By Caesar D’Mello
Melbourne, May 15, 2020: One of the most devastating pandemics in human history is affecting almost every country on earth, including India, at varying stages of its development and varying levels of success in controlling it.
We are incessantly updated on cases and deaths, curves and vaccines, new arrangements at home and work, job losses, halted or slowing industry, shattered economies, life as we know changed, perhaps forever – faces of ‘dancing with the enemy.’.
The deluge of information, statistics and expert views, from multiple angles, however, remains mostly focused on measurable medical, sociological and econometric data, but overlooks consideration of the root of the pandemic. Truly, is it enough to identify its material starting point, such as whether it originated from bats or a laboratory in Wuhan to understand it fully?
Quite correctly the public discourse concentrates on the pandemic as a health crisis, but ignores what most can intuitively realize, that a pandemic is a mirror of society. We see in and through it the living threads of society’s fabric – how it is formed, its attitudes, priorities and prejudices, its values on life, material wealth and the spiritual, the quality of its governance, how justly it allocates resources, how its poor are treated – some reports have pained Indians and put India in a poor light internationally.
A pandemic forces, or should force a society to ask serious ontological questions of itself, of its nature, its self-image and self-understanding, of the failings and gaps in the way it lives and functions.
Covid-19 has brought to the fore a focus on the centrality of life. In this regard it points to an obvious disconnect: that while we are desperate to preserve and save life even as we are struggling to do so during this health challenge, as humanity we have developed the technological and scientific capacity to destroy some or most life on the planet, if so desired! So why is life valuable in one sense, as our efforts to respond to the pandemic show, yet disposable in another?
Even as the preservation of individual lives engages our best minds, some seem to believe that the pandemic legitimizes a new form of eugenics, a contemporary Darwinism of survival of the fittest. Why draw all under the restrictions, they say or imply, when it is the elderly, weak, sick and sickly who are most vulnerable? Would it not be efficient to accept a certain level of their mortality as “a new normal”, and free everyone else in society and the economy to march on? A mortality of a few for the many!
However, thankfully, there are those who do not project such reasoning but they, too, urge a return as soon as possible to life as it was BC – before coronavirus. ‘Snap back’ is a term for this! Caught on the horns of a dilemma of saving lives yet reviving the economy, the preference is for the way it used to be. This is seen as a goal and definition of “success”.
Variations of such reading appear around the world. The question of “snapback to what?” should be raised in reference to a variety of dimensions of our society, including the following two.
If the template for life on “the other side” is a ‘business as usual’ economy, does this mean, for instance, exploiting the environment as before – using it as a mere means for economic growth, enrichment of a minority, shareholder returns?
Should we disregard the profits-driven decision-making that inflicts far- reaching interconnected deleterious outcomes, including loss of habitat for animals, destruction of trees and forests that aids climate change, carbon emissions that cause massive pollution and increase in respiratory illnesses, poisoning of the seas and waterways, in a long litany of such effects?
Does snapback mean we should continue to feed the monster of militarism, globally absorbing US$1.8 trillion ($1,800 billion – in India $60 billion) a year for arms and warfare and sustaining tension and bellicosity, with dire human and ecological consequences, when health, education, economic and social inequality, the environment and other life-diminishing concerns are crying for attention to elevate the quality of human life, to Shalom?
Haven’t we seen enough to distrust the tired old notion that the arms expenditure and militarization brings us genuine security, while ignoring the non-military and much less expensive ‘soft power’ of peace building though mutual trust and confidence-building initiatives and strategic and patient diplomacy?
We should strive to persuade the ‘powers and principalities’ to grasp the true benefit of the vision for humanity, proposed by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutteres, and endorsed by Pope Francis: the fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war.
Experts advise us we have not yet understood thoroughly the epidemiology of the coronavirus, and in what ways it will continue to inflict challenge humanity. But given the enormity of its wide-ranging impact now and in the future, it would be naïve in the extreme to be fixated on a single event, cause or factor and the associated polemics to help us understand it completely.
We have to come to grips with why the era we live in is called Anthropocene, wherein humanity’s self-gratification is a serious factor in shaping the planet and the environment, marked by irremediable damage to life in all its forms, and to the well-being of ‘Our Common Home’.
We have to cast aside our arrogant myths of our power and superiority bred through a political and economic system that does not benefit the many, and acknowledge the pervasive ‘anti-life system’, as Pope Francis calls it, that violates ‘the most universal law…the interdependence of everyone with everyone, that there is no being, much less us humans, that is an island disconnected from everything else.’ In humility we have to question the way we live.
(Caesar D’Mello, a consultant on peace, justice, tourism and “development” issues is associated with Pax Christi Australia and International, a Catholic-based ecumenical movement concerned with peace and disarmament that involves justice, an end to oppression of marginalized people, care for Earth, and a just sharing of her resources.)