For an ethical critique of the world we live in
Marx José Gómez Liendo1
Recently, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) inaugurated a social observatory to reflect on the global COVID-19 pandemic.2 This initiative highlights the central role of the social sciences and humanities in reflecting on and analyzing the dimensions of our lives that have been affected by this event and the new forms of inequality that may arise from these complex times.
The very question of thinking, in general, or of thinking about something in particular, plunges us headlong into philosophical territory. In turn, the question of the place and time from which we think about that something reveals the need to make explicit the intentionality of our reflections. These questions become crucial when that “something” being thought about is a pandemic. As the Bolivian philosopher Juan José Bautista points out, “the problem of thinking is not thinking itself but the production [and reproduction] of life” (2014, 76). And with the affirmation of life, an ethics emerges (Hinkelammert and Mora Jiménez, 2016).
Thinking about the pandemic, then, means examining the assumptions underlying the actions the world as a whole has taken (or failed to take) up to this point. Thinking about the pandemic from the perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean means considering the fabric of life through the lens of colonial wounds, imperial interference, economic dependencies, and the structural asymmetries created by a world now seeking to navigate the global health crisis it faces. This crisis, made evident by the coronavirus, extends far beyond both the virus itself and the purely health-related aspects.
All of this implies a critical attitude from academics, community-based organizations, social movements, professional associations, alternative media, multilateral institutions, decision-makers, and other groups of actors. By critical attitude, I mean a “literal disagreement with the existing social order” (Bautista 2014, 137). This social order is raising alarms today, but it generally remains silent in the face of other social “viruses” and “pandemics,” if the metaphor is appropriate.
For example, according to the Global Study on Homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC 2019), 87 women were murdered in 2017, 58% of whom were killed by their partners, ex-partners, or family members. The “pandemic” of femicide continues to claim lives daily, even in the “time of coronavirus.” However, it seems that the virus of patriarchy has not yet reached a lethality rate high enough to shake financial markets, approve multi-billion-dollar economic rescue programs, and quarantine the misogynists who violate bodies, plunder territories, devalue knowledge, and annihilate lives. Femicide does not collapse the world’s health systems, as COVID-19 does, but it exposes the limitations of existing justice systems and their misogynistic foundations.3
With this example, I don't intend to trivialize the situation we are experiencing, but rather to emphasize the need to think about the pandemic socially from multiple intersectional perspectives. When we think about the pandemic, we are thinking about life itself.4 Therefore, our attitude becomes not only critical, but ethical-critical.
This ethical critique must simultaneously traverse three paths (Bautista 2014, chap. 5). Initially, given the urgency of the situation we face, our attitude is situated on an ontological, partial plane. Discussions revolve around which action or set of actions are “right” or “wrong,” as in the strategy of the hammer and the dance. These actions are framed within certain healthcare models and rarely question their foundations. Therefore, although it may seem contradictory, “to criticize [at this initial stage] is not necessarily critical” (Duque and Gutiérrez 2001, 187).
Bearing this in mind shifts ethical critique to an ontological plane. Debates focus on how different healthcare systems can become efficient and effective within this critical situation and within their respective economic and political frameworks. Simultaneously, the rationales guiding actions on the ontological plane begin to emerge in this second phase. Let us briefly mention a few countries.
● From the United States, the country with the most cases detected to date, Bernie Sanders is calling for Medicare for All so that the citizens of that country can receive free care in the face of this emergency, while President Trump hoped to be able to relax the quarantine and reopen the country by April 12, but given the pressure from his advisors he had to extend it until the 30th of that month.
● In Chile, the Minister of Health, Jamie Mañalich, shamefully (or atrociously) displays the maximum price of the test to detect COVID-19, showing that even a pandemic is a potential market niche.
● Corpses in hospitals, homes, and streets are the painful evidence of the Ecuadorian government's delayed response, more concerned with structural adjustments amid the pandemic than with guaranteeing healthcare for its population. Faced with the plight of Ecuadorians, particularly in Guayaquil, seeking dignified funerals for their loved ones, President Lenin Moreno announced the creation of a cemetery as if it were a project to be inaugurated with applause.
● President Macron addresses the French people to say that one of the first lessons of this pandemic is that health must be outside the laws of the market, without confessing what lessons he has learned - assuming that he has - from the days of protests that the yellow vests have led in the country for two years.
