In 2011, director Lars Von Trier released Melancholia, a film (spoilers ahead) about the end of the world, brought about by a collision with a planet 10 times the size of Earth. That planet, having been hidden for millennia by the sun, first appears in the night sky as a beautiful evening star. Gradually, scientists realize that the planet, called Melancholia, is on an irreversible collision course with Earth, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop it. Its trajectory is calculated painstakingly by scientists, who project that it will actually pass close to the Earth initially without striking it, but our planet’s gravitational pull will cause it to slow, stop, then reverse course (or “slingshot”) shortly thereafter, pulling it headlong into the Earth.
The film features a fine performance by actor Kiefer Sutherland, whose character has, out of hubris and desperation, convinced himself that Melancholia will actually pass the Earth without reversing back to destroy it. To this end he fashions a primitive circular device out of wire which, by holding it at arms length, he uses to gauge the closeness of Melancholia to the Earth as it approaches. And, true to form, although Melancholia grows larger and larger in the sky, it actually then dwindles in size as it passes, then initially moves away from the Earth. Sutherland’s character feels vindicated ... for a moment.
The next morning the planet is gigantic in the sky, having reversed course (as science predicted), and is now bearing straight down upon the Earth. Sutherland’s character commits suicide as he realizes everything he assumed was folly.
In the past two months, we have witnessed something few could have expected to witness in our lifetimes: the wholesale demolition of our assumptions about the world, and our place in it. The scope and magnitude of what we are witnessing as the COVID-19 pandemic upends everything many Americans considered as settled and immutable, from our jobs to our children’s futures to our retirements and the common wisdom that whatever might befall us, things would all “work out” eventually, even if not specifically for ourselves, then for humanity as a whole.
In what seems to be the most forward-thinking reflection on the crisis to date, Eva Illouz, writing for Haaretz, captures this unsettling moment in time, using Von Trier’s film as a template.
The coronavirus is an event of a magnitude that we struggle to grasp, not only because of its planetary scale, not only because of the speed of the contamination, but also because institutions whose titanic power we never previously questioned have been brought to their knees in a matter of few weeks. The primitive world of deadly plagues erupted into the sanitized and advanced world of nuclear energy, laser surgery and digital technology. Even in wartime, cinemas and bars have continued to function, but the normally bustling cities of Europe have now become eerie ghost towns, with their residents all in hiding.
The psychological impact of what human beings around the planet are dealing with now is also beyond anything most people have experienced, and thus, we are not prepared. The immediacy of the crisis, in which our natural freedom of movement to travel, to intersperse, has been drastically cut back, has also upended our assumptions about human interaction. As Illouz puts it, humanity’s “most comforting gestures—shaking of hands, kissing, hugging, eating with others—have turned into sources of anxiety and danger.”
In the United States we are witnessing assumptions about our democracy, such as the right to securely and safely vote, being casually discarded on an ad hoc basis in the name of whatever political ideology holds power. (It’s highly doubtful that Wisconsin voters would be forced to face potential death just to vote this week if the the political makeup of its state Supreme Court were different.) In other countries (those with far weaker “democratic” traditions), we are simply witnessing a swift reversion to dictatorship. The assumption that people will be permitted, by the institutions they created, to govern themselves has proved in crisis, almost too quickly, to be based on little more than hopeful beliefs that served to disguise the reality. As Illouz states: “A structure, whether economic or mental, is usually hidden from view, but crises have their own ways of exposing their patterns to the naked eye.”
One of the most fragile illusions unveiled by the pandemic has been our health care system. Whether a health care regime for citizens is publicly or privately financed, a population implicitly views that system as a means of holding the nation together by keeping its members healthy and alive so they can satisfy whatever role they may play in that society. That such a health care system must be maintained by a nation’s leadership is taken as a given, as an implicit “contract” or pact between the governed and its leaders. But as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, Illouz notes, we now see that assumption too is grounded in willful self-delusion.
The crisis highlights two opposite things: that this contract, in many places in the world, has been gradually breached by the state, which has seen its mission instead as enlarging the volume of economic activity, lowering the costs of labor and facilitating the transfer offshore of production (among other things, of such key medical products as masks and respirators), deregulating banks and other financial institutions, and generally responding to the needs of corporations. The result has been, whether by design or by default, an extraordinary erosion of the public sector.
The for-profit health care system in the United States is perhaps the most glaring example of how the nation’s priorities have gradually shifted away from providing health care for all to securing profit for some, on the assumption that the profit motive can always coexist with the public good. As a result of this failed assumption, Americans are now finding themselves in a near-adversarial relationship with the system that provides them with medical care as overrun hospitals scramble to provide for a need that should have been anticipated for years. Whatever “compact” that once existed has been broken. The only question is—by whom?
