Pandemic Education and Viral Politics [1 ed.] 0367635402, 9780367635404

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PANDEMIC EDUCATION AND VIRAL POLITICS

Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and their basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand and information science on the other to understand ‘viral’ technologies, conspiracy theories and the nature of post-truth. The COVID-19 pandemic is a major occurrence and momentous tragedy in world history, with millions of infections and many deaths worldwide. It has disrupted society and caused massive unemployment and hardship in the global economy. Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley explore human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe, and the philosophy and literature of pandemics, including ‘love and social distancing in the time of COVID-19’. These essays, a collection from Educational Philosophy and Theory, also explore the politicization of COVID-19, the growth of conspiracy theories, its origins and the ways it became a ‘viral’ narrative in the future of world politics. Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois. He is the Executive Editor of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy, and he is the author of over 100 books, including The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future (2019), Wittgenstein, Education and Rationality (2020) and Wittgenstein: Antifoundationalism, Technoscience and Education (2020). Tina Besley is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. She is Founding President of the Association for Visual Pedagogies (AVP) and Immediate Past President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). She has published over 12 books and many articles and is Deputy Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, and an Associate Editor for the Beijing International Review of Education. She works closely with Professor Michael A. Peters and with a wide international network of scholars.

PANDEMIC EDUCATION AND VIRAL POLITICS

Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley The right of Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peters, Michael A., author. | Besley, Tina, 1950– author. Title: Pandemic education and viral politics / Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029577 (print) | LCCN 2020029578 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367635404 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367635398 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003119579 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: COVID-19 (Disease)—Political aspects. | COVID-19 (Disease)—Social aspects. | Epidemics—Political aspects. | Epidemics— Social aspects. | Biopolitics. Classification: LCC RA644.C67 P48 2021 (print) | LCC RA644.C67 (ebook) | DDC 362.1962/414—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029577 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029578 ISBN: 978-0-367-63539-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-63540-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-11957-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

 Permissions   1 Introduction: education, philosophy and viral politics Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley   2 Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm Michael A. Peters, Petar Jandrić, and Peter McLaren

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  3 A viral theory of post-truth Michael A. Peters, Peter McLaren, and Petar Jandrić

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  4 On the epistemology of conspiracy Michael A. Peters

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  5 Love and social distancing in the time of COVID-19: the philosophy and literature of pandemics Michael A. Peters

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 6 The Plague: human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe Michael A. Peters

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  7 Philosophy and pandemic in the postdigital era: Foucault, Agamben, Žižek Michael A. Peters

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  8 The disorder of things: quarantine unemployment, the decline of neoliberalism, and the COVID-19 lockdown crash Michael A. Peters   9 ‘Reality is an activity of the most august imagination’. When the world stops, it’s not a complete disaster—we can hear the birds sing! Michael A. Peters 10 The Chinese dream encounters COVID-19 Michael A. Peters 11 Biopolitics, conspiracy and the immuno-state: an evolving global politico-genetic complex Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

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Index112

PERMISSIONS

Peters, M. A., Jandrić, P., & McLaren, P. (2020). Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1744226 Peters, M. A., McLaren, P., & Jandrić, P. (2020). A viral theory of post-truth. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1750090 Peters, M. A. (2020). On the epistemology of conspiracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1741331 Peters, M. A. (2020). Love and social distancing in the time of Covid-19: The philosophy and literature of pandemics. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1750091 Peters, M. A. (2020). The Plague: Human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00131857.2020.1745921 Peters, M. A. (2020). Philosophy and pandemic in the postdigital era: Foucault, Agamben, Žižek. Educational Philosophy and Education. https://doi. org/10.1007/s42438-020-00117-4 Peters, M. A. (2020). The disorder of things: Quarantine unemployment, the decline of neoliberalism, and the Covid-19 lockdown crash. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1759190 Peters, M. A. (2020). ‘Reality is an activity of the most august imagination’. When the world stops, it’s not a complete disaster – we can hear the birds sing! Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1764268 Peters, M. A. (2019). The Chinese dream: Educating the future. London: Routledge. Peters, M. A. & Besley, T. (2020). Biopolitics, conspiracy and the immuno-state: An evolving global politico-genetic complex. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1772026

1 INTRODUCTION Education, philosophy and viral politics Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

When severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)—the virus that causes COVID-19—first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, even the most experienced international public health experts did not anticipate that it would rapidly spread to create the worst global public health crisis in over 100 years. By January 2020, a few public health officials began sounding the alarm, but it wasn’t until March 11, 2020, that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. (CIDRAP, p. 2)1

Globally, nations have responded very differently to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following epidemiological modelling, and aiming to ‘flatten the curve’ to avoid deaths and overloading their already limited public health services, some have closely followed a health model with severe staged lockdowns, wearing facemasks, using personal protective equipment (PPE), social distancing and sanitizer hand-washing (e.g., New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Norway, Denmark). Others, alarmed at the economic consequences and dismissive of the science (it is not ‘just a little flu’) with many people seemingly more concerned with their individual rights and liberties than the well-being of the Other, have limited recommending any or many of these measures until the virus has spread widely in their societies; consequently, we find that they have astonishingly high numbers of infections and deaths (e.g., USA, Brazil, UK; see rolling updated figures from Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere as presented in The Guardian2). With organisations and movements, both Left and Right, demonstrating solidarity in the name of freedom and civil rights, the public message is that COVID-19 will not be over soon, will complicate matters further and will create problems for all forms of mobility and mass movement of goods, people and services.

2  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

The COVID-19 crisis has suddenly brought epidemiology, the media and political use of multiple scenarios to the fore, so a brief history about the discipline seems timely, as outlined by Anderson (2019). Epidemiology, from the ancient Greek, comprises the meaning of ‘epi’ meaning ‘upon or among’, ‘demos’ meaning ‘people’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘study’. In the Western tradition of medicine, Hippocrates is often regarded as the first epidemiologist. He was first to note the ‘logic’ of disease and the relationship between the disease, its spread and the environment. He drew a distinction between ‘epidemic’ and ‘endemic’ to distinguish those diseases that reside within a population from those ‘visited upon’ a population. A major text and forerunner of modern epidemiology was De contaogione et contagiosis morbis written in 1546 by Girolamo Fracastoro3 (1478–1553), an Italian physician who wrote his texts in the form of poetry and who proposed a scientific theory of disease well before its empirical formulation by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. In particular, his study of the mode of syphilis transmission is one of the earliest examples of epidemiology, called Syphilis, or A Poetical History of the French Disease, where he writes: ‘I sing of that terrible disease, unknown to past centuries, which attacked all Europe in one day, and spread itself over a part of Africa and of Asia’.4 Naming it the French disease is similar to Donald Trump’s naming COVID-19 the Wuhan or Chinese virus. Most definitions of epidemiology are similar and, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), epidemiology is a branch of medicine that deals with the study (scientific, systematic, and data-driven) of the distribution (frequency, pattern) and determinants (causes, risk factors) of health-related states and events (not just diseases) in specified populations (neighborhood, school, city, state, country, global). It is also the application of this study to the control of health problems).5 Harvard’s PhD in Population Health Studies notes that ‘Various methods can be used to carry out epidemiological investigations: surveillance and descriptive studies can be used to study distribution; analytical studies are used to study determinants’.6 It is primarily a quantitative discipline that relies on probability theory based on causal reasoning and hypothesis testing that analyzes the outbreak, transmission, surveillance, monitoring and screening by using a combination of statistics, biology and social sciences to shape evidence-based policy, in particular public health policy. In developing a National Institutes of Health (NIH) project in 2015 ‘to produce a systematic history of epidemiology and of the development of epidemiological techniques from the mid seventeenth to the mid twentieth century’, Alfredo Morabia mentions the work of John Graunt (1620–1674) using quantitative methods for the study of plague, and that epidemiology ‘struggled to achieve recognition as a scientific discipline’ until the turn of the 19th century, when new statistical

Introduction  3

methods (Pearsonian and Fisherian statistics) were developed in relation to chronic and cardiovascular diseases.7 Focusing on the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa that date back to 1976, James Webb in The Lancet (2015) points out that Historians of medicine and public health have mostly paid scant attention to the historical study of viral disease control efforts and their epidemiological consequences. Most medical historians tend to focus their research efforts on the social history of disease in developed nations. Epidemiologists are deeply involved in the analysis of viral outbreaks, focusing principally on dynamic modelling. The twain rarely meet. One consequence is that physicians and public health specialists do not usually draw lessons from the historical record of disease control efforts. This can sometimes result in poor policy decisions.8 Unfortunately, we can see this playing out in many countries with the current pandemic. Yet only the precise patient history record and how this might align with environmental hazards—such as air and water quality and pollution, alongside with other health conditions, and including bacteriological threats—must accompany traditional temporal studies if we are to understand the globalization of viruses and the global pandemic threat they represent in the increasing interconnectivity of globalization. While the impact on some wealthy countries has been huge, arguably because of a failure of public health policies and political decisions, the great worry is that COVID-19 looks set to ravage countries with little public health infrastructure and very few hospitals with sufficient resources, and greater levels of poverty and congestion than elsewhere, e.g., India, Pakistan, Africa and other developing countries. The fear is that this will become a third global phase and may well become the source for a second- and third-wave global reinfection, if the developed world, still recovering from its viral infection, does not and cannot devote the necessary resources to these new crises. Humanitarian aid and the long-term recovery of the interconnected global economy depend upon recognizing the chances of continued transmission in an era of increasing interconnectivity. As we go to press in mid-2020, new epidemiological models reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic is not about to disappear. It may be with us for a much longer period than first thought, extending well beyond the end of 2020. It indicates how little we know about the behaviour of this virus despite the mountain of scientific papers published since December 2020. Some scientists indicate that it may become endemic. A recent study from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota reveals the strong possibility of a second wave of the virus that will eclipse the first wave, necessitating the reintroduction of strict social distancing measures and the likely shut down of many public facilities, as well as businesses. What has become known as the Minnesota model9 uses the best comparative data provided by flu pandemics,

4  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

of which there have been nine since the early 1700s. The report, COVID-19: The CIDRAP Viewpoint, suggests three scenarios: Scenario 1: The first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a series of repetitive smaller waves that occur through the summer and then consistently over a 1- to 2-year period, gradually diminishing sometime in 2021 . . .; Scenario 2: The first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a larger wave in the fall or winter of 2020 and one or more smaller subsequent waves in 2021. This pattern will require the reinstitution of mitigation measures in the fall in an attempt to drive down spread of infection and prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed . . . Scenario 3: The first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a ‘slow burn’ of ongoing transmission and case occurrence, but without a clear wave pattern . . .10 Whatever is likely to happen, the report advises that we should plan for another 18 months to two years. We should plan for the worst scenario, and the pandemic ‘won’t be halted until 60% to 70% of the population is immune’. The report paints a troubling picture of the months ahead, including the possibility of a severe second wave in North America that eclipses the first, and the potential need for a reintroduction of strict public health measures. In this ‘panic’ environment politicians, especially those seeking re-election, must refrain from ‘fake news’, fake remedies, misinformation and disinformation. In this second and third wave period, public information requires careful scrutiny and must reflect the verified evidence-based scientific global consensus in order to avoid damaging conspiracy theories and the potential social conflicts and disorder that a second wave may incite. Education has a paramount role to play here, especially in developing criticality in relation to the generation of fake news and post-truth, misinformation and disinformation, which are often hard for people to distinguish, but also to help people—young and old—deal with ever-increasing existential fears and anxieties that have become increasingly apparent. Existential fears and anxiety at present are not only related to the coronavirus pandemic, but to the accompanying global economic crisis and the existing climate and biodiversity crises; consequently, some people are feeling overwhelmed, depressed and hopeless, even to the point of suicide. Many online comments have appeared addressing these issues; for example, Mikkel Gabriel Christoffersen argues that Søren Kierkegaard can help us understand fear and anxiety during pandemic isolation, the difference between exterior changes and interior responses as set out in The Concept of Anxiety (2015, orig 1844). He notes that Kierkegaard distinguishes fear and anxiety thus: Fear, he argues, arises on account of being threatened with something concrete. A big dog barks at you angrily and you are struck with fear.

