The coronavirus crisis clearly has a political dimension, since its solution requires political measures. However, the political weaponization of the virus by ideologues of both right and left has been nothing but counterproductive. Not only is it unhelpful in dealing with the pandemic; it also offsets any silver lining that we may find in this crisis, such as the bridging of social, cultural and political divides.
The Virus vs. the System
What’s remarkable about the politicization of COVID-19 is how versatile it is. Whatever your ideology, the virus validates it. At least, that’s the impression one gets from reading social media posts, which range from I told you so to Vice contributor Reina Sultan’s viral Tweet, which urges: “PLEASE let this moment radicalize you.” Sultan argues that there is an immediate need for radical system change, since “[c]apitalism prevents” government from taking steps to “make sure people don’t need to go to work” during the pandemic. According to Sultan, “The government could put a moratorium on rent, mortgages, student loans [and] nationalize utilities,” the implication being that “a handful of billionaires” could bear the multi-trillion-dollar cost.
Others have used the renewed—and deserved—appreciation of healthcare workers and other systemically important occupational groups, many of whose members earn relatively low incomes, to push for anticapitalist policies, arguing that the current crisis shows how unfairly income is distributed in our capitalist society. But income isn’t distributed at all. Rather, it reflects supply and demand, a function of scarcity and perceived usefulness. Thus, it makes little sense to base one’s general economic policy on the particular requirements of an emergency situation. Many countries would do well to invest in their healthcare systems. But that’s not an argument against capitalism.
Particularly shortsighted is some anticapitalists’ schadenfreude at the fact that the economy is taking a hit due to the pandemic—as if economic crises only affected large corporations and rich capitalists. What about all the ordinary people whose livelihoods depend on a functioning economy? Besides, don’t we need economic growth and stability to sustain public health?
Some people take their schadenfreude to such extremes that they are celebrating Coronavirus infections among their political enemies. The gloating reactions to Boris Johnson’s announcement that he has contracted COVID-19 are a case in point. Such reactions are obscene.
A particularly radical manifestation of this mindset recently popped up on my Facebook newsfeed: “I hope all politicians, police and elitists will get Covid 19, and die.” The poster identifies as a Muslim anarchist. While his views may be fringe, they are embedded in a larger network of radical thought and action.
The anarchist platform CrimethInc. recently published an article entitled “Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide.” The piece, which focuses more on “how to survive all the needless tragedies that governments and the global economy are heaping upon us in the context of the pandemic” than on the virus itself, makes some good points about the importance of community and mutual aid at times of crisis; however, its advice on social distancing is highly irresponsible:
We won’t be safer if our society is reduced to a bunch of atomized individuals. That would neither protect us from the virus nor from the stress of this situation nor from the power grabs that capitalists and state authorities are preparing to carry out.
According to CrimethInc., “The measures being implemented around the world are totalitarian in every sense of the word.” In fact, “the virus shows us … that we were already living in an authoritarian society.” And “it might be worth it to risk our lives … to defend our freedom and the possibility of living in an egalitarian society.” In other words, not only is resistance to the system more essential than resistance to the virus; it has become even more pressing now that the system is taking action against the virus.
Looming Totalitarianism?
Is there any merit to the claim that governments are using COVID-19 as an excuse to move towards totalitarianism? It depends. This certainly seems to be the case in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has weaponized the virus against his opposition in an attempt to undermine parliament and the rule of law. Experts warn that Hungary is in danger of sliding into dictatorship. But the former communist country is, in many ways, an outlier compared to most other modern democracies. Orbán’s autocratic leadership style, his pronounced nationalism and his attacks on press freedom led to the suspension of his Fidesz party from the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) in the EU parliament.
In my home country of Austria, the situation is quite different. Austria was one of the first western nations to implement restrictive government measures to contain the virus. This was partly because of our geographic proximity to Italy. However, these measures are backed not only by the government—a coalition of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the left-leaning Green Party—but by the opposition and by the vast majority of citizens. These measures are not arbitrary (at least not by design); and they don’t infringe on freedom of speech or of the press. So to speak of looming totalitarianism seems like a misguided, slippery slope fallacy.
The real question, of course, is whether draconian government restrictions work to squelch pandemics. While it may be too early to say for sure (though we have reason to be optimistic), history offers some interesting case studies, most notably the cases of St. Louis and Philadelphia during the Spanish flu, which killed millions worldwide. While the Philadelphia authorities largely ignored the outbreak and even “threw a parade that drew 200,000 people,” St. Louis immediately “closed buildings such as schools, churches, courtrooms and libraries,” and “[g]atherings of more than 20 people were banned, work shifts were staggered and ridership on streetcars was limited.” As a result, the death toll in St. Louis was less than half that of Philly.
