Putting the Pandemic in Context
Readers of these dispatches will note that I have refrained from writing about the event that has come to define our present moment more than any other: the pandemic spread of the novel coronavirus of 2019. Those of you who converse with me often will know that this event has haunted almost every dispatch that I have written, and you will know that I have not written about this event because, above all else, I felt that I couldn’t write about the event without situating it in its wider context.
If I am able to speak out and say something meaningful about the pandemic now, here in this dispatch, it is only because I feel that I have properly “set the stage” for speaking out in a series of earlier dispatches: “For bell hooks”, “A Case in Point”, “Ecoregionalism“, “Late Davosian Holocausts”, “Proxies and Redeemers”, “Three Freedoms”, “Six Theses on Science”, “The War on Terra”, and, most recently, “The Great Derangement”. While I would like people to be able read the following commentary on the pandemic on its own, it is my hope that the commentary will be read alongside the aforementioned dispatches, so that readers may better sense and understand how I and others who share my perspective have been experiencing and reckoning with the pandemic.
As I see it, there is no way to process what has happened over the past two years with respect to the present pandemic without having some sense and understanding of the manner in which the spread of disease was part and parcel of the colonization of the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For it was during the colonization of the New World that differential susceptibilities to disease became an integral part of imperial power formations: a means to filter and channel different populations apart from one another and to stratify them, establishing hierarchies of privilege founded in part upon differential susceptibilities to disease.
The colonizers of the New World were well aware of the fact that they brought diseases, smallpox in particular, to the New World and that these diseases decimated the indigenous populations of the New World. The records of the exploits of Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors during the sixteenth century indicate that they knew that plagues of smallpox, previously unheard of in the New World, were a common consequence of their contacts with the New World’s indigenous peoples. This awareness, however, did not inspire the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors to be careful when making contact with indigenous peoples. Much to the contrary, Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors recognizing this fact believed that the plagues that decimated indigenous peoples were blessings that enabled them to conquer, dominate, and exploit those peoples whom they came to consider cursed, lower races of humanity.
It is certainly not the case that the colonizers of the New World were unaware of the fact that being careful about making contact could reduce the spread of disease. During this very same period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when epidemics broke out in Europe the rich knew to flee to their country houses and to “social distance”, and the poor knew that life in cramped quarters meant disease and death. A passage from the first volume of Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism is instructive on this very point:
At the first sign of the disease, the rich whenever possible took hurried flight to their country houses; no one thought of anything but himself: 'the plague making us cruel, as doggs, one to another' noted Samuel Pepys in August 1665. And Montaigne tells how he wandered in search of a roof when the epidemic reached his estate, 'serving six months miserably as a guide' to his 'distracted family, frightening their friends and themselves and causing horror wherever they tried to settle'. The poor remained alone, penned up in the contaminated town where the State fed them, isolated them, blockaded them and kept them under observation. Boccaccio's Decameron is a series of conversations and stories told in a villa near Florence at the time of the Black Death. Maitre Nicolas Versoris, lawyer in the Paris Parlement, left his lodgings in August 1523. But three days after he reached his pupils' country house at the 'Grange Bateliere', then outside Paris, his wife died of the disease — an exception that confirms the value of the customary precaution. The plague in Paris in that summer of 1523 once again struck at the poor. Versoris wrote in his Livre de Raison: 'death was principally directed towards the poor so that only a very few of the Paris porters, who used to run errands for a few pence and who had lived there in large numbers before the misfortune, were left. . . . As for the district of Petiz Champs , the whole area was cleared of poor people who previously lived there in large numbers.' One bourgeois from Toulouse placidly wrote in 1561: 'the aforesaid contagious disease only attacks poor people . . . let God in his mercy be satisfied with that. . . . The rich protect themselves against it.' J.P. Sartre was right when he wrote, 'The plague only exaggerates the relationship between the classes: it strikes at the poor and spares the rich.' In Savoy, when an epidemic was over, rich people, before returning to their carefully disinfected houses, would install a poor woman inside for a few weeks, as a sort of guinea pig, to test at risk of her life whether the danger had really departed.