Introduction  5

But the dog is concrete, it is visible, and you are totally absorbed with the idea of how to handle it. Anxiety, in contrast, takes a more abstract object, namely nothingness itself. Hence, COVID-19 is an ‘exemplary object of anxiety’ and has ‘a similar phenomenology as the pollution that sociologist Ulrich Beck investigated in his work Risk Society. The public response to pollution, Beck states in this book, would be anxiety’.11 Existential psychotherapy has a place too. It evolved after World War II, following from Viktor Frankl’s12 famous memoir (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946) using his experiences in Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz, on how to find meaning in the midst of extreme suffering. He argues that man cannot avoid suffering but can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl devised logotherapy as a way of creating meaning. In the 1950s, Rollo May brought these ideas to America, developing the ‘existential-humanistic’ approach focusing on human potential. In 1980, Irvin D. Yalom’s  Existential Psychotherapy identified four main ‘givens’ of the human condition: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Addressing these becomes even more apparent and important amid the current pandemic. Existentialist psychotherapist William Berry, in a 2020 Psychology Today blog, notes that, following Michel de Montaigne, facing death leads to freedom, that some people will have distorted thinking about the virus, that many people have reconnected with others amidst fears of loneliness, and that the pandemic offers the opportunity to face existential angst and grow.13 There has been a plethora of advice posted in all forms of media—social media, podcasts, blogs, parodies of old songs (‘don’t stand so close to me’; ‘a spoonful of Clorox helps the medicine go down’; ‘take my breath away’), infographics, tweets etc., most frequently emphasizing ways of coping, existential psychology being but one, and many posts going viral. The use of humour and memes has become a very common way to cope with anxiety and fear when lockdowns make people feel like their normal world is ending, shocked at seemingly apocalyptic scenes of empty shops, streets and freeways, and having unexpected positives such as air so clear they can see views like mountains not seen in recent decades. So in the current pandemic, philosophy of education and education at all levels—pre-school, schools, adult and public education—can provide important ways for an anxious, fearful population to deal with the multiplicities of physical and psychological impacts of the virus. Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture and their basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand and information science on the other, to understand ‘viral’ technologies, conspiracy theory and the nature of post-truth. The COVID-19 pandemic is a major occurrence and momentous tragedy in world history with millions of infections and

6  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

many deaths worldwide. It has disrupted society and the global economy, causing massive unemployment, death and hardship. Post-truth and Fake News provided an examination of the ‘post-truth’ era in relation to the concept of ‘viral modernity’ (Peters et al., 2018). Working with colleagues, we have extended the notion in two main ways: first, by reference to epidemics, infodemics and the bioinformational paradigm, arguing ‘viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world’ (Chapter 1); second, through the development of ‘A Theory of Post-Truth’, a notion of semiotic systems inspired by Bateson’s (1972) remark, ‘There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself’ (Chapter 2). The application of the viral concept thus draws on a parallel between viral biology and information science—the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm—that brings together two of the most powerful forces that now drive cultural evolution. In this paradigm, one of the prime intellectual tasks is to understand the ‘epistemology of conspiracy’ because ‘viral politics’ has become ‘government by conspiracy’ (Chapter 3). Public intellectuals should embrace a broadly semiotic concept of truth that is both critical and nonfoundational, we would argue best represented, though in different ways, by Wittgenstein and Foucault, who emphasize ‘language-games’ and ‘the orders of discourse’. This view leads to a deconstruction of the liberal theory of the public intellectual that decentres the individual scholar to emphasize intellectuals as part of networked social scientific media where ‘truth’ is understood as being the end (telos) of a process of systematic chain of inquiry that coheres with other verified, dependable and informed beliefs. By contrast, viral forms of information—lies, misinformation, rumours, propaganda and c­ onspiracies—do not meet the criteria of ‘justified true belief’ (there is no belief, truth or justification condition) and typically they may be politically motivated, utilizing fear and panic that are highly damaging to the health of the public sphere. ‘Viral politics’ is the term we give to the deliberate use of misinformation, innuendo and lies for political purposes that often depend on viral media where truth is no longer considered to be an issue. The concern for truth is replaced by the strength of subjective conviction and conspiracy that coincides with existing prejudices and is easily manipulated through digital networks. All those who do intellectual work—philosophers, researchers, teachers and journalists—must develop networks that aim at generating true and verifiable knowledge and the skills to differentiate between knowledge and information. Anti-intellectualism is also a virus (Peters, 2019) and we must protect the public infosphere as that which is vital to the democratic way of life. The chapters of this collection mostly adopt and follow the literature on biopolitics developed by Foucault that refers to a form of power directed at the population governing and controlling propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity. It is a model that replaces old power

Introduction  7

of death that symbolized sovereign power through the administration of bodies and the calculation and management of life such as the calculus that adopts a prudential model of immuno-state rationality to estimate how many people will be sacrificed to keep an economy open and working. These essays, written for Educational Philosophy and Theory, bring together pieces written during the first wave of the pandemic on a variety of related topics that also examine narratives in philosophy and literature in the time of the virus, human resilience, unemployment, social disorder and viral politics. This will prove to be a critical moment in the history of the world. Does humanity have the intellectual honesty, skills and understandings of international cooperation, and the will to collectively address this pressing problem of a world pandemic in a way that looks after the weak, the poor, the old and the disadvantaged? Is there a chance that science will win out over government mismanagement and the politicization of COVID-19 to overcome a global problem that will not let us be safe until every country is safe? As we write this Introduction from the relative safety of our home in Tairua, a small seaside town of only about 1,500 permanent residents on the Coromandel Peninsula (a popular tourist destination, two hours’ drive from Auckland), we are thankful that in our country, Aotearoa/New Zealand, a ‘Team of 5 Million’ responded very positively and cohesively with the levels of lockdown imposed. There was remarkable political and national unity under the leadership of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield during the crisis, and we all became familiar with mantras: ‘go hard and go early’ to eliminate the virus, and ‘be kind’ to support others in our communities; wash your hands; stay 2 metres apart; and so on. Closing our international borders has been a vital aspect, with some implementation issues, but has had a huge impact on many people, especially tourism, hospitality, international education and some primary export industries. None of us know how this will pan out in the future, but in the meantime, be safe and be kind as you care for yourself and others—our global connectedness on this one planet has become even more painfully obvious in this pandemic. We would like to acknowledge and thank Peter McLaren and Petar Jandrić for co-authoring the first couple of chapters, and Katie Peace and Jacy Hui from the production team at Taylor & Francis. We would also like to thank the open reviewers for Chapter 1—Liz Jackson, Marek Tesar and Sean Sturm. Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley Tairua, New Zealand 26 June 2020

Notes 1 COVID-19: The CIDRAP Viewpoint. Part 1: The Future of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned from Pandemic Influenza, University of Minnesota. April 30, 2020. www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/cidrap-covid19-viewpointpart1_0.pdf

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2 The Guardian provides regular updates and graphs and maps using from CSSE, Johns Hopkins University, the WHO, CDC, NHC and Dingxiangyuan. On June 26 there were 9,535,588 cases; 487,306 deaths and 3,753,074 recovered. It is acknowledged that testing and data varies in how different countries undertake this, so they point out that deaths are a more reliable indicator. See www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/24/ coronavirus-world-map-which-countries-have-the-most-covid-19-cases-and-deaths 3 www.britannica.com/topic/De-contagione-et-contagiosis-morbis 4 www.worldcat.org/title/syphilis-or-a-poetical-history-of-the-french-disease/oclc/ 606552687 5 www.cdc.gov/careerpaths/k12teacherroadmap/epidemiology.html 6 www.hsph.harvard.edu/phdphs/epidemiology/ 7 https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/G13-LM010884-02 8 www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60108-8/fulltext 9 https://mn.gov/covid19/data/modeling/index.jsp 10 COVID-19: The CIDRAP Viewpoint. Part 1: The Future of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned from Pandemic Influenza, University of Minnesota. April 30, 2020. www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/cidrap-covid19-viewpointpart1_0.pdf 11 https://sciencenordic.com/anxiety-denmark-epidemic/corona-isolation-puts-ourexistential-state-to-the-test/1682499 12 Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997), professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School, founded what became called the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ (after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology)—the school of logotherapy. Dr. Frankl received Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Vienna. During World War II, he spent three years at Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps. The quest for meaning sustained those who survived. For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love and courage in the face of difficulty.   www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/26/viktor-frankl-mans-search-for-meaning/ 13 www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-second-noble-truth/202004/the-existentialcrisis-you-are-or-should-be-having?amp

References Anderson, W. (2019, June). The history of Epidemiology, International Journal of Epidemiology, 48(3), 672–674. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyy247 Bateson, G. (1972). Steps towards an ecology of mind. Ballantine Books. Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s search for meaning. Pocket Books. Kierkegaard, S. (2015/1844). The concept of anxiety (A. Hannay, Trans. & Intro.). Liveright. Peters, M. A. (2019). Anti-intellectualism is a virus. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(4), 357–363. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1462946 Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvönen, M., & Besley, T. (Eds.). (2018). Post-truth, fake news: Viral modernity and higher education. Springer. Webb, J. L. A. Jr. (2015). The historical epidemiology of global disease challenges. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60108-8 Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books. www.basicbooks.com/titles/ irvin-d-yalom/existential-psychotherapy/9780465021475/

2 VIRAL MODERNITY? EPIDEMICS, INFODEMICS, AND THE ‘BIOINFORMATIONAL’ PARADIGM Michael A. Peters, Petar Jandrić, and Peter McLaren

Epidemics, quarantine, and public health management (Michael A. Peters) Viruses exist only within the cells of living organisms, are found in most planetary ecosystems, and are the most numerous biological entities on Earth with trillions of varieties. They are thought to have played an essential role in the evolutionary history of life. As Nasir et al. (2012, p. 247) write: Viruses are intriguing biological entities that are borderline between inanimate and living matter. . . . They often integrate into cellular genomes and massively enrich the genetic repository of numerous organisms, including animals, plants and fungi. . . . Viruses are believed to have played important roles in the evolution of cellular organisms. Viruses are “remarkably abundant” and diverse with “numerous morphological forms and replication strategies”. As Nasir et al. note, “viruses are considered unworthy of living status and their placement alongside cells in the ‘tree of life’ (ToL) unwarranted”, and they go on to observe “the question about the origin of viruses and life itself remains for the most part a philosophical debate and largely dealt with theoretical arguments rather than molecular data, especially because viral genomic repertoires are limited and patchy” (Nasir et al., 2012, pp. 247–248). The virus-first hypothesis maintains there are three virospheres that can be physically linked but are functionally disjoint: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. On this hypothesis viruses are considered to contribute to the evolution of cells with an attempt to propose the “virocell” that links both. “Remarkably, viruses appear alongside with cells on a comparable evolutionary time scale and form a basal and distinct ‘supergroup’ in a truly universal ToL” (Nasir et al., 2012, p. 248).

10  Michael A. Peters, et al.

Viral infections have always existed in human population; in some historical periods, diseases such as the Spanish Flu have affected large proportions of population.1 In the absence of cure, already the Mosaic Law mentions procedures of separating out sick people to prevent spread of disease. The first organized isolation of healthy but potentially sick people took place in response to the Great Plague (also commonly known as Black Death) in the 14th century in the independent trading city-state of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia). In order to protect its citizens from the Plague, city authorities ordered that all ships and people need to be isolated for 40 days before entering the city. Medicine of the day did not know that the Great Plague had a 37-day period from infection to death. For luck or coincidence, this somewhat arbitrary measure achieved full success. Derived from Italian words quaranta giorni meaning 40 days, the quarantine has become standard epidemiology practice until today. Large epidemics and pandemics have always been significant social and cultural events. For instance, between 1918–1919 the influenza pandemic “took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined” (Outka, 2019). While its effects have been overshadowed by horrors of WWI and challenges of the interwar period, the influenza pandemic has nevertheless “shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry” through its “hidden but widespread presence” (Outka, 2019). Outka’s work “uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism”, and “brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight” (Outka, 2019). In the midst of current outbreak of COVID-19, historians are drawing lessons from media responses to the 1918–1919 pandemic; in spite of very different contexts, it seems that much can be learned from century-old experiences (Brockell, 2020). In Madness and Civilisation Michael Foucault describes the Great Confinement, which was based on the model of the leper colony. While leprosy is not a virus, but rather a bacterial infection (Mycobacterium leprae) spread between people through extensive contact, in social terms its effective history led to a “game of exclusion” that for several centuries dominated structures of exclusion where the role of the leper was substituted by the poor, by vagrants, by prisoners, and by those considered “mad”. Foucault (2006, p. 6) writes: In the Middle ages, exclusion hit the leper, the heretic. Classical culture excluded by means of the General Hospital, the Zuchthaus, the Workhouse, all institutions which were derived from the leper colony. I wanted to describe the modification of a structure of exclusion. (Foucault, 1996, p. 8) Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by

Viral modernity?  11

the poor by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the “alienated”, and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study. The forms this exclusion took would continue, in a radically different culture and with a new meaning, but remaining essentially the major form of a rigorous division, at the same time social exclusion and spiritual reintegration. (Foucault, 2006, p. 6) In Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975, Foucault (2007) contrasts the reductive view of power that excludes with a generative model based on lepers and “plague towns”. In the former case lepers were excluded from society and forced to wear bells around their neck to warn others of their advance. By contrast, in the case of “plague towns” it was impossible to control through exclusion. Instead the solution adopted was quarantine that was a method assisted by urban form that had divided towns into smaller and smaller section (quadrillage) where streets were controlled and policed twice daily through roll calls and registers that recorded the latest victims who were removed. It was a form of pyramid administrative control where continuous surveillance operated. As Foucault (2007) explains, It is not exclusion but quarantine. It is not a question of driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place, of assigning places and of defining presences and subdivided presences. Not rejection but inclusion. You can see that there is no longer a kind of global division between two types or groups of population . . . one that has leprosy and one that does not. . . . There is a close and meticulous observation  .  .  . [a] constant examination of a field of regularity within which each individual is constantly assessed in order to determine whether he conforms to the rule, to the defined norm of health. (Foucault, 2007, pp. 45–47) The plague referred to as the Black Death is also due to a bacterial infection (Yersinia pestis) generally found in animals, especially rodents, and transmitted through fleas. The risks of getting the plague were highest in crowded and congested areas, normally in the poorest section of a city, where sanitation is poor or non-existent. There are several forms of plague—septicemic, pneumonic and, the most common, bubonic—that is thought to have originated in East Asia and travelled along the Silk Road, reaching Sicily in 1347 and reducing the population by over 100 million. Foucault contrasts the “ritual of exclusion” in dealing with lepers with plague towns that gave rise to “disciplinary diagrams” that involved “multiple separations, individualising distributions, an organisation in depth of surveillance and

12  Michael A. Peters, et al.

control, an intensification and a ramification of power” (1975, p. 231). In dealing with plague towns, as Elden observes, the “emergency plan” [plan d’urgence] for epidemic disease comprised the following measures: 1

All people must remain at home in order to be isolated in a particular place, even in a single room; 2 The town is divided into distinct sectors or regions, inspectors patrol the streets, and a system of generalised surveillance is used to compartmentalise and control; 3 To accompany the detailed reports that come from these sectors, there will be a centralised information system; 4 People who do not show themselves for the inspectors at their windows will undoubtedly have contracted the plague, and therefore must be transported to a special infirmary, outside the town. Statistics can be derived from the reports that follow; 5 Houses need to be disinfected and sterilised. (Elden, 2003, p. 243) As Elden goes on to note: The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society (1975, pp. 231–232): the military model of organised discipline replaces the religious model of exclusion (1994, Vol. III, p. 218). Two forms of the utilisation and control of space—­exclusion and inclusion-organisation—two forms of political power—negative and positive. The positive form of power is the birth of administrative and political strategies (1999, p. 44). Its four modes are selection, normalisation, hierarchisation, and centralisation (1997a, p. 161). Although these are used in Discipline and Punish to trace the emergence of the disciplinary society more generally, in its earlier context Foucault is more interested in public health campaigns. He suggests that “urban medicine, with its methods of surveillance, hospitalisation, etc. is nothing other than the development . . . of the political-medical plan [schema] of quarantine” (1994, Vol. III, pp. 218–219). (Elden, 2003, pp. 243–244) Foucault’s analysis has an uncanny application today in the public health management strategies for dealing with coronavirus (COVID-19) with haunting images of empty streets in Wuhan and other Chinese cities, with face masks and bodysuited medicos.

