In December and January, thanks in great measure to the support and assistance of dear friends, I visited India for the first time. I arrived in Delhi and spent time there, in Jaipur, and also in the forests of Ranthambhore (seeking tigers) and in the hills at Nainital (seeking Nanda Devi). It was an extraordinary and multifaceted experience.
India has the second-largest population in the world and is a colossal country. It has undergone a sudden and spectacular 'modernisation' since its opening under the aegis of Rajiv Gandhi in 1993. I was warned to be prepared for the poverty of India, for the glaring contrast between wealth and abjection visible on the streets of its great cities. And indeed I saw such poverty and such contrasts. But what overwhelmed me was rather a sense of the sheer violence and awful sublimity of the processes now unleashed in that country. Nowhere I had previously travelled showed me the 'Juggernaut of Capital', as Marx called it, as so massive, aggressive, loud, over-coloured, over-stimulated, destructive and arrogantly powerful. If this reads like an aesthetic judgement (of no very sophisticated kind), as against a social or political one, then this indicates the dangerous Naipaulian ground on which I at times found myself. I needed and need to remind myself that capitalism everywhere is brutal, coarse and coarsening, destructive and ugly, as well as enabling, exhilirating, liberating and even ecstatic. In the West, however, capitalism has been contested and even at times overlaid with the veils of social democracy, which has sought since 1945 to trim, cushion, compensate, ameliorate the explosive, amoral and indifferent energy of capitalism. So it is easy for me to sit in south Dublin, forget I live in a profoundly interconnected world and pretend that my immediate locale is not damaged or fractured in the way I felt I saw society and culture fractured and damaged in India.
As if to slam home the lesson to me, however, Covid 19 has radically re-adjusted the world, even since my last blogpost. Or, more accurately, it has re-adjusted my cosy liberal and complacent world, with an abrupt reminder that there is no escape from the entanglements and contradictions of modernity anywhere. My university, along with the rest of the Irish education system, is closed down. Work is to be carried on online. Meanwhile, in the brave new post-2008 Irish economy, maybe 200,000 people have been flung out of work - in the last week - as the state has shut down branches of economy and society which are predicated on or involve sociability, in the effort to stem the spread of the virus.
Much discussion has centered on the threat of C19 to the Irish health system and indeed this concern is justified, in the context of a system which is highly funded but seemingly mismanaged and suffering from post-crash bed closures. The fear is that a health system insufficiently tooled-up with ICU equipment, respirators, test kits, beds and staff may be broken as the number of virus sufferers rises geometrically to ever-greater heights.
But the threat to the economic system, or the ways that the crisis may transform the economic system, is at least as spectacular and alarming. Fox News in America was reporting a few days ago that the Trump administration, which had initially denied the importance of the pandemic, and then and now attributed it to Chinese malevolence, was planning to combat the effects of the virus with techniques of 'shock and awe'. 'Shock and awe' is a term which came into widespread usage as the United States prepared to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. The war would be opened with offensive weapons of such spectacular effect and stunning lethality that, it was hoped, the Iraqi people and leadership would be browbeaten into very rapid collapse and surrender. And of course Saddam's regime did indeed crumble very quickly, though war in Iraq dragged on, at a lower intensity, much longer than the United States had planned or hoped.
The point now, of course, is that Western societies (and many others) are being struck by a force which seems to precipitate and justify state biopolitical measures whose effect on their economies is that of 'shock and awe'. Western societies are, to varying degrees, putting their economies to sleep. Service industries are shutting down. The airline industry is shrinking before our eyes. Tourism is evaporating. Vital services - not only health but also rescue services, civic supports and infrastructure, not to mention education - all have shut down or 'gone online'.
In 2006, Naomi Klein published The Shock Doctrine, an account of the emergence of what she called 'disaster capitalism'. Making an analogy with mental health and torture techniques funded by the CIA in the 1950s, which purported to use electroshock therapy as a way to 'wipe the slate clean' in the minds of schizophrenic or otherwise ill patients, with a view to reconstructing them, Klein noted the way that isituations of natural or political-military disaster - New Orleans after Katrina, Chile after the Pinochet coup, Iraq after the 2003 invasion - had been viewed by the acolytes of Milton Friedman as the perfect 'clean slate' economic-political systems where a pure and fundamentalist version of capitalism could be installed.
We are indeed living in a moment when 'all that is solid melts into air'. Western economies are grinding to a halt. Western governments are putting in place purported economic supports in a manner which runs completely counter to their previously declared ideological positions - as is the case in the UK and the USA. The very 'social contract' is under radical modification in a situation where societies are being admonished to adopt 'social distancing'. Mrs Thatcher famously declared that 'there is no such thing as society'. Now we are being told to put 'society' on hold - in order to defend society.
The question to be asked is: what will emerge from this? Cui bono? Is this a moment when society - at national and at international levels - radically re-arranges itself?
At the end of WW2, the United States emerged as the dominant power - military, economic and political. The national territory of no other great power was similarly unscathed. The USA accounted for 50% of economic production on the planet, in the context of the flattened economies of Europe, Russia and Japan. If China can emerge now from the virus crisis, with C19 contained due to the power of its authoritarian state apparatus and political system, and with the other major economies in self-induced recession or even depression, it will be in a unique position in which to intervene, buy up, or otherwise manipulate large parts of the global economy. China has been using its enormous economic power to intervene - it is suggested, benignly - all over the world in the last 20 years. Chinese infrastructural aid has been crucial to development all over Africa in recent times - benignly, it argues, though the purchase of land in countries like Tanzania and the development of an agricultural economy which is orientated to the Chinese market seems to suggest otherwise. The Covid 19 moment is maybe the Chinese moment in geopolitics.
In Ireland, not only is the health system vulnerable, but the heavily service-based economy is also. Hundreds of thousands of people have been put out of work overnight. In the past, the social effects of recession in Ireland have been altered by the possibility of emigration. That option simply no longer exists. We have only a 'caretaker government' - political authority is lacking in legitimacy. What will be the longer-term effects of this?
In my own world of university education, transformation is sharp too. Academics already work remotely a lot of the time - the shift to teaching entirely online may not be such a huge transition. But the after-effects of this may be worrying. As Fintan O'Toole put it in the Irish Times a few days ago, academics are faced with a dubious choice. If they rise to the challenge, provide an adequate or more than adequate form of pedagogy and pastoral care for their students online, surely this has a the potential to bring 'reforms' to university provision, governance, pedagogy and research of a profound kind. If every university practices 'distance education', where teaching is a cottage industry which lecturers provide from home, will academic work be radically transvalued? Why would a university bother any more providing facilities such as offices, seminar rooms, lecture theatres, libraries? If the tap of funding for Irish universities which derives from Indian and Chinese students dries up, what future for third level financing? How will modes of university governance and accountability - already remote and top-down - mutate in conditions where actual meeting, collegiality, debate and critique are no longer physically possible?
Conor