No, Nature Is Not Fighting Back
A particularly facepalm-inducing trope that is going around is that the Coronavirus pandemic is the planet’s way of indicating that it’s had enough of the anthropocene. According to one article,
The coronavirus pandemic is no accident. Like past global epidemics, it’s a warning that nature has had it with the ecocidal proclivities of man. These outrageous actions are changing climate and are warming and threatening planet Earth. Nature (the Earth) is fighting back. Climate change is sowing pandemic diseases.
While the outbreak of COVID-19 in humans is linked to the trade and consumption of wildlife, the idea that we are currently experiencing nature’s revenge on humanity is, at best, a pathetic fallacy (the attribution of human feelings, motives and responses to inanimate objects or phenomena). The earth is not fighting back; nor are pandemics nature’s population control. What makes the latter notion particularly objectionable is its implication that mass death is, ultimately, a good thing: after all, it’s necessary to thin the herd from time to time. To those who so argue I say, Go first!
Identity Politics Rears Its Head
Another narrative is that “COVID-19 is a gendered crisis.” Australian politician Mehreen Faruqi has stated that “[n]urses, nurse aides, teachers, child carers and early-childhood educators, aged-care workers and cleaners are mostly women,” and that women, therefore, “carry a disproportionate risk of being exposed to the virus.” However, these are by far not the only occupational groups facing a Coronavirus risk. We must also consider those male-dominated whose members are working on the frontlines: such as the medical profession and the police. In fact, men constitute the majority of fatalities. So why make this a feminist issue?
It has also been suggested that “LGBTQ+ communities are among those who are particularly vulnerable to the negative health effects of this virus.” The reasoning is that because “[t]he LGBTQ+ population uses tobacco at rates that are 50 percent higher than the general population,” and because “COVID-19 is a respiratory illness that has proven particularly harmful to smokers,” they are more likely to be affected. A second argument is that “a greater number of “[LGBTQ+ folk] may have compromised immune systems” due to higher rates of HIV and cancer in the community. Thirdly, many LGBTQ+ individuals “are reluctant to seek medical care” due to “discrimination, unwelcoming attitudes, and lack of understanding from providers and staff in many health care settings.” Of these positions, the first two can only be described as gratuitous identity politics. Smoking and pre-existing health conditions are risk factors that affect large segments of the general population. To frame these issues in terms of LGBTQ+ identity seems arbitrary and needlessly divisive.
Isolation, Xenophobia and Diplomacy
Nor is it helpful to call COVID-19 the China virus. The government of Xi Jinping is not blameless, but pointing fingers out of political expediency is a dangerous distraction from the challenge at hand. China is sending both experts and medical supplies to the West to help with the pandemic. This may well be a PR stunt—but beggars can’t be choosers. This is an emergency situation, and the last thing we need are further diplomatic tensions.
This brings me to the issue of national isolation. Closing our borders, an emergency measure against the spread of COVID-19, is certainly a sensible policy in the current situation. But that doesn’t imply that this should also be done under normal circumstances. Yet many nationalists now feel vindicated in their anti-immigration views. There is great danger in invoking epidemiology in the context of immigration. It’s a xenophobic trope: the ingroup threatened by outgroup contamination. This can lead to the demonization and dehumanization of perceived outgroups: a recipe for violence and disaster.
So, while self-isolation on both the national and personal levels is necessary at this juncture, it’s important to draw a clear distinction between people and the virus. Nor is this the time to engage in divisive politics. After all, the goal should be to fight the pandemic, not each other.
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“While the outbreak of COVID-19 in humans is linked to the trade and consumption of wildlife, the idea that we are currently experiencing nature’s revenge on humanity is, at best, a pathetic fallacy (the attribution of human feelings, motives and responses to inanimate objects or phenomena).”
A fallacy to which Pope Francis has recently succumbed. In an interview he declared that the Coronavirus is “certainly” Nature’s response to us, and possibly her “revenge”!
COVID-19 and the Economics of Mortality
The elevation of the COVID-19 virus to the status of a global pandemic highlights a phenomenon I will call ontological politics.