Europeans at home knew to be careful not to crowd and come into contact with others when disease was running rampant. The conquistadors departing their disease ridden boats knew just as well, and they would have known what was afoot when the indigenous peoples they contacted were struck down by disease.
What made the situation in the Americas differ from that within Europe at the time was the fact that the New World populations-to-be-conquered were being decimated by a disease that was not decimating the conquering Old World European population to the same degree. Recognizing this, rather than fleeing from the diseased in order not to be infected themselves, the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors with intentional carlessness pursued contact with indigenous peoples, knowing that this would aid them in their conquest. The Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not weaponize smallpox as intentionally as the British later would during the eighteenth century: we have no record of any conquistador writing, as a British officer once wrote, that smallpox ought to be deployed against Indigenous peoples as a means “to Extirpate this Execreble Race.” Nevertheless, we have record enough of the fact that Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors were aware of the advantages that their lesser susceptibility to smallpox gave them and that they leveraged these advantages in order to establish themselves as the privileged ruling population in the lands they conquered.
Going further still, the indigenous populations of the New World were so susceptible to their conquerors’ diseases that they could not properly serve their conquerors and provide them with the hard labor that was demanded to establish an economy based on the mining of silver and gold and plantation agriculture. It followed from this that that the conquerors had to import laborers from the Old World who were less susceptible to the imported diseases but who were still easy enough to identify as belonging to a population “other” than that of the conquerors. And here we have the crucible from which imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy first emerged, with its characteristic racial hierarchy based on skin color.
Karl Marx wrote that “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Marx should have added to that list of horrors: “the plagues visited upon the aboriginal populations of the New World by violent and grasping European adventurers possessed of a careless disregard for life”.
The lower susceptibility of the European colonizers to smallpox relative to that of the colonized peoples of the New World was a matter of natural historical accident, yes, but its dire consequences were the result of the European colonizers leveraging of this natural historical accident to the hilt in order to conquer, dominate, and exploit colonized peoples.
Fast forward to the present and reckon with the fact that the differential susceptibilities to the novel coronavirus of 2019 that characterize the world today are not a historical accident. Rather to the contrary, the differential susceptibilities to the novel coronavirus are more and more a matter of artifice resulting from inequitable distributions of (i) effective diagnostics, therapies, and vaccines (ii) the tools and the know-how to make effective diagnostics, therapies, and vaccines, and (iii) the resources needed to maintain sensible social distancing measures without wreaking havoc upon the social relations that make for fulfilling lives and livelihoods. These inequities are being actively maintained by the richer nations of the world — i.e., by the victors of colonization and their would-be successors — and these inequities are being leveraged by the richer nations in order to (i) further the neocolonial dependence of poorer nations on the charity and largesse of richer nations, and (ii) further restrict the global mobility of the peoples of the poorer nations. Some have, rightly, called this state of affairs a “viral apartheid” and called the victims of this state of affairs the “viral underclass”
In an essay attempting to criticize the global response to the pandemic, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote:
What is striking [...] is [our] inability to examine [the measures that have been taken in response to the pandemic] outside of the immediate context in which they appear to operate. Rarely does anyone attempt to interpret these new structures, as any serious political analysis would demand, as signs and symptoms of a larger experiment in which a new paradigm for governing people and things is manifesting itself.