Viral modernity?  13

Viral modernity? Elements of viral-digital philosophy (VDP) Viral modernity is a concept that is based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand and information science on the other—it is an illustration and prime example of bioinformationalism (Peters, 2012) that brings together two of the most powerful forces that now drive cultural evolution. The concept of viral modernity applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education, and emerging knowledge ( journal) systems. Evolutionary bioinformatics indicate the conceptual closeness between the two. Philosophy and the humanities more generally are marked by two emergent and profound developments that have already begun to determine their future shape and major theoretical preoccupations: the ecological turn and the digital turn. At the most basic level the ecological humanities share an ontology of interconnectivity with the new digital technologies and together decentre humanity and redefine it as part of larger living and technological systems. This paper examines and speculates on the intermeshing of these two systems by inquiring into new possibilities for thought and research provided for by the concept of ‘viral modernity’. Gillings et al. comment in ‘Information in the Biosphere: Biological and Digital Worlds’: Evolution has transformed life through key innovations in information storage and replication, including RNA, DNA, multicellularity, and culture and language. We argue that the carbon-based biosphere has generated a cognitive system (humans) capable of creating technology that will result in a comparable evolutionary transition. Digital information has reached a similar magnitude to information in the biosphere. It increases exponentially, exhibits high-fidelity replication, evolves through differential fitness, is expressed through artificial intelligence (AI), and has facility for virtually limitless recombination. Like previous evolutionary transitions, the potential symbiosis between biological and digital information will reach a critical point where these codes could compete via natural selection. Alternatively, this fusion could create a higher-level superorganism employing a low-conflict division of labor in performing informational tasks. (Gillings et al., 2016, p. 180) Gillings et al. (2016, p. 183) provide a timeline for the evolutionary development of information in the biosphere (Figure 2.1), and suggest that the collective body of technology can be regarded as “self-organizing (adaptive), energy transforming (produces, consumes, and exchanges energy with the environment), and

14  Michael A. Peters, et al.

FIGURE 2.1 Schematic

timeline of information and replicators in the biosphere (Gillings et al., 2016, p. 183).

auto-poietic (self-producing new technology from its own parts)” that leads some scholars to consider technology as “a living organism” where information in its viral form is regarded as a replicator, with similar properties to biological replicators. Such a parallel employs a model of understanding that sees words and genes in terms of increasing fidelity of replication through time. It seems inevitable that digital and biological information will become more integrated in the future. This scenario raises the question of how such an organic–digital fusion might become a symbiosis that coevolves through natural and artificial selection. In a fusion of digital and biological systems, both could contribute their functions to generate a higher unit of organization, similar in effect to previous evolutionary transitions [43]. Such a transhuman vision is referred to as the technological singularity [79]. (Gillings et al., 2016, p. 188) If we imagine this bioecological model of information, we can discern both an “ecology of good ideas” such as that expressed in the virtuous circle of exchange that takes place in open science where information is shared and built upon by members of the scientific community, and an “ecology of bad ideas” as the viral circulation of fake news in a post-truth world (Peters et al., 2018). Gregory

Viral modernity?  15

Bateson (1972, p. 492) remarks: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds”. The rest of that sentence that gets forgotten has a special valence in an age of post-truth, Bateson continues, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself”. The history of the basic error that keeps getting propagated Bateson maintains is the idea of “self” that we have been acculturated to in the West and that has become part of our eco-mental system as the basic operating premise of our thought and experience. Anthropologically speaking, 19th-century evolutionists encourage an erroneous way of viewing our relations with the environment destroying the earlier forms of animism that was based on an empathy with the natural environment and separating “the notion of mind from the natural world” (Bateson, 1972, p. 493). The “mind separate from the body, separate from the society, and separate from nature” is the fundamental error that Bateson attacks and tries to rectify in Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (1972).

Bioinformationalism: information theory and genomics (Petar Jandrić) With the advent of computer technology in mid-20th century, humankind has started to produce and share large amounts of data. The early digital age is predicated on the assumption of openness and free sharing of information; openness involves a set of technical and other standards which allow sharing of information, while freedom refers to various legal and other standards pertaining to sharing of information. However, the computer industry has soon started to develop various obstacles to openness and freedom of information from corporate and military security protections to copyrights. In response, activists and hackers have stated to develop computer viruses—computer programs designed to modify other computer programs and spread themselves through replication. Some computer viruses are developed to explore and fix bugs in computer systems (so-called white-hat hacking) while other computer viruses are developed to cause damage and/or loss of information (so-called black-hat hacking; see Jandrić, 2019a). Whatever their purpose, computer viruses bring about a viral modernity which “challenges and disrupts the openness of a free distribution model as well as distributed knowledge, media and learning systems” (Peters, 2012, p. 62). Just like in biological systems (human body), “the virus flourishes because of the computer’s capacity for information sharing and the computer is unable to distinguish between a virus and a program. The alterability of information allows the virus to modify and change information, providing conditions for self-replicability.” (Peters, 2012, p. 62) Fred Cohen has therefore advocated “the benevolent virus and friendly contagion as a foundation of the viral ecosystem instead of the corporate response to securitize and privatize all open systems through sophisticated encryption” (in Peters,

16  Michael A. Peters, et al.

2012, p. 62). Already in 1994, “some scientists begun to ask if computer viruses are not a form of artificial life—a self-replicating organism. Simply because computer viruses do not exist as organic molecules may not be sufficient reason to dismiss the classification of this form of ‘vandalware’ as a form of life” (Spafford 1994, p. 249). Roughly since the brink of the millennium, traditional computer systems have slowly but surely given way to various artificial intelligences. According to Liza Daly, “artificial intelligence is the umbrella term for the entire field of programming computers to solve problems. I would distinguish this from software engineering, where we program computers to perform tasks.” (Daly, 2017) This simple definition describes an important paradigm change in the inner workings of the computer. Traditional computers, including the most sophisticated expert systems of yesterday, consisted of long lines of code which determined their behaviour: for every input, such systems would do predetermined calculations and provide an output. In contrast, AI systems are provided with some initial rules of behaviour, and then they are “taught” by large datasets. Then, a computer independently establishes various connections between input data and produces “intelligent” solutions to new problems in non-predetermined ways. This is the essence of machine learning, which is broadly defined as “the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed” (Ng, 2018). (Jandrić, 2019b, pp. 31–32) Artificial intelligences cannot suffer from traditional computer viruses, although some computer viruses (and anti-virus programs) may contain elements of artificial intelligences. The advent of artificial intelligences has reinvigorated debates about distinctions between humans and machines exemplified in Turing’s test, and has brought about various philosophies and research approaches such as sociomaterialism, posthumanism, actor-network theory, and science and technology studies (Jandrić, 2017, Chapter 9). In the late 20th-century human society has experienced a vast wave of digitalization. We digitized images, music, books, and the (human) genome. In 1996, the cloning of Dolly the Sheep marked a symbolic change in research direction. We’re actually starting at a new point: we’ve been digitizing biology, and now we’re trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology, with designing and synthesizing life. So, we’ve always been trying to ask big questions. “What is life?” is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. We’ve tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. We’ve been digitizing it now for almost 20 years. When we sequenced the human genome, it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. Now we’re trying to ask: can we regenerate life, or can we create new life, out of this digital universe? (Venter, 2008)

Viral modernity?  17

Following the shift from digitization of biology to biologization of the digital, century-old primacy of physics has now given way to biology. According to Dyson (2007), “[b]iology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries. . . . Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare”. This shift in relative importance between physics and biology does not imply that physics has become obsolete (on the contrary, digital tools have now become indispensable in biosciences) or that the value of (human) life has suddenly risen in importance. Instead, the rise of bioinformationalism has merely marked new research directions in our sciences, inspired by social and cultural changes and enabled by technological developments, at our current historical conjecture. This curious mix of “blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism” (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 896) is often described by the notion of the postdigital. According to Peters and Besley (2014, p. 30), “[t]he postdigital does not describe a situation, condition or event after the digital. It is not a chronological term but rather a critical attitude (or philosophy) that inquires into the digital world, examining and critiquing its constitution, its theoretical orientation and its consequences”. In our postdigital age, contagious diseases such as COVID-19 are at the same time biological (they arrive from nature and affect human bodies), social and cultural (they illicit socially and culturally constructed responses), and digital (COVID-19 research is enabled and powered by digital technology). Developed within a postdigital context, world’s response to the threat of COVID-19 says a lot about the viral nature of our modernity.

COVID-19—the bioinformationalist response According to the World Health Organization (2020), “the current outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) . . . was first reported from Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019”. Thirty days later, on 31 January 2020, UK’s Wellcome Trust issued a statement entitled “Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak”. Initially signed by 67 large organizations such as the European Commission and mainstream academic publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature, the statement committed to ensure that: • • •

all peer-reviewed research publications relevant to the outbreak are made immediately open access, or freely available at least for the duration of the outbreak research findings relevant to the outbreak are shared immediately with the WHO upon journal submission, by the journal and with author knowledge research findings are made available via preprint servers before journal publication, or via platforms that make papers openly accessible before peer review, with clear statements regarding the availability of underlying data

18  Michael A. Peters, et al.

•

•

researchers share interim and final research data relating to the outbreak, together with protocols and standards used to collect the data, as rapidly and widely as possible—including with public health and research communities and the WHO authors are clear that data or preprints shared ahead of submission will not pre-empt its publication in these journals. (Wellcome Trust, 2020)

Within days, research organizations started to share results of their work on COVID-19 and academic publishers quickly developed a global infrastructure which enables such sharing. For instance, immediately after signing the statement, Springer Nature added a banner saying “Springer Nature is making SARSCoV-2 and COVID-19 research free” to all their journals (Springer Nature, 2020). Clicking on the banner leads to a landing page containing an introductory text followed by continuously updated links to various articles and books relevant for COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus responsible for an outbreak of respiratory illness known as COVID-19, which has spread to several countries around the world. As a leading research publisher, Springer Nature is committed to supporting the global response to emerging outbreaks by enabling fast and direct access to the latest available research, evidence, and data. Below are related research articles from our journals, as well as additional commentary on this topic and relevant books. All content listed here is free to access. If you are not able to access an article that you believe to be important in both understanding and addressing this emergency, please contact our customer services team. Springer Nature encourages early sharing of research submitted to all our journals through preprints, and our In-Review preprint service is available for many journals. We strongly urge authors submitting articles related to this emergency to share underlying datasets relating to the outbreak as rapidly and widely as possible. We are a signatory on the consensus statement, Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (nCoV) outbreak. (Springer Nature) The page also links to useful external resources such as live information about the virus2 and the World Health Organization’s dedicated webpage.3 The latest data about the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Visual Dashboard, operated by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE), was made available in real time on GitHub.4 This historically unprecedented level of sharing information has quickly brought about some impressive results. Within weeks, Chinese scientists “had sequenced the viral genome, deciphering the virus’s genetic code—a vital key

Viral modernity?  19

to diagnosing and ultimately treating the disease. They immediately shared that critical genetic roadmap with researchers all over the world. That early collaboration allowed doctors in other countries to be ready when the first cases appeared outside China” (Crowe, 2020). At the moment of writing these words, a Google Scholar search for articles about the COVID-19 virus published between 1 January and 28 February 2020 returns 2,140 unique results. One of these articles, “Time Course of Lung Changes On Chest CT During Recovery From 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pneumonia”, is based on an examination of “patients with RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 infection presenting between 12 January 2020 to 6 February 2020” (Pan et al., 2020). The study was published online on 13 February, which is seven days after the last patient was examined. This ground-breaking reaction of the medical profession brings sends a larger message. “When the story of the coronavirus (2019-nCOV) is finally written, it might well become a template for the utopian dream of open science—where research data is shared freely, unrestrained by competition, paywalls and patents” (Crowe, 2020). While the exact flow and dynamic of the collective response to COVID-19 will surely be analyzed long after the epidemic is gone, let us look into some major changes it introduced to the scientific community.

The bioinformationalist challenge of open science Standard academic publishing is a slow enterprise. Scientists do their research, write up their results, and submit their manuscripts to relevant academic journals for double-blind review which typically involves the following steps: 1 2 3 4 5

Admin check (writing style, clarity, originality) First reading by the editor The first round of double-blind peer review Second editor’s check Decision goes to author: a Accept b Accept with minor changes c Accept with major changes d Reject

6 7 8 9

Author submits the next version; The second round of double-blind peer review If necessary, the third round of double-blind peer review Final decision—article goes to production.