Ontology is that branch of philosophy which enquires into the nature of Being. A key presupposition in the Western philosophical tradition going back to Plato is that the highest form of being is God. And so, ontology has always been incipiently linked to theology. What distinguishes contemporary ontology is that it puts aside this theological dimension (nonetheless, a residue of it remains, in the popular notion that human life is ‘sacred’). In this form, modern ontology – an “ontology without metaphysics”, as Foucault called it – is thereby a philosophy of finitude, of finite Being, the philosophy of a being who lives.
Ontology enters the political sphere in precisely this existential guise, as the politics which takes as its object the life and living being of human individuals. As a consequence, the human increasingly comes to be identified with a vital substance removed from every juridico-political form. But without the latter, persons are necessarily exposed to what both saves and annihilates them. This is why, as Michel Foucault points out, the “formidable power of death” unleashed by the wars of modern states “presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, to optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. . . . It is as managers of life, and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed”.
The idea of a ‘governance of life’ is not exactly new. Foucault traced its origins to roughly the end of the 17th century, when for the first time in history, large-scale management of populations became the prerogative of the state. Moreover, whilst this current Coronavirus outbreak has re-activated those bio-political exigencies which arose with the SARS and AIDS pandemics, to name only a few, the politics of life is not limited to such periodic explosions. Apart from the managerial state, a durable version of bio-politics has been with us for quite some time now, in the form of the politics of identity and gender, human rights activism and the ecological movement. In all these, the political unconscious is oriented by the conditions of what Giorgio Agamben called “bare life”. Taking charge of this biological zero-degree, whether through the preservation, enhancement or prevention of human existence, constitutes the entire scope of political power. And so to politics alone will be reserved the right to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death”. Clearly, then, if we’re to understand the broader implications of this new global pandemic, we must get a handle on the basic bio-political premises which have long underwritten all our social, political and moral concepts.
The first is that politics becomes preoccupied with questions of survival. Viewing political conflict as an existential risk, or, equally, defining threats to survival in political terms, reduces politics to notions which properly belong to biology (for instance, the competition among organisms for survival). But is it appropriate to frame political policy, internal or foreign, in terms of biological concepts? After all, organisms compete for sheer existence, whereas political communities compete for a type of existence. Life in the state is qualified by and circumscribed within certain limiting institutional and social norms. Despite what Aristotle says, the human is not a political being by nature.
To the extent that politics is a relative rather than absolute value, political conceptions belong in the domain of what Karl Popper called ‘World 3’; as a product of mind, they include ideas, representations and doctrines. In short, political facts are not part of nature. They are created by human beings. The point is that making politics beholden to naturalistic criteria such as survival shifts the focus of politics away from institutional reform towards defending a social community against what are perceived as external or internal threats to its existence. Then power becomes the prerogative of those who specialize in strategies for survival. The current trends in this respect are not difficult to recognize: for example, the increasing preoccupation of governments with ‘national security’ issues, and the rise of the authoritarian ‘strong-man’ political leader, whose only goal is to retain power (that is, ‘survive’ politically).
On the other hand, if one considers the kinds of questions of interest to the public lately, from reproductive technologies, the obsession with regimes of self-care, physiological health and personal well-being, to manifold environmental concerns about the future of life on the planet, it’s noticeable that many if not all bear directly on the biological conditions upon all which human life depends. Referring to the racial ideology of German National Socialism, Rudolf Hess called Nazi politics “applied biology”. The only difference between today’s situation and Nazism is that rather than a racialized body, now it’s a physiological and psycho-biological body which forms the sole subject of politics.
At War Against the Virus, but Who is the Enemy?
Quite a few recent news commentators have remarked on the convergence between political, social and economic measures enacted to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 virus and the placing of entire nations on what is effectively a ‘war-footing’. With the qualification, however, that the enemy in this case is not so much a hostile nation as an anonymous biological ‘force’. This is important. Identification of an enemy is the precondition of war. In an effort to specify the distinctive feature of a totalitarian political regime, Hannah Arendt distinguished between real and objective enemies. She argued that the latter category is particular to Totalitarian politics. What is the meaning of this differentiation, and why should it be relevant to bio-politics? I will suggest that the notion of the objective enemy is at the heart of bio-power.
The measures taken to combat the real, that is, political enemy, are bound by certain juridico-political constraints. The latter, as a power that “holds back” , contains political conflict and prevents it from becoming untrammelled. And the fact that the enemy is defined in political rather than existential terms acts as a constraint on the measures taken to combat them. Whereas in the case of the objective enemy, such constraints are largely absent, and the reason is that, for a totalitarian political regime, its enemies do not actually fall under the jurisdiction of legality. The totalitarian enemy is not considered to have committed a crime or violated any legal code. Their enemy status does not depend on intent, behaviour or even political identity; it’s not what they do but the sheer fact they exist which makes them an enemy (thus for the Nazi’s, the Jews were guilty of the “sin of being born” ).
