Tag: covid-19

Learning to Live With The Virus

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Learning to live with the covid 19 pandemic

The coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 pandemic has sickened as many as 145 million people around the world. It is raging in several countries like never before. The second wave of COVID-19 has seriously exposed the health infrastructure in India. Even as I write, thousands of dead bodies are waiting for their turns in temporary cremation grounds. Thousands more are dying on the streets waiting to be admitted into the hospitals. Several thousand is begging, borrowing & stealing oxygen cylinders to keep their loved ones alive.

It is a manufactured crisis. The election rallies in Bengal, and Kumbh Mela were buzzing with millions of devotees – both political and religious – clinging to one another, chanting their respective Gods names. The megalomania of the supreme leader & the consequent downplay of the virus has spiralled into a crisis, like never before.

The COVID-19 pandemic – and the loss of loved ones – has created a void in our lives. More particularly, human’s anxiety over life and death has risen. In reality, we survive near-death experiences every day. Mental health has taken a huge toll on each one of our lives. As we scroll through Instagram and Twitter day-in-day-out, we are anguished by the current crisis. Each one requires the other to say: “Hey, you. I know things are pretty crazy right now. It is all overwhelming and scary. But, you will be OK – eventually.”

covid-19 pandemic and Kumbh Mela
Amid rising coronavirus cases in the country, thousands of saffron-clad seers and ash-smeared Nagas flouted Covid-19 norms and gathered at Har Ki Pauri ghat in Haridwar for a holy dip in the Ganga during the second “shahi snan” (royal bath) of the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar. | Press Trust of India (PTI)

The pandemic has completely changed our lives. Let’s take something as simple as our experiences of space: our mobility is enormously restricted and is under the constant gaze of the other. We don’t go out for morning walks – if that luxury existed for some of us. We are restricted to four walls of our homes, working while sulking in bed. We don’t even realize what time it is, what day it is – for all days are the same. Anthropologist Jane Guyer calls it, “enforced presentism”: we are coerced to live only in the immediate present, having lost the ability to plan ahead. (However, the reader should note that Guyer coined the term in her seminal 2007 essay on contemporary forms of temporal reasoning.)

It is this enforced presentism that raises questions about what it is like to live in times of normalcy. Can there be a normal life after the pandemic? Amidst crisis, it is hard to imagine a future that looks different from the present. It is here, we seek to ponder over life’s big questions: What is the meaning of life? What it feels like to be dead? Does God exist? If so, how can Almighty witness the suffering of millions on their death beds, in anguish, in vast numbers? However, I do not seek to engage with these questions in depth – at least, in this essay.

With regards to God, Voltaire wrote: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” His reasoning: the existence of God helps establish social order. Decades later, somewhere in Russia, Mikhail Bakunin wrote: “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” A century later, Albert Camus, a scholar of existential philosophy, sums up the God dilemma in this quote: “If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish him.” As a student of philosophy, I am convinced that – God or no God – we will have to live a life. It is here, the epicurean thoughts come to my rescue.

Mass cremation in times of COVID-19 pandemic
Mass cremation of victims who died due to coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is seen at a crematorium ground in New Delhi, India, on April 22, 2021. | REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

The ancient Greek philosophy of Epicureanism was developed in 300 BCE in Athens by Epicurus. And its main proponent: Titus Carus Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem, “On the Nature of Things”. Epicureanism challenged society in ways that seem unacceptable at the time in Greece. It teaches that the greatest good is to seek modest pleasures to attain a state of tranquillity, freedom from fear, and the absence of bodily pain. This combined makes up for eudemonia (happiness).

Epicurus and his followers formed a small commune in Epicurus’s house, surrounded by a garden, outside the city walls. The Epicureans took their meals in common, discussed philosophy, and socialized. Epicurus was a pragmatist. He declared, all that exists is made of indestructible atoms – tiny mobile particles invisible to the naked eye.

Prayers, to Epicureans, were useless for there was no hell. “The life of eudemonia was simply the one where pleasure dominated over pain”.  To them, happiness was derived from external things and socialization. When there is no immediate danger of dying, people are less afraid of death, Lucretius says. But when illness or danger strike, people begin to think of what comes after death.