● Venezuela, besieged by the criminal unilateral coercive measures of the United States and in the midst of a profound economic, social, political, and public services crisis, is among the first countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to take action to cut the chain of transmission by 90% within its territory. As with other issues, this time the South American nation is also the target of media crossfire and the barrage of post-truth narratives. Likewise, and as in other adversities, the Venezuelan people are demonstrating their resilience under extreme conditions. At the time of writing, Sunday, April 5, 2020, 20 days into the national quarantine, 159 confirmed cases have been detected, 52 people have recovered, and 7 people have died.
Within each country, the current and structural challenges of each healthcare system reveal the scope, reach, and limitations of different approaches to managing this aspect of life. By questioning the foundations upon which each healthcare model justifies itself, our critical-ethical stance can broaden our perspective. This is where we arrive at the third and final stage: the trans-ontological moment.
In this context, the question of life as a condition of possibility for thinking takes on its full radicality (Bautista 2014, chap. 3), exploring other notions about health, hygiene, illness, attention, care, economy, politics, life, dignity, affections, etc.5 We can think about the pandemic because we are alive. Being alive, we suffer the pandemic that threatens our existence and the very possibility of thinking about it. Although, it must be said, not everyone suffers the pandemic in the same way.
Staying home is a privilege; however, it ceases to be one when, in some cases, this means confining women, girls, and boys in the same "cell" with their domestic abusers, or when it implies eviction for being unable to pay rent or mortgage due to unemployment during quarantine. Promoting teleworking is framed within global digital divides. The practice of social distancing is, in itself, the habitual way of being for the displaced, uprooted, and intensely liberal individual. Essential businesses represent fundamental spheres for the material reproduction of modern social existence. The absence of a coordinated response at a global level has led to shameful statements and irresponsible stances, such as those of Jair Bolsonaro. Faced with all this, love and solidarity are the shared cognitive, emotional, and political resources that will allow us to navigate this pandemic toward a different horizon of otherness, justice, and liberation.
These three paths open up lines of emergency work, without implying that we should be caught up in the whirlwind of immediacy. In the first stage, discussion on indicators, diagnostic techniques, treatment protocols, and potential vaccines is urgent, but this alone does not resolve the serious design problem of the modern world. In the second stage, a comparative analysis of different healthcare models or systems and their respective institutions, infrastructures, and socio-technical and economic-political frameworks is necessary, as well as an evaluation of intra- and inter-state coordination mechanisms. Finally, the third stage would address the problem of the pandemic in its radical nature, that is, the world we live in and the foundations that sustain it. The pandemic has revealed many things. One of them, perhaps the most important, is the fact that the modern world has shown its inability to guarantee a fundamental ecological-political postulate or principle: the production and reproduction of human life (Dussel 2010, Thesis 18). Furthermore, the global socio-ecological crisis demands that we extend this principle, in communion with non-human life forms (Haraway 2015). What other evidence is needed to declare modernity a failed civilization?
The pandemic tragically reminds us of our fragility as a species in the face of the mythical and triumphalist narrative of progress and modernity. It also reveals the limitations of existing institutions and conventional political responses. Therefore, considering the pandemic simultaneously in the three moments mentioned here inevitably leads us to a discussion about the default setting of our culture (Escobar 2016, chap. 3). This is a civilizational backdrop or horizon in which we are socialized, from an early age, to prioritize “production and consumption (at the expense of other ways of valuing existence), individual success (instead of collective well-being), orienting ourselves toward the future (instead of being present in the present […]), and subordinating spirituality to the materialism of things, being to possessing” (Escobar 2016, 109).
Many reflections have circulated regarding the coronavirus pandemic (AA. VV. 2020), and the media coverage has been equally copious. We hardly have time to process everything that is circulating and everything that is happening, but one question is becoming clear in all of this: “What is so serious about our time that it gives us pause for thought [and action]?” (Bautista 2014, 78). Thinking about a problem radically “ultimately implies thinking about all of humanity and the entire planet” (p. 79). And so as not to leave the question without a preliminary answer, it is worth highlighting that the most serious aspect of our time is the fact that the euphemism called world economy and the heterogeneous set of multiple oppressions that constitute it lead us "to think in a radical way about the contradiction between life and death, that is, [...] the dilemma between producing conditions for the production and reproduction of the life of all or continuing to persist in this same form of systematic production of death, both of nature and of the human being" (p. 81).