That the objective enemy is defined in existential rather than political terms has drastic implications. For instance, whilst in conventional war, the enemy combatant has certain legal rights, the objective enemy is beyond the protection of the law. In this respect, Arendt rightly identifies the concentration camp as the typical institution of totalitarian politics. In the case of the Nazi regime, the express purpose of the concentration camp system, instituted by Hermann Goering in 1933, was to incarcerate ‘enemies’ of the regime. Apart from being places of detainment, the camps also functioned as a sort of experimental ‘social laboratory’ in which the very notion of an objective enemy was tested and refined. Most importantly, they were places in which the law did not apply. Indeed, what is conspicuous about all the various forms of torture and punishment inflicted on inmates is that, by order of the SS, the camp administration were strictly forbidden to correlate these punishments – or, for that matter, the original grounds for imprisonment – with any specific crime or fault. The inmates had to be prevented from ever understanding why they were being punished or incarcerated, lest they come to see their punishment or imprisonment as some form of ‘atonement’ (and thus feel morally justified). The point is that the objective enemy is “not really suspected of any hostile action”, and “is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked, or whose past justifies suspicion”. Rather, they are “a carrier of ‘tendencies’, like the carrier of a disease”.
It’s significant that Arendt uses the simile of disease. A recent media news story in this country described how nursing and medical staff were subject to verbal abuse when seen outside hospitals wearing their uniforms. In one reported incident, a driver waiting in a queue at a drive-in coffee shop scolded a nurse for being out in the public and “potentially spreading the Coronavirus” amongst waiting customers. As is the case with the objective enemy, this nurse is targeted as incipiently ‘dangerous’, not as a result of any identifiable act or attitude, but by virtue of her living being. Her guilt is ontological – attached not to what she is doing but simply to the fact that she is; just going about one’s daily business – shopping, buying food, or waiting at a bus stop – is enough for one to be classed as a threat.
The category of objective enemy completely transforms how the political adversary is defined. Ordinarily, the latter is someone with whom I may engage in a discourse. In situations of political conflict, one hopes that things can be resolved through reasonable negotiation. Should such negotiation fail, recourse to war becomes likely. And yet, in the traditional politico-legal framework of European public law, the Jus Publicum Europaeum, even in the midst of war, the opportunity always exists to resume diplomatic relations. However, if the adversary is a non-human force, discussion or reasoning are obviously ruled out.
After likening the Jewish People to a bacterial infection, Julius Langbehn, a right-wing anti-semitic ideologue popular in Wilhelmine Germany, remarked that “[o]ne doesn’t negotiate with trichinae and bacilli, nor are trichinae and bacilli educable; one exterminates them as quickly and completely as possible”. In our context, Langbehn’s choice of words could not be more significant. Negotiation and a spirit of reasonable compromise are precisely the meaning of political rationality. Whereas in a situation where one no longer has anything to say to one’s opponents, politics is surpassed, whilst the concept of war moves beyond any juridical or political framework. In which case, the steps taken to counter the enemy will be less a matter of a battle of wits that engages a worthy opponent and more an efficiently expedited ‘procedure’ such as one might utilize to remove an obstacle blocking one’s path. Rather than an organized fighting force to be reckoned with, the enemy is regarded as a menace: a miscreant, a ‘non-person’, a pest or a dangerous disease that must be eliminated. But then there will be little to prevent the transformation of politics into a “manifestation of absolute violence, a strategy of annihilation taken to the extreme”, as Alain Finkielkraut put it,
Because the objective enemy is defined in expressly non-human terms, it opens the way for war to become a sort of ‘hygiene operation’. Indeed, the latter was precisely how Adolf Hitler conceived of the extermination of the Jewish People. It’s not without significance that the killing agent used in the gas chambers of Nazi extermination facilities was an industrial pesticide commonly used to eradicate rodents. It was also on these terms that Hitler justified the German military thrust deep into Eastern Europe and Russia, which involved the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other ethnic groups considered to be ‘socially inferior’. It’s important to remember that Hitler’s operation to ‘clear’ Europe of such peoples served no military-strategic purpose. Rather, it was carried out on the pretext that these peoples represented a threat to the ‘racial health’ of the German nation.
