The Absolutism of Reality (University, society and pandemic)
Leopoldo Múnera Ruiz[1]
Pandemics force us to confront, in our simple condition as human beings, what Blumenberg called the absolutism of reality[2]. The situation in which we lose the control we had or thought we had over the course of our lives or over the ordinary course of death, as we are subjected to phenomena that escape our hands and our actions, and are imposed on us individually and collectively, until we manage to reorganize our existence and live with them.
In the case of Covid-19, the absolute nature of reality allows us to have both certainty and a wide range of uncertainties regarding it. The certainty is well summarized by Professor Juan Carlos Eslava of the Faculty of Medicine at the National University of Colombia. Amid the deluge of information we receive each day of quarantine, Professor Eslava simply reminds us that “SARS-CoV-2 is a strain of coronavirus that had not been previously identified in humans, hence the general susceptibility of the species to the virus. We also know that, generally speaking, a person can contract COVID-19 through contact with someone infected with the virus. The disease spreads primarily from person to person through droplets expelled from the nose or mouth of an infected person when they cough, sneeze, or talk. These droplets are relatively heavy, don't travel very far, and quickly fall to the ground… It has also been noted that droplets can land on various objects and surfaces surrounding the person, so people can become infected if they touch these objects or surfaces and then touch their nose, mouth, or eyes. This is why handwashing with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand sanitizer has been widely recommended.”[3]
Given this fragile certainty, the uncertainties are multifaceted. We cannot pinpoint the origin of the disease; it could be an event occurring without human intervention, an accident resulting from laboratory experimentation, an intentional scientific product, or, in the least likely scenario, a biological weapon. We do not know for sure how to address it politically and socially; we find two opposing approaches, each with its own nuances: general or selective isolation through confinement, and so-called “herd immunity,” a term that is undeniably jarring for those included in this group.
The statistical analysis is perplexing; some speak of the disease's low lethality and mortality rates, based on probabilistic calculations, although for most people, 400.000 deaths worldwide in such a short time are undeniably frightening, especially as infections continue and the rising curves shift continents. Others emphasize that the rapid spread and high transmissibility of the disease make it a "major public health problem." I quote Professor Eslava again: "Here, public health professionals follow the teachings of the British epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose when he highlighted a paradox in public health: a large number of people exposed to a small risk can generate far more cases than a small number exposed to a large risk."[4] Finally, a few—perhaps too many—who flood social media or design public policies in countries like the United States, Brazil, or Mexico insist on denying the danger posed by the disease and are willing to sacrifice the population over sixty years of age and the most vulnerable to save the rest of their "herd."
The availability of a vaccine or cure for the disease, and the timeframe for their development, are also uncertain. The scientific community is working with various hypotheses, while some doctors, in the day-to-day management of the pandemic, are attempting to contain it with a cocktail of medications, including anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and anticoagulants, with their respective and inevitable side effects. The epistemological closeness between the natural and social sciences has never been more evident, making it clear that human knowledge resides within hermeneutical diversity.
Behind these uncertainties and others like them, such as those related to the effects of the disease on different genders, sexes, or ethnic groups, or the appropriateness of wearing face masks, lie ethical, political, or economic conceptions that are sometimes explicit and other times camouflaged behind technical language. This is the case when irresolvable dichotomies are established between the political and social treatment of the disease, inspired by general care, and the functioning of the economy, regardless of what is understood by that term, or between political authoritarianism and the rising or falling nature of the contagion curves, even though the latter has served both purposes. There are also self-contradictory complementarities, for example, when the abstract protection of life is proclaimed while simultaneously defending the concrete need to "sacrifice" a portion of the population—the largest and most vulnerable—in the name, as always, of the "herd."
Of course, we are also subject to the inherently political uncertainty that manifests itself in the dilemma between those who proclaim the end of capitalism, or at least its unfettered or neoliberal version; those who, in another sense, believe the time has come for a new welfare state; and those who, yearning for lost normality, announce a return to the previous situation after a traumatic crisis, but with the control derived from risk management and the trivialization of foreseeable damage. In the political sphere, such uncertainty, as always happens with the absolutism of reality, allows for the emergence of myths, of imaginary narratives about our past, present, and future, which can serve to guide society toward new utopian, dystopian, or “realistic” horizons, within the current limits of what is possible.
The vulnerable society
The absolutism of reality has not been imposed on an abstract humanity or one outside of history. SARS-CoV-2 has produced a systemic crisis in societies that have been under the devastating effects of neoliberalism for decades or that have been dominated by state capitalism or one-party rule. Both political systems are built on the belief that nature is at our disposal to be exploited according to our insatiable needs for accumulation and consumption. In the Global South and in some parts of the Global North, health systems were deprived of their main resources to confront a pandemic, as a consequence of privatization and the commodification of their services, which are primarily focused on curing diseases and targeting spending. As David Harvey says, large pharmaceutical corporations enthusiastically contributed to propping up this orientation of public policies, which left the majority of the population in a large part of the world unprotected against a potential and foreseeable global epidemic.[5].