Depending on the journal, this process can take anywhere between a few months and a few years. To support swift response to the COVID-19 crisis, academic editors have significantly increased speed of peer review. In their Editorial, Eric J. Rubin, Lindsey R. Baden, Stephen Morrissey, and Edward W. Campion

20  Michael A. Peters, et al.

of The New England Journal of Medicine have put together a set of practices to “rapidly evaluate submitted manuscripts and, if we plan to publish them, will expedite all editorial steps to make them available as quickly as possible” (Rubin et al., 2020). Academic editors have done their best to keep the integrity of their work. “Some of these articles have been reviewed and edited and revised in 48 or even 24 hours, including working overnight and weekends but still going through rigorous peer review to meet the standards that we think are important” (Campion in Crowe, 2020). Despite all precautions, however, some published articles have already been proven wrong. Published on 31 January, the preprint article “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” (Pradhan et al., 2020) received “90 critical comments within 48 hours and was swiftly retracted” (Kupferschmidt, 2020); on 14 February  2020, results of the paper were officially debunked in another publication (Xiao et al., 2020). After publication, academic articles get listed in various databases of academic material. Non-curated databases, such as Google Scholar,5 automatically list new publications a few days after publication; however, this automatic process can include a lot of non-relevant or even fake material. Curated databases, such as Web of Science,6 take much longer to list new articles, yet their protocols guarantee a certain level of relevance and verifiability of listed research. Fifty-nine days after the outbreak,7 the non-curated database Google Scholar listed 2,140 relevant articles for COVID-19, while the curated database, Web of Science, listed only one relevant article. Preprint repositories such as bioRxiv and medRxiv lie somewhere in the middle between non-curated databases such as Google Scholar and curated databases such as Web of Science. Articles published in these repositories get some dedicated attention, yet many of them, including the abovementioned retracted article “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” published at bioRxiv, are published with disclaimers such as: “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review” (Pradhan et al., 2020). On 26 February, Kai Kupferschmidt wrote Early this week, more than 283 papers had already appeared on preprint repositories . . . compared with 261 published in journals. Two of the largest biomedical preprint servers, bioRxiv and medRxiv, “are currently getting around 10 papers each day on some aspect of the novel coronavirus,” says John Inglis, head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, which runs both servers. The deluge “has been a challenge for our small teams . . . [they] are working evenings and weekends.” (Kupferschmidt, 2020) This deluge of COVID-19 related articles does not only affect academic editors and publishers; more importantly, it significantly influences researchers and their research. In 2020, researchers looking for COVID-19-related academic articles in non-curated Google Scholar were faced with reading an average of 36 articles per

Viral modernity?  21

day. Restricting themselves to more reliable sources such as a combination of preprints and academic journals, researchers nevertheless need to read approximately 10 articles per day. With one relevant paper indexed in 2020, the traditional curated database of Web of Science is currently of no use. Furthermore, the number of preprints and publications with relevant keywords in January–February 2020 has risen exponentially (see Figure 2.2). While it is impossible to predict whether this rate of growth will continue in the future, the number of COVID-19related preprints and publications may soon become too large for human comprehension. In a matter of days or months, COVID-19 research could reach the problem of “undiscovered public knowledge” described already in 1986 by the University of Chicago library scientist Don Swanson (1986). According to Steve Fuller, this problem consists of at least three levels: “1) there’s more stuff than can be reasonably read; 2) disciplinary specialisation exacerbates the problem; 3) as a result, when we ask money for ‘new research’, we may end up reinventing the wheel, in the sense that the answer may already exist and we just don’t know it” (in Fuller & Jandrić, 2019, p. 200). Some of these problems might perhaps be resolved through various applications of artificial intelligences, yet this implies that COVID-19 research is now reaching beyond medical profession to include data experts, computer scientists, and others.

FIGURE 2.2 Number of COVID-19 related preprints and publications in January–Feb-

ruary 2020 (Kupferschmidt, 2020).

22  Michael A. Peters, et al.

I am writing these words on 28 February 2020, which is 59 days after the official outbreak of COVID-19. With daily reports of more and more cases of infections and death, the epidemic is still in full swing. Responses developed by the global research community during January and February 2020 have already returned some fascinating results—the virus genome has been mapped, reliable tests have been developed, and the first vaccine trial has started (Park, 2020). There is no doubt that such developments would not be possible without the principles of open science—free sharing of datasets and research results, quick review and publishing procedures, and, above all, decommodification of all COVID-19related research. However efficient, the principles of open science are soon bound to bump into some natural limitations including but not limited to questionable verifiability of (some) published results to data deluge. Therefore, it is crucial that philosophers, information scientists, and other experts in knowledge development urgently join medical researchers in our common struggle against this deadly threat to humanity.

A virus of misinformation: infodemics and the US response—a case in point (Peter McLaren) I haven’t touched my face in weeks. It’s been weeks! I miss it. —President Donald Trump (Salvador Hernandez, Buzzfeed News, 4 March 2020)

When a top official from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency expected the coronavirus would begin spreading at a community level in the United States, President Trump “responded that U.S. containment of the virus is ‘close to airtight’ and that the virus is only as deadly as the seasonal flu” (Thielking, 2020). Now a ProPublica report has made it clear that as a result of shunning World Health Organization disease test guidelines, the US lost crucial time in tracking the spread of the coronavirus and COVID-19. The US insisted on devising its own test, resulting in an overreliance on the development of a specifically American test. Currently commercial manufacturers across the US are working around the clock to mass-produce coronavirus tests. And yet still needed, as of this writing, is a broadening of the criteria for testing. ProPublica reports, As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test. The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was

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sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples. As a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration only allowed those state labs to use the test—a decision with potentially significant consequences. The lack of a reliable test prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping with a possible outbreak—“surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals. (ProPublica, 2020) Egregious failures followed the dissemination of the first test kits that were sent out from a laboratory in Georgia—a laboratory that, understandably, is no longer under government contract. According to Terry Schwadron (2020), “[t]he White House has insisted only on centralizing messaging on the disease, a power it has used to attack perceived political foes for anything that has goes wrong— as if that makes it any easier to feel secure about illness”. Seizing control of all official communications about coronavirus, while at the same time weaponizing the virus to attack political rivals in the Democratic Party, has proven to be an unmitigated disaster, putting lives at imminent risk. The US citizenry is not getting the information needed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as the public attempts to fight the spread of COVID-19 in tandem with a politically weaponized virus of misinformation hatched in the fetid wheelhouse of a leader who likely suffers from narcissistic personality disorder and who is currently gripped by a paralyzing fear of losing an election. What US residents are receiving is a slew of conspiracy theories regarding the nature and origin of the virus. One such conspiracy centres around the claim that the virus was created in a laboratory. According to Gregory: Much of the misinformation centers on the unfounded claim that the virus was created in a laboratory. In one version of this false story, the source of the outbreak can be traced to Chinese spies who stole the virus from a lab in Canada, then mutated it into a biological weapon before it leaked out from a state-owned virology lab in Wuhan, China—where the first case of COVID-19 was identified. (Gregory, 2020) Many other social media reports have a similar conspiratorial and unsubstantiated ring to them. But there are other, more challenging barriers to truthful information about the coronavirus. Schwadron (2020) has catalogued some of the bureaucratic and political bulwarks that were already in place when the US

24  Michael A. Peters, et al.

decided to take COVID-19 seriously. According to Schwadron (2020) they are numerous. He mentions reports circulating in the news media, in on-line forums and posts, and from conflicting remarks from government sources about other aspects of the U.S. government response towards vaccine development, mask production, where to place and care for quarantined patients and any needed stockpiling of medicines that depend on Chinese supply lines. Of course, this administration also had dismissed an existing infectious disease response panel, proposed significant cuts in public health and for the CDC [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], where a number of vacancies remain unfilled, and generally has conducts big campaigns against Obamacare, Medicare and Science. It has done nothing publicly to ask social media companies to quash bad health information. (Schwadron, 2020) Testing capacity was not distributed across local health departments when the CDC began investigating a case in California in which the patient was suspected of being the first infected in the United States without having travelled to affected areas or without being knowingly exposed to someone with the illness who had recently travelled outside the country. Clearly, federal, state, and local officials should have already been engaged in widespread surveillance testing in order to accommodate this suspected patient, but they were soon entangled in a bureaucratic quagmire. Again, Schwadron (2020) captures the confusion: Doctors at the University of California, Davis Medical Center, where the patient is being treated, said testing was delayed for nearly a week because the patient didn’t fit restrictive federal criteria, which limits tests only to symptomatic patients who recently traveled to China. “Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19,” UC Davis said in a statement. UC Davis officials said because neither the California Department of Public Health nor Sacramento County could test for the virus, they asked the CDCto do so. But, the officials said, “since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered.” After this case, and under pressure from public officials, the CDC broadened its guidelines Thursday for identifying suspected patients to include people who had traveled to Iran, Italy, Japan or South Korea. (Schwadron, 2020) We would expect that people with a discerning, critical mind would understandably be alarmed at the idea that a widely-known vaccination critic, Donald Trump, was now in charge of the White House during a pandemic. We were not surprised by the outrage that followed from citizens of every stripe. Below are some of the tweets sent by Trump in 2012 that surely justify such outrage:

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“A study says @Autism is out of control—a 78% increase in 10 years,” Trump tweeted in 2012. “Stop giving monstrous combined vaccinations immediately. Space out small individual shots—small babies can’t handle massive doses. Get smart—and fast—before it is too late.” (cited in Burris, 2020) “I have received many notes of thanks from people regarding my comments on vaccines and autism,” Trump said later that year. “The autism and vaccine safety community is encouraged that I’ve been willing to speak up on this issue. I feel strongly about it—and I’m pleased my remarks have had significance concerning this health crisis. Stop massive one time ­vaccinations— spread them out over a period of time.” (cited in Burris, 2020)

The anti-vaccinationist’s vaccination After a decade of bloviating against vaccinations, Trump is now bragging that a coronavirus vaccine is just around the corner. Trump is clearly desperate to deploy a vaccine to COVID-19 before the next election and he has pressed pharmaceutical executives and public health officials to do just that. Trump believes that news of an imminent vaccine could help stabilize markets and stem the rising tide of harsh criticisms of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And, of course, help Trump’s election chances. Trump has repeatedly derided the Democrats and the Left (and even Fox News when they occasionally criticize Trump) for misrepresenting Trump’s (according to him) grandiose achievements (Palma, 2020). Consider this following tweet: “@FoxNews is working hard pushing the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats,” Trump tweeted. “They want to be, unlike their competitors, @CNN & MSDNC (Comcast), Fair & Balanced. When will they ever learn. The Radical Left never even gave @FoxNews permission to partake in their low rated debates!” Trump supporters are very likely to follow Trump’s directives to ignore any news reports from mainstream news outlets such as CNN, NBC, or ABC. Therefore, Trump is careful about how he stage-manages the image of his handling of the coronavirus as it spreads throughout the US. Trump has pleaded with Big Pharma executives to come up with a vaccine before November’s election (Rupar, 2020). It is very likely that new drugs to treat patients infected with the virus will make an appearance much sooner than vaccines (Thielking, 2020). Rupar describes the chaos surrounding the situation: “I mean, I like the sound of a couple months better, if I must be honest,” Trump said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the “couple months” time

26  Michael A. Peters, et al.

frame execs mentioned merely referred to a vaccine being ready for trials. Later, Trump pressed the pharmaceutical leaders on why they can’t just release the coronavirus drugs their companies are working on tomorrow— in the process revealing that he doesn’t understand the concept of clinical trials. “So you have a medicine that’s already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it’s specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can’t you?” he said. “Now the critical thing is to do clinical trials,” explained Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences, which has two phase-three clinical trials going for remdesivir, a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “We have two clinical trials going on in China that were started several weeks ago . . . we expect to get that information in April.” Trump also wondered aloud why the flu vaccine can’t just be used for coronavirus, asking, “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?” “No,” one of the experts at the table replied. Following the meeting, an unnamed administration source told CNN that they thought the scientists and experts were able to convince Trump that a vaccine would not be available for a year or longer. “I think he’s got it now,” the source told CNN. (Rupar, 2020) And yet, only hours after being told by medical experts that a vaccine would be unavailable for at least a year, Trump proclaimed at one of his rallies that a vaccine would be available relatively soon. Foreseeably, Trump took an “ethnonationalist stance” on the virus, arguing that “[t]here are fringe globalists that would rather keep our borders open than keep our infection—think of it—keep all of the infection, let it come in” (cited in Rupar, 2020). Trump has also expressed bewilderment about “the difference between cures, which eliminate diseases, and therapies, which treat them” (Rupar, 2020). Trump has consistently and confusingly conflated these terms. In order to keep numbers artificially low, for fear of the stock market plummeting, Trump delayed testing, and then lied about the availability of tests. And even as the pandemic rages across the US, Trump and his administration are still trying to gut what is left of Obamacare—a move that could potentially remove health care from 30 million Americans. And when a vaccine is finally developed and available to the public, there has been no assurances that it will be affordable for all. Trump also has a history of taking control of the messaging when it comes to science-related issues. For instance, the White House has prevented meteorologists from discussing hurricane forecasts, Health and Homeland Security staff from commenting on gun violence after mass shootings, and US Geological Survey scientists from mentioning climate change (Woodward, 2020). Taking its cue right out of Joseph Stalin’s playbook, the Trump administration’s attacks on science, which have often been provoked by public crises, have revealed instances where the White House has muzzled representatives entirely, or at the very least required them to remove certain words from reports, or demanded that they both

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retract and reverse statements from their reports, and these include rebukes of the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Agriculture, the US Geological Survey, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Interior, and the National Park Service (Woodward, 2020). There was also an expressed outrage among the public when Trump put antiscience Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus threat to the US, since the worst HIV outbreak in Indiana’s history occurred in 2015 while Pence served as governor of that state. Pence was too slow in declaring a public health emergency and approving needle exchanges (Stroop, 2020). Pence has already erroneously claimed, as has Trump, that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be available in a few months (Rupar, 2020) and he is bragging about increased screenings at US airports without seeming to realize that airport screenings are not the equivalent of laboratory testing (Parton, 2020). However, it has been revealed (a divine revelation?) that Christian nationalist Mike Pence has a weapon that he believes is much more powerful than any remedy, treatment, or cure that might be cooked up in a laboratory—even a US laboratory. What on earth could that be? It turns out to be a high-powered White House prayer circle, designated as an official US government task force, and made up of mostly white male conservative Christians armed with scripture and ready to take on the demonic forces of COVID-19. Chrissy Stroop writes, A plague is upon us. And white evangelicals, naturally, are on the scene— theologizing the COVID-19 outbreak, praying, scolding, and generally being counterproductive. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s response is being led by one of them—Vice President Mike Pence, a fellow Hoosier and one who, as governor of Indiana, allowed an HIV outbreak to blow up because his Christian extremist ideology prevented him from adopting sensible policy. There are reasons I’ve left that state. While the White House’s Christian supremacist coronavirus prayer circle has been mocked by critics, Stroop (2020) is quick to point out that: “people aren’t mocking Pence’s prayer circle because they’re praying, they’re mocking it because it reflects a history of substituting prayer for action in situations that require material actions that the prayer-givers are powerful enough to take”. We feel fortunate that Rick Wiles8, a non-denominational senior pastor at Flowing Streams Church in Vero Beach, Florida, “founder of TruNews, a website that promotes racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories”9 was left out of the White House prayer circle. Other evangelicals outside the divine circle are doing enough damage. Pat Robertson told his millions of television viewers that if you have a healthy gut you won’t be in danger of falling prey to the

