered our assumptions about politics, society, economics and international relations.
Charles Dickens must be thinking of the year 2020 when he named his seminal novel Hard Times. The world is passing through an unprecedented public health emergency - the spread of the novel coronavirus that has infected more than 2 million people and claimed more than 1,50,00 lives since its discovery in China in December 2019.
The viral infection was labelled a ‘pandemic’ by the World Health Organisation in March and has now become the biggest global crisis of the last 100 years. The rapid spread and severity of Covid-19 have shattered our assumptions about many things including politics, society, economics and international relations.
The present crisis has not just engulfed one society or one nation but all of humanity. It has raised certain ethical and philosophical questions. According to health experts, social distancing has been suggested as an important means to contain the virus.
Societies all over the world are facing another kind of social distancing due to what can be called the ‘digital addiction’. The distance between us and screens has reduced but the one in our relationships has increased. This virus has pushed us even more towards machines and the internet. Moreover, it is a fact that in materialistic societies where money becomes the only value, one’s relationships do suffer whether it is with God, nature or with fellow beings.
The worldwide surge in cases of domestic violence during global lockdowns indicates the stark realities of our societies. What people need in these difficult times are love, care, compassion and empathy. Social distancing itself means that we have to be away from the other person so that we do not transmit the virus as we care about each other. It is high time we learnt the values taught to us by the great religions of the world – the value of love by Christianity, brotherhood by Islam, compassion by Buddhism, non-violence by Jainism and toleration and liberalism by Hinduism.
Another important issue is that people all over the world are experiencing stress, anxiety and depression. Coronavirus has flattened the world in the sense that both the rich and the poor are now faced with the uncertainties of a health pandemic. Spirituality, and not religiosity, could be one answer to the problem. Most people remain ignorant all through their lives about their true selves. They consider themselves bodies and minds, unaware of their true self, the divine fragment within them, they struggle all through their lives suffering pain and miseries.
It is also often misunderstood that religion and spirituality are things that have to be reserved for the old age. “Religion is the opium of the masses,” said Karl Marx. I agree that organised religion can be controlled by the vested interests of those who exploit it for their own benefit and to fool people. But spirituality provides the space which we all, irrespective of our religions, can inhabit and flourish in.
Spirituality is finding transcendence from everyday life problems. These times of distress where even medicine cannot provide a clear answer proves that human life needs a combination of both science and spirituality. Science to analyse and understand the external world and spirituality to deconstruct the true self of human beings.
The spread of Covid-19 has also brought into sharp focus the issue of the human relationship with nature. Once human activities stopped due to lockdown, the air became cleaner, the water clearer and the other species started surfacing around human settlements.
The crisis has shown the limits of the project of modernity. When modernity came armed with the idea of reason, rationality, science and technology, it gave power to Homo sapiens to control and conquer nature. The discovery of scientific laws which govern this physical world enabled human species to exploit and control nature for its own benefit.
Human beings forgot the ontological premise of existence that is ‘relationality’. Everything and everyone is related to others in this ecological system. The project of modernity also gave a false belief to the man about unlimited progress. Science has given human beings means for survival, luxury and comfort. It has been thought that due to science and technology, hunger, starvation and disease would become a thing of the past. And this resulted in a competitive, consumerist and violent culture produced by the forces of modernity. This crisis has shown us clearly that it is high time we reviewed our relationship with nature and took environmental issues seriously, as time is running out.
The spread of the coronavirus all over the world is not only a public health crisis but an economic crisis too. It affects both lives and livelihoods. Economic experts are busy producing data on how this crisis will affect the world economy in general and economies of countries in particular. The governments of different countries are busy announcing relief packages to mitigate the hardships caused by the spread of Covid-19. In India, when the government announced the 21-day lockdown on March 24, the first news in media was about the migration of daily wagers and contract labour working in the unorganised sector in urban cities to their villages.
It is a cruel irony to see poor migrants walk miles on foot to reach home in a day and age when we are expected to send humans to the moon. They could not survive the crisis even for a day. Coronavirus hit them hard in more ways than one. Professionals who are working in different companies have been working from their homes during this lockdown period. But what about those who have neither homes, nor work? The lives of these people have come to a standstill. The choice before them was to either die of hunger or from the virus. And in this time of calamity, they chose their home – the anchor to all their hopes of survival.
Endless debates have ensued on whether the government’s relief package for the poor was sufficient or not. Perhaps the issue is much larger and much more structural. What about the system that produced such glaring inequalities? A large chunk of the Indian population faces structural inequalities produced by capitalism and the caste system.
Karl Marx said years ago that capitalism is an unfair and exploitative system. But his whole knowledge was discarded and discredited in the 1990s due to the events that took place in the Communist bloc. Francis Fukuyama, an American scholar, quickly grabbed the opportunity created by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and declared the end of history and end of the ideological era in his book The Liberal Order and the Last Man. Since then, capitalism moved around the world triumphantly in its new avatar: neoliberal globalisation. The forces of globalisation took malls and markets to remote corners of the world and sold them as the only panacea for human ills.