Epicureans believe, when things go bad, they do so badly. We will suffer. And there is no real cure, except time and distraction. They say, it is essential for you to be aware of the external causes of misfortune and steer clear of them before they occur. These thoughts resonate with humans’ reaction to the 21st Century pandemic.

COVID-19 pandemic & Varanasi
A man selling masks on the busy street of Varanasi during the pandemic. | Shubhangee Vyas for Unsplash

Bad things occur – again and again. Already, the pandemic has fueled inequality both among and within countries. New virus variants have ravaged the streets of London, Mumbai, and California among others. Everything is scarce, everywhere – hospital beds, doctors, ventilators, oxygen cylinders, Remdesivir tablets, etc. Quarantines – and the general concern about the raging virus – have taken a huge toll on our day-to-day life.  Mental health has been neglected since. Living has become a misery for many of us. Death does not come easy. And the dead don’t die in peace. With COVID-19, we feel it all – one at a time. So, how do we cope? Or can we really cope?

To be frank, I don’t have answers to both of these questions. COVID-19 is a new disease, and there is no road map for a predictive future. No one really knows how long it will take the world to reach normalcy. But, as an Epicurean would have responded: “We just need to learn to live with it.” HOPE, I guess, is what drives us forward. Let’s hope, someday, the world will have the full toolkit to tackle the pandemic. Our future needs better management. We will need to focus on building the infrastructure to mitigate such health crises. We need to cooperate better. The rich are obliged to help the poor – both among and within countries. We need to build a sustainable future.

In the meantime, we need to focus on learning to live with the pandemic.

Picture: National Geographic

The Morality of Saving Lives and COVID-19

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The morality of saving lives

What is one of the most difficult tasks of a doctor in dealing with the pandemic? I say, it is the dreadful morality choice the doctor ought to make while saving someone at the cost of the other. This has been an intrinsic moral dilemma for centuries of human civilisation. Even as we begin, it is imperative to make one thing clear at the start: societies have scare resources. As a result of resource-constraint, the doctors are forced to ration ventilators, life-saving drugs, dialysis machines and the staff qualified to operate them.

Rationing ventilators has become a new normal in a world grappling with COVID-19. The hospitals get to decide which patient should receive access to mechanical ventilation and other medical procedures. Such an exercise often decides the fate of patients. It is excruciating to think of doctors making moral decisions of which patient gets to live and who dies.

Moral dilemmas are as antique as the medicinal practices themselves. However, in times of crisis, these dilemmas become more evident, unique and urgent. Thus, it is essential to take a look at the concept of morality and the dilemmas that we grapple with in our daily lives. We, humans, inherently belong to one of the two schools of moral philosophy: Millsean utilitarianism and Kantian deontology.

Utilitarian Philosophy and Doctors

Utilitarianism, often also known as consequentialism, was articulated by 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and popularized by John Stuart Mill. In 1776, in his work, A Fragment on Government, Bentham invoked what he defined as a “fundamental axiom, it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” Benthamite utilitarianism surmises on “ends justify the means” morality.

Immanuel Kant wrote Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in 1785. He argued that in order for one to act in a morally right way, one must act from duty. Kant argued that it is not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong, but the motives that enabled the action. He concludes what truly good is: “Nothing in the world – indeed nothing even beyond the world – can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except goodwill.”

Deontology and Kant

Deontology is a normative ethical theory that defines, as Kant had propounded, the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong and not on what it achieves. Kant notes that a person has goodwill when he “acts out of respect for the moral law.” And that there are certain universal moral laws that are the guiding principle behind the ethical behaviour known as the “categorical imperative.” Deontological philosophy argues that it is “the means that justify the ends.” One of the most influential deontological works in recent times comes from Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in his work, A Theory of Justice propounds a social-contract based on the “veil of ignorance.”

In this essay, I argue that humans are not consistently inclined to a singular school of morality, they shift their goalposts based on circumstances they are encountered with. Let me illustrate this with two ethical dilemmas:

Imagine you are a doctor, and there are five patients in dire need of transplants to live. And each of them will require a different part of the human body. In the next ward, a healthy patient with a mild headache is unconscious due to a dosage of a drug. So, would you kill the healthy patient and harvest his organs to save five lives? Most of us will utterly reject the idea of killing a healthy person. In here, no matter what the consequence of the action is, it is morally wrong to kill a healthy human. Here, we are all Kantians.