Of course, likening Jews to ‘parasites’ or ‘vermin’ – a plague of insects, locusts or lice, but also to a virus or a disease – has a long history in the language of anti-Semitism. What is decisive, however, with Nazism is that such terminology went well beyond an analogy or a literary figure. The Jews didn’t just resemble parasites or behave as bacteria; rather, for Nazi ideology, they really were bacteria. In which case, they could expect to be treated accordingly. Consequently, the correct term for their massacre is not ‘holocaust’, with its sacred connotations, but ‘extermination’ – exactly the term used for insects, rats, and lice (thus the name for the Final Solution in the Nazi lexicon, Soziale Disinfektion – ‘social disinfection’ – was no euphemism).
Behind Hitler’s fixation on a global racial struggle was a bio-political conception of social reality which one recent philosopher has characterized as immunological. It was the likening of the Jewish people to an ‘infectious disease’, quite literally a ‘bacteriological’ danger, which led to measures whose aim was to immunize the German population against a deadly threat. Hence the ruthless genocide enacted against the Jewish populations of East Europe was meant to prevent the spread of a ‘racial infection’. Hence, also, Heinrich Himmler’s remarks, in his 1944 speech to SS troops in Kharkov, that “Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness”. At the end of the 19th century, Ernest Renan predicted the coming of “zoological wars”, in which whole armies would be exterminated like vermin. Who could have believed that, only forty years later, his vision would become a reality?
All of this, frightening and disturbing as it may be, gives us cause to reflect. For instance, what might it mean that a concept like that of the objective enemy can be found lurking in the background of our current global health crisis? I would suggest it indicates a radical and comprehensive reorganization of all our political concepts, one which has, however, long been underway. The COVID-19 virus pandemic is only the symptom of a much more widespread contagion – that of bio-medical politics. Just as in the Nazi concentration and death camps, and as the by-now obligatory ideology of human rights makes clear, the preeminent figure of this new political reality is the notion that adherence to our own biological material is what makes us human; just one example of how this bio-political concept of ‘bare life’ underlies the entire public discourse on COVID-19 are grim forecasts in the media that as a result of the pandemic, we can expect an explosion in global poverty. For what is the latter but a prototypical instance of human existence reduced to the level of subsistence? On the other hand, some commentators have expressed concern about the potential for ‘dehumanization’ when analysis of the pandemic seems exclusively preoccupied with the economic impact of the virus. Still, what sense could there in worrying that individuals might be at risk of losing their humanity when the very determination of life in biological terms has already stripped the person of all personal attributes?
Nietzsche predicted the coming of a “struggle for dominion over the earth”, that will be “carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical principles”. It’s not difficult to identify, in the modern world, such an idea of a struggle for global dominion with geo-politics; more rarely does one see a recognition of the underlying ‘philosophical principle’ as the above-discussed bio-political paradigm of ‘bare life’. With the latter, the human being, denuded of all juridical and ethical determinations, is reduced to a bundle of vital functions that can only be defined biologically and medically.
As with the so-called ‘neo-morts’ – the ‘living dead’ in hospitals and palliative care facilities, whose vital functions are sustained by a complex technological apparatus – it becomes increasingly difficult to define the boundary between life and death. Is the life sustained in this way a form of living being which serves death? Or is it the other way around? (i.e., in the sense that the very machinery which supplies life has become a power of life and death). Where are we to find the ontological postulate to clarify such issues? Even as researchers seem unable to reach a consensus on the global tally of fatalities ascribed to COVID-19 because of all sorts of strangely abstract controversies as to how and on what grounds fatalities should be calculated, at least one thing is clear: it’s because power “is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” that every sort of politics nowadays seems to have turned into a sort of reckoning on death.
The Life of Death
In the previous section, I discussed some ramifications of the analogy, common now, between the COVID-19 pandemic and a state of war. Which of course begs the question: how does one go to war against a disease? A political order is a human order to the extent that the enemy confronted on the battlefield is at once a member of a fighting force who can expect to be killed and a person with whom one can reason. And because reason and speech is the opening of justice, it’s as a speaking being that the enemy has legal rights and thus human dignity. But what happens when the enemy is an anonymous force that can never be personally confronted? You cannot reason with the blind forces of life. So whilst in the wake of COVID-19, it may feel like humanity is under siege, this is certainly not war in any conventional sense of the word. And it certainly doesn’t aid our understanding when, in order to try to address what’s at stake, people reach for conventional theological or humanistic arguments. Let us, rather, attend carefully to the sense of the perplexing difficulty this situation represents. Only then will we be in a position to recognize how a beguiling paradox is at work here, a paradox which perhaps defines our bio-political epoch.
