CORONAVIRUS: A new planetarity

29 Mar, 2020 - 00:03 0 Views
CORONAVIRUS: A new planetarity

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

The coronavirus pandemic is bringing to the front seat what can be called a human and a planetary question. As human beings what, and who are we, in this vast planet. What power do we command over nature and its visible and invisible elements? That a virus can cause such worldwide catastrophe and take so many lives, in the process causing such a tragedy and a scare is a sign that the macro-universe of men and women is not safe from the micro-universe of bacteria, virus and other small but powerful monsters of nature.

It is a common and also proverbial truism in the jungle that the elephant, ruler of the African jungle, is vulnerable to one of the smallest figures of the wilderness, the ant. Like any other virus, the coronavirus is so small as to be invisible but as powerful as cannot be ignored for the damage that it can do to the masters of the universe, the most intelligent animals, men and women. The small but very powerful force of the virus is, in my view, raising capital human and planetary questions that can only be ignored at our own peril. The coronavirus is real; it is human and has huge planetary implications.

It is under the attack of such human and planetary monstrosities as the coronavirus that the true condition of the world and that of humanity usually comes out. Societies and their human beings can best be judged when they are under crisis and catastrophe. The truth itself might as well be the child of catastrophe and crisis. One of the telling truths about us human beings in the planet is that, in spite of all the intelligence and power that we flaunt; we are a particularly fragile and vulnerable lot. Our power and mastery of the universe is real, obvious, but truly fake. In that vein all forms of power and control might after all be fundamentally fake, and vulnerable to the small, seemingly powerless and invisible monstrosities.

The Democratic Virus
The coronavirus is evidently deadly and openly democratic in its virality. It is disrespectful of human class and race. After dismissing the need for quarantining human beings to combat the pandemic, Iranian Deputy Minister of Health, Iraj Harirchi humbly admitted that he had contracted the virus himself, is battling the deadly ailment. His sober observation was that: “This virus is democratic, and it doesn’t distinguish between poor and rich or between statesman and ordinary citizen.” Nothing, even power, privilege, prominence and money, can protect a human being from this latest pandemic.

Initially, the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, was proud to dismiss it as the “Chinese Virus.” He cannot say so now as the virus has proven that it is as American as it is a citizen of any part of the planet. That it was first detected in China may be credit to Chinese science and political alertness than it is proof that it originated in China.

The coronavirus is medical and political. It comes and spreads in a world context. The economic and therefore political war between China and the USA is a real world context upon which the coronavirus has deposited itself. The USA will blame China and China blame the USA. We live in a contested world. One wonders if World War III is not going to be a biological and medical war. Or that the troubled planet upon which men and women have committed mass murder, pollution and other sins is going to fight back with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, heatwaves, cold fronts and diseases. In the coronavirus we are together; Boaventura Santos reminds us that actually “pandemic” refers to “all human beings.” Here is a planetary crisis that forces us to look at each other in the eye as different but also the same human beings under the sun.

Not the Only Virus
Our world, politically and economically, works with fashion and trend. To be true, the coronavirus is not the only virus. It is just the latest or the one that is trending, has become viral. Scientists can invoke epidemiology and explain to us what is happening but a philosopher can note that there are people in the world that have, from their birth, lived pandemic lives of misery, suffering and precarity of existence. Poverty, ignorance, and not just disease, have been pandemics that have defined the existence of the majority of the people of the planet. Imperialism, slavery, colonialism and tyranny have been pandemic viruses at large in the planet.

What coronavirus has achieved, in its monstrosity is to remind us that in spite of the class and race differences that we have constructed and used against each other in the planet, we are the same. Slavoj Zizek is right therefore in observing that the coronavirus comes among viruses of ideological mystification, fake news and other human disasters that have been going on for some time now. Zizek takes it further to surmise that coronavirus will teach capitalism a communist lesson; that we belong together and anything else is fake, let us fairly share the world and whatever good it can offer. I can add that we must stop being viruses to each other politically and economically because there are enough viruses in nature to finish all of us off.

We as human beings are and have been dying of many other things before we knew of the coronavirus. But this one brings a special death that seems not to choose along the usual lines. As in the true last days, coronavirus has almost dramatised the lesson that sometimes the first may be last, and the last first. Zizek seeks to make a deeper philosophical observation of this. Not only is this a huge planetary catastrophe but it is also an individual calamity. Corona rules are demanding at planetary and individual level. Strict to the rules, actually, one must not only isolate himself and herself from others, but certain parts of one’s body must not have contact. Coronawise, our hands must not touch our mouths, eyes and other orifices. At the same time; the medical idea of quarantining people does not only collapse the borders between hospitals and prisons but also brings back the problem of creating borders and building fences to separate human beings from each other. In that way, the coronavirus brings out telling truths about our modern colonial world system that feeds on classifications and separations.

Isolation is true discrimination. Zizek mourns that it has taken such a catastrophe to teach us the very basic truth that originally and naturally, as human beings in nature we are one. The air, water, soil, plants and wild animal life are living entities that must be in communion with us. What we give to nature, the Rastafarians believe, nature will give it back to us in huge quantities. So we may ask; what have we given to nature as human beings to allow us to question what nature is giving us?

Nature: The Real Attention Seeker

I am sure I am not the only one. As the coronavirus flexes its muscles and shows that it can wipe helpless human beings from the floor of the planet we all look up to science to save us. We wake up in the morning to peruse journals, newspapers and other sites to see if any scientist in the world has landed a cure or at least a vaccine. In times of epidemics and pandemics, Science and God are looked and called upon to intervene. Every one of us becomes religious and scientific in the face of a pandemic. And both religion and science simply understood and philosophically taken; refer to nature, the visible, tangible and the invisible universe.

The term Enlightenment that was popularised by western philosophy and science refers to how man came to conquer nature and master the universe. How man brought light to the darkness of the world, that is. And man has done it. Giant infrastructures are here. Powerful atomic bombs that can end the earth in the press of a button are here. Fast digital and 3D, even 5D, technological devices are ours. That is all true but what is not true is that we have mastered nature or conquered the universe. We are fragile and vulnerable to nature; with all our science and might. Man has sought and found attention as the powerful conqueror of the universe and master of the earth but the real attention seeker and finder is nature and its visible and invisible monsters. We can talk of natural resources that we can exploit for power and profit but let us agree that it is a monumental fallacy that we have conquered nature.

Never must we Waste a Good Crisis
One of my favourable philosophical aphorisms came from Chairman Mao: “There is great disorder under the heavens; the situation is excellent.” Every great disorder and catastrophe creates excellent opportunities for thought and invention. Suspending the beliefs that coronavirus is man-made and someone wants to reap political and financial profits from it (in philosophy every conspiracy theory is another truth), what appears is that coronavirus is proving to man, black and white, big and small, that we are nothing. The virus is creating great disorder under the heavens and philosophically, the situation is excellent. True to Hannah Arendt, in such Dark Times as this, we must do nothing but think! We live in a failed world system that has created and produced failed conditions and states that cannot protect us from nature and its violences.

Coronavirus provides a world and human crisis that we cannot waste. It is disorder that provides an excellent opportunity for imagining and building another world and another humanity. We need a new Humanity and a new Planetarity. Forget the races, the tribes, the genders and the borders, we are one species among other species that are in trouble with ourselves and ultimately with nature.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa: [email protected].

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