Survival in the Age of Coronavirus

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I. 

 

I'm pleased to see that the philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han addresses the coronavirus pandemic within the context of his work on what he terms the palliative society (i.e., society characterised by a generalised fear of pain - or, indeed, any form of negativity that might possibly cause suffering or distress) [a].   

 

Pleased, not only because I think what he says is insightful, but because I think it important that heretics [b] speak up and challenge the prevailing Covid orthodoxy which governments, medical bodies, and the mainstream media are all promoting in order to justify the destruction of individual rights and liberties in the name of public health. 

 

 

II.

 

According to Han, Covid-19 reveals what kind of society we belong to; one in which survival has become an absolute value and where all forces are marshalled "for the prolongation of life" [14] at any cost. 

 

He writes:

 

"In the pandemic, the bitter fight for survival is subjected to a viral intensification. The virus enters the palliative zone of well-being and turns it into a quarantine zone in which life is completely paralysed into survival. The more life becomes survival, the greater the fear of death. Algophobia is utimately thantophobia. The pandemic makes death, which we had carefully repressed and set aside, visible again. The prominence of death in the mass media makes people nervous." [14]

 

That's true: there are people who terrify themselves reading the latest daily updates on infection levels, hospitalisations, and deaths; not just in their local area, but nationally and even globally. They seem to have lost all sense of perspective or context and treat even a tiny rise in the number of people dying with (and not necessarily of) coronavirus as if it were the end of the world, rather than the end of a few individual lives (mostly aged over 80 and very often with serious pre-existing health conditions).  

Han writes:

 

"The society of survival has no sense of the good life. Even enjoyment is sacrificed in the pursuit of health as an end in itself. [...] We are prepared to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living for the sake of survival. In the face of the pandemic, even the restriction of fundamental rights has been accepted without so much as a question being asked. We comply willingly with the state of exception that reduces life to bare life." [14-15]     

 

Bare life: i.e., a socially distanced existence in which we lock ourselves up at home or creep about in masks, regard strangers (and even our own relatives) as potential vectors of disease, and constantly self-test for signs of infection. It is a life divested not only of pleasure, but of all meaning (i.e., lacking in any meta-physical dimension). 

 

We become, in effect, zombies: "A society that is gripped by the mania for survival is a society of the undead [...] too alive to die, and too dead to live" [17].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021). All page numbers given in the post refer to this work.  

      Byung-Chul Han, of course, is not the first author to inveigh against this will to survive. Nietzsche was keen to stress that the will to power was more than merely a will to life and could, in fact, have aims contrary to the wellbeing and survival of the organism. D. H. Lawrence also wrote at length against the unappeased rage of self-preservation; see, for example, his 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3-128.  

[b] For a recent post on heresy (as/and philosophical idiotism), click here. Like Han, I conceive of the heretic as a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus and the commonly accepted values of their era. 

On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism

 

Detail from a poster designed by Maciej Hibner 

for the film The Idiot (dir. Ivan Pyryev, 1958)

 The idiot has no soul: he is like a flower - an existence open to sunlight ... Botho Strauss

 

 

I. 

 

Derived from the ancient Greek term haíresis [αἵρεσις], heresy originally meant choice and thus implied the exercise of free will. 

 

And so one will readily understand why the heretic - he who chooses to hold views which are at variance with the orthodox position or party line - is so despised by those whose authority is challenged. 

 

For formal heretics deliberately cause division and sow discord and, according to the Church, are spiritually cut off from the Truth, even before they have been officially excommunicated (or burnt at the stake). 

 

Their sin is obstinancy rather than error; a persistent adherence to falsehood.  

 

 

II. 

 

Now, whilst I share certain traits with heretics, I'm not sure I would count myself among their number. 

 

For one thing, when presented with the blackmail of choice (either/or), I choose not to choose and affirm neither/nor. For some, this makes me an idiot, like Bartleby, but as we'll see below, that might not be so terrible.

 

Secondly, whilst a heretic may not subscribe to dogma, in choosing to believe something else, they remain persons of faith and often as fanatic in their belief (and their hatred) as those who accuse them of heresy - Martin Luther is a good example of this [1].     