To begin with, it’s worth remembering that a virus represents the very potency of a biological process which goes on within (and indeed presupposes) life. In other words, the virus erupts as life and within life, but is already, in this living form, a pathological force, life that works to negate life. Or, to put it somewhat differently: a virus is that organic development by which life itself becomes the engine of its own destruction, just as an auto-immune disease represents the moment when the life-forces in a living body start to attack its own vital substance. In this respect, death is not something hostile to life, attacking it from without. Rather, it is already present in the form of death-directed life forces which lie ready to ambush the normal functioning of a living being, destroying it from within.
At this point, a parallel arises which is at once arresting and uncanny: that between the virus-carrier and the suicide-bomber. The latter, regardless of their particular theological or ideological motivations, is at base a life resolved to create destruction; their mission is to take as many other individuals as possible with them on their own death-laden trajectory. The suicide bomber is, in effect, a lethal fragment of living vitality that discharges itself on the life of others with the intention of killing them. As with the person infected by this virus – who has effectively, from the point of view of the disease, become an incubator of death – the suicide bomber is the most intensive activation of life become a veritable force of annihilation.
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the immense conundrum of a politics of living being than this likeness, showing how when life become the highest value, one may expect all kinds of disturbing reversals. For instance, in the cross-fire of political commentary about COVID-19, one often hears talk of a looming conflict between those economic and social measures designed to slow transmission, and the potentially catastrophic economic effects of such measures. Certain social restrictions might stop the virus dead in its tracks, but kill the economy, whereas those who baulk at crippling the economic system risk putting many millions of lives at risk.
Steve Hilton takes this dilemma even further: “You know that famous phrase, ‘The cure is worse than the disease’? That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it’s just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people. A UK study calculated that 130,000 people died avoidably from austerity there between 2012 and 2017. The years of austerity for America to pay the cost of this shutdown will be worse. Adjusting to the size of our economy, it’s over a million deaths . . . Poverty kills, despair kills. This shutdown is deadly. . . . Don’t turn a public health crisis into America’s worst catastrophe”.
Hilton poses an opposition between, on the one hand, the human cost of economic shutdown, and on the other, the mortality potentially inflicted by the virus. He then suggests that both these scenarios will lead to identical, or near-identical, outcomes – a huge loss of life. In which case, why deliberately inflict upon society a total shutdown when, all things considered, the same death toll will result with or without it? Presumably, the virus will do its destructive work and then depart, whereas a deliberately inflicted trauma, such as closing down large sectors of the economy, will leave tragic long-term consequences. The first catastrophe might now be unavoidable; the second, however, can be avoided. Or at least, so this argument goes.
I’m not in a position to verify whether Hilton’s claim about the mortality caused by economic slowdown is factually correct; what interests me is the presupposition of the argument itself. The author sets up his discussion on the basis of an opposition between two scenarios, as an ‘either-or’, but with both leading to virtually the same outcome in terms of deaths. Hilton obviously advances this argument more as a provocation than as an analysis. Yet what’s striking is that he has, quite inadvertently, stumbled on a certain truth: that, in fact, in a bio-political framework, these two terms – economics and human life – are one and the same. Karl Marx understood labour and work as a metabolic exchange with nature that reproduces and preserves the species. In this sense, Marx anticipated the demise of classical political theory, swallowed up in the modern age by the idea of political economy. The latter, arising in the late-18th century and at the dawn of our bio-political era as a sort of hybrid conceptual monster, attests to that coupling of life and power which is at the heart of bio-politics.
The common denominator between the virus and the economy is that both are effectively the life-process writ-large; and with the neutralization of moral, social, and metaphysical standards effected by the paradigms of bio-power, nothing remains to mediate between the economy and life but biology. Again, this situation is not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic. It prefigures a general trend. For instance, to take just a few examples: the growing prominence of issues of ethnicity and gender, the centrality of public health care as a privileged index of the functioning of economic systems, and the priority some contemporary political parties accord to maintaining the homogenous ethnic composition of states. In all of the above, there is a tendency to flatten the political into the biological. Likewise, that international political conflicts seem to constantly turn into ‘human rights crises’ can be attributed less to a proliferation of tyrannical political despots and more to sense in which people nowadays find it impossible to think of politics in anything but ontological terms (that is, as a politics of living being).
