The Way Ahead

Photograph by Jessie Eastland (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This blog post is the transcript of a speech delivered by Scott Slovic on May 3, 2020 at the online, international conference “Imagining a Post-Coronavirus World,” hosted by AURO University, Surat, India.

After listening to nearly forty presentations this weekend, the question for all of us is whether the way ahead has become clearer. I certainly find that my own thinking has been stimulated and perhaps sharpened in certain ways by the lectures I’ve been able to attend.

I suggested in my remarks early in the conference that I had begun to think about something I referred to as “COVID Mind,” meaning certain ways conceptualizing human life on the planet that have taken on particular salience since we’ve become aware of the current pandemic. My initial list of possible examples of COVID Mind included a growing sense of universal human vulnerability or precarity, a heightened awareness of our limited cognitive sensitivity to exponential patterns of change and large-scale phenomena, a concern about our destructive relationships with other species and how these interactions can come back to haunt us, and an appreciation for the possibility of radically changing our ways of life in response to crisis.

Some of the lessons I’m taking with me from the talks I was able to attend this weekend include the sense that our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic have been highly mediated or shaped by the kinds of language and imagery we’re being fed through various sources—journalists, governments, and so forth. Even this weekend’s conference altered my sense of what the pandemic is and how it’s taking place. COVID-19 is not a single, definable phenomenon, and our understanding of it changes as we take in new frames and new discourse. For instance, what does it mean to describe our current predicament by using humorous memes or jokes? What is the tone of this humor—actual hilarity or rather a kind of angry, bitter way of expressing disgust and frustration, often directed at inept or corrupt leaders? And if we are repurposing such discourse frames as zombie narratives, imagery taken from the environmental movement to describe industrial contamination, and even from war, does this mean we don’t yet have language available to us that fully matches the coronavirus? How might we recycle earlier conceptual frameworks, perhaps even dating back to plague narratives from the 1820s, and modify these inherited frameworks to suit our twenty-first-century predicament? My point is that COVID Discourse, or COVID language, is evolving as we speak—literally, this weekend’s conference is helping to refine and explain precisely how language has been used and may be used in the future to represent and shape our experience of this phenomenon.

I also take with me vivid thoughts about the way the coronavirus is being used opportunistically by various people to push forward potentially totalitarian systems of surveillance, systems that have already been employed to a limited degree in some societies but now have the potential to become much more widespread, even in hitherto democratic societies where individual privacy and freedom have been prized. I would associate this observation with the broader aspect of COVID Mind that I call vulnerability or precarity. Ironically, I actually do believe careful government management of social distancing and human movement is powerfully important to saving lives, and yet the fear of abusive structures of surveillance and control also have the potential to be scary outcomes of the current crisis, adding to the other things we have to fear these days, including economic collapse and the danger of the COVID virus itself. So some of the talks I’ve heard this weekend have accented my sense that human feelings of vulnerability are a major component of COVID mind.

I have also come away from this weekend’s meeting with the feeling that there are some positive opportunities emerging from today’s COVID crisis. This conference itself is evidence that the crisis, including the frustrating and disruptive lockdowns in many of our countries, has provided the opportunity for deep reflection on human nature and human societies and the opportunity to slow down and look at and celebrate the world we inhabit, if only from the windows of our homes. We are also now communicating with each other with great energy and empathy, across cultures, across disciplines, across languages, and potentially even across species—some are even contemplating how this terrible moment in our history might launch our communication to other planets. This conference, which is now coming to an end, has reinforced my feeling that there are opportunities for thought leaders to derive inspiration for positive social change from the pandemic, especially if we’re willing to think and act boldly. As Professor Rajan Welukar suggested at the outset of this meeting, we have the opportunity to denote 2020 as “year zero,” just as many tried to do in the wake of August 6th and 9th, 1945, at the dawn of the nuclear era. Yes, we need to ask such questions as “How do we learn to live together?” But in asking this question, I would define “we” not only as the human species, but as a reference to the wider biosphere.

In sum, I am not yet sure what all of the various aspects of COVID Mind might be, but my experience of various lectures this weekend and my reading of the conference program have inspired me with the sense that I am part of a community of thinkers, who are working to create something positive from this crisis.