We are thus learning that we can live more frugally than before, that we can communicate with others through the internet, have meetings without leaving our homes. etc. This may have durable consequences, limiting air travel, hiking local production and reducing consumption.
The health crisis has also had an impact on our subjectivity, and especially on our rapport to time, which many philosophers, such as Bergson and Heidegger, consider is the essence of man. In the first place, the pace of our lives has slowed down considerably. What the sociologist Rosa considers to be the fundamental characteristic of our contemporary relationship to time: acceleration, has been detained with the confinement of half of the world population.
Subjectively, it has slowed down the rhythm of the life on millions of people. On the other hand, Kim Stanley Robinson writes that with the pandemic, older people have seen their time horizon reduced due to the fact that they have become aware that they may face death immediately. Although it is true, as Heidegger says that our essence is defined by death, we usually do not think of this prospect. The pandemic has imposed this possibility in very real and close terms. If somebody who is 60 years old thought his life horizon was 20 or 30 years, the present situation has abruptly shortened its scope.
It is possible, as some analysts have said, that the confinement has given rise to a purely subjective and conjunctural awareness, that once the emergency is over everything will return to normal. The experience of the last forty years that began with the governments of Thatcher and Reagan, who considered that “…there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”, can lead us to come to such a conclusion.
We may think the same if we think with Foucault that power in the contemporary world is no longer imposed upon us from the centrality of the State, but that it is diffused in such a manner that it controls us, so to speak, from within ourselves, that power has been internalized. A perspective that leads us to consider, wrongly according to Wieviorka, that structures are too strong to allow for any change.
The transformation of the conception of time of older people may bring them closer to the preoccupations of the youth movement that was so active in different parts of the world just before the epidemic. Concerns that are linked to the way in which the young experience temporality nowadays. From the demands of their movements, one can observe that young people feel that their future is closed and that time is, so to say, slipping between their fingers.
This is well exemplified by Greta Thurnberg, whom Eliane Brum considers as a representative of the first generation without hope. Greta has organized a school strike since more than a year ago, arguing that it is worthless going to school if there is no future, if “time is running out”. She has said “I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to have hope. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act, to act like your house is on fire, because it is.”
This girl is the image of young people that, according to psychologists in many parts of the world, are seeking aid for their deep concern and anguish about the future. In the demonstrations and school strikes, banners have exhibited this distress: “Later, I want to be alive”, “I will do my homework when you will do yours”. In Santiago in Chile I saw tags on the walls that point in the same direction: “For a future without fear”, “We shout because we hope it could be otherwise”.
While in the past, social movements were based on Christian temporality, as they struggled for a better future, based on the idea that an earthly utopia was possible through revolution, and they were based on the faith of progress, of improvement (of the working class, of humanity), today they arise from despair, from concern for the future. Paul Mutuku, a young Kenyan activist, considers that “Young people are the only generation that has grown up in this age of climate change. They have not seen the best of nature that other generations have had the privilege of seeing.”
A 10-year-old militant of the Hong Kong movement declared “…there is less and less hope for Hong Kong now. It doesn’t really matter what we try to do about it. There isn’t much hope for the future, which means that there isn’t much hope for us, either. That’s why we have to come out and resist.” Another Hong Kong activist comes to the same conclusion: “What really makes me get up and do something? I’m not that sure. Maybe because it’s now a bad future, or no future at all.”
Once we transcend the sanitary crisis, we may see the reemergence of the social movements that were budding all over the world: from France, with the gilets jaunes, to Chile with the students, from Hong Kong to Beirut. These movements carried demands that were political, economic, and social, but also ecological. And as the feminist turn of all of them showed, in their center they had subjective claims.
It is possible that when these movements resurface, they will receive a new impetus by the growing awareness that many individuals gained during the pandemic. And in this manner, when we overcome the current health crisis, we may become aware that, as was tagged on a wall in Santiago of Chile during the mobilizations of the end of last year, that “Normality is the problem.”
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This is a revised version of an article that appeared (in Spanish) in the journal El País.
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Ilan Bizberg | Radio Free (2020-06-15T08:39:46+00:00) Covid-19 crisis: normality was the problem. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/15/covid-19-crisis-normality-was-the-problem/
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