This brings us to a second delusion many of us have internalized solely by way of routine, mind-numbing familiarity: that anything other than a centralized governmental response can cope with a pandemic or similar health crisis of this scale. As Illouz notes, the warnings about an explosive, uncontrollable, animal-borne viral pandemic have been sounding loudly for decades as humans have encroached upon natural species, grotesquely altering the balance of nature. The type of virus that is COVID-19 is simply the most recent and virulent example of this “zoonotic spillover,” a term that defines the transfer of animal pathogens to humans, and is really just the predictable result of a relentless pursuit to develop, extract minerals, and overpopulate what little open land is left on the Earth, all in the name of economic growth.
The consequences of ignoring these warnings are now staring us in the face in the form of the worst pandemic the world has seen in a century. And it is ironic that the consequences are falling hardest on the countries that had the wealth and power to do something to stop it. The same nations that are groping for private sector solutions where only government can provide the solution.
The United States now has the highest number of people sick with the virus worldwide, paying the price for Trump’s criminal lack of attention to the importance of rapid action in combating the epidemic. But Trump was not alone: To some degree or another, both American and European societies lacked imagination, in that they were too busy, pursuing profit and exploiting land and labor whenever and wherever they could.
But the real revelation in this crisis has been that far short of protecting their people, many nations are first and primarily concerned about protecting economic interests. Illouz writes from the perspective of an Israeli citizen, but we see that mindset in this country with Trump’s mantra that we “can’t allow the cure to be worse than the disease.” We see it in the actions of Republican governors, waiting until the very last minute to shut down their states in order to extract the last bit of wealth from their own sliver of society. It is a pattern that is being repeated worldwide, according to Illouz.
[W]hat is new about this crisis is how much it is haunted by “economism.” The British model for responding to the medical threat initially embraced (and subsequently abandoned) the least intrusive path of intervention, for the sake of maintaining regular economic activity. It opted to let nature take its course, according to the model of auto-immunization (that is, contamination) of the younger 60 percent of the population, even though that would mean sacrificing an estimated 2 to 4 percent of its population (this model was also adopted by Holland and Sweden).
In Bergamo, Italy, Illouz points out, workers were kept working at the behest of corporations and industry that dominated the region politically. In Brazil, self-absorbed and self-deluded tyrant Jair Bolsonaro claimed in court that “the health of the economy could not be sacrificed for an imaginary threat to the health of the populace.” Even Germany and France initially responded in the same fashion—by weighing economic value over the potential threat to human life until the last possible minute. In the U.S., we were urged by some to weigh the value of older people—those much more likely to die from the virus—against the economic power of younger people.
That these types of arguments have any sway at all shows us how radically our assumptions about our society and its supposed benefits—including the health of the public—have been, and continue to be, savaged in the name of economic laissez-faire, deregulation, and free-market determinism, often referred to as “neoliberalism.” That’s a word that has been so bastardized as to be nearly meaningless, but its original and intended definition is captured well by Illouz.
In fact it was the reflexive panic of the financial markets integral to these countries' economic systems, which occurred as the severity of the pandemic became clear, that provide the most ironic example of how our assumptions have been constructed on wet sand: All of these structures to keep money flowing and markets capitalized were dependent on a healthy public. ( “Markets feed on trust as a currency to build the future, and trust, it turns out, rests on the assumption of health,” states Illouz.) Meanwhile, corporations were encouraged—even legislated—to exploit and profit from a system designed to ensure and perpetuate that health. As a consequence—especially in countries like the U.S. that largely abandons its health care to the private sector—profit-oriented conglomerates found ways to maximize their own gains while providing as little in terms of relative health care as possible while ignoring potential crises like COVID-19 that could not be risk-assessed for a profit.
Even in those countries that committed themselves to public-financed health care, budget cuts, mismanagement and speculation led, in many cases (including France, as cited by Illouz) to gross shortages in equipment and beds—which are only now being revealed.
Illouz contends that if nations are to crawl out of the economic abyss that this pandemic is sure to create, what she calls the “bluff of neo-liberalism” that has created these conditions must be forced to cooperate with government, to ensure the public health “at the price of lower profits.”
Capitalists have taken for granted resources provided by the state – education, health, physical infrastructure – without acknowledging that the resources they were squandering from the state could, in a situation like this, ultimately be responsible for withholding them from the world which makes the economy possible. This must stop. For the economy to have meaning, it needs a world. And this world can only be built collectively, by the joint efforts of corporations and the state. While only states can manage a crisis of such scale, they will not be strong enough to get out of the crisis alone: Corporations will need to contribute to the maintenance of the public goods from which they have taken so much benefit.
Illouz reminds us that this pandemic, however horrific, is only a preview of what we can expect as manmade climate change accelerates, exacerbating inequalities between nations and among populations on a scale so vast that they can now even scarcely be imagined. And she does not ignore the fact that public fear itself is the breeding ground that allows dictatorial impulses to thrive, effectively condemning nations to ignore solutions that encroach upon their political power: “Crises of this kind can generate chaos,” she predicts, ”and it is in the management of such chaos that tyrants often emerge.”
After the COVID-19 crisis has finally passed, there cannot be a return to “business as usual.” If we allow that to occur, we will be condemning ourselves to repeat this sordid scenario again, and again, become victims of our own misguided illusions.
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2K00mnE
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