Part I of III
An alternative way, admittedly a tad peculiar of thinking about Covid, it is as an overextended viral teaching moment or boring class that threatens to go on and on until we are all buried, or at the very least, fallen sleep unto sickness, or sick onto death as it’s literally happening, not necessarily in the Kierkegaard sense. As far as learning goes, it has traditionally been agreed that there is nothing that does not have in it something to teach and that every moment has in it something to teach. As teaching goes, we should already have learned that good teachers are harsh; that incidentally is what Jesus, Socrates, or Nietzsche, respectively, wanted us to learn from them; the later even wrote so, verbatim. Well, then, Covid too is that kind of teacher.
But, if such an alternative way of looking at Covid is not utter nonsense, then the question is, what is it trying to teach us? In answering this question, I have drawn three possible lessons we should have all been learning from it. While they are interrelated, some may be deemed more pressing than others, some might be easier to discern, or some could have been learned sooner — before the end to the pandemia, if it ever will. The order of their appearance might be irrelevant. Of far more importance is to bear in mind these two caveats: firstly, in attempting to decipher if there is anything Covid is trying to teach us and what that might be, I must assume the virus was not created in a lab to be planted precisely on Wuhan to be through it intentionally released unto the world. And secondly, I must also assume the virus did not unintentionally “escape” from a lab directly to the Wuhan market in China and then reaching the world from it, also unintentionally. For neither of these two scenarios have any conclusive proofs been offered by the scientific communities; only counterarguments as to the unlikelihood, or vise versa, of either one scenario or the other have so far been offered.
Indeed, the only concrete pointer in the public dominium that could eliminate one of the two caveats above, is only linguistic in character, and very peculiar at that, also possibly circumstantial. It is a slogan. “Kung-Flu,” the slogan coined from among the circle of Mr. Trump, American President when Covid first broke out, is all at once quite too to the point, funny, pithy, neat, literarily creative, and far too clever, and more decisive, it is too politically overcharged a riposte against China to have sprung out ad-lib from someone who did not know what they were talking about — and this before the rest of the world knew what Covid was all about. And yet, “Kung-Flu,” in the context in which it was deployed is dismissive of the veracity that a new killer virus was spreading through America and the world. So, that’s that.
That being the case, one is left with no other recourse than to reasonably speculate based on what is scientifically known about Covid that is already in the public dominium. Hence my speculative reasoning approach.
Although Covid is not yet the longer learning moment of its kind humanity has had to sit down through, it’s already looks like it will be running longer than the wrongly named “Spanish Flu” (two years), which neither spoke Spanish nor originated or started out in Spain. Also, Covid is moving closer to be longer-lived, or in truth, a longer-killer than the first installment of the European Plague or Black Death did, (four years). And if Omicron turns out to be as totalitarian as the sounds of its name makes it look, or if Covid should keep mutating into more nefarious-sounding letters, in a blink of an eye the ongoing teaching moment would have overtaken the Greek Plague in Athens (four years). The Plague gave the Athenians some break in-between before striking again. We might not be that lucky.
But what did the Greeks, West Europe, and the Americas learn from their respective teaching moments? Sparing the details, one thing is certain: they all learned that almost nothing remains the same after a pandemy, a war, or a natural devastation that lasts long enough. And the also learned something else. Namely, unless we are talking Nuclear Bombs, life goes on. But there is something else. Whatever the final cost in human lives lost; whatever the final tally in material destruction and in lost business and opportunities, whether it is a pandemic disease, a war, or a natural disaster, and regardless of where it takes place, the societies to which any of that happens is confronted with the unique truth that it has reached a stage, or has been living in a state characterized by the limit of knowledge available to it. By its character, philosophy recognizes in that an epistemological limitation.Therefore, as this limitation has been once again uncovered by the rise and ongoing spread of the virus in our own time, it is of transcendental interest for philosophy, as philosophical thought is first in gaining awareness of it. Therefore,
Lesson Number One:
We are learning from Covid, or what is the same, Covid is teaching us that at least for the time being, the world is being confronted by a limitation in the available knowledge in the field of epidemiology and the medical sciences, and in politics. All throughout, since the discovering of the virus in Wuhan, apart from the millions of sick and dead people, it would seem that the most alarming feature of this health crisis has been the limited scientific knowledge available to the world governments. Thus, an epistemological crisis has become attached to the health crisis, and both crises has been working synergically, both feeding on each other, which is responsible for the impression we get that the world powers have run out of steam and out of recourses, and that Covid is here to stay forever but not for good.