Let us now imagine that there is a limited supply of a life-saving drug. Six people will certainly die if they are not treated with the drug. But, one patient requires all of the drugs if he were to survive. But, the other five would require only one-fifth of it. What would you, as a doctor, do in this scenario? Many of us would administer the drug to the five patients as it would fetch the maximum utility. At this point, we are consequentialists.

Taurek and Numbers 

John Taurek, in 1977, in a paper titled “Should the Numbers Count?” presented the above scenario and argued against the general notion of saving five patients than one. To Prof. Taurek, numbers don’t matter. He responds:

“Here are six human beings. I can empathize with each of them. I would not like to see any of them die. But I cannot save everyone. Why not give each person an equal chance to survive? Perhaps I could flip a coin. Heads, I give my drug to these five. Tails, I give it to this one. In this way, I give each of the six persons a fifty-fifty chance of surviving.”

Prof. Taurek adds, “I cannot see how or why the mere addition of numbers should change anything.” However, it becomes evident that Taurek underestimates the number-game a little too much. What if, the calculation was one life against a hundred, a thousand, or a million? Would numbers still not matter? One of the most compelling critiques came from Derek Parfit. In his article “Innumerate Ethics”, Parfit argues that equality meant giving equal consideration to each person’s life, rather than equalising their chances of survival. Parfit wrote, “We should save more people” as each person counts for his life and more people count for more.

Morality and the COVID-19

There are two schools of thought within medical departments about the action plan about the virus. One school of thought preaches that the resources must aim at guaranteeing intensive treatment to patients with a higher chance of survival. It privileges the “higher life expectancy” over those with less chance of survival. In other words, relatively young patients with health problems are prioritized over the elderly and sick.

Another school, deontological ethics, prioritises the elderly and sick over those who are less likely to be affected by the virus. Since the death-rate of the older population is high, the preachers of deontology believe that with proper care and treatment they are reducing the number of deaths. They argue that patients with lower risk are more likely to survive without proper medical treatment, but that is not true in the case of elderly people.

Even as we learn to live with the virus, there is a grave challenge to the inherent human-beliefs more than ever. John Authers, a leading business editor, wrote, “The pandemic is also a test of the strength of the ideas humans choose to help them form moral judgements and guide personal and social behaviour.”

Conclusion

The crisis challenges our abilities to justify what is right and what is wrong. More so, it questions our ability to interpret the purpose of human existence. The estranged society as it exists is its next target. It is at this point, we realise that humans are a product of unequal resource privileges, where one’s garbage is another’s gold. The constant fear engulfing our lives about the known and unknown strangers that might infect us with the virus.

The privilege of justifying our ability to quarantine the population – rich, and poor alike; at times, enabling the poor to toil for their livelihood and battle the virus; telling the destitute, elderly and sick that it is the time for you to sacrifice yourselves for the benefit of the larger society; spewing hatred in the name of primetime news;  watching the migrant women walk a thousand miles with babies wrapped around their shoulders; enabling the labourers to sleep on the railway track even as the train passes over them.

The virus shows us the world we have created – gravely unequal and subtly cruel. It is the marvellous creation of thousands of years of humanity’s obsession with greed and competition. Coronavirus has challenged the ability of humans to protect human society. Vulnerability has become the cornerstone of today’s world. In the post-COVID-19 world, humans ought to become human first, only then humanity will thrive. It is time to rethink and reconceptualise an equal and just society.

Picture Courtesy: Getty Images

Happiness in the Unknowns

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happiness in strangers

We live in crazy times. These days, social realities are generated in the virtual world. An era of snappy chatter applications – Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and House-party – where one finds happiness in strangers. Today’s generation would not be able to imagine life without the internet. Life before Facebook and Snapchat has ceased to exist in our lived realities. Life without a gaze at mobile-screen would seem as dull as the glance at a starless gloomy sky.