Returning to "normal," escaping this "contingency," is the yearning and nostalgia of socio-economically well-off classes and social groups. For impoverished classes and social groups, "normal" is an "extended contingency." It means living hand to mouth, earning an hourly wage, and avoiding illness. It means migration and hardship; grief and pain experienced from afar; anger and resentment. In short, existence hanging by a thread.
Thinking about the pandemic provides both the context and the pretext for deploying a robust ethical critique, fostering openings and transformations beyond the patriarchal, capitalist, and modern-colonial onto-epistemic framework. The agency of the novel coronavirus is inviting us to consider a political virology; that is, to consider the broad range of social, cognitive, technical, political, economic, and ecological transformations that are at stake due to multi-scale viral dynamics within an asymmetrical framework of relationships between human and non-human actors and groups.
The pandemic has changed everything, but the magnitude, characteristics, and dimensions of that change will depend on the humility with which we recognize and accept that a microscopic entity had to remind us of our fragility and finitude in a megalomaniacal epochal moment. In other words, “our civilization will have to end one day. But we have an important role to play in determining when it ends and how quickly. […] As I inhale, I know this civilization is going to die. As I exhale, this civilization cannot escape death” (Hanh 2008 in Escobar 2016, 234).
This death is not an absolute end, but rather the end of a proud civilization and the emergence of interconnected networks of life. Such is the framework within which the ethical critique of the world we live in would operate.
1- Venezuela, Sociologist, Msc. Social Studies of Science (IVIC). Research areas: political ecology, modernity/coloniality, alternatives to development, political ontology, cognitive capitalism, transitions towards sustainability.
2- COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by the recently discovered novel coronavirus. Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause respiratory infections in humans. For more information, please consult the following link from the World Health Organization (WHO): https://www.who.int/es/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/qa-coronaviruses
3- Foundations that are also at the root of the planetary socio-ecological crisis (Nogales 2017).
4- Specifically, the protection of human life. Thinking about life in general involves something much bigger. It implies moving beyond anthropocentrism. For example, and although this may be controversial, why don't we think about life—with the same degree of alarm—when we think about the burning of the Amazon or the loss of biodiversity? I thank my colleague and friend, Marhylda Rivero, for pointing out to me the need to make this fact explicit.
5- The challenge here lies in how to open these concepts to embrace other subjects, agents, narrative territories, and non-isomorphic semiotic materials (Haraway 1995 [1991]); that is, other ontological and epistemological formulations, other ways of being and knowing. Far from promoting a tendency to relativize everything, this openness recognizes that there are historical configurations and material, ecological, ethical, and political implications that must always be kept in mind (Villarmea Requejo 1999).
Highlighted
AA. VV. (2020). Wuhan Soup. Contemporary thought in times of pandemic. Mandatory Preventive Social Isolation (ASPO).
Bautista, Juan José (2014). What does it mean to think from Latin America? Madrid: Akal.
Duque, José and Gutiérrez, Germán (editors) (2001). Itineraries of critical reason. Homage to Franz Hinkelammert on his 70th birthday. San José: DEI.
Dussel, Enrique (2010). 20 theses on politics. Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana.
Escobar, Arturo (2016). Autonomy and Design. The realization of the communal. Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca.
Haraway, Donna (2015). «Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.» Environmental Humanities, 6, pp. 159-165.
Haraway, Donna (1995[1991]). Science, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra (First English edition, London: Free Association Books).
Hinkelammert, Franz and Mora Jiménez, Henry (2016). Towards an economy for life. Prelude to a second critique of political economy. La Paz: Vice Presidency of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
Nogales, Helena Katherina (2017). «Coloniality of nature and women in the face of a planet that is running out». Political Ecology, 54, pp. 10-13.
UNODC (2019). Global Study on Homicide. Gender-related killing of women and girls. Vienna: United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime.
Villarmea Requejo, Stella (1999). «Situated knowledges and feminist strategies». Spanish Journal of North American Studies, 17, pp. 219-235.
[+] Thinking about the pandemic
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