Panic-stricken we rush to obey contradictory instructions and try multiple strategies to ‘contain’ the virus
There is surface transmission. There is no surface transmission. The safe distance is 3 feet/4 feet/6 feet. Immune boosters work. Immune boosters don’t work. You can take multivitamins for extended periods of time. You must not take multivitamins for extended periods of time. One mask suffices. Two masks are necessary.
That was about the virus. Then there are others.
The economy will survive the pandemic. The economy will crash. Students who are ‘passed’ without exams are as good as those who are tested. Students who are ‘passed’ in this manner will be no good. Opening up malls and shopping areas is good for the economy in this time —but they can also be sites of contagion. And, of course, everyone is now an epidemiologist, virologist, immunologist and nature cure practitioner.
The data deluge is only matched by its unreliability, so much so that political communication specialist Rasmus Nielsen in a recent report argues that we know we are being lied to!
It is now assumed that safety is everyone’s concern. As the medical humanities scholar Lisa Diedrich puts it: “By refusing to wear masks and practice social distancing, people have sought to demonstrate — to show by action and display of feeling — how much they don’t care that people are dying in unprecedented numbers.”
Commenting on the American refusal to practice Covid protocols, she adds: “this disregard for the health and care of others has become politicized… The mask is a visible sign of regard for others. It communicates an understanding that one’s body is not autonomous from but interdependent with the bodies of others. That some would fixate on the requirement to wear a mask as somehow restricting one’s bodily freedom is a most cynical disregard for the specific practices of public health…”
It may be argued that limitations on free will do exist, but communitarian responsibility requires informed consent and informed choice-making. And this is where things go drastically wrong in the current scenario.
Political philosophers such as Alvin Goodman discussing epistemic democracy models have argued that a free press is integral to democracy. It must publish relevant truths and members of the public must believe those truths. Our current problem lies here.
Informed choices and decisions are at best a risky venture today. The state’s exhortations to be responsible, for oneself and for others, are launched in the midst of the (mis)information deluge around Covid, and citizen responsibility means, now, ignoring the contradictory bits of data that comes our way, and acting with care and concern.
That is, responsibility means being able to sift through it to understand fake from authentic, to identify reliable sources from unreliable ones. We are, in the pandemic, even more of information-subjects, our subjectivity — of which social and moral responsibility is a constituent — than before, forged in the crucible of information.
For the citizenry, the worry is compounded by the problem that the political knowledge held by a few becomes the rationale for their holding office — what the political theorist David Estlund in the 1990s termed ‘epistemic authoritarianism’. This is clearly the mark of those in power. Their office bestows upon them the authority to make pronouncements: their knowledge of political truths — for eg, the risks in confirming the numbers of the dead or publicising the pros and cons of the vaccines, or the (political) reasons for a certain direction in vaccine policy.
Public choice theorists in the field reject the idea of any normative political truth. Even when there is consensus on something – like vaccine efficacy – it is not possible to assume this agreed-upon idea is ‘truth’.
Estlund puts it this way: “there is no collective standpoint from which the principles could be held to be true. They are accepted by each individual as true (or reasonably close), but this cannot be the basis on which they are accepted by all, since not all believe them for the same reasons.”
In this context, we do not find it possible to act responsibly on the basis of information received because there is no normative ‘truth’ about Covid that we can agree on for the same set of reasons. In such a context, the panic is not from Covid-19, it arises from contradictory data.
The philosopher Isabelle Stengers speaks of ‘cold panic’: ‘a panic that is signaled by the fact that openly contradictory messages are accepted’.
She elaborates: “And this panic is also shared by our guardians. Somewhere they hope that a miracle might save us — which also signifies that only a miracle could save us. It might be a miracle that comes from technology… or the miracle of a massive conversion, after some enormous catastrophe. Whilst waiting, they give their blessing to exhortations that aim to make people feel guilty and propose that everyone thinks about doing their own bit, on their own scale — on condition, of course, that only a small minority of us give up driving or become vegetarian, because otherwise that would be quite a blow to economic growth.”
Stengers makes a strong case for cold panic and while her arguments are directed at climate change discourse, it applies just as well to Covid-related panic of 2020-21. Panic-stricken we rush to obey contradictory instructions and try multiple strategies to ‘contain’ the virus.
Cold panic is accompanied, Stengers notes, by the emphasis on citizen-duties. It speaks to our reliance on miracle cures and even accidental cures. If cold panic drives us to behave more responsibly, it also means that we do so in an information-deluge which is no different, oddly, from an information-vacuum because no one agrees, or can agree, on the aetiology, prophylactic or therapeutic measures for the pandemic. And yet, we must be both self-reliant and responsible.
The experience of cold panic is here to stay!
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
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