In Latin America, and especially in a country like Colombia, the majority of workers have been relegated to the status of mere survivors in rural areas ravaged by neo-extractivism and agribusiness, or in the informal labor market with minimal social protections, and a significant number remain condemned to persistent unemployment. Meanwhile, wage earners, like castaways of labor reforms, along with small and medium-sized business owners, bear the brunt of the tax burden that allows for continued exemptions for large corporations and agricultural profits. The survival conditions of a large part of the population perpetuate their vulnerability to any public health crisis.
The commodification of education
Education in general, and higher education in particular, have suffered the escalating effects of “structural adjustments.” In Colombia, the drive to expand coverage at all costs and with criteria of economic efficiency has transformed schools into social machines for transmitting knowledge and shaping subjectivities destined to reproduce social inequalities, despite the resistance—sometimes desperate and always stigmatized—of critical teachers who, along with their colleagues, must navigate the challenges of the banking model of education.
Within the broader educational system, universities appear to occupy the last place in the process of commodifying scientific, professional, and artistic knowledge. Academic and pedagogical discussion has been relegated to a secondary position by the imposition of competencies, understood as standardized knowledge based on the country's economic development, and by the institutionalization of academic credits, based on the students' purely instrumental rationality. The relevance of knowledge to Colombian society, its regions, and territories has been subsumed within this developmentalist logic.
Financing is increasingly leaning towards credit or demand-side subsidies, through the implementation of programs with local and elitist names, although most of them are imported, such as Being Smart Pays Off y Generation E, designed wholly or partially to rescue private universities from bankruptcy, which, like public universities, are affected by decreased “demand” or student dropout rates caused by economic and social factors or a lack of cultural and career opportunities for students. Likewise, the approval of other programs such as the Income-Contingent FinancingThey promise future indebtedness for students or their families for a good part of the students' working lives, as if education were fundamentally a good for individual benefit.
Scientific and academic research has been reduced to the scale of meager state funding, adorned with symbolic gestures such as committees of experts or the creation of a Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation with as few resources as the defunct COLCIENCIAS; meanwhile, so-called outreach continues its path of securing its own resources, increasingly defined by the provision of profitable scientific or academic services. Nevertheless, despite the gradual weakening of the public university as such, and the attempts to transform the ailing higher education system into one of tertiary education that prioritizes low-investment, low-quality technical and technological training, state-run higher education institutions survive amidst precarious conditions, like most workers. Within these institutions, sectors of the student body—and to a lesser extent, the faculty—continue to strive to build alternatives that guarantee the fundamental right to education and universal access to the common good of knowledge.
In the final stage of this crisis, the novel coronavirus emerged with its uncertain consequences. The anxiety generated by the stark reality tends to privilege the memory of the pandemic and dilute the memory of the pre-pandemic era. Since 2011, the student movement, organized in the Broad National Student Assembly (MANE), highlighted the structural problems of Colombian higher education and attempted to develop a comprehensive reform of Law 30 of 1992, based on several elements: the universalization of relevant and quality higher education, with special emphasis on historically discriminated sectors of the population; the restructuring of the higher education system through dynamic subsystems from a sectoral and territorial perspective; university autonomy and democracy as inalienable principles; the need for an academic reform that simultaneously addressed the structuring of critical knowledge, the specificities of disciplinary fields, and a creative exchange of social and cultural knowledge; and the progressive elimination of free public higher education. The formalization of teaching staff; the end of corruption in public or private institutions, "non-profit", and the development of research programs in dialogue with the different sectors of Colombian society or the permanent interrelation with popular or subaltern social classes and groups.
The technical difficulty in structuring an alternative bill agreed upon by the academic communities and the internal division of the MANE, due to the political dynamics of student organizations, led not only to a decline in the movement, but also to a deepening of the neoliberal political and economic orientation, combined with neo-institutional elements, through the same mechanism used between 2000 and 2010: the implementation of successive micro-reforms by different governments in the opposite direction to that intended by the students who fueled the protests of 2011. During the first eighteen years of the 21st century, sixty-four laws and twelve decrees relating to higher education were adopted in this regard.
Seven years after the bittersweet process of the MANE, in 2018, the student movement, along with some teachers' organizations, returned to the streets en masse, as in other parts of Latin America. It focused its demands on the financial strangulation of public higher education institutions, without neglecting other demands, such as the structural reform of the Colombian Institute for Educational Credit and Technical Studies Abroad (ICETEX), and announced subsequent negotiations on many of the issues that were the banner of the movement in 2011. However, at the beginning of this year, after the large and unexpected social mobilizations carried out between November 2019 and January 2020 against the direction of the economy, the breaches of the peace agreement, and the assassination of social leaders—more than four hundred in three years—it became clear that the government of Iván Duque was only willing to partially fulfill its commitments regarding the financing of the institutions and intended to delay the other points or merge them into the public policy designed for the sector since his presidential campaign, which sought to strengthen loans and demand subsidies at the expense of the institutions' budgets.