While I found that Agamben’s criticisms betrayed distinctly ableist, classist, and Eurocentric biases, I do believe that Agamben correctly diagnosed our failure to put the global response to the pandemic in a wider context. As I see it, not only must we grasp the fact that the global response to the pandemic was to develop arrangements for a regime of viral apartheid and to sacrifice a viral underclass, we must also ask ourselves why the global response was such. We must ask why the global response was not, as it might have been, a concerted three prong push (i) to develop arrangements for equitably distributing effective diagnostics, therapies, and vaccines, (ii) to develop arrangements for equitably distributing the tools and the know-how to make effective diagnostics, therapies, and vaccines, and (iii) to develop arrangements for equitably distributing the resources to needed to maintain sensible social distancing measures when pandemics arise so that people are not forced to choose between either spreading and suffering from disease or sacrificing social relations that make for a fulfilling life and livelihood.
Asking myself these questions, the first thing that I have become certain of is the fact that a core feature of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is a “necropolitics” that routinizes, normalizes, and optimizes the exposure of abject populations (non-whites, non-men, and non-capitalists) to a greater risk of injury, disease, and death. The second thing that I have become certain of is the fact that the viral apartheid that we are currently witnessing is part and parcel of the progressive refinement of a much broader global apartheid regime, concomitant with the militarized border regimes that are being constructed in anticipation of migration crises fueled by climate catastrophes and the un-remediated legacies of colonial domination and exploitation.
It is worth quoting a recent article written by Max Granger in The Intercept to set the scene fully:
According to estimates from the United Nations, there are more than 82 million people forcibly displaced by violence and persecution and over 280 million migrants worldwide (not counting the 780 million people displaced within their own countries). These numbers will continue to grow, as the climate crisis makes large parts of the planet uninhabitable, displacing an estimated 1.2 billion people by 2050. The main destinations for international migrants and asylum-seekers have long been the United States and Europe. The EU’s response to the arrival of refugees from the former European colonies of Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, and others has been a ruthless campaign of militarization and deterrence. It has included the construction of over 1,000 miles of walls and high-tech fencing, along with the rapid expansion of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, or Frontex, whose budget has ballooned from 118 million euros in 2018 to a proposed 754 million euros in 2022.
Like the United States, Europe increasingly outsources its border enforcement to other countries, through policies that seek to prevent migration and to detain and kill people before they even reach the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Once at sea, migrants face the likelihood of death: Since 2014, more than 45,000 people have died or disappeared while attempting the crossing. Many spend years in detention centers, clandestine prisons, and in conditions of forced labor before ever stepping foot on a boat. Meanwhile, the number of people who perish in the desert before even reaching the sea, or who die in captivity after being repelled by EU deterrence, remains largely unknown, since no government or organization is keeping track. The International Organization for Migration, an agency of the United Nations, estimates that deaths in the Sahara Desert are “at least double” those in the Mediterranean, but no one actually knows. These deaths, it bears repeating, are the result of policies created by the same governments now welcoming millions of Ukrainians without hesitation.
Given that I live in the United States, I am compelled fill in a few gaps in the passage above. I must note (i) that the United States government has, quite obviously, been running its own ruthless campaign of border militarization and deterrence, (ii) that the United States has outsourced parts of its border enforcement to Central and South American proxies just as Europe has to North African proxies, and (iii) that the deadly crossings of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts and the Caribbean Sea are very much akin to the deadlier crossings of the Sahara and the Mediterranean.
The perverse irony of this scene is that it involves a twisted process of psychological projection wherein and whereby the former colonizers, those who brutally conquered and spread disease amongst the peoples that they brutally conquered, are now actively bringing conditions into being that will enable them to cast those suffering and fleeing from the destructive legacies of colonization as violent, grasping, disease ridden invaders. In the midst of a planetary ecocide, the most outrageously brutal historical tragedy is beginning to replay itself as the most outrageously brutal historical farce.
We are witnessing a phase shift in which the Great Derangement turns in on itself and the repressed returns with a most horrific and twisted vengeance. Possessed of a bad conscience arising from the fact that they have yet to make artful reparations to the victims of colonization, the victors of colonization are now determined to replay the horrors of colonization so that they might misconstrue themselves as the ones suffering violent, grasping, disease ridden invaders and, worse still, so that they might misconstrue themselves as having the “right” to detain and kill “illegal” migrants and refugees in “self-defense”.