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coronavirus. Scott Lively claims that the Democrats are intentionally going to try to infect people in order to sink the economy and thereby magnify election problems for Trump. Sean Hannity, one of the most popular radio personalities in the US, and a feral Trump supporter, has put this same message out into the public airwaves through his Fox News state media broadcasts while also claiming that Trump has done more to prevent the spread of the virus than “anybody in modern history”. Televangelist Jim Bakker is selling his Silver Solution cure, claiming that it cures the coronavirus virus. It sells for $115.00 and California law has required him to warn purchasers that it contains chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects. Clearly, Trump’s insistence on politicizing the outbreak and spreading disinformation about the health risks to the wider population has put the public’s ability to handle the virus at grave risk. And there are also accusations in the media that Trump’s administration is trying to profit financially from the pandemic. According to a Common Dreams report: On February 29, the Post detailed how Trump’s main concern as the potential for a viral outbreak heightened in the U.S. was that he was being treated unfairly by the media, that health officials offering candid assessments of the threat posed by the disease were making him look bad, and that the panic was affecting the stock market. That led to the president downplaying the danger posed by the disease and encouraging conspiracy theories calling the outbreak a “hoax.” The Post also reported Trump knowingly lied about the disease spread in a press conference in an attempt to soothe markets. The president has assigned managing the virus to a team of health ­ industry-connected officials who have interests in profiting off of the disease, Sharon Lerner reported for the Intercept Saturday, and over the course of his presidency “shut down the National Security Council’s global health security unit and cut $15 billion in national health spending, including funding for the management of infectious global diseases at the CDC, DHS, and HHS.” (Common Dreams, 2020a) As a way of assuring the capitalist class that the central bank was taking COVID-19 seriously and was committed to keeping the economy from spiralling out of control, the Federal Reserve cut its interest rate to the lowest rate since the 2008 Recession (that was linked to the subprime mortgage crisis). And the cuts could keep increasing. Trump is considering the use of natural disaster funds to pay for coronavirus patients who remain uninsured. The US is woefully unprepared at this present moment to handle a pandemic. Concerned by Trump’s public health cuts, presidents and registered nurses Deborah Burger, Zenei Cortez, and Jean Ross of National Nurses United, the largest union for registered nurses in the United States, penned an open letter to Vice President Mike Pence which asserted that, “[a]t the moment, we have a fragmented and broken public health infrastructure which is woefully unprepared for COVID-19” (Common Dreams, 2020b). The letter calls for assurance that a

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vaccine for the virus will be provided for free to the public and that health care workers will be protected. Initially Trump claimed that the Democrats were creating hysteria surrounding COVID-19 as a means to discredit his presidency. Trump described such tactics as a hoax. Trump seemed to echo the vile remarks by his friend and ideological twin, hate radio impresario Rush Limbaugh (whom Trump recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom), who wrote: Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. [interruption] You think I’m wrong about this? You think I’m missing it by saying that’s. . . . [interruption] Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks. (Limbaugh, 2020) Limbaugh’s comments are more than irresponsible—they could have fatal consequences. Medical experts now caution that COVID-19 appears to be deadlier than the seasonal flu. Thomas Franck reports that as the infections have spread in the US, Trump has begun rejiggering his position that the virus was a hoax. Instead, Trump bragged: “We are magnificently organized with the best professionals in the world”. Trump’s description of the heroic efforts of his administration to contain the spread of the virus was sheer bloviation (Franck, 2020). Later Trump added the following comments: “We have to take it very, very seriously. . . . We are preparing for the worst. . . . My administration has taken the most aggressive action in modern history to prevent the spread of this illness in the United States. We are ready. We are ready. Totally ready” (cited in Franck, 2020). Yet Trump continues to communicate in an information mode marked by a bad messaging ecology, undercutting the seriousness of the situation by politicizing his Democratic opponents and further fracturing the cohesiveness of the country at a time that calls for a unanimity of response: “We will do everything in our power to keep the infection and those carrying the infection from entering our country. We have no choice. . . . Whether it’s the virus we’re talking about or many other public health threats, the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and well­ being of all Americans.” (cited in Franck, 2020) Just when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was expressing concern about the spread of the virus throughout local communities in the US, Trump pushed back on the CDC’s assessment, remarking that he does not believe that community spreading in the US is inevitable. In fact, Trump initially asserted that he’s not worried about the spread of the virus in the US. He noted “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low”. He also opined, “We’ll spend whatever is appropriate. Hopefully, we won’t have to spend so much

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because we really think that we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. . . . It is what it is. We’re ready for it. We’re really prepared. We have, as I said, we have the greatest people in the world. We’re very ready for it” (CNN, 2020). Just two years previously, in 2018, Trump closed the United States pandemic office. Beth Cameron, the former Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff, writes: When President Trump took office in 2017, the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense survived the transition intact. Its mission was the same as when I was asked to lead the office, established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014: to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic. One year later, I  was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like covid-19. Thus, when the coronavirus appeared, “there was no clear White House-led structure to oversee our response, and we lost valuable time” (Cameron, 2020). There has been concern expressed that hospitals are not getting the testing kits and that Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have not decided what part of the nearly $4,000 associated costs of getting tested for the coronavirus would be covered by insurance, putting infected people at risk for staying in the general population without treatment (Common Dreams, 2020b). And, unsurprisingly, Trump was quick to point out that his huge public rallies are free from the coronavirus and that they are “very safe” (Edwards, 2020). This remark is all the more suspicious in light of the fact that the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, who has steered the country through the AIDS and Ebola epidemics, has been silenced by the Trump White House. Fauci can only speak about the virus with prior approval and clearance from the White House (Shear & Haberman, 2020). As it stands, there is no federal regulation to protect those millions of Americans who have jobs that put them at a higher risk of coming in contact with airborne infection diseases such as COVID-19. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration does have a standard for protecting workers from bloodborne pathogens, but as OSHA notes, that regulation “typically [does] not include respiratory secretions that may transmit COVID-19” (Jamieson, 2020). As Jamieson notes, [t]he Trump administration has been far more likely to repeal regulations on employers rather than add new ones, and the president has worked hard to downplay concerns over coronavirus as the stock markets plunged. He has lowballed the number of infections as they have become public, and said the virus will probably “go away” in the spring, even though experts aren’t sure that will happen. (Jamieson, 2020)

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But we can always rely on administration officials to offer sound, commonsense advice. Dr.  Sara Cody, health officer and director of the Santa Clara County Public Health Department, recently offered advice on how people can stop the novel coronavirus from spreading: “Today, start working on not touching your face because one main way viruses spread is when you touch your own mouth, nose, or eyes,” Cody, director of the Santa Clara County’s Public Health Department said at the Friday press conference. Less than a minute later, Cody brought her hand to her mouth and licked her finger to turn a page in her notes. (Hernandez, 2020) Some good news has emerged on the horizon—a funding package passed by the Senate and on its way to Congress. Yet even here there are political antics galore. When reviewing the $8 billion bipartisan funding package for the coronavirus, Trump supporter Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) mocked the whole process by wearing a gas mask. Clearly we are living in the bowels of Foucault’s disciplined society, ever in search of that fictitious pure community that can only be imagined by viralized groups such as those currently ensepulchered in globally pandemicized plague towns filled with the sights and sounds of hacking coughs, bloody phlegm, and the sloppy lotion squeaking from hand sanitizer stalls running out of anti-bacterial refills. Yet there are those who are attempting to exclude potential carriers of the virus from the incipient plague towns of Europe and North America through an increase of street assaults on Asian bystanders (Yan et al., 2020; Guy, 2020).

Postscript (Michael A. Peters, Petar Jandrić, and Peter McLaren) Utilizing aspects of a viral-digital philosophy, we have outlined a concept of bioinformationalism that trades on earlier work in postdigital studies to engage with the history of epidemics and the institutional response to COVID-19 or coronavirus. At the beginning of March 2020, the world has passed through the early stages of the pandemic, based on one of seven human strands of a virus that started in the city of Wuhan and spread within China, killing more than 2,500 people and threatening the rest of the world where currently numbers contracting the virus are greater than within China. Bioinformationalism is a concept that allows us to observe parallels between viral forms in biology and information and to differentiate between good and bad ideas, as in open science, that develops a virtuous exchange and sharing of ideas, and fake news that propagates error and falsehood through conspiracy theories based on generating fear as a means of control and domination.

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We have written this article in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. While we developed our viral-digital philosophy, analyzed success and limits of open science, and waited for our open reviews, on March 11 the World Health Organization “declared COVID-19 a pandemic, pointing to the over 118,000 cases of the coronavirus illness in over 110 countries and territories around the world and the sustained risk of further global spread” (Ducharme, 2020). Writing from New Zealand, Croatia, and the US, we have suffered different levels of exposure (at the moment of writing, one of us has just started a two-week self-isolation) and witnessed different governmental responses. Another one of us who teaches in the US has seen visiting scholars he has brought to his university from China, just prior to the outbreak of the virus, seek early passage back to China where the likelihood of infection now appears much less than in the US. China, where the COVID-19 pandemic started, has immediately introduced harsh measures such as complete closure of multi-million cities and already reports a decline in number of newly infected people. Europe and the US have been much slower to respond, and on March 13, “[i]nternational health officials said Friday that Europe has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, as the continent is now producing more new cases each day than China did at the height of its crisis” (Coote & Jacobson, 2020). As we write these words, European countries have now finally implemented vigorous measures including closing borders, schools, etc. while the US, acting even later, has declared a “national emergency” that provides emergency powers. These varied responses reflect differences between political regimes, ideologies, and ways in which societies are organized. However, conceived in our viral modernity characterized by “multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows” (Ritzer, 2010, p. 2), the COVID-19 pandemic is a sobering reminder of unity of the whole humankind. Based on recent overlay data from China and South Korea, it is likely that the COVID-19 pandemic in the West will last at least for 3–4 months (say June– July 2020), even with rigorous and systematic testing. The real global health crisis will occur when the virus makes inroads into developing countries that do not have the health infrastructure or testing regime to deal with the virus and generally with poorer hygiene and public education. The infodemic effects are likely to be even greater during this time with damage to the infosphere, including international education and education at home. The ongoing economic and social effects will be disastrous and this provides an anti-globalization experiment when countries suspend travel and close their borders at exactly the point when the free exchange of scientific and public information is absolutely vital. Our current conjuncture requires emergency plans, sober media reporting, hand-washing instructions, and a myriad of other measures that might help humanity to defend from COVID-19. While we engage in all these measures, it is hugely important to also step back and take a birds-eye, longue durée view at current events. Written in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article lays some foundations for this work that will surely be continued in many years to come.

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Open review 1: biopolitics and education (Liz Jackson) Peters, Jandrić, and McLaren’s article, “Viral Modernity? Epidemics, Infodemics, and the ‘Bioinformational’ Paradigm”, explores some of the most important issues we now face. “Infodemics”, “bioinformation”, and “viral modernity” are not commonly discussed as such. Yet as the authors illustrate, understanding these complex forces from historical and political perspectives is key in examining the much more topical COVID-19 epidemic. The article thus does a valuable service by tying together these and other complex themes, showing how bioinformation, modernity, concepts of virus and quarantine, and post-truth politics blend in a poisonous public stew in this case. This is particularly seen in the acts and words of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. As the article demonstrates, these politicians engage in biopolitics, but manipulating COVID-19 for their own partisan ends, within a post-truth landscape of power grabbing that hardly respects open science, a form of knowledge socialism marked by openness and peer review (Peters et al., 2018; Peters, 2019). Thus, the article does an excellent job covering a range of topics substantively and analytically. In the rest of this review, I would like to consider the importance of informal education in relation to biopolitics, public health management, and bioinformationalism in this case. While Trump and Pence advocate nationalism, and white and Christian supremacy in their response to COVID-19, conditions of viral modernity and post-truth enable their dilution of messages from open science, establishing and exacerbating uncertainty, and mass public and political vulnerability. In particular, by doubting and rejecting World Health Organization guidelines, Trump and his associates bolster one aspect of viral modernity, as the loudest voice in the room wins over knowledge from open science. In place of facts about COVID-19, mainstream media in the United States echoes gossip, such as that association with China or Chinese people is essential for contracting COVID-19, while the virus can also apparently travel long distances by itself on postal packages. These ideas stigmatize and scapegoat people of Chinese ethnicity, who now face serious harms related to harassment, while also increasing mass panic and uncertainty (Jackson, 2020). Instead of sharing public information about COVID-19 developed on the principles of open science, social media provides an echo chamber of individual postings of anecdotal insights, for example of what one scientist who worked in China says about COVID-19. Such sharing, bolstered by viral social media functions, again dilutes information, obscuring, complicating, and sometimes contradicting better sources. In this context, Peters, Jandrić, and McLaren provide a tremendous service by entering their discussion in the sphere of educational philosophy, highlighting how education is interconnected with knowledge and politics in such cases. I hope this article invites more conversation on viral modernity, bioinformation, and more in education in the future.

