Of Pandemic and Life’s Propositions

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that has raged across the world since late 2019 is unprecedented on many grounds. Like previous pandemics, it has been widespread spatially and temporally. Like all pandemics in recorded history, it has also brought disease and death to millions. However, the nature of the virus and its adaptability to different environmental and climactic conditions have been unlike other pandemics in human history. With time, the virus has undergone mutation at multiple levels, and the extent of mutation is not fully known. This pandemic is no longer just a medical disease; it has evolved into a social malaise. Stigmas are associated with the disease as the pandemic has exposed the simmering fissures in human society and human relationships. As a consequence, the imprints left behind by the novel coronavirus in the lives of people are multidimensional and constantly evolving.Three recent essays—“Paravictorianism: Mary Shelley and Viral Sovereignty,” by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb; “The Logic of the In-visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch,” by Walter D. Mignolo; and “Thinking through the Pandemic: A Symposium”—explore the multifarious and multidimensional nature of the COVID-19 pandemic across different planes of human existence. The pandemic has influenced a change in the perception of history and of the ways humans perceive themselves and their positionality in the world. For the first time, in uncountable years, humans, despite their “sophisticated biomedical infrastructures,” have found themselves at the mercy of a disease whose cure is not fully ascertained.1 “Thinking through the Pandemic” explores the near-surreal experience of this pandemic. It has fueled human imagination in ways nobody could have envisaged and has generated a new language register that will be a part of everyday human communication for years. The abundance of information on the pandemic has left people overwhelmed and in turn has influenced them psychologically and emotionally. All three essays touch on this psychosocial impact of the pandemic on human society.Human happiness has also been altered. With the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns—total and partial—in different parts of the world for different stretches of time, digital dependence has increased across all age groups and on all fronts, from education to commerce to observation of customs and rituals. Both physical distancing and greater reliance on digital connection have left people more isolated. Working from home has blurred lines between personal and professional spaces, and the virtual has become the real as the term normal has acquired a whole new range of meaning. The culture of digital dependence due to the pandemic has also adversely affected individual self-worth and increased individuals’ aggression and frustration.Kolb’s essay on the diplomatic tensions between Indonesia and the World Health Organization in 2006 over a naturally occurring viral flu that was linked to the war on terror explores how a pandemic can reaffirm racial stereotypes and facilitate religious or racial suppression. Kolb’s essay examines the institutionalization of a viral pandemic in the context of nineteenth-century literary studies as the transitions of “a viral pandemic, climate change, racial capital, corporate kleptocracy, industrial agriculture, neoimperialism” are directed in favor of the privileged classes—racial, ethnic, socioeconomic.2Kolb’s observations bring us to the question of modernity, particularly of the West. Complicated by geopolitical tensions and turmoil in the global economy, the pandemic has exposed the inequalities that exist in the modern world. We are on the cusp of a “change of epoch,” despite the apprehension and fear about the pandemic, Mignolo warns. In the new epoch familiar notions are increasingly defamiliarized, he explains. This includes Western notions of modernity and the temporal linearity of modernity. Mignolo raises the question not of how a war is waged against the disease but of how we can defend ourselves and “of the sickness of a civilization that cannot imagine any other way to deal with the nightmare.”3 For Mignolo, the COVID-19 pandemic raises questions that can be seen as marking the end of the epoch of Western hegemony and the colonizing of the mind. Agreeing with Mignolo, Kolb, and the symposium contributors, all we can say with certainty is that this pandemic has altered the perception and propositions of human life forever.