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PREFATORY NOTE: The following post is a short portion of the new afterword I wrote at the end of 2020 to a set of four lectures on “postmodern” philosophy I originally delivered by invitation at Renmin University in Beijing, China, in the fall of 1998. My four lectures were subsequently published in Chinese translation, along with all the other lectures belonging to the same series. I wrote the new 2020 material—which consisted of the afterword already mentioned, as well as a new foreword, preface, and acknowledgments—for a planned new Chinese edition of the whole lecture series. Those original 1998 lectures along with the new 2020 material are now available in English for the first time — in a paperback edition on Amazon.com, under my name and the following title: After Postmodernity: The Impotence of the Modern.
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The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.
— Vandana Shiva[i]
As world-renowned ecofeminist Vandana Shiva herself goes on to explain a bit later in the same source from which I have taken the lines above, the crisis of the current global coronavirus pandemic is also inseparable from the ever-spreading replacement of small-scale farming by massive corporate agribusiness, including the entire complex apparatus of global marketing that inseparably goes with it. It is just such global processes of food production and market distribution that create both the conditions in which parasites continue to mutate into ever more virulent forms, such as Covid-19, and the conditions that generate maximum speed and extent for the spread of such new germ-forms around the entire globe.
Thus, the massive, underlying iceberg of crisis that breaks the surface of global awareness with the coronavirus pandemic is in reality not just a health crisis, nor even just a nexus of multiple health crises, as Shiva addresses in the lines cited above. It is, rather, a Gordian knot of multiple crises, not only medical but also ecological, political, economic, psychological, social, and existential, all tied up tightly with one another.
As the breaking above the surface of that great complex of interlocking crises, the coronavirus pandemic manifests not only as a great danger, but also as an at least equally great opportunity. In its very danger, it invites us at last to see and say the fundamental truth that underlies the entire network of interconnected crises that face us today.
What is that massive, underlying truth?
It is the truth of our common and definitive human dispossession.
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What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:19
We are all radically dispossessed.
It should never be forgotten that such common human dispossession weighs far more heavily on some of us than on others. It weighs — still, even after years of feminist protest and action — far more heavily on women in our society than it does on men, for example. It weighs far more heavily on members of minorities of the human population than it does on members of the dominant majorities. So, too, does it weigh far more heavily on gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersexual, queer, asexual, and transgender individuals than it does on those who are cisgender. The daily suffering of all of those subclasses in our society today is far greater than that of those in the dominant classes.
Nevertheless, it is not only the oppressed who are dispossessed. It is also the oppressors. All of us alike — whether we belong to the segments of the population who are oppressed or belong (as I, a white, cisgender male, do) among those segments who do the oppressing, and irrespective of individual preferences and desires — are oppressed.
Marx and Engels long ago realized that clearly when they argued that, by their own liberation, the oppressed would also effect the liberation of the oppressors. That is true only because we all, oppressed and oppressors alike, share the same underlying common human dispossession. That is also why psychoanalysts such as Eric Fromm and, above all, Frantz Fanon—both of whom belonged among the oppressed, Fromm as a Jew and Fanon as a Black—argue that universal human liberation can only occur with the help of such aid as psychoanalysis or its equivalent provide, both at the level of the individual and at the level of society.
That is the same fundamental truth that today, in the global Covid-19 pandemic, has broken above the surface of the ocean of lies, illusions, and delusions that have inundated us all for so long. The pandemic is just the tip of that iceberg.
If we are not all to continue to find ourselves constantly shipwrecked by it, we need to attend to the much greater part of that same iceberg — that far greater part only the tip of which breaks the surface of our shared delusions with the coming of the current pandemic.
Thus, it is not the truth of our universally shared human dispossession that is new today. What is new today, this day of the coronavirus crisis, is merely that that truth may be at last breaking clearly above the surface of our shared, common awareness.
The truth at issue is not itself new at all, however. Rather it is an ancient truth, indeed, an archaic one, in the original sense of that term — the archaic sense of archaic, as it were.
The truth of our common human dispossession is, in fact, the originary truth that defines us all as human: the truth that we must first be sprung free from the illusions that blind us before we can at last for the very first time truly be given ourselves to be. That originary truth is that we are finally fully born only through a sort of second birth or re-birth, as Christianity calls it.
That is the iceberg of truth that finally breaks the surface of our universally shared human delusion with the current pandemic crisis.
[i] Vandana Shiva, “Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life” (Independent Science News, 9/21/20), excerpted from the appendix to her book Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedoms (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020).