An Era of Social Media

We live in an era where real space is shrinking like never before. A decade ago, if one were asked whether they would talk to a stranger on Facebook, the answer would have an induced element of scepticism. In today’s world, we meet people and un-meet them within a few seconds. Instagram grapples with our narcissistic-self and inordinate confidence. It is where lies become truth, relationships are prefect, family members are blocked, and everyone shows off the best of their lives. All through the day, we would scroll through the feed, and feel real.

As much as, we enjoy sliding into the messages of others, we are also dealing with our inability to access a reality. We are, therefore, attempting to feel happy in the virtual world. You know how it goes: you slide into a DM of a person that you would like to talk to and begin your wait game. Even as you expect a ‘hi’ from the other end, you do not feel a thing about it. Within those 10 minutes of exchange of words, you open up about your personal, detailed stories about how your life should be. Half an hour into the conversation, you are expressing your melancholy about how your partners cheated on you, and what you did about it. And so on.

Finding Solace in Strangers 

Realities have faded into an unexpected desire for the unknowns. In our quest to enjoy our virtual reality, we open up to the unknowns so much that we surrender our selves. To the unknowns, we convey our darkest fantasies, miserable ecstasy, and sad desires. We create stories for them about our lives that exist only in the imaginations. You convey to them, how much you hate your so-and-so friends. How much you would want to sleep with an erudite physics professor, who, you had until then restricted to your dreams. For the unknowns, we create realities and recreate them, just so they meet their perfect passion.

Why would we tell anything to the ones we do not know?

One reason would be that we cease to have any expectations from people that do not know us. We also feel secure for the reason that we do not know them or intend to know them. As a result, our insecurities are hidden in a toolbox that we would never wish to open. It is in this context, Malcolm Gladwell writes, “Sometimes the best conversations with strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.” The unknowns become our tool to deal with reality as it exists.

Keep Thy Stranger As A Stranger

Even as I began inquiring as to why one finds it easier to talk to the unknowns, someone on Instagram said, “Every new stranger will evoke a new identity in individuals. As a result, with every new stranger, a fresh identity of self is formed.” Someone else replied, “It enables you to explore a different surrounding and upbringing.” The stranger is like a clean slate. You can draw any version of yourself. A good friend of mine, wrote to me: “We find comfort in talking to a stranger, because, we can pretend to be someone we are not. And as humans, we have grown desperate and lonely. Thus, we will try and mould ourselves into someone that the stranger likes.”

It is crazy how much we love talking to the unknowns than our own friends. Unknowns don’t judge us; even when they do, we don’t care. If the Bible were to be reproduced, “Thou shalt love thy stranger as thyself,” would surely find its place. However, Matthew would have cautioned us in the next verse, “Keep thy stranger as a stranger.” With the unknowns, we always have an option of unknowing them. We could vent-out all day long, everything we want, and have a veto over the ‘block clause’. If the creeps come your way in the form of unknowns, which is far more likely, the block-option is a touch away.

We seek happiness in the unknowns. We tend to find another us in them. Or know how the other is different from us. Thus, a stranger always contains an element of surprise, rather a pleasant discomfort. We tend to portray our life as it exists or as we wished it to be. Through, such an exercise, we are put a smile on our faces and reserve our realities for the ones we know.

Politics in the Time of COVID-19

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politics of covid-19

The COVID-19 crisis has created a new normal – empty streets, closed cafes and restaurants, sealed borders, restricted travels, and virtualised human interactions – a world paralysed at its own pace. Coronavirus has engulfed everyone’s lives with the fear of the unknown, or rather, of the unforeseeable. People, in billions, have been forced to stay at home. Young and the old alike, complaining of fever and dry cough, have filled hospitals in thousands.

Citizens, at least the privileged, lined up in supermarkets to stock up groceries and toilet papers. Meanwhile, the rest complained, “We will die – either from the virus or from hunger”. In a globalised society, the pandemic has produced a new form of self-organisation that isolates the self from others to sustain itself. The pandemic has made uncertainty a new normal.

COVID-19 and China

The novel Coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The virus has since spread like a wildfire across the globe. More than two million people throughout the world have contracted the virus and tens of thousands of them have died.

Initially, China had covered up the extent of the spread of the Coronavirus outbreak for several weeks in December. The Chinese Government denied all the initial evidence and suppressed those who had warned of it, most tragically the Wuhan physician Dr Li Wenliang. The global response to the crisis has been too little, too late, and too laggard. The nation-states have been seeking to look inwards. As a result, the COVID-19 crisis seems to be nowhere in sight of control.