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Open review 2: re-thinking collective viral modernity (Marek Tesar) COVID-19 has quickly become the new code for being and living in the world as connected human subjects. The paper has highlighted these notions and tensions, and this is a timely and important contribution to the scholarship and where we are at as both scholars and human beings in 2020. It is important to debate and see this paper in relation to what this means to be an academic in 2020, with events, meetings, visiting lectureship and conferences getting cancelled. We have entered into 2020 with an interesting experience, which this paper has discussed and debated powerfully and in depth via concepts such as viral modernity and bioinformationalism. There are three areas that I would like to further build on and mention in order to show how viral modernity may operate and exist in scholarly world of 2020. I am intrigued by the notion of generosity in academia in relationship to wellbeing. We have already problematized well-being in the past (Tesar  & Peters, 2019), however COVID-19 has brought to us new ideas and experiences what this may mean and how it may be performed. What we have witnessed are academics not willing to travel to conference not in order to protect themselves, but to protect those with lower immune systems and more prone towards respiratory illnesses. This act of care is much needed by individuals and is linked to care and being with the collective, as Peters et al. (2016) have pushed in the collective ecology of writing. This is an antidote to the private individualistic hoarding of resources in the time where panic (exemplified by media) is reaching out to everyone on this planet. The second point is about the notion of technology in COVID-19 outbreaks. The article refers to the “collective body of technology” that has been powerful in the way it helps us to understand how technology operates and works. Meetings have moved online. Conferences are offering synchronous and asynchronous sessions instead of the traditional face to face. Academics who, for past decades, have been forced by administration to try and utilize online mechanisms in teaching to increase enrolments and often to enable cost cutting are now being asked to prepare to use these technologies to keep teaching and learning going in the event of a university shutdown. However, perhaps because of COVID-19, we have witnessed a collective intelligence of technology (Peters & Jandrić, 2018), where the technology started to serve as both towards stopping the spread (and fake news), and to enable staying connected and continue the academic work of connection and dissemination. The final point for me from this important paper is perhaps the most important one. The idea of connectedness while being isolated. We are all connected, and no longer can ideology or geographical borders contain a virus (or the idea of a virus). The planetary outlook will perhaps allow us to rethink how we are positioned in the world; where the human subject stands; what is the future of mankind. In some countries we have been advised not to kiss dogs in order to

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stop the spread of the virus. We were asked to perform social distancing. Yet, we have never been more connected; both as academics, as people; as a planet with all human and non-human entities. As this paper reminds us, it is indeed a “viral modernity”.

The virus as Pharmakon (Sean Sturm) The topic of this essay, viral modernity, or the nexus signalled by the homology of computer and biological viruses, is timely. It argues, in a hyperbole so outrageous that it just might be true, that the global plague of misinformation that has been unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic (not least Donald Trump’s accusation that it is “fake news”) is what Paul Virilio (2007) would call the “integral accident”, or disaster that is characteristic, of the technology of bioinformatics.10 To say that every technology has its integral accident is another way of saying that technology is a pharmakon (Derrida, 1981): a cure that can harm its patient—as writing was for Plato and technoscience might be for us (Stiegler, 2012, 2016). (I would note that, in the original Latin, a virus is a potion or a poison—and, in the case of technoscience, that, while some of us drank the purple Kool-Aid willingly, most of us are being force-fed it.) Moreover, the essay also alerts us—via Bateson (1972) and Guattari’s (1989) post-Cartesian ecologism—to the “intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers, 2017), that is to say, to the recalcitrance of the Earth to humans’ embrace of the Anthropocene and the technoscientific solutionism it too often is taken to imply. But its analysis of viral modernity stops short of offering prompts for the kind of collective and transversal experimentation that we—and we ­scholars—need to reclaim our capacity for what Isabelle Stengers (2017, p. 391) calls “autonomous consensus” (viz., non-majoritarian “sensing-together”). What are we scholars to do in the face of Gaia, who—like Schiller’s (2011/1795) figure of Truth—masks herself in “fake news” and ever “biggerer” data? First, we need an epistemology that allows us to see at scale because “seeing like a system” (Gershon, 2005), as many scientists and some “humanitarians” are learning to do from ecologists, is not enough. Seeing at scale involves learning what we cannot control (the Earth) and what we can do (experiment together). In the case of the specific problem that the essay raises—what the editors of scholarly journals are to do in the face of “fake news” about coronavirus—the tried and true solutions won’t work. Critique, like fact-checking, won’t work because it tends to rely on a positivist and Cartesian understanding of truth as correspondence with the facts people know for certain. (Trump doesn’t care about facts or people because everything is relative to him.) Global solutions, like teaching AI through large datasets, won’t work either because they rely on anthropocentric algorithms to extrapolate from what we already know to what we don’t. (Proving Trump wrong proves him right because that’s exactly what the “fake news media” would do.) Both solutions exhibit a human hubris that prevents us from learning what we cannot control. So what are we to do? In short, we learn to experiment—and, in in doing so, to wrest scholarship from capitalism. As Stengers (2015, p. 53) puts it, “Struggling with

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Gaia makes no sense—it is a matter of learning to compose with her. Composing with capitalism makes no sense—it is a matter of struggling against its stranglehold”. When it comes to scholarly journals, learning to experiment—to compose with Gaia—means paying attention to collective and transversal techniques like editorial collectives, open review, collective writing, and multimodal writing that allow us, in Stengers’ phrase, to “sense together” and work to (re)claim a commons that is “more-than-human” (Bresnihan, 2015).

Notes 1 During the largest part of history, people did not distinguish between illnesses caused by viruses and bacteria. 2 See https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740 fd40299423467b48e9ecf6. 3 See www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019. 4 See https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/Covid-19. 5 See https://scholar.google.com/. 6 See www.webofknowledge.com/. 7 On 28 February 2020. 8 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Wiles; https://www.yonkerstribune.com/2020/ 04/confronting-the-anti-semitism-of-rick-wiles-by-michael-l-brown-and-jonathanfeldstein; https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/crazy-talk-adf-lawyer-makesnice-with-florida-radio-extremist. 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Wiles. 10 The essay neatly brings together what Žižek (2009, p. 53) called the four “antagonisms” confronting global capitalism: “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new technoscientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums”.

References Bateson, G. (1972). Steps towards an ecology of mind. Ballantine Books. Bresnihan, P. (2015). The more-than-human commons: From commons to commoning. In S. Kirwan, L. Dawney, & J. Brigstocke (Eds.), Space, power and the commons: The struggle for alternative futures (pp. 105–124). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/97813 15731995 Brockell, G. (2020, February  29). Trump is ignoring the lessons of 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions, historian says. Washington Post. Retrieved March 1, 2020, from www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-is-ignoring-the-lessons-of-1918-flu-pandemicthat-killed-millions-historian-says/ar-BB10yD9n Burris, S. K. (2020, March 2). Trump demands pharma come up with a vaccine for c­ oronavirus— but he’s been spreading vaccine conspiracies for years. RawStory. Retrieved March 14, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/03/trump-demands-pharma-comeup-with-a-vaccine-for-coronavirus-but-hes-been-spreading-vaccine-conspiraciesfor-years/ Cameron, B. (2020, March  13). I  ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it. Washington Post. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca80c22bbee96f_story.html

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CNN. (2020, February 27). Trump puts Pence in charge of US coronavirus response. CNN. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_def3ee04c8731 454045ca5b61678dd2d Common Dreams. (2020a, March 2). ‘Deadly consequences’: Critics sound alarm as Trump prioritizes politics over public safety in coronavirus response. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/03/deadly-consequences-critics-soundalarm-as-trump-prioritizes-politics-over-public-safety-in-coronavirus-response/ Common Dreams. (2020b, March 3). Nation’s fractured public health system under Trump ‘woefully unprepared’ for coronavirus, nurses and experts warn. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/03/nations-fracturedpublic-health-system-under-trump-woefully-unprepared-for-coronavirus-nursesand-experts-warn/ Coote, D., & Jacobson, D. (2020, March 13). Coronavirus epicenter has shifted from China to Europe, WHO says. UPI. Retrieved March 14, 2020, from www.upi.com/Top_News/ World-News/2020/03/13/Coronavirus-epicenter-has-shifted-from-China-to-EuropeWHO-says/6091584090903/?ur3 = 1 Crowe, K. (2020, February 1). ‘We’re opening everything’: Scientists share coronavirus data in unprecedented way to contain, treat disease. CBC News. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.cbc.ca/news/health/coronavirus-2019-ncov-science-virus-genome-whoresearch-collaboration-1.5446948 Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Ducharme. (2020, March 11). World Health Organization declares Covid-19 a ‘pandemic.’ Here’s what that means. Time. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from https://time. com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaration/ Dyson, F. (2007, July 19). Our biotech future. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/07/19/our-biotech-future/#fnr-* Edwards, D. (2020, March 2). Trump insists his rallies are free from coronavirus: ‘I think it’s very safe’. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/03/ trump-insists-his-rallies-are-free-from-corona-virus-i-think-its-very-safe/ Elden, S. (2003). Plague, panopticon, police. Surveillance & Society, 1(3), 240–253. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v1i3. 3339 Foucault, M. (2006). Madness and civilisation (J. Murphy & J. Khalfa, Trans.; J. Khalfa, Ed.). Routledge. Foucault, M. (2007). Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975. Palgrave Macmillan. Franck, T. (2020, February 28). Trump says the coronavirus is the Democrats’ ‘new hoax.’ CNBC. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/trump-says-thecoronavirus-is-the-democrats-new-hoax.html Fuller, S.,  & Jandrić, P. (2019). The postdigital human: Making the history of the future. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(1), 190–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s42438-018-0003-x Gershon, I. (2005). Seeing like a system: Luhmann for anthropologists. Anthropological Theory, 5(2), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499605053993 Gillings, M. R., Hilbert, M.,  & Kemp, D. J. (2016). Information in the biosphere: Biological and digital worlds. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31(3), 180–189. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.12.013 Gregory, J. (2020, February 28). The coronavirus ‘infodemic’ is real. We rated the websites responsible for it. Stat. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from, www.statnews. com/2020/02/28/websites-spreading-coronavirus-misinfor-mation-infodemic/ Guattari, F. (1989). The three ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). Athlone Press.

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Guy, J. (2020, March 3). East Asian student assaulted in ‘racist’ coronavirus attack in London. CNN. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.cnn.com/2020/03/03/uk/coronavirusassault-student-london-scli-intl-gbr/index.html Hernandez, S. (2020, March  4). A  public health official warned people not to touch their face due to Coronavirus—then immediately licked her finger. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.buzzfeednews. com/article/salvadorhernandez/ public-health-official-touch-face-coronavirus Jackson, L. (2020). Make Hong Kong great again. In H. Greenhalgh-Spencer (Ed.), Philosophy of education 2020. Philosophy of Education Society. Jamieson, D. (2020, March 4). Coronavirus reveals a gaping hole in U.S. Workplace Safety Law. Huffington Post. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.huffpost.com/entry/corona virus-osha-workplace-safety-regulation_ n_5e5fcaa1c5b6732f50ebcffb Jandrić, P. (2017). Learning in the age of digital reason. Sense. Jandrić, P. (2019a). The three ages of the digital. In D. R. Ford (Ed.), Keywords in radical philosophy and education (pp. 161–176). Brill/Sense. https://doi.org/10.1163/978 900440467_012 Jandrić, P. (2019b). The postdigital challenge of critical media literacy. The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy, 1(1), 26–37. https://doi.org/10.1163/25900 110-00101002 Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000 Kupferschmidt, K. (2020, February 26). ‘A completely new culture of doing research.’ Coronavirus outbreak changes how scientists communicate. Science. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/completely-new-culture-doingresearch-coronavirus-outbreak-changes-how-scientists Limbaugh, R. (2020). Overhyped coronavirus weaponized against Trump. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/02/24/overhypedcoronavirus-weaponized-against-trump/ Nasir, A., Kim, K. M., & Caetano-Anolles, G. (2012). Viral evolution: Primordial cellular origins and late adaptation to parasitism. Mobile Genetic Elements, 2(5), 247–252. https://doi.org/10.4161/mge.22797 Outka, E. (2019). Viral modernism: The influenza pandemic and interwar literature. Columbia University Press. Palma, S. (2020, March 2). ‘People are going to die’: Trump trashed for ‘sitting in front of the TV’ and whining about Fox News amid coronavirus outbreak. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/03/people-are-going-to-die-trump-trashedfor-sitting-in-front-of-the-tv-and-whining-about-fox-news-amid-corona-virus-outbreak/ Pan, F., Ye, T., Sun, P., Gui, S., Liang, B., Li, L., . . . Zheng, C. (2020). Time course of lung changes on chest CT during recovery from 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia. Radiology. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.2020200370 Park, A. (2020, February 25). Covid-19 vaccine shipped, and drug trials start. Time. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from https://time.com/5790545/first-covid-19-vaccine/ Parton, H. D. (2020, March 2). Mike Pence is supposedly in charge on coronavirus response—And it’s a total disaster. Salon. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.salon. com/2020/03/02/mike-pence-is-supposedly-in-charge-on-coronavirus-response—andits-a-total-disaster/ Peters, M. A. (2012). Open works, open cultures, and open learning systems. In T. W. Luke & J. Hunsinger (Eds.), Putting knowledge to work and letting information play (pp. 55–72). Sense.

