There’s a lot of interesting thinking going on in response to the coronavirus pandemic and how it will “change everything.” Here’s the beginning of a curated sampling. It takes for granted that there will be suffering, a lot of it, unequally distributed and with a preponderance of it coming down on first responders and low-wage, precarious laborers. But the pandemic may also be, as Arundhati Roy calls it, “a portal,” a “historic trigger event,” or as Eric Holthaus puts it, “a moment of triage for the entire planet,” in which our task is twofold: “we have to urgently prevent social and economic collapse and build a new world at the same time.”
The question is: a portal to what (what kind of new world?), and how can we work the odds to favor the possibility of a more desirable “new world”?
In “The Revolution is Under Way Already,” historian Rebecca Spang compares this time to revolutionary times past:
[R]evolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas (peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress) become fused into a more or less stable constellation. […] they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity. […] To claim this moment as a revolution is to claim it for human action.”
(I’ve tried to make that point around revolutions before, always with a deep nod to William Connolly’s work on “resonance machines,” but the ones I wrote about — Ukraine‘s Maidan and Egypt’s Tahrir Square — did not work out to be as deep and lasting as their supporters had hoped.)
So what are the options open to us today?
In “Pandemic Politics” I outlined the four future scenarios developed by my colleagues at the Rubenstein School a couple of months ago. In “What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures,” ecological economist Simon Mair details something very similar, with one of his axes closely echoing our axis of integration-atomization — he calls it “protection of life” vs. “exchange value” as “guiding economic principle” — while the other cross-cuts ours in an interesting way. Where we had distinguished between resource scarcity and resource abundance, Mair distingushes between “centralized” and “distributed responses” to the crisis.
Two of the resultant scenarios – “Barbarism” and “Mutual Aid” – correspond fairly closely to our “Handmaid’s Tale” and “Rational Rations” (though Mutual Aid could also arise in our “Earth Charter” scenario). The other two, “State Capitalism” and “State Socialism,” very loosely reflect our “Amazon Prime” and “Earth Charter,” except that we seem to have extrapolated more to a global, “post-national” level where Mair assumes a continuation of the nation-state system. In that respect, my colleagues may have been a little more visionary (or less realistic?) in our predictions for the next 20 years.
In “Beyond the Breakdown: Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath,” Italian radical philosopher Bifo Berardi goes further, calling this “the end of human history,” or at the very least of “financial capitalism” and of “modern humanism,” with “the Earth” and its “agents” — “floods, fires, and most of all critters” — “rebelling against the world.” The two political alternatives open to us, for Berardi, are “a techno-totalitarian system that will relaunch the capitalist economy by means of violence, or the liberation of human activity from capitalist abstraction and the creation of a molecular society based on usefulness.”
These loosely map onto Mair’s State Capitalism with a heavy dose of Barbarism, and his Mutual Aid (/Rational Rations and Earth Charter scenarios). Which suggests that Mair’s fourfold, perhaps expanded through a post-national lens, may still be a more complete working map.
Climate journalist Eric Holthaus’s suggestions for what we should do in this “triage moment” include “Nationalise the fossil fuel and airline industries,” “Public works projects on an enormous scope and scale,” and “Strengthen social safety nets” — all of which sound like Mair’s State Socialism, and bear an obvious resemblance to Bernie Sanders’s “Emergency Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic” (which goes into more critical detail on what not to allow with any government bailouts).
But then we have the alternative and seemingly equally plausible scenario that Donald Trump, having grown comfortable in his new role of daily podium overlord, sails through the relatively easy task of defeating Joe Biden and ushers in the new global era of bellicose authoritarianism — State Capitalism and State Socialism combined into a thousand blooming flowers of institutionalized Barbarism.
The scenarios start to resemble something like a game of global Russian roulette, with the optimistic visions — like “Great Transformationist” Gert Leonhard’s prognostications about “How Covid-19 changed our world” — being one among many possibilities on a spinning wheel that is more likely to be tipped by powerful vested interests than it is by the wishful desires of “global change agents.”
Leonhard and his fellow German futurists Matthias and Tristan Horx work from a futures scenarios model somewhat similar to ours, with one axis spanning the globally “connected” vs. “disconnected,” and the other the “optimistic (successful connections)” vs. “pessimistic (unsuccessful connections).” Their hoped-for “resilient society” emerges at the confluence of connection and optimism.
Bifo Berardi’s final point, however, about “the return of mortality as the defining feature of human life,” resonates with a lot of other reflection going on today that circles around the question: what, in the end, is important? What can we shed (shit jobs, the fossil fuel sector, a thousand television channels and twenty flavors of latté, much of the global advertising and marketing industries) in an effort to create a viable world?
What the various optimistic scenarios (like Leonhard’s) miss, to my mind, is an acknowledgment of how important protecting one’s wealth will be to those who have so much of it to protect. This will, on some level, not be a hugfest, but a long, protracted war.
A multitude of more philosophical readings can be found online and they are growing everyday. Here are a few of my favorite places to track them:
- The European Journal of Psychanalysis’ “Coronavirus and Philosophers” list
- The Syllabus’s “The Politics of COVID-19″ ongoing reading list (by subscription)
- Stuart Elden’s periodically updated “Geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid-19” reading list
It’s rewarding (for environmental studies scholars like me) to see how many of these reflections acknowledge the re-entry of the natural world into human awareness. As Justin Smith puts it in “It’s All Just Beginning”:
We created a small phenomenal world for ourselves, with our memes and streams and conference calls. And now — the unfathomable irony — that phenomenal world is turning out to be the last desperate repair of the human, within a vastly greater and truer natural world that the human had nearly, but not quite, succeeded in screening out.”
We. The human. Not exactly (as regular readers of this blog know). But yes, the screen is coming down, whatever (and whoever’s) screen it had been.
The question that still resonates most for me is the one that I raised a few months ago: not so much where are we bound as with whom, and to whom, are we bound?
