One of the los most contemporary philosophers, Korean Byung-Chul Hang, postulates in his book, The Society of Fatigue, that every age has its emblematic diseases, and mentions that despite the manifest fear of the flu pandemic, we do not currently live in the viral age. He says that “… We have left it behind thanks to the inmunological technique. The beginning of the 21st Century, from a pathological point of view, would be neither bacterial nor viral, but neuronal…”. Well, its seems to have to be recalculated. Our dashboard has been kicked again. Our certainties are not such according to the current circumstances. The excess of positivity that defines us as a society these days – according to Byung-Chul Hang in his book – positions as in a state of continuous ectasy of sufficiency, efficiency, performance and superabundance. But I add, just for a little while.
We are living as a civilization – on a global scale – one of the most widespread and rapid health emergencies on record to date. This point, accompanied by the technological capacity of effective traceability and monitoring, remind us minute by minute of the harmful power of the virus. The world has literally stopped us, and to paraphrase Mafalda, we cannot get off. It seems that we have been interrupted by the sweet schizophrenia taht we enjoy so much.
Let us first understand 2 concepts – repeatedly fed up lately – to frame the topic; whatis a pandemic and what is COVID-19.
PANDEMIC (RAE, 2020).
1. F. Med. Epidemic disease that spreads to many countries or taht attacks almost all the individuals of a locality or region.
Image 1. Year 1918. Deployment of emergency beds with the Spanish flu.
COVID-19 (WHO, 2020).
Acronym of English COronaVIrus Disease 2019.
Coronaviruses are an extensive family of virusesthat can cause diseases in both humans and animals. In human, several coronaviruses are know to cause respiratory infections that can range from the common cold to more serious illnesses such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The most recently discovered coronaviruses causes coronavirus disease COVID-19.
COVID-19 is the most recently discovered infections disease caused by the coronavirus. Both the new virus and the disease were unknow before the outbreak in Wuhan, in December 2019.
Image 2. Illustration of Corona Virus and Planet Earth.
Architecture of a Pandemic.
This time the architecture of the disease has surprised uas with the speed and contagion, off guard and hinting at many deficiencies. It gives us a kind of quasi-spontaneous decision making, evaluating our virtue to improvise solutions in real time, and at the same time testing our common sense in the most demanding way possible.
So simple and evolved is the natural strategy – as taken from Charles Darwin´s diary – that it tests us being ourselves the vectors of the same situation. The virus needs a vehicule – a host – and we are the transport ourselves and the victims themselves. What and amazing paradox! Perverse – in our eyes – with a touch of black humour, whitout doubt. The screenwriter stands out again, as he usually does.
Image 3. Scene from the movie Outbreak, 1995.
We have to stand firm, strategically and intelligently, as aindividuals as a group, facing one of the many pandemics that we will have to navigate. This will be not the first or the last. It will be one more test in the continuous examination that the nature and the ecosystem have for us. Simply because we are a part of that balanced system, where we are neither more nor less than an arrogant (f) actor, who seeks survival at all costs, naturally or artificially.
If we really seek to understand something of what is happening to us, we will work to decipher the message within the criptex, which at first glance we perceive as a great disgrace in all its facets and in all voices. Seeing the fatality and the hardship of the situation, perhaps is the really easier, direct and obvious way; but evolution, if it has told us something in our short history, has been the opposite. The “butterfly effect”, “the black swan” or “chaos theory” are just some of teh cncepts that illustrate the interwoven and integrated complexity of reality, and how little we understand at a glance the why and the what for of the situations. Let´s really discover the virtue of the experience that bind us, deduce, or at least make the attempt, of thinking “out of the box”, and for once seek to be sincere and locate ourselves in our proper dimension. We are, after all, one more element in a complex equation that includes us and does not make us stand out, which we are still far from understand and surely even further from manipulating in any of its possibilities in the right way.
We consistently show our best face as egomaniacs, arrogants and foolish – most of the time – but deep down and almost exclusively, we get lucidity to see the day, and we justify in a more or less decent way, why we should not be extinguished at the first chance. Surely this test will reorder the global dashboard and move many tiles from the grid to reconfigure a new context, which will be the beginning to rethink the operation of the new mechanism. Let´s rise to the circumstances and leave aside all the shortcomings that cloud our judgement.
The virus has brought us together – never less literal – to give solutions, let´s take the right steps. Henry Ford said: “Getting together is a start, staying together is progress, working together is success”. Let´s say that the initial kick was not given by us.
Now is our turn.
Author: Arch. Juan Andrés Marín