The interventions of the Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (ESMAD) in public universities, particularly at the University of Antioquia, due to an illegal and unconstitutional protocol for the “control of explosives” in educational centers, adopted by Daniel Quintero, the newly appointed Mayor of Medellín, the judicialization or criminalization of social protest and the attack in the same city against Professor Sara Fernández, General Secretary of the Association of Professors of the University of Antioquia (ASOPRUDEA) and founder of MANPUP, foreshadowed a new offensive against university autonomy throughout the country and confirmed the authoritarian drift of the national government and many of the local governments that expressly or tacitly support it.
The uncertainties generated by the pandemic cannot obscure the authoritarian nature of its political handling, which predates the pandemic and is designed to perpetuate the economic and social dogma responsible for the extreme vulnerability of Colombia's working class and a significant portion of the middle class. If the stark reality has been imposed upon us due to the effects of the pandemic, political absolutism uses it as a shield to continue a predatory model that exploits local communities, broader solidarity, and nature; it attempts to consign to oblivion the social crisis that Colombian society was experiencing before the coronavirus and the lack of legitimacy of the current president. The exceptional circumstances created by SARS-CoV-2 in our daily lives do not justify the authoritarian political exceptionalism that has been established as the only alternative and has confined us to small, fenced-in areas, surrounded by a deficient healthcare system and a lack of economic alternatives for the majority of the population.
Edgar Morin is right to say that “after the epidemic will come the uncertain adventure in which the forces of the worst and the best will develop; the latter are still weak and scattered. Let us know, in short, that the worst is not certain, that the improbable can happen, and that in the titanic and inextinguishable battle between the inseparable enemies that are Eros and Thanatos it is always healthy and invigorating to take the side of Eros.”[6] Thus, for example, faced with the inevitable shift to remote learning, we must begin to engage in dialogue, with the creativity of Eros, about the meaning of education, pedagogy, and the communication that constitutes them. This is to prevent an interminable technical debate, where shared and common spaces are reduced to mere instruments, from forcing us to accept virtuality as the norm and the natural consequence of having implemented emergency remote teaching during the pandemic. The aim is to transform this into the expected opportunity to lower the costs of public higher education and avoid the political dangers of... copresence human in universities.
It is essential that we participate in decisions about our individual and collective well-being. The new mobilizations, the new contentious action, the new co-inspiration, as Humberto Maturana calls it, must begin against the political absolutism that serves as a tool to deepen the economic and social project that increases the vulnerability of the most unprotected sectors of our societies. Beyond sectoral demands, which are necessary, it is essential to join forces to prevent the transformation of the absolutism of reality into a political and social absolutism with disastrous consequences for Latin America.
Student organizations have begun to mobilize again, slowly and tentatively amidst the uncertainty, as have educators' organizations; some critical intellectuals are making visible the alternatives not only to neoliberalism, but to capitalism; we, the elderly, have begun to make our voices heard after being relegated to the condition of incapacity; the social and economic crisis that is just beginning is pushing the majority of the population to the violent threshold that separates survival from death, and every day the collective self-determination of communities and society in general becomes more urgent.
Faced with the determinism of capital, which condemns us to languish in the “end of history,” the moral economy of the multitude teaches us that there are divergent and invisible possibilities for life in the solidarity economy, community projects and buen vivir (living well), ecosocialism and ecofeminism, the recovery of the commons, ancestral learning, and the radicalization of democracy and its extension to the global sphere. This could be the beginning of a new era, but we are on the edge of contingency. The future that awaits us depends on our present and immediate actions. The university needs to rethink the meaning of the knowledge that constitutes it, in an inter- and transdisciplinary way, to reimagine the forms of coexistence that guarantee us dignified social relationships with nature and with other human beings, relationships oriented toward individual and collective self-realization, in order to overcome the precarious survival endured by the majority of the Latin American population and evidenced by the absolutism of reality.
Bogotá, June 11, 2020
[1] Professor at the National University of Colombia. Member of MANPUP.
[2]. Blumenberg, Hans (2003). I work on the myth. Barcelona: Paidós, pp. 11-40 and Bottici, Chiara (2012). Philosophy of the Political Myth. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, p. 133.
[3]“Email from Juan Carlos Eslava”, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Colombia, 4/06/2020.
[4]“Message from Juan Carlos Eslava”, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Colombia, 4/06/2020.
[5]Harvey, David (2020). “Anti-capitalist politics in times of COVID-19”. In: https://ctxt.es/es/20200302/Politica/31496/coronavirus-anticapitalismo-neoliberalismo-medidas-covid19-david-harvey-jacobin.htm
[6]Morin, Edgar (2020), “Festival of Uncertainties”. In: https://kipschool.org/usr_files/generic_pdf/MORIN%20Edgar%20(2020)%20Festival%20de%20incertidumbres_%20(002).pdf
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