The Sunday News
It was very much like any other academic exaggeration and intellectual attention seeking when in the 1980s and the 1990s sociologists prophesised that the world was approaching the dreaded condition of a “risk society.”
It was chiefly the German sociologist Ulrich Beck and the British social scientist Anthony Giddens who postulated that the time was fast coming when the world population would be deeply concerned about the possibility and or impossibility of the future itself. The world becomes a true “risk society” when it has become so endangered, fragile and vulnerable to the extent that the future of the world and that of humanity in the planet become doubtful and scarce.
The fear of nuclear warfare, from the 1950s and the later decades once rendered the world a risk society. The stand-off between the United States of America with its allies and the Soviet Union with its own was marked by the fear of nuclear warfare that would end the world and reduce the planet to ashes.
Everyday thinking and politics was occupied with the fear of the end of the world and the passionate desire to preserve human life under the sun. Human life and happiness had to be navigated and negotiated from a global dark cloud of the possibility of a nuclear Third World War.
A man made catastrophe, in other words, threatened the planet. It was hard to imagine a tomorrow of the world when superpowers amongst the world countries had nuclear warheads trained against each other. Life had to be lived and enjoyed in the full knowledge that it could end any minute and end in true apocalyptic fashion.
The Coronavirus pandemic of the present has returned humanity to that condition of fear of the end. For Africans it is a double jeopardy as we fear the virus itself and also suspect and even fear the vaccines that are being produced against it.
The African is once more the unhappy and fearful child of the planet.
Living in the End Times
In the alarming book of 2010, Living in the End Times, Slavoj Zizek did not say anything new about the possible end of the world and its orders. He only put across the old news in a new way.
Zizek typically added poetry and style to the old prose about a world system and world order that are tittering towards a collapse of apocalyptic extents.
Drawing from the book of Revelations metaphor of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that represented conquest, war, famine and death that would bring the world to an end Zizek pictures the risks that punctuate the present world, risks that have spectacularly been dramatised by the scourge of Coronavirus.
The global ecological crisis, biogenetic revolution, social inequalities, and worldwide economic meltdown are pictured by Zizek as the four horsemen that are bringing the present world as it is known to its end. The worldwide death toll of coronavirus that increases by each day is reminding everyone of the vulnerability of the world and the fragility of human life.
The present world with all its capitalist political and economic modernity has been so polluted and corrupted that it produces fast-multiplying and mutating micro-organism that are eating humanity away and threatening to turn the earth into a cemetery.
If the Cold War inspired the arms race where every country had to invent and amass weapons the Coronavirus and the war against it has provoked a medical scientific race where countries and their scientists are scrambling to produce a vaccine to mediate the pandemic.
The spectre of the Coronavirus is haunting the world and fear of death and the end envelopes every inch of the earth.
A vaccine has never been a cure; it has always been a negotiation and mediation of disease. What scientists and politicians of the world are not telling us, perhaps, is that all of us at some point will get the virus and fight the individual war to survive it.
The virus, maybe, is a modern kind of the flood of Noah from which some will be served and others consumed; a kind of judgement day where one person will be for himself or herself in the trial of salvation from damnation.
We can hazard to imagine our own Passover where those that have battled the virus and survived will be the ones to celebrate that the virus has passed over and left them to fight another day.
The New Abnormal
The prevalent noise is about how Coronavirus has brought upon us a new normal regime of life. The way we live and work has suddenly changed and human contact and interaction transformed.
What is not obvious but real is that the virus has largely served to emphasise if not to dramatised the old problems of the world such as social inequalities and other forms of apartheid. It is the poor and those that have always lived in the peripheries of mainstream social life that are the ultimate victims of Coronavirus.
No doubt the virus, so far does not discriminate rich from poor, but the poor even if they are not infected by the virus suffer its social consequences more.
It is the poor and other vulnerable people that cannot afford social distancing and working from home, if they have a home in the first place. As the vaccines, one after another, are getting launched from different western capitals the poor and other marginal people know it that they will be the last ones to benefit from the immunisation programmes.
When it comes to serving the world population from Coronavirus through vaccines and other mediations the old discriminations and marginalisations of the poor and unable are going to apply, the last are going to be the last as usual.
Not all countries and communities of the world are going to afford the vaccines the same. Social inequalities that have always punctuated the world will show their true colours as the world population scrambles for survival.
The new normal is only a shadow that hides, behind newness, the old and abnormal social inequalities that haunt the world. What we have is a new ab-normalisation of social relations in a world that has always been a risky and dangerous place for the powerless.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Hogsback, Eastern Cape, South Africa: [email protected].