If the concept of a health crisis need not explanation, an epistemological crisis takes place whenever a life-or-death problem demands to be adequately dealt with within an x time-lapse or timeframe, and we get thereof confronted by an insufficiency of the specific kind of knowledge, be it scientific, technologic, or political that could successfully get us out of trouble. Such insufficiency represents a limitation in the available knowledge precisely when there is an urgent need to know. That is where we have been for two years in a row and will likely continue to be for the duration.
Maybe the day will yet come when the unquestionable origin of the virus will be established. When we do, and if we ever do, much of these considerations will have to be revisited and confuted. But up to now and until it happens, though it does not look like it would, it stands to reason to accept that Covid is trying to teach us that, however scientifically and technologically advanced we are or deceive ourselves into believing we are, modem sciences and technology have not moved all that far off from Medieval Europe during the Black Death, nor, for that matter, too far off from the times of the Greeks. Not when humanity is confronted by a Nature that remains to be fully understood by the sciences; and not when Nature is eternally transforming and evolving. So, Covid is a reminder that the Earth we claim as our home is secretly inhabited by dangerous forces that are always ahead of us because we live surrounded by them, as if to make sure we are not secure anywhere and that the world remains a mystery to us despite all we claim to know about it.
Because dangerous invisible forces of Nature — phenomenologically understood, Nature itself, is always ahead of us, the urgent need for knowledge is recurrent throughout human history. But it cannot always be had when it is most needed.
When philosophy asserts that the onset, spreading, and staying power of Covid signifies an epistemological crisis, it is because the knowledge that would have allowed scientists on the field to see it coming before it hit us was not immediately available, and this is demonstrated by the failure of researchers in the field to discover its origin even now, years after the outbreak. That is something which further indicates an epistemological neglect by the scientific world community and their political superintendence and administrators. That is their main failure. Again, this is so only on the assumption that the virus was neither planted in Wuhan, nor accidentally released from a Chinese lab.
But this is just a way of stating that although the sciences know how viruses in general spread, they do not yet know how the x number of undiscovered and/or inactivated viruses “jump” to and spread among humans. Covid is also teaching us that the power of scientific knowledge in virology is still quite limited.
For all that is known by the sciences about its origin, Covid was brought down to us by extraterrestrials; maybe Covid is the link between us and the growing UFO’s activities across the world we have been hearing more and more about in recent years. Likewise, for all we know, Covid is the product of mutations of interplanetary or out-of-space debris unintentionally brought to the Earth by any of the thousands of space objects we keep sending up to the Heavens, or it has come down together with space junk leftovers from our experiments with the Heavens. Who among the world’s expert epidemiologists can scientifically refute this kind of speculations?
But, that ridiculous scenarios like these ones cannot be either ruled out nor substantiated, has didactic significance. It signifies that Covid is teaching us it can eliminate beforehand the conditions that could make possible us knowing what is most important about it: where it originated (in a Chinese or an American lab?); what or who was its originator or author (not the same as to where it was first discovered), or where it first spread from to where it was first discovered (from a bat cave to the Wuhan market, or to another unknown animal acting as “middleman”). To be sure, scientists and medical doctors have been learning a great deal about Covid; but everything they know about it remains epiphenomenal. That is, scientists do not know near enough to predict how many variants of the virus are still possible or likely; and what is worse, they cannot tell us anything concerning what are the specific factors that determine the mutation between one variant of the virus to the next one. Nor can they rely on what they already know to predict which of all the possible variants will be less or more lethal, something made rather difficult when not altogether impossible if the Origin and the Originator of Covid are not known.
Of a piece with all that, we are being taught by Covid that epistemology– the synthesis of the material and immaterial conditions that make the production of knowledge possible– can structure knowledge to move through society as if though a system. Because the bio-matter researchers have had but piecemeal success in producing comprehensive and reliable knowledge on the virus, politicians and policymakers have from the beginning of the outburst been mishandling whatever available scientific knowledge there is as they sought to base on it the social policies deemed necessary to contain the virus, which have proven mostly ineffective. Instead, many of these policies and regulations have in their turn created situations of their own that unnecessarily complicate life and tend to make having Covid or not having Covid a matter of indifference.
Thus, for the most part and with very few exceptions, the global authorities have been self-defeating. Instead of admitting from the very beginning that nobody knew anything for sure about the incipient virus; that the set of rules they were putting in place were for lack of certainty; that they were letting themselves be guided by common sense (which they were not), or that citizens should deploy in their daily lives the common sense their authorities were lacking, and may be let their survival instincts kick in — the governments of the world for the most part chose all to the contrary.
