By Marian Pastor Roces
(First of two parts)
THE COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 takes human beings to the outer reaches of what is humanly imaginable.
That is to say, few humans are prepared to grasp the scale of what is taking place. The present global contagion may not have the staggering numbers of, for example, the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, which killed 50 million people and infected a third of the world’s population. But even if the human toll is ultimately low this time, compared to 1918, or that of World War I (40 million) or of World War II (70 million to 80 million) — mortality figures can no longer be the true measure of how bad things got.
Body counts belong to ways of thinking circa pre-20th-century wars. The thinking slid into the 20th, when people should have known better than to measure the size of any apocalypse by casualty totals. It hooks people into parochialisms: to the undersized scale of individuals, families, imagined communities. To tales of heroes and anti-heroes.
Kill numbers intensify emotions around concepts of horror, hope, and resolve. But all three emotions fade fast. Horror, hope, and resolve faded soon after the Holocaust, and indeed after the Spanish Flu pandemic. “It is an oddity of history that the influenza epidemic of 1918 has been overlooked in the teaching of American history,” according to the American National Archives.
In the Philippines, the horrific Philippine-American War is a blank in Philippine history. And the Martial Law trauma to social systems is inconceivable to many who were conceived during those years.
Victim stories in fact occupy a modest space in the impossibly big scheme of things. And while these “humanize” colossal events, the immediacies of horror fade upon contact with fresh immediacies; from the rawness of the here-and-now. And few know of the long-ago contexts of today’s devices.
The idea of triage dates to the Napoleonic wars. It means quick sorting of casualties by level of injury, but also culling: allowing some to die. Now proving useful again (even without the benefit of historical hindsight), it, however, means silence about the second meaning. Which is that death sentences are being handed out by doctors who are trained to heal in Italy, Spain, China, possibly soon in the US — hopefully not in the Philippines.
Still, historical accounts do not begin to complete any kind of big picture. “Big” means many, invisibly overlapping aspects of human experience in different times and places. Few aspects link as cause-and-effect strings. For pandemics, the event horizons to track are separately readable through updated molecular biology, biopolitics, cultural geography, political economy, medicine, pharmacology, and the work in the complexity sciences — unreadable across disciplines as tidy loops.
But we can at least be inoculated against conspiracy theories by some sense of what is going on in these fields. For starters, the magnitude of virulent complexity shows by recognizing that within this last decade, two pandemics, so to speak, preceded the present one. Bigger contagions than SARS, MERS-CoV, and swine flu.
Separate but intertwined pandemics of ignorance and populism overwhelmed the world, with as grave a shock to human social organization as wrought now by COVID-19. While “pandemic” is metaphorically used to describe these political events, the impact on human beings is similar and literal. And the dynamic is described well as virulent.
Mass ignorance, artificially produced by battering down systems of truth, ruins human potential. It is a kind of mass murder. Death as rhetoric rushes actual killings. And while older populisms also held power via alternative facts, early 21st-century populisms are a global ecosystem of autocracies plugged to digitally circulated demagoguery. The AI dimension is enormous and impalpable.
Populism wrests and keeps power by violent simplification; by post-industrial production of untruths that are cynically endured or hysterically welcomed as the new normal in too many parts of the world. This is certainly the case in the Philippines following the loud sentiments of too many who have tired of technocratic tropes of democratic progress, and have expressed through the ballot a preference for quick fixes.
The quick fix delusion is fanned by autocrats, the Philippine one included, who grasp in a primal way the political economy of lies. Rhetoric about swift deliverance from unhappy circumstances is also fed by the American president to a base of white supremacists, who then indulge in hyper-nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-globalization screeds.
The social contract in China pivots on the carrot of immense wealth for the stick to whack civil liberties — ultimately the false causality that on its back-end preserves the matter-of-course trafficking of wildlife for food. Among other monster modus operandi. And Russian power is recreating itself, as China is, from massively expanding falsehood factories that are light years faster than the human speed at which dissent coalesces.
And yet the circumstances that hothouse new viruses both biological and digital are no less hideous than the outcomes of ecosystem collapse, everywhere on the planet, from intricate artificial ecosystems of lies produced by impenitent capital.
Violent simplification is also at the heart of all fundamentalisms — religious, economic, cultural. This brings this sketch to the Middle East and to South America, where massive social experiments are taking place that are fixed (or fixated) on economic essentialisms. But enough said for the moment (until Part 2).
It should be a minimum human response to the pandemic to gain and refine the ability to connect science-denialism, populism, and regimes of untruth, with State inability to match and beat this virus.
The Philippine case is playing out with two autocratic habits: the knee-jerk deployment of military language and strategy to address collapsing systems; and the small-town politics elevated to the national level. Both habits are hugely inadequate to the moment, especially because a population already addled, a priori, by disinformation campaigns, lives at the edge of anarchy.
For this country and the rest of the world, minimally adequate thinking and action involves non-State actors — scientists, educators, physicians, civil society, people’s organizations, geneticists, and so forth — to recognize, describe, and act to the dynamics of macro global change that is nearly inconceivable.
To be continued.
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic whose research interests include international art events, museums, identity politics, cities, and clothing. She is the founder and principal of TAO, Inc., a museum and exhibition development corporation.