Still, there will be those who insist on hammering away at the issues with obsolete concepts. Economics, we are told, represents a relative value, whereas the lives of individuals are an absolute. But then how could one even contemplate a trade-off between the value of human life and ‘mere’ economic considerations? In the meantime, they forget that since at least the start of the 19th century, the very concept of value itself has been understood precisely in economic terms. Carl Schmitt touched on this conundrum in a short pamphlet called ‘The Tyranny of Values’:
“Since 1848, there has been a synchronism as remarkable as it is shocking, a simultaneity, an osmosis and symbiosis between the philosophy of values and the philosophy of life . . . Life is, if not the highest, still one of the higher values of every philosophy of life. For over a hundred years now, the twin pair, life/value and value/life, makes its presence felt in a tightly interwoven contemporaneity . . . In the value system and the vocabulary of racial outlooks, value and life appear intimately bound on a higher plane. Thus, while addressing the Press on the 10th of November, 1938, Hitler spelled out an ‘incomparable value’ for the benefit of everybody, and indeed, of the Germans: the German people was ‘the highest value that there is on this entire earth’”.
Historical content aside, Schmitt’s remarks indicate something crucial. And this is that, henceforth, these two terms – life and value – have become interchangeable. The bio-political paradigm presumes that human life is, in Hitler’s words, “the highest value that there is on this entire earth”. At the height of the Nazi Terror, Arendt warned of the dangerous assumption that biological life is “the highest good”. Because bio-power reduces individuals to mere instances of a ‘life-process’, it degrades the actual existence of the human as a personal being, just as it absolutizes the species-being. We are familiar with this dehumanization in the name of humanity from the “total wars” of modern technological civilization.
The political conflicts of the 20th century, which led to mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale, were fought on the basis of value-absolutes; that is, they were wars between ideologies, each of which advanced a total claim on reality. In our bio-political era, the value-absolute is not so much life as the equivalence of life and death (for instance, it’s no accident that the so-called Beveridge Plan, perhaps the largest public health program in human history and the origin of the modern Welfare State, was elaborated in the middle of a war that produced 50 million dead). What’s important, then, is not simply that the COVID-19 pandemic might well kill millions but that it’s a phenomenon which takes place in a period of human history in which this equivalence is unmistakeable.
In this respect bio-politics, especially in its bio-medical format as an ideology of public health, despite its supposedly humanitarian goals, paves the way for a comprehensive dehumanization, one that will make the horrific events of 20th century political history seem like a kind of pleasant belle epoque.
Conclusion
The Covid-19 virus outbreak has activated the deep principle of bio-politics – the conatus essendi, a concept Spinoza defined, many centuries before Freud or the birth of modern biology, as the drive by which “each entity strives to persevere in its own being”. Since the connatus exists beyond the reach of all traditional notions of social morality, such as altruism, we totally misunderstand it by calling it selfishness. What we’re dealing with here is far more fundamental – the deep ontological ground and power-house of all living being, something totally non-psychological, which defies all conventional religious, moral and socio-political wisdom. It will not be countered with the blustering moralizing pronouncements of public intellectuals and government leaders – that in these difficult times, ‘we must all pull together’. Those incidents mentioned earlier, where nurses and medical staff seen in public were abused for potentially “spreading the virus”, reprehensible as they are, nevertheless demonstrate a sort of perverse lucidity on the part of the victimizers. Aside from the obvious insensitivity of their behaviour, these people have hit upon a sublime truth. In its imperturbable atavism, the conatus essendi is the arcane of bio-politics.
Many cultural critics nowadays bemoan the demise of a notion of the ‘common good’. Whether one chooses to frame such a notion in terms of virtue or theological concepts, the current pandemic strikingly shows it does still exist, but that in our bio-political era, it can only be defined in ontologico-medical terms. This is why the response of governments and political powers all over the world has, with few exceptions, been so unanimous; it is the implicit recognition that life is indeed the only remaining communal good which exists after the evacuation of all moral, theological and metaphysical categories.
When individuals are preoccupied with asserting their ‘right-to-be’, human existence is in danger of becoming, in the form of the conatus essendi, a modality of that gross life-force which continues on its way, shoving aside everything in its path. In this respect, both nature and history are the medium of a self-sufficient and self-satisfied being, “revelling in its exception, solicitous of its own happiness – or its own health”, a being which, “persisting analytically, or animally, in its being”, in “the ideal vigour” of its identity, always seeks to enhance its own powers, capacity and position in the world. The great problem with bio-politics is that in never questioning this ontological prioritization of the ‘I’, it makes “individual self-preservation the presupposition of all other political categories, from sovereignty to liberty”.