What we are bearing witness to is so vile that many, if not most, are averting their gaze. Still others are watching it all unfold with a steady gaze but absolving themselves from caring by rationalizing these events to be the inevitable result of humanity’s innate aggression and death drive. This rationalization is a false one. As David Graeber puts it:
It’s not that as a species we’re particularly aggressive. It’s that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly. Our first instinct when we observe unprovoked aggression [ — and this is especially true when we observe ourselves being brazen aggressors or being the victims of brazen aggression — ] is either to pretend it isn’t happening or, if that becomes impossible, to equate attacker and victim, placing both under a kind of contagion, which, it is hoped, can be prevented from spreading to everybody else. […] The feeling of guilt caused by the suspicion that this is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave — since it is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave — opens up a complex play of projections, in which the bully is seen simultaneously as an unconquerable super-villain and a pitiable, insecure blowhard, while the victim becomes both an aggressor (a violator of whatever social conventions the bully has invoked or invented) and a pathetic coward unwilling to defend himself. […] We equate aggressors and victims, [and] insist that everyone is equally guilty (notice how, whenever one hears a report of an atrocity, some will immediately start insisting that the victims must have committed atrocities too), and just hope that by doing so, the contagion will not spread.
Graeber’s propsitions land right on the nose. Presently, the victors of colonization are being rationalized to appear simultaneously as unconquerable super-villains and pitiable, insecure blowhards; and the victims of colonization are being rationalized to appear as aggressors (violators of whatever social conventions the victors of colonization have invoked or invented) and pathetic cowards unwilling to defend themselves. Going further, it is important to recognize that both the victors and victims of colonization are themselves engaged in such rationalizations and that they are both often to be found reacting to such rationalizations. We may consider, for instance, those victims of colonization who become notorious global terrorists and violent traffickers of drugs and human beings: having rationalized themselves to be simultaneously both aggressors and cowards, they are reactively endeavoring to affirm their apparent aggression and to shed themselves of their apparent cowardice. Alternatively, we may consider those victors of colonization who, having rationalized themselves to be simultaneously both unconquerable super-villains and insecure blowhards, are now reactively endeavoring to give themselves a makeover and appear as unconquerable super-heroes possessed of an irreproachable self-assurance, fighting global wars on drugs, terror, and human trafficking in the name of freedom, justice, and liberty. These two convergent reactions to rationalizing and rationalized histories of extreme violence are both serving only to further the progressive refinement of the global apartheid regime.
Putting these rationalizations aside, it is plain to me that there is no sensible way out of our present global apartheid regime and its sufferings unless the victors of colonization take responsibility for the legacies of colonization and make artful reparations to the victims of colonization. Ay, and there is no way to make sense of the viral apartheid that has emerged in response to the coronavirus pandemic without making sense of the fact that the victors of colonization are persisting in their refusal to take responsibility and make artful reparations to the victims of colonization. As climate catastrophes approach, the global response to the coronavirus pandemic seems poised to set the template for future global responses to fast unfolding catastrophes that threaten the health of the whole Earth and all of her peoples. Unless the victors of colonization and their would-be successors are induced to change their ways, we can only expect that new refinements to the global apartheid regime shall emerge with each and every crisis, up until the point at which the regime can no longer be refined further and it collapses in on itself to devastating effect.
This is why I believe that there is no project that is more urgent, more challenging, and more creative today than the project of encouraging and supporting the making of artful reparations — it is a project that will require remarkable works of storytelling, artistry, science, philosophy, and social activism. Ay, and I am writing this dispatch in the hopes that soberly observing our failure to respond gracefully to the pandemic will serve as a wake up call for those who have not yet realized that the project of making artful reparations will be the project of our times, no matter whether the project fails or succeeds.