Pandemics provide the nation-states with an opportunity to seek to control the human population. They enable the rise of a big-state that takes tough measures towards its survival. Three such features of a pandemic-state are surveillance, authoritarianism, and xenophobia.

Surveillance

Countries, both democratic and non-democratic, have been using technology to track the movement of their citizens. Surveillance has become a new tool to control the spread of the pandemic. Nation-states have enforced their citizens to follow the norms of social-distancing, while also punishing those not adhering to them.

Surveillance technologies have been used to track where people are, where they have been, and what their recovery status is. This data is further used to determine the extent of the spread of disease and then track those who have been in contact with those infected by the virus.

Israel has authorised the internal security agency to tap the secret trove of cellular data of its citizens. South Korea and other East Asian countries have had their initial success in digital contact-tracing using mobile applications. Many countries across the globe have been following suit. States have been exercising the power to monitor people using technology. Several leaders across the globe have been using the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress their population, thereby resulting in an Orwellian State – Big Brother is Watching You.

Authoritarianism

In response to the crisis, the world autocrats have been employing a mixture of propaganda, suppression of political rivals, and expansion of political powers. As an old maxim goes, “Never let a good famine go to waste”, many world leaders have been successful in their power grabs.

Pandemic has enabled the leaders to legitimise the use of executive powers, detain people, and infringe on the freedoms of expression. Hungary has passed a new law that grants Prime Minister Victor Orban the power to suspend the country’s existing laws. An indefinite State of Emergency has been declared in Hungary, curtailing the freedom of expression and penalising those breaking quarantine orders.

Philippines legislature has granted President Rodrigo Duterte emergency powers. And the President has imposed shoot-to-kill orders of those not following the quarantine norms. In Egypt, chemical warfare troops, clad in the protective suit have been deployed to disinfect the suburbs.

Pandemic has allowed the Governments to ban public assemblies, quarantine, close borders, limit trade, impose restrictions on movement, and censor media. History also suggests that after a crisis, the state does not give up on all the ground it had secured. Thus, it is imperative to speculate about the kind of state we would live in after the crisis.

Xenophobia

There has also been a rise in the process of ‘othering’ with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of taking the opportunity to embrace and support one another, the nation-states have become the spouts of xenophobia. Even as the Coronavirus spread across the globe, reports of racism towards East Asians have been on the rise in Western democracies.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has repeatedly referred to the Coronavirus as ‘Chinese Virus’. Incidents of racially motivated crimes have risen throughout the United States since the outbreak of the virus. Xenophobia has become a petty tool for governments and their citizens to colour responses concerning the pandemic.

Media also plays an important role in the creation of ‘the other’, as a contrast to the self. Xenophobia systematically enables the social stigma towards others in society. The moment a pandemic is regionalised and stigmatised, humanity will suffer a sad demise.

Scholars across the globe have given their verdict on a post-pandemic world, with many affirming that the “world will be less open, prosperous, and free”. Some scholars believe that China would rise as a new global power; some others have written an obituary to hyper-globalisation. Climate change, for good, will gain limelight in a post-pandemic world. It is interesting to see how the crisis in itself pans out over the period to provide an affirmative answer. A pandemic-State will always be mired by the rise of authoritarianism, surveillance, and xenophobia.

Conclusion

However, such a State will not be suitable for a post-crisis era. We need to keep in check the power of Governments in a post-pandemic society. United Nations, as an agency, has failed to provide a collective global response. Its decline seems evident, more than ever. It should not mean the demise of ‘global governance’. We need institutions with a robust and structured form of global governance mechanisms.

A world government with structured power-sharing with nation-states would be a sophisticated alternative to human society. Such a government would require enforceable jurisdiction on issues that threaten humanity, such as poverty, health, terrorism, war, and climate change. We need cooperation between countries more than ever. The pandemic will not end for anyone until it ends for everyone.

Disclaimer: The article was first published with the Nepal Institute for International Cooperation and Engagement (NIICE), and with KhabarHub.

Picture Credits: The Economist