The fate of mankind was left to markets.
The new slogan was more markets and less government as governments are part of the problem and not the solution. In the 1990s, the welfare state was dismantled in the name of austerity. Since then, there has been no end to capitalism in sight and the Left has failed to mount a sustained attack on neo-liberal policies followed by the government.
The argument in favour of these neoliberal policies was that high growth would trickle down to the bottom of the pyramid and would lift people out of poverty. To what extent these policies made a dent in poverty is subject to debate but one thing is for sure that this model of capitalism led to skyrocketing inequalities in society.
French economist Thomas Piketty in his prolific writing, Capital in the 21st Century, argued relentlessly that inequalities are built in the very system of capitalism. It creates inequalities that are unsustainable and incompatible with democracy and social justice. In India, inequalities have been rising sharply for the past three decades. According to an Oxfam International report, the top 10 per cent of the Indian population holds 77 per cent of the total national wealth. In 2017, 73 per cent of the wealth generated went to the richest one per cent while 67 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw a one per cent increase in their wealth. No relief package can overcome such deeply embedded structural inequities.
Another area that needs attention in this crisis is politics. Lots of literature in recent years by Mouffe, Ranciere and Zizek highlight the fact that we are living in a ‘post-political’ world. In general terms, post-political means the weakening of democracy and the shrinking of the public sphere. Post 1990s, the ‘political’ as a space of contestation, has been overtaken by politics understood as ‘technocratic management’. And this technocratic management operates within the unquestioned framework of representative democracy and the free market. The political has been reduced to policy problems managed by the experts.
The other important concern is that the state has been down for almost three decades, relinquishing its activity in the social sphere to the markets. The present crisis amply demonstrates that the state is badly needed during a crisis – be it a health crisis or one of the economy.
But everything does not augur well with politics, state and the government. Democratic politics is not only about elections and forming of the governments, but it also means accountability over policy decisions.
The role of opposition parties and the media becomes much more critical at a time when governments all over the world are indulging in what Michael Foucault called ‘governmentality’, that is, controlling and monitoring the lives of citizens through various instruments. States are becoming surveillance states and using biopower over their citizens. The crisis situation may further strengthen the control and surveillance of the people by the state jeopardising the citizens’ right to privacy and their freedoms and civil liberties, case in point the Aarogya Setu app.
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued in a recent article that the securitisation of public space, self-isolation and the lockdowns constitute a challenge to the norms of democratic politics. There are real dangers that crisis governance may remain the status quo, and emergency measures adopted by governments in the face of crisis may be used in normal times too. The overall dangers to the citizens’ life and liberties has become much more acute when viewed alongside the rise of populism and the far right in countries such as India, the US, the UK, Brazil and Hungary. Politics is already becoming increasingly populist and to different degrees illiberal and authoritarian.
The crisis has its implications for global politics too. A new diplomatic war has ensued between the US and China over the outbreak of Covid-19. US President Donald Trump has criticised the role of WHO and accused it of being too soft on China, from where the virus originated. The US has stopped funding to WHO as a retaliatory measure. The crisis will permanently change power dynamics and relations among the major countries of the world.
President @realDonaldTrump is halting funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess WHO's role in mismanaging the Coronavirus outbreak. pic.twitter.com/jTrEf4WWj0
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 14, 2020
Second, the outbreak of the pandemic of global proportions has exposed the lack of global governance. The containment of Covid-19 needs global coordination. This is a crisis that cannot be left to the management only at the national level. Though some countries have closed their borders, it does not make sense if only some countries do so and others don’t or react late.
The argument is simple: global threats need global solutions. No meeting of the United Nations Security Council has yet been called to discuss the issue. The coronavirus may settle down in some time but there are other global threats that are looming large on the horizon such as climate change, terrorism, hunger and nuclear proliferation. The global response is difficult to come if we don’t create suitable and accountable political institutions at the global level.
The institutions we have right now – the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions - were created after World War II and reflect the realities and requirements of that period. The world has undergone tremendous change both qualitatively and quantitively since then. There is an urgent need to create new institutions and regimes and to democratise already existing institutions. The important concepts in global politics that are power and security now need to be seen in the new light.
Power does not mean only military power as suggested by the dominant paradigm of international relations – realism or the economic power as suggested by another paradigm – liberalism, but power also means having sufficient capacities in sectors such as health and education. The US, the hyperpower of the world, has best of the weapons in its arsenal and has a US$ 21.4 trillion economy but lacks sufficient equipment to handle the crisis. The concept of security has already undergone a paradigmatic shift from state security to human security and the present crisis has fully shown what human security means for the individual as well as for the state. International cooperation is the only way to contain the spread of Covid-19 and manage its economic, political and social fallouts in the coming months.
Humanity has to make use of this opportunity to press the reset button on our world, or else future generations will not forgive us.