 

Having said that, I sympathise with Byung-Chul Han's call for a form of heresy - based on what he terms idiotism - that might challenge the New World Order: 

 

"Today, it seems, the type of the outsider - the idiot, the fool - has all but vanished from society. Thoroughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotisms." [2] 

 

Han continues: 

 

"In light of compulsive and coercive communication and conformism, idiotism represents a practice of freedom. By nature, the idiot is unallied, un-networked, and uninformed. The idiot inhabits the immemorial outside [...] 

      The idiot is a modern-day heretic. [...] As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness." [3]

 

That's a nice expression. And I do like this vision of an idiot, veiled in silence, refusing to identify himself or bow down to the neoliberal demand for total self-exposure. Today, the only way to resist the world is via silence, secrecy, and solitude. 

 

And it is philosophical idiotism alone which "erects spaces for guarding silence [...] where it is still possible to say what really deserves to be said" [4].

 

 

Notes 

[1] Nietzsche's changing view of Luther is interesting. He began as an admirer, but his favourable attitude undwent radical revision after Human, All Too Human (1878) and in his late writings Nietzsche offers a scathing denunciation of Luther as a moral fanatic. Essentially, for Nietzsche, Luther is the man who in reforming Christianity restores it to power and thereby terminates the hope of a neo-pagan Europe which the Renaissance had tantalisingly held out.  

[2] Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017), p. 82.

      Clearly, Han is not using the term idiot in its modern sense (i.e., to refer to a stupid person). Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek term from which it derives - idiōtēs [ἰδιώτης] - which refers to a private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than simply subscribe to common sense or public opinion (even at the risk of appearing ignorant or foolish). For Han, "the history of philosophy is the history of idiotisms" [p. 81].

 

[3] Ibid., p. 83. 

 

[4] Ibid., p. 84.

      Han acknowledges that this politics of silence was already being called for by Deleuze thirty years ago. See 'Mediators', in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 121-34, where Deleuze writes: 

      "It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." [129]

Why I'm Suspicious of Pride

I.

I'm not a great fan or follower of the journalist Brendan O'Neill, but as an atheistic libertarian he often writes things that cut across aspects of my own thinking (or, as critics would say, reinforce my own fears and prejudices).

Thus, for example, I was interested to read a recent column in The Spectator in which O'Neill expresses his irritation at London Pride; the UK's largest queer celebration which sees rainbow flags hanging from virtually every public building and branded on just about every conceivable product you may wish to purchase in order to show your support for the LGBT+ community and the sinister political project known as diversity.        

Like O'Neill, I'm perfectly happy to commemorate the Stonewall riots and welcome many of the social, political and cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fifty years vis-à-vis the rights of sexual minorities. I might not fetishise notions of freedom and equality, or posit them as ideals over and above all other considerations, but neither do I wish to live in a time or place where these things are denied.  

But, like O'Neill, I also find it depressing to see a genuinely radical event co-opted by governments, corporations and the media and pinkwashed into a bland (and virtually mandatory) spectacle informed by a needy and therapeutic politics of identity:

"It’s no longer enough to leave homosexuals alone to live however they choose and to inflict on them no persecution or discrimination or any ill-will whatsoever on the basis of their sexuality, which is absolutely the right thing for a civilised liberal society to do. No, now you have to validate their identity and cheer their life choices."

Now, we must all assemble - cisgender heterosexuals included - beneath the omnipresent bloody rainbow and condemn anyone who refuses to do so as a political heretic.


II.

Actually, the very word pride is problematic, philosophically speaking, due to the fact that it has both negative and positive connotations. It is, for example, often used as a synonym for the Greek term hubris and refers thus to a destructively excessive or self-indulgent quality. It certainly isn't an unambiguously virtuous concept as Aristotle and the organisers of Pride events seem to believe.

Thus, I'm always rather suspicious of people who speak insistently in terms of pride; particularly those who belong to sexual or racial minorities, as they have a tendency to overcompensate for feelings of low self-esteem and guilt born of a long history of oppression and marginalisation. 

Indeed, it could be argued that pride which has been determined by such a history is simply shame on the recoil, or what Nietzsche would characterise as a revolt in morals and is thus still contained within the same old dialectic rather than part of a genuine revaluation of values ...

Ultimately, the old slogan gay is good is as mistaken as the homophobic view that gay is evil (and for the same reason).

See: Brendan O'Neill, 'Why I'm Sick of Pride', The Spectator (6 July, 2019): click here.