It is worth noticing here how, the more they have been claiming to uphold, to stick to and to respect their democratic values, the more prone they have been to resort to imposing mandates and regulations that have so far only succeeded in creating the impression of a worsening situation without an end. In this connection, the vaccine that at first was conceived of and promoted as the panacea, has eventually been revealed in some cases according to some scientists, as capable of itself to produce the virus, Then, we also eventually learned that being vaccinated did not really stop transmission to others, and that others, vaccinated or not, could transmit the virus to somebody else that would have been vaccinated or not. And, also worthy of notice, the obvious nonsensicality fueling these policies, doctors and politicians have been adding more nonsense. And thus, whereas at first one vaccine shot would have done, two shots became the magic number. Presently, it is number three that is magical, and in some countries, Israel for instance, four is the magic number. The vaccine, theoretically a booster to the immune system, needed a “booster” of its own; and later we learned that the “booster” itself needs to be “boosterized” with further boosters.
So, a situation that in the beginning was purely a biological-medical phenomenon, has revealed itself to have been something essentially political all along.
That is, in most part of the “democratic” developed world Covid is being experienced not as a health crisis but mostly as a social crisis of disobedience. As we are learning, a disobedience crisis happens as the product of measures and/or policies imposed by the authorities that are themselves inconsistent and/or that consistently fail at solving or adequately dealing with serious wide-spread crises.
That’s a new phenomenon which legitimated democratic governments will have to reckon with for years to come. To be sure, for the time being such crisis of disobedience expresses itself only as a resistance by large groups to obey a government mandate to receive into their bodies a vaccine that fails to do what it was initially touted as (immunization against the virus). But the effect of such resistance will leave political reverberations through society that could in time and under given circumstances take the form of legitimation crises of authority. It is a sure bet that the longer Covid stays around and the more the measures against it taken by the authorities prove to be ineffective or inadequate, the more likely that the ongoing crisis of disobedience in the liberal democratic world would shape into legitimation crises of authority on other areas of society, as the health-related crisis might not limit itself to only issues derived from the presence of Covid among us.
The dominant tendency can be expected to be the mistrust and distrust not only of the good will and good intention of the authorities whenever danger looms, but worse than this, of the political and the knowledge-based capability of the authorities and their representatives. For instance, the stark rise of violent criminality and the rash of large-scale robbery referred by the media as “crash and grab,” are the earlier manifestation of a crisis of disobedience morphing into a legitimation crisis, as the distrust and mistrust of authorities spreads to other areas of society. That already happened millennials ago, during the earlier phases of the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Thus, the erosion of Authority that liberal democratic governments have been trying to keep from materializing through overreacting and overreaching, is being helped precisely by that effort, making more patent their incapacity. At the worse of such crisis, the laws would be blissfully ignored and violated, and ethical responsibilities and moral scruples would go into suspension. Their Plague taught the Athenians all this and much more.
It is even quite possible that, at the highest international centers of liberal democracy, some among its leaders have begun to see the light and are now getting ready to back away from the spate of restrictions they have been imposing to the democratic ways of life over the last two years. Thus, if the steps taken in this direction in Denmark and Sweden appear to be genuine, that might not be the case in the heart of liberal totalitarianism. The Brits are proclaiming not more restrictions, and the Americans will soon follow. (Of course, that also has to do with the fact that, whereas in the latter the courts and the people have inflicted several reversals to Biden’s democratic authoritarianism, in the former the people have also pushed back on the inept and scandal-ridden Johnson’s government, and so both equally need to do PR damage-control to harness their unpopularity).
And yet, as important as that all is, none of the above is the crucial lesson that Covid is trying us to learn. As a teaching moment, Covid is didactic in character. It must then be regarded as a sort of real-like simulation for what could happen to Humanity if ever any of the thousands of scientific-technological experimentations going on any given day, say, highly lethal chemical substances, outer planetary and lunar colonization, or with multiverse social media — would unpredictably go awry suddenly. Nuclear energy is a case in point. Necessary as it is for life, it also has the potential for evaporating life from vast regions of the planet and even the planet itself. Any of those fields carries the potential for becoming the scenarios of urgent need to know, of having availability of the knowledge applicable to solve specific death-or-life human-made catastrophes at a global scale. It is, of course, not yet definitive that in Covid we are not already confronted with one of those possible human-made scenarios.
If we assume that Covid might be teaching us that lesson, then it is logical to assume we are not assimilating its teaching. But, if we are not learning what Covid is trying so hard to teach us even though it is only a limited simulation of what could be the very worst, then there is no reason for hopes. For it has shown that we cannot rely on legitimate authorities to efficiently guide us to safety and out of danger. They might have made Covid into harsher the teacher than it wanted to be.