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Peters, M. A. (2019). Knowledge socialism: The rise of peer production—collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi. org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1654375 Peters, M. A.,  & Besley, T. (2014). Social exclusion/inclusion: Foucault’s analytics of exclusion, the political ecology of social inclusion and the legitimation of inclusive education. Open Review of Educational Research, 1(1), 99–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 23265507.2014.972439 Peters, M. A., & Jandrić, P. (2018). Peer production and collective intelligence as the basis for the public digital university. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(13), 1271– 1284. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1421940 Peters, M. A., Jandrić, P., Irwin, R., Locke, K., Devine, N., Heraud, R., . . . Roberts, P. (2016). Toward a philosophy of academic publishing. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(14), 1401–1425. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857. 2016.1240987 Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvönen, M., & Besley, T. (Eds.). (2018). Post-truth, fake news: Viral modernity & higher education. Springer. Pradhan, P., Pandey, A. K., Mishra, A., Gupta, A., Tripathi, P. K., Menon, M. B., . . . Kundu, B. (2020, January 31). Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01. 30.927871 ProPublica. (2020, February 28). Key missteps at the CDC have set back its ability to detect the potential spread of coronavirus. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/02/key-missteps-at-the-cdc-have-set-back-its-ability-todetect-the-potential-spread-of-coronavirus/ Ritzer, G. (2010). Enchanting a disenchanted world: Continuity and change in the cathedrals of consumption. Pine Forge Press. Rubin, J., Baden, L. R., Morrissey, S., & Campion, E. W. (2020). Medical journals and the 2019-nCoV outbreak. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(9), 866–866. https://doi. org/10.1056/NEJMe2001329 Rupar, A. (2020, March 3). Trump’s ignorance was on public display during coronavirus meeting with pharmaceutical execs. Vox. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.vox.com/2020/3/3/21162772/trump-coronavirus-meeting-pharmaceuticalexecutives-white-house-covid-19 Schiller, F. (2011/1795). The veiled image at Saïs (J. Merivale, Trans.). In H. W. Longfellow (Ed.), Poems of places: An anthology in 31 volumes (Vol. 24). James R. Osgood. Schwadron, T. H. (2020, March 4). Trump’s White House unleashes a dangerous virus of misinformation. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/ 2020/03/trumps-white-house-unleashes-a-dangerous-virus-of-misinformation/ Shear, M. D.,  & Haberman, M. (2020, February  27). Pence will control all coronavirus messaging from health officials. New York Times. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/us-coronavirus-pence.html Spafford, E. H. (1994). Computer viruses as artificial life. Artificial Life. https://doi.org/ 10.1162/artl.1994.1.249 Springer Nature. (2020). SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19. A new virus and associated respiratory disease. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from www.springernature.com/gp/ researchers/campaigns/coronavirus Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism (A. Goffey, Trans.). Open Humanities Press. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from http://openhumani tiespress.org/books/download/Stengers_2015_In-Catastrophic-Times.pdf Stengers, I. (2017). Autonomy and the intrusion of Gaia. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(2), 381–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3829467

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Stiegler, B. (2012). Relational ecology and the digital pharmakon (P. Crogan, Trans.). Culture Machine, 13, 1–19. Stiegler, B. (2016). The digital, education, and cosmopolitanism. Representations, 134(1), 157–164. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2016.134.1.157 Stroop, C. (2020, March 3). There’s every reason to be skeptical of Mike Pence’s Coronavirus prayer circle. RawStory. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.rawstory.com/2020/03/ theres-every-reason-to-be-skeptical-of-mike-pences-coronavirus-prayer-circle/ Swanson, D. (1986). Undiscovered public knowledge. The Library Quarterly, 56(2), 103– 118. https://doi.org/10.1086/601720 Tesar, M.,  & Peters, M. A. (2019). Heralding ideas of well-being: A  philosophical perspective. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019. 1696731 Thielking, M. (2020, February 26). Trump’s no stranger to misinformation. But with the coronavirus, experts say that’s dangerous. STAT. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www. statnews.com/2020/02/26/trump-mixed-messages-on-coronavirus/ Venter, C. (2008). On the verge of creating synthetic life. TED. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life Virilio, P. (2007). The original accident (J. Rose, Trans.). Polity. Wellcome Trust. (2020, January 31). Press release: Sharing research data and findings relevant to the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/sharing-research-data-and-findings-relevantnovel-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak Woodward, A. (2020, February 28). Trump barred a top health expert from speaking freely about the coronavirus. It’s one of many ways the administration has muzzled scientists. Business Insider. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.businessinsider.com/ trump-gags-top-us-coronavirus-official-history-censoring-science-2020-2 World Health Organization. (2020). Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak. Retrieved February 28, 2020, from www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019 Xiao, C., Li, X., Liu, S., Sang, Y., Gao, S.-J., & Gao, F. (2020). HIV-1 did not contribute to the 2019-nCoV genome. Emerging Microbes & Infections, 9(1), 378–381. https://doi. org/10.1080/22221751.2020.1727299 Yan, H., Chen, N., & Naresh, D. (2020, February 21). What’s spreading faster than coronavirus in the US? Racist assaults and ignorant attacks against Asians. CNN. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/us/coronavirus-racist-attacks-againstasian-americans/index.html Žižek, S. (2009). How to begin from the beginning. New Left Review, 57, 43–55.

3 A VIRAL THEORY OF POST-TRUTH Michael A. Peters, Peter McLaren, and Petar Jandrić

There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself. —Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Towards a theory of viral modernity (Michael A. Peters) In evolutionary biology, there is a strong hypothesis that holds that viruses may have been free-living organisms that, as parasites, were the precursors of life. Their diversity runs into trillions and, unlike all other biological organisms, some have RNA genomes and some have DNA genomes; some are single-stranded and other are double-stranded genomes; they can only self-replicate within a host cell; and, none contain ribosomes and therefore cannot make proteins. Among the three main theories of where they came from and whether they are alive, one recent account holds that viruses either predate bacteria, archaea, or eukaryotes or coevolved with host cells (Koonin & Martin, 2005), but while they can evolve rapidly because of their short generation times and large population sizes, viruses cannot reproduce by themselves (Nature, 2020). The social history of viruses and its impact on the human species began during our evolution and epidemics have been record as early as Neolithic times, when human beings began to lead sedentary lives in relatively densely settled agricultural communities with domesticated plants and animals some 12,000 years ago. Smallpox and measles are among the very earliest of viruses that affected human beings. Influenza pandemics have been recorded as early as 1580 when Spanish colonial conquests began in South America decimating the indigenous peoples. The 1918–1919 influenza epidemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and it was not until the 1930s that the science of virology was established with the invention of the electron microscope and immunology and vaccination

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developed. While there was some progress in recognizing viruses and growing them in culture in the early 20th century, it was not until the crystallization of the tobacco plant mosaic virus in 1935 that virology blossomed. Emerging viruses of the 20th and 21st centuries have included zoonotic infections that jump from animals to other species such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), that is a novel type of coronavirus. In The Pandemic Century; One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris, Mark Honigsbaum (2019, p. 11) argues that ‘far from banishing panic, better medical knowledge and surveillance of infectious diseases can also sow new fears, making people hyperaware of epidemic threats of which they had previously been ignorant’. He continues, ‘the media play its part in these processes—after all, nothing sells like fear—but while 24/7 cable news channels and social media help to fuel the panic, hysteria and stigma associated with infectious disease outbreaks, journalists and bloggers are, for the most part, merely messengers’ (ibid). Honigsbaum (2019) argues it is mostly medical science and epidemiology that become ‘the ultimate source of these irrational and often prejudicial judgements’. The concept of ‘viral media’ dates from the first computer virus that dates back to 1986. When Robert T. Morris released the ‘Internet worm’ in 1988, the word entered the language and the notion of ‘computer virus’ enter the public lexicon. ‘While the worm did not contain any code to change data or otherwise corrupt the systems it invaded, its self-replication flooded many networks with an overload of traffic’ (Chu et al., 2020). Viral media take their name from the fact that they are able to replicate themselves and convert themselves into copies based on how viruses propagate themselves and establish patterns of circulation within human populations. In this sense, it can easily become the self-replicating sentence including the expression of thought, information and data that circulate through social media, often in the form of memes as a form of informational viral patterns. Viral media also typically includes video that gets circulated many millions of times within a short period. All information that is easily shareable and websites that promote electronic sharing and exchange through decentralizing platforms enable users to flick on or spread memes, leading to what many now see as an aspect of network culture and the cultural politics associated with it, which often means that content users become creators who can use or modify content. Network culture then is a recent reflection of the last few decades of Internet use brought about by increasing interconnectivities on open platforms that increase the speed, velocity and scope of information, often also personalizing messages and spreading hype, gossip and bullying comments that disrupt peer cultures. Viral information and viral media have developed a special link between the way that information behaves in digital networks and the role that information plays as a messaging system in genomic biology. In social digital networks, viral media does not discriminate between information and knowledge: it can generate and circulate information irrespective of its truth value. It is an ideal medium for hype, exaggeration, falsehood, lies and gossip that are characteristic of the age of post-truth (Peters et al., 2018). Where knowledge on the standard account

A viral theory of post-truth  43

requires conditions of belief, truth and justification, information requires none of these conditions and misinformation and disinformation are fundamental categories of information. In the post-truth ‘condition’, there is a rift between evidence and truth. There are similarities between the propagation of fake news and social media ‘echo chambers’ and the evolution and transmission of infectious diseases. As Kucharski (2016) suggests, ‘disease strains can evolve and compete in a host population, much like rumours, and infections and opinions are both shaped by social contacts’. Today’s news on Facebook outperforms real news and deliberately propagated false stories and conspiracies that plumb the social-psychopathic scepticism sows doubt of all institutions, especially government, sometimes causing great damage to the public realm (Peters, 2020a). My take on viral modernity and a viral theory of post-truth grows out of a perspective developed from Wittgenstein and Foucault as anti-philosophers where both are seen as radical anti-foundationalist thinkers who are suspicious of transcendental arguments and are involved in the attempt to overcome metaphysics, embracing genealogical history, contextualism, localism and radical contingency while rejecting of the notion of truth as correspondence to reality (Peters, 2019a). After the linguistic turn, these anti-philosophers recognize that truthful propositions do not stand by themselves but are part of a system of beliefs (a ‘theory’) governed by underlying a grammar or set linguistic rules—a fundamental semiotic interpretation that focuses on coherence. My argument is that this is also an ecological approach with an emphasis on ecologies of truth that are dynamic and evolve. Wittgenstein and Foucault are thinkers of different philosophical traditions who are different in many respects but both entertain and explore forms of anti-­ representationalism and anti-essentialism, and, in particular, the rejection the Cartesian basis of modern philosophy (Peters et al., 2019). So truth cannot be regarded in terms of a single statement and its agreement with reality. The prephilosophical notion as Aletheia is an ontological rather than epistemological notion, which is ‘truth’ as a verb (‘telling the truth’). Both Foucault and Wittgenstein embrace this emphasis on subjectivity and its relation to the Greek invocation ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Care of the self’ (Peters, 2019b). In addition, it could be argued both thinkers also develop a view of truth in relation to a network of beliefs that are consonant with the ecological, community and semiotic model of truth. This is one of the reasons I developed the concept of bioinformationalism (Peters, 2012)—the viral theory of post-truth, as Bateson (1972) puts it, ‘is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself’.

The virologist perspective to bioinformational reality (Petar Jandrić) In our recent article, we defined viral modernity as ‘a concept that is based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms

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of bioinformation in the social world’ (Peters et al., 2020). This concept, which ‘draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand and information science on the other’, is ‘an illustration and prime example of [contemporary] bioinformationalism’ (Peters et al., 2020). Every age has its own viral modernity. Following developments in information and communication technology, the COVID-19 pandemic is the first global exercise of bioinformationalist viral modernity where viral behaviour of the biological novel coronavirus, 2019nCoV is dialectically intertwined with non-biological viral information and viral media. The resulting combination is ‘digital and analog; technological and non-­ technological; biological and informational’ postdigital reality, in which the digital and non-digital interact in ‘hard to define; messy; unpredictable’ ways (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 895). Let us refine this theoretical conclusion using an example. Biological viruses, including but not limited to the novel coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, cannot make proteins and require a host cell to replicate. Information viruses work in the same way. When Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, writes, ‘The coronavirus is the common cold, folks’ (Limbaugh, 2020, this is the birth of the information virus. Posted on Limbaugh’s website, this information virus is harmless. Yet as soon as it reaches its host cells, readers, Limbaugh’s information virus causes irresponsible behaviour which causes the spread of the biological virus. Some of these host cells, or readers, will repost Limbaugh’s information virus to other websites and social networks, thus causing its spread. In the language of virology, Rush Limbaugh (due to his digital audience reach) is a super-spreader of the information virus, and the spread of the information virus is dialectically intertwined with the spread of the biological virus. While the information virus and the biological virus both contribute to the COVID-19 pandemic, our responses to their hosts are radically different. People who knowingly spread the biological virus are subject to harsh legal consequences, yet Rush Limbaugh’s right to spread the information virus is protected by the free speech legislation. This opens up an interesting moral and practical question: what needs to be done with information viruses and their spreaders? Spreaders of biological viruses get a compulsory measure of physical ­quarantine—whether they like it or not, they need to remain isolated to protect others. What would an equivalent of a physical quarantine look like in the digital world? Should we temporarily suspend Rush Limbaugh’s right to free speech? Should we allow him to speak freely, but restrict him from publishing his thoughts online? Our postdigital reality is a ‘rupture and continuation’ of predigital challenges (Jandrić et al., 2018, p. 895)—questions like this are both same and different as questions from previous viral modernities. In earlier articles we elaborated upon the debate whether viruses should be understood as an inanimate matter or as a form of life (Jandrić, 2020; Peters, 2000). This debate extends to the question whether viruses have their own will, or merely a natural tendency, to behave in certain ways. While this debate is largely unsettled, or more precisely ‘resolved’ with the Messianic conclusion that viruses

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reside in between the inanimate and animate world, in the following discussion I will anthropomorphize viral behaviour—not because I think that viruses really have a soul (in ancient Latin, the word anima means soul or vital force), but because such anthropomorphism provides an easy (and common) way of explaining viral behaviour. Biological viruses require a host organism for their reproduction. While they do cause some unpleasant consequences for their host organisms (fever, pneumonia and other symptoms), biological viruses do not ‘want’ to kill the host organism because that would diminish their own chances for survival. Instead, biological viruses evolve towards various forms of more or less ‘peaceful’ existence with their hosts. The flu virus, for instance, has been with the humankind for many centuries now, and has evolved towards dangerous and unpleasant yet manageable coexistence. As shown previously, information viruses follow the same principles. They need host computers and human consumers to reproduce and they also cause various symptoms such as hardware malfunction and post-truth. Obviously, it is in best interest of informational viruses to keep the relationship with host computers and humans at a level of manageable coexistence—if all humans die, there will be no one to share tweets and Facebook posts. In spite of similarities in their behaviour, however, information viruses are fundamentally different than biological viruses, and it would be a stretch to expect information viruses to ‘recognize’ this interest. Strategies against biological viruses include vaccines, anti-viral drugs, quarantine, and so on. This list is by no means exhaustive, and merely serves to illustrate the point that every strategy against biological viruses has a roughly equivalent strategy against information viruses. Biological vaccines are roughly equivalent to informational firewalls, content filtering software, and so on; biological antiviral drugs are roughly equivalent to informational anti-virus programs; quarantine or restriction of movement of humans and goods is roughly equivalent to disconnecting a person or a computer from the Internet. These rough equivalences cannot be taken for granted, yet in the bioinformationalist dialectic between biological viruses and information viruses, they can serve as points of departure for development of a common anti-pandemic strategy. Biological viruses and information viruses share many common characteristics including, but not limited to, similar mechanisms of reproduction and survival. Both types of viruses need human beings for their survival and evolve very quickly. Biological viruses and information viruses are fundamentally different yet dialectically interconnected, because survival and reproduction success of one is crucial for survival and reproduction success of the other. In our bioinformational society, therefore, symptoms caused by biological viruses such as COVID-19 cannot be thought of without symptoms caused by information viruses such as post-truth, and bioinformationalist anti-pandemic strategies should take a holistic approach against both biological and information viruses. This virologist perspective offers a new lens for approaching our bioinformationalist reality, and this new lens opens up a myriad of new questions. What is the

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relationship between biology and information in our bioinformationalist reality? Which lessons from the world of biology can we take into the world of information, and vice versa? Answering these questions will require a lot of dedicated research. While it is impossible to predict what this research will bring about, I do believe that the virologist perspective may offer a lot of value in our postdigital, bioinformationalist reality.

