What will a post-coronavirus world be like?

Social distancing and other stringent measures to curb Covid-19 may become our new reality as we evolve deeper into technology and connectivity

The side-effects of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic are bound to be far-reaching and profound.

This global public health crisis will change the world in ways similar to those that the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, US, had on the world and our public consciousness.

This calls us to ponder on how the responses to this pandemic may be changing us as citizens of the world.

What will a post-coronavirus world be like?

What kind of self-aware people will we be after all the social distancing and lockdown orders have been grafted into our minds?

Which aspects of our sociality will we have ditched and which new ones will we have acquired?

Will being connected online replace the importance of communion? Will we shake hands and hug again?

Read: We are swimming naked in the tide of the coronavirus

Remember that terms such as Islamophobia were not in the popular lexicon until the wake of 9/11.

The shock and commensurate array of drastic emergency interventions that governments all over the world implemented out of an understandable fear and an impulsion to stem a culture of anti-West terrorism left an aftermath of a draconian global security regime which, by now, is routinised in the psyche of the citizens of the world.

Aviation safety controls on what to pack and not to pack for a flight, the biometric digitalisation of identity, and community cyber surveillance, as well as controls on international banking and money transfers, which were temporary measures spurred by the 9/11 incidents, have now become an accepted feature of our lives.

We have sleep-walked into a post-9/11 crisis culture.

Is there a possibility of being somnambulised into a post-Covid-19 world which, by all observations, will be a peculiarly authoritarian one?

The progressive outlook of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship has been rudely overturned by the self-protective jingoism of border closures and exclusion of foreign nationals from our national spaces.

Will the routinisation of xenophobia and border mentality be the lasting behavioural traits that will outlive this global health emergency?

Since the outbreak and global spread of Covid-19, the medical scientific community, journalists and civil society appear to have happily bestowed the state with the duty to lead, design, control and micromanage all responses to this pandemic.

The prerogative to define and quash the virus is, in the first and ultimate instance, with the state, as classically demonstrated by US President Donald Trump’s pontifical but false prescription of chloroquine as a possible cure, right in the face of his head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the eminent immunologist Anthony Fauci.

What are the long-term effects of the daily dose of health instructions and commands from politicians, who, in the ordinary course of our civil lives, we don’t really trust?

How is this regimenting our public self-awareness?

Covid-19 has unleashed the state as the accepted protector and saviour of its citizens, with a right to deploy all of the political, legislative and even military powers at its disposal.

This is the rise of the state as conceptualised by the 17th-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Read: Covid-19: We need a people-led army-enforced lockdown

This Hobbesian state has emerged as not only the omnipotent protector of citizens against their proclivity for self-destructive tendencies, but also the guarantor of the persistence of the prevailing financial and economic system.

The naturally greedy natives of this economic system, who would engage in price gouging to exploit the opportunity of the demand-and-supply pressure occasioned by the need for medical goods, are being restrained by specifically proclaimed punitive sanctions ranging from fines to imprisonment.

The post-Covid-19 state is also emerging as the bulwark against self-interest.

At last, through lockdowns and similar measures, we are policed to think not only of our individual survival, but also of the consequences of our behaviour on the health of others.

The South African government is urging the rich to contribute to its Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund, targeted at mitigating the consequences of decades of neglect and corruption by providing requisite basic infrastructure such as clean water, which is needed for the prescribed protocol of washing of hands.

The global 1% and the upper middle classes, who had opted for private healthcare and the security of the euphemistical medical aid, had, at a some point of the evolution of our democratic capitalistic society, opted to shift the care of their health away from the state to their personal agency.

They migrated away from the sphere of influence of public health regulators and dictations. But Covid-19, in being declared a public health pandemic, has thrust this middle class back underneath the command and control of the public health tsars.

As if this were not enough, as the pandemic worsens, private hospitals and other health facilities are being nationalised by stealth in the course of the salvation of the nation.

In the wake of Covid-19, hallowed profits and exclusive privileges are suspended, suddenly rendered expendable holy cows.

Thanks to Covid-19, the individualistic consciences of Westerners in so-named advanced societies, who have been politicised (think austerity) and cultured to not give much thought to the elderly in their midst, are now being mobilised by the state to protect themselves against infection in the name of protecting those vulnerable elderly people.

The indiscriminate and dramatic spread of Covid-19 has not only exposed the socioeconomic disparities in access to quality and efficacious healthcare, both globally and within borders, it has also unveiled that we are all of one kind, the humankind. We are all equally vulnerable, kings and commoners alike.

Like no event in living memory, the worldwide spread of Covid-19 has demonstrated how the fate of the privileged and powerful is symbiotically tied to those of the masses of the damned, which include not only the communities of the abject poor, but also the hardened convicts in the crowded prisons of the world.

Will the post-Covid-19 world be characterised by a dividend of a new moral consciousness of social solidarity and interdependence fostered as the responsibility of the state?

How long will the state, an institution inherently infested with neoliberal capitalist ethos, sustain this role without corrupting it for its own ends?

What more will we be asked to sacrifice in the name of global solidarity and the injunctions to curb our self-interest and be mindful of the wellbeing of our fellow human beings?

Which rights and liberties are we being hypnotised into sacrificing without whingeing?

Lamola is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Pretoria

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