As the opening onto a world which “affirms and firms itself up in the life of human individuals and in their struggle for existence”, bio-politics is an egology. This is why all the global humanitarian initiatives which have hitherto proceeded under the banner of public health, universal human rights, or global economic equality, have, in the wake of the virus, become quite transparent. We can now see these initiatives for what they really are: as symptomatic expressions of the conatus essendi, the political camouflage for an egoistic striving for personal salvation whose ferocious “concern to be” jeopardizes the ethical, “menacing” the fundamental “generosity” of compassion with the “inhuman necessities of being in man and in economy”. But again, let us be clear that what is at issue with this egoism is not so much an “ugly vice” of the subject as the ontological fixation which sustains the “persistence and insistence of beings in the guise of individuals jealous for their part”.
The ontological postulate of bio-politics makes it impervious to conventional social, moral, political and theological norms. The politics of being is, in fact, the silent revolution which, unbeknown to most, has long been gathering momentum in our midst. And so, the ‘war’ against the COVID-19 virus is a war that unfolds under the horizon of ontology, in the name of Being, and that means in the name of those philosophical totalizations which seek to dominate reality in an all-encompassing manner. Hence a memorable formulation of Emmanuel Levinas, that may well serve as the leitmotif of our bio-political era: “Political totalitarianism rests on an ontological totalitarianism”.
It would be too easy to believe this pandemic is some freak occurrence of epidemiology, bursting onto the world-stage to wreak havoc and destruction on all the existing social, economic and political structures of our globalized planetary-system. On the contrary, what is happening today only brings into focus, in a single cataclysmic movement, all the underlying mechanisms of ontological politics characteristic of our bio-political civilization, mechanisms which have long been assembled in the wings, ready and waiting for the opportune moment to be activated.
The silver lining is that most people have had a powerful re-prioritization thrust upon them, and they now appreciate the importance of practicality over ideology. The handful of remaining lunatics shown in this article are brazen opportunists trying to take advantage of the crisis, but their increased loudness is only to compensate for their dwindling numbers and rapidly decline in influence.
I am not sure about their decline in influence. It seems like public institutions across the west have been totally and utterly taken over by leftist thinking. I see no cracks in the armour so far.
On the possible eminent totaliarismo and looking at the case of Brazil (my country) many of the opposition, the press and the population find the current president (Jair Bolsonaro) authoritarian comparing him even with Orbán. Obs: They have a certain reason, because the president has some “harsh” speeches and criticizes Congress and the media a lot, but sincerely these sometimes also exaggerate criticisms of him.
Some of the opposition are looking to take advantage of the situation. The left says a lot that the president does not think about the poor (this is not new from the left) and how the poor will suffer more with the virus this “beautiful” speech has intensified) The president until 15 days ago was skeptical about the disease classifying -the one of only a small flu (it was logically and rightly criticized for that) and even against the isolation measures proposed by the governors. But after days that states have done what all countries are doing and the cases of covid-19 increasing the president has changed the speech. At that time, the Government created a 3-month salary program for people who are informal workers and will stay put, in addition to authorizing employers (small and medium-sized entrepreneurs) to reduce their employees’ salaries with the Government paying the difference. Exactly today, Congress will vote on a bill that authorizes the Government to increase spending on security and especially health, that is, the Government may exceed the spending limits imposed by law.
Despite comparing Bolsonaro a lot with Orbán (for being right-wing and his son has already visited Hungary) in the case of Brazil there is no greater risk to democracy because of the virus and contrary to what many thought Bolsonaro does not give any sign (for while) of totalitarian threat taking advantage of the world moment. Despite their problems and fights with Congress at the time, both sides seem to have entered the “same road” in the search for a solution. Especially because the two would lose if they continued with the disputes while the virus spreads. Well, this is my vision!
Thanks for this except:-
“The government of Xi Jinping is not blameless, but pointing fingers out of political expediency is a dangerous distraction from the challenge at hand. China is sending both experts and medical supplies to the West to help with the pandemic. This may well be a PR stunt—but beggars can’t be choosers. This is an emergency situation, and the last thing we need are further diplomatic tensions.”
A bizarre paragraph in an otherwise much better article! People all over the world are quite rightly pointing fingers at China’s GOVERNMENT, as distinct from its PEOPLE, who have little control over that government. That is neither political expediency nor a distraction. And vast amounts of those medical supplies are proving less than useless. “Beggars” most certainly CAN be choosers when they pay millions for medical supplies that turn out to be dangerously faulty. And we must not let the Chinese government or anyone else exploit this emergency. Diplomacy be damned!