The biopolitics of truth (Peter McLaren) I would not wish to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by an unimpeachable narrow-mindedness but at this historical moment the attempt to disambiguate the meaning of truth has become increasingly more politicized in a disturbingly truncated fashion in this age of toxicity, in this age of Trump. In the 1980s it was the post-truth proclamations of the postmodernists who held sway, whereas today attempts to highjack the epistemological ‘relativism’ arguments are increasingly undertaken by those who could be described as ‘alt-Right adjacent’ and they now dominate the paleoconservative mediascape in places beyond Fox News in growing social media platforms spawned from the fear-mongering swamplands of racism and white nationalism. Truth relativism (truth is relative to a particular frame of reference) and judgemental relativism (truth is relative to competing paradigms) are now being weaponized by the Trump administration (famously captured by Kellyanne Conway’s famous words, ‘alternative facts’ and Trump’s use of the term ‘fake news’ to discredit stories produced by journalists critical of the Trump administration). Absent some ideal orator-citizen such as Cicero, critical educators can certainly counter the gaslighting philippics produced by Trumpland by engaging in a historical materialist rebuttal that enables us to utilize Hegel and Marx effectively in our attempt to engage the post-truth avatars at Fox News. We can, for instance, approach the notion of truth through the Marxist works of Paula Allman (1999, p. 236), who maintained that there are different levels of truth: meta-transhistorical truths, which appear to hold across the history of humanity but which must always be held to criticism; transhistorical truths, which are susceptible to future revision; truths that are specific to a particular social formation; and conjuncturally specific truths, which are transient but attain validity in the contextual specificity of the processes of which they are a part. Although adopting a negative dialectics to produce a critique of political economy and making it sound byte friendly is a challenge which I must defer to others. While I agree that epistemological viewpoints about the world are both valueladen and theory-laden, unlike some postmodernists I don’t believe that we can alter the world simply by changing our beliefs about it. (We are, after all, philosophers of praxis!) And it would be a mistake to bleed epistemological objectivity into ontological objectivity and then claim that because there is no epistemologically objective or ‘God’s Eye’ view of the world, there cannot exist an objective world ontologically. Just try walking through a wall or stopping traffic on a busy

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highway by exercising the power of your mind. Groups who occupy different geopolitical, ethnic and socio-cultural contexts and who embrace radically different worldviews or cosmovisions do not inhabit objectively different material worlds (at least so long as we agree that the same laws of physics hold true for all social universes—but of course the laws of physics are being rethought and the consequences for our understanding of consciousness could be dramatically revised in the process). Regardless of the ‘regime of truth’ in which we find ourselves ensepulchured, we are forever obliged to distance from our ‘iron cage’ (pace Weber) by always asking ourselves: By whose standard do we assess what is true and what isn’t? My answer is that no one individual or group can decide what is objectively valuable or meaningful for others. We therefore accept that no absolute, ahistorical criteria of truth and rationality exist. We can’t look blindly to some authoritative body who can pronounce definitively what is true and what is false. It has to be an ongoing global/communal conversation. It’s imperative that we constantly negotiate our position, even if we think it is universally true. My interest lies in the self and social formation that I call the ‘revolutionary intellectual’ whose essential gesture is to contribute to the formation of a counterpublic sphere by making the case through a philosophy of praxis for a socialist alternative to capitalism. While subjects who inhabit the world differently cannot have access to the same or the full truth of human history, we do admit to the possibility of having access to partial truths. The world is, in fact, knowable, but our knowledge of the world will always be partial and relational. We are immersed in ‘fields of knowing’, and our engagement is historically situated. The situated nature of knowledge has led me to approach the question of truth in the context of understanding how knowledge is created, constituted and produced—in other words, in the context of how knowledge comes to be viewed as knowledge through the process of our self and social formation (what the Germans refer to as ‘bildung’). This presupposes the notion of education, that is, the idea that a person can, in fact, be educated. This means recovering philosophy from its capture by anti-foundationalists, or to use another familiar term, from the postmodernists. Philosophy has taken a beating over the decades from thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Foucault. Foucault (1988) drew upon a Nietzschean genealogical method of the self that points to discursive transformation in terms of regimes of knowledge and the relation of the self to the question of truth—of telling the truth—and the relation between ‘telling the truth’ and forms of reflexivity, in order to reveal the use and abuse of history (Peters, 2020c). And, as Peters notes, ‘[w]hile Foucault distinguished himself from Marx through a philosophy of the subjectivity trying to development a culture on the Left that was not Marxist, his work still bears traces of Marx and it is not silly to want to see overlapping connections’. For Wittgenstein, truth can be found through an examination of everyday language games which make work and daily activities and social practices possible. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that truth is a form of error which a type of living species requires in order to survive on an everyday basis. Nietzsche saw

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the world as a fable, Wittgenstein saw it as nonsense, as routine linguistic behaviour, life-sustaining forms of life yet without ground or foundation. Wittgenstein challenges the Platonic distinction between knowledge and belief, rejecting Aristotle’s claim that science is knowledge through causes, arguing that humans claim to know what they already believe. In other words, belief precedes knowledge (Reitz, 2016). He maintained that learning is, in fact, based upon belief, and beliefs are, in fact, the artifact of indoctrination—they are the result of being familiar with the language games that comprise our forms of life, that which we know from our experience. Does this mean we throw out the idea of ontological necessity? Truth according to Wittgenstein is reduced to linguistic forms of life created through intersubjective human activity, randomly organized without any metaphysical basis. Here, description replaces explanation, and trust in our language games is taken as certainty or truth (Reitz, 2016). The meanings of words are quite plainly the way that we put them to use in our everyday social practices. If we follow Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy is a result of misunderstanding language, and that truth is really an artifact of assimilating the intersubjective teachings of our communities as we navigate our daily lives (Reitz, 2016), then we face some serious challenges today with the ascendency of Trump. Unspooling Trump’s demagoguery can give us a clue of how educators, as public pedagogues, can begin to resist. Let’s take a look at Trump’s favourite linguistic manoeuver. Pretend that your argument would be the superior one and would win out if only it were adjudicated fairly (perhaps by right-wing Supreme Court justices), that is, if only you weren’t being challenged or scolded by the media that are calling you racist or sexist and homophobic. Retreating into discursive tribalism and avoiding evidential claims of any kind appears to be Trump’s signature position. Here it is easy to recognize that criticizing the president of the United States is tantamount to being ‘an enemy of the people’. Do so at your own risk. At the same time, it would be foolish to dismiss the importance of Wittgenstein or Foucault as simply enemies of truth since their radically different philosophies helped to initiate the social and cultural turn in philosophy based on an understanding of practice (Peters, 2020b). As Peters (2020b) points out with unwavering verve, Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self and the ancient practice of parrhesia, of speaking the truth, which was derived from Nietzsche’s Hellenistic and Roman Stoic philosophical therapeia, addresses the important concept of ‘care of the self’ as a critical philosophy traceable to Kant, a project which embraces a much wider view of subjectivity than Wittgenstein. Foucault and Wittgenstein, according to Peters (2020c), ‘established anti-philosophy itself as a coherent counter-narrative or counter-tradition, a shadow boxer that seeks to achieve a form of positive nihilism that destroys the liberal Enlightenment tradition as a simple accumulation of inherited “truths” that represent the major moves in the game of philosophy as such truth are asserted, argued for, opposed, accepted and fought for within the language of metaphysics to determine its legitimacy, its transcendence and its authority’. And Peters (2020c) also reminds us that Wittgenstein’s ‘socialist’ conception of a multiplicity of language-games ‘owes

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something to the social turn, social epistemology and, at one stage, to his fascination with Russia after the Communist Revolution when he thought at one stage he wanted to live in Moscow’. Foucault’s work also presents us with the concept of ‘historical ontology’ (Hacking, 2002) that can be distinguished from historical epistemology and historical meta-epistemology. Influenced by this contribution by Foucault, Hacking (2002) introduces us to a conception of reason that is ‘neither subjective nor constructivist’ but is linked to the idea of various ‘styles of reasoning’ (see Peters, 2020b) related to ‘specific styles of demonstration such as experimental, axiomatic, and analogical-comparative techniques’ (Peters, 2020b, pp. 164–165). Peters follows a similar trajectory in his concept of ‘ethico-poetic self-constitution’ or put simply, ‘writing the self’ (Peters, 2000). Charles Reitz (2016) and others critical theorists have called for the recovery of philosophy, largely through an engagement with the Frankfurt School, and in so doing Reitz singles out Marcuse’s clarion call for more emphasis on the study of political linguistics, aesthetics, epistemology and the history of philosophy—in the context of deepening the critical praxis of our shared, practical, public life. This all makes sense. But while this will help us to directly challenge the logical positivists, we are sure to find the most stubborn and pugilistic resistance from the Trumpsters for whom entering the domain of logic is tantamount to giving sway to social justice warriors, such as proponents of climate science. Trumpsters find it easier to live inside the digital platforms with the flat earthers. Heaven forbid we make any concessions to climate science! But remaining solely in the realm of classical science, pulsating with the lifeblood of deductive reasoning, won’t help us solve the problem of building a socialist alternative to capitalism. Adhering to abstract logic as the court of final appeal, alas, has its problems. According to Reitz, ‘truths of logic, untethered to any truths of physical fact, or social history, displace the real connections between language and the world’ (2016, p. 85). He goes on to say that ‘nothing is left but logic as a deductive system or necessary arrangement of parts once first principles have been arbitrarily determined’ (2016, pp. 85–86). In other words, an argument can be made using deductive logic, or following an artificial logical, syntactical calculus, but that doesn’t mean that the argument is necessarily cogent or sound. For that, you need a critical faculty. That’s where critical pedagogy comes in. The question of what is true is not so much syntactical as it is pedagogical because education is about forming minds and for that you need premises that are warranted. And just look around and see the suffering of 99 percent of the world and it doesn’t need rocket science to determine what first premises ought to be warranted. Here we are better off in the realm of liberation theology with its preferential option for the poor and suffering. That is, we are better off having an ethical imperative! Reitz feels that Dewey and Hegel would not require a course on formal logic because they believe knowledge isn’t just an abstract calculus but a knowledge of some ‘dynamic reality’ and that formal logic tends to ‘separate reason from its real social and cultural substrate and the conflicts that are seen as the very engines of the education of human reason’ (2016, p. 88). Philosophy, then, following Hegel, must be educated reason and,

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following Dewey, must be thought of as coterminous with a general theory of education (Reitz, 2016). Certainly we need evidential statements, causal connections, value statements and deductive and inductive forms of inference but this entire process of discerning truth ‘needs to be a solution-oriented and knowledge-based process’ and furthermore, it needs to emerge ‘from a thoughtful consideration of a specific content/problem area’ (Reitz, 2013, p. 90). And this stipulates engaging in contemporary cultural and political conflicts. And that’s our role as critical educators. We must consider carefully ‘the history of competing warrants for the evaluation of knowledge claims and political goals’ (Reitz, 2016, p. 91) beyond mere pedestrian discernment. What are the historical warrants? What are the historical, international and multicultural contexts that must be taken into account when examining the existing standards of criticism in the fields of ethics, epistemology and ontology? These are the questions that philosophers would do well to consider and educators would do well to put into practice as we engage in doing our part in creating a counter-public sphere in these perilous times. We are philosophers of praxis, after all, needing to know reality in order to change it. Neither deductivism nor postmodernism adequately explains the foundations of critique.

Conclusion (all authors) This article consists of three radically different takes to a viral theory of post-truth. Michael Peters explores fundamental philosophical questions about our current postdigital reality and develops the concepts of bioinformationalism, viral information, viral media and viral modernity. Michael points toward similarities in ways information behaves in digital networks and biological systems, and the rifts between evidence and truth, in our post-truth conditions. Petar Jandrić compares behaviour of biological viruses and information viruses and explores main similarities and differences between these types of viruses and between human responses to them. Petar points towards dialectical relationships between biological viruses and information viruses, and argues for holistic bioinformationalist anti-pandemic strategies. Our three different perspectives are indeed different in approach, focus and conclusions. Yet it is at the intersection of these perspectives that we seek a common viral theory of post-truth. Using the lens of revolutionary critical pedagogy, Peter McLaren explores posttruth as a philosophical and political phenomenon which is closely linked to education. Peter seeks solution to the problem of post-truth in the formation of the ‘revolutionary intellectual’, who contributes to the formation of a counter-public sphere through a philosophy of praxis and seeks a socialist alternative to capitalism. With the advent of computers, human society has entered a new phase of development characterized by radical interdependence between previously disconnected aspects of human reality. This postdigital reality is characterized by various ‘leakages’ between the inanimate and the animate, between the world of biology and the world of information, between the Global South and the Global North. To an extent, concepts such as bioinformationalism and viral modernity

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reveal conceptual connections and invite philosophical questions about relationships between life and information that have always been there. Yet these questions have also undergone significant transformations and viral modernity of the Spanish Flu is very different from the viral modernity of COVID-19. The virologist perspective to our bioinformationalist reality recognizes the dialectic between biological viruses and information viruses, or more generally between inanimate matter and life. This perspective may help us explore ways in which strategies against virus pandemics developed in the biological context, such as quarantine, can be applied to informational pandemics such as post-truth. Yet the virologist perspective to our bioinformationalist reality is also deeply political and its development will depend on ways we educate ourselves and others for new reconfigurations aimed at (socialist) alternatives to capitalism. Our approaches to a viral theory of post-truth could not be further from each other; yet it is at their intersections that we can point together towards importance of developing the virologist perspective to our bioinformationalist reality into the future.

References Allman, P. (1999). Revolutionary social transformