Breaking with the Past

With the natural rhythm of daily life interrupted as a result of COVID-19, many struggle to find direction as the future has suddenly become less predictable. While some heed the call to practice social distancing—an act of solidarity—others gleefully meander through crowded public space—an act of dissent. The virus—seemingly so far away for many, yet too close in reality—is all the more eerie in that its existence is often invisible to its hosts, a fact that can ignite profound feelings of panic, confusion, and distrust.

When the clear path is lost, a tension between self and society sets in. On one hand, the global upheaval that is COVID-19 elicits a feeling of camaraderie amid what is a collective tragedy—the shared sense of despair felt when encountering stories from around the world of lives lost and hearts broken. On the other hand, lack of resources and disrupted supply chains can evoke the driving force of survival, a looming individual tragedy—the fear for oneself and one’s family. In a single day, one may vacillate between wanting to help those most at risk and wondering if they can afford next month’s rent. Is it “normal” to feel so conflicted?

In What about Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-based Society, psychologist and psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe discusses the tension between sovereignty and solidarity—the self and the collective—that shapes our character. Identity, writes Verhaeghe, is the balancing act between these two poles—the harmonizing between wanting to unite with, yet distance ourselves from, the group.11Paul Verhaeghe, What about Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-based Society, trans. Jane Hedley-Prole (Melbourne and London: Scribe, 2014). However, it is the structure of society that shapes our social ontology, and largely dictates where on the spectrum our personal and collective psyches fall.

Capitalism functions on a theory of the human as homo economicus, a being naturally inclined to pursue personal welfare at the expense of the universal good. It was Thomas Hobbes, celebrated theorist of liberalism, who opined that if not for an overbearing government, human life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”22Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1651). Today, the tenets of neoliberalism have accelerated the notion of the atomized self, facilitating the rise of a strict market rationality with entrepreneurialism and personal responsibility being the hallmarks of our social ethos. In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, political theorist Wendy Brown argues that in our current milieu of precisely crafted scarcity and struggle, virtually every sphere of human possibility, public or private, has been “economized.”33Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015). Not only are we pitted against one another, justifying inequality through a fetishism of competition and hierarchy, but collective politics has in many parts of the world—particularly in the United States, now the epicentre of the crisis—also become unimaginable, leaving democracy itself unattainable.

While COVID-19 makes its way across our globe, invading our social and political veins and disrupting the global economy, the urge to emphasize the personal over the collective, selfishness over altruism, is beckoning. Quarantine, isolation, social distancing—those of us sitting at home, lives on pause, feeling lonely and disconnected, peer out the window and wonder, “When will this end?” Yet in each corner of the globe we are all, as a species, exposed to the same crisis, and the collective nature of our human struggles is being brought out by the pandemic. The time has come to recognize our shared interests and forge a new world order.

As Verhaeghe shows, when the symbolic order is disrupted, our connection to the past becomes severed, and we are no longer our same selves. The virus, in disrupting that order, has unveiled a new reality, one that thrusts the interconnected nature of the human condition back into collective consciousness—the same nature that Western individualism and the ideology of capitalism mask so well. Yet it is through this unfortunate experience that we are forced to reflect on the fleeting, vulnerable state we all share. As the poet and philosopher David Whyte writes,

The reality of trauma evoked by the pandemic symbolizes the presence, and fear, of the unknown. Yet we seem to forget that it is the unknown that is intrinsic to our being. In Giving an Account of Oneself, feminist philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler argues that we neither completely choose the social relations that shape us, nor the language we use to describe those experiences. In other words, we are collectively vulnerable to the limits of self-knowledge. Never being able to provide a full “account” of ourselves—a description of who we are and why—means that we can never achieve full transparency with regard to the nuances of lived experience and nor should we expect this from others. Because of this, Butler posits the need for a universal ethics based on the human condition: our inherent inability to be held responsible for what has been imposed upon us. In this line of thinking, we are already in solidarity, for you didn’t choose this life, and neither did I.55Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

We have a responsibility to realize our collective humanity through our collective vulnerability, the latter of which has become all too salient in the fight against COVID-19. Underscoring common welfare means setting aside social relations steeped in market rationality—like short-term profits and just-in-time production of medical equipment—for a humanism that promotes the well-being of all, especially those who have been marginalized in various ways. The recognition of unity across the board can pave the way for a new, representative politics.

There is a foundation upon which to build this new representative politics—and it is one that recognizes joy alongside the need to disrupt the prevailing order. In Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, Lynne Segal explores the project of leaving aside individualistic pursuits of contentment for a shared sense of enjoyment with others, and the radical possibility contained within such moments. Segal says that even in unfortunate moments like these, we can reclaim the prospect of delighting in others while, and for the purpose of, making a change.66Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London and New York: Verso, 2017). This line of thinking extends from the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who writes in On Revolution that happiness itself is not a private matter, but comes from a sense of shared interest in one another, in mutual belonging, and in active involvement in public affairs. It is, in other words, the only way toward true democracy.77Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963).

The lessons of COVID-19 force us to take seriously the claims of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who in The Sociological Imagination wrote that “personal troubles” are “public issues.”88C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). In this moment of united vulnerability, let us seize the radical possibilities entailed in envisioning a new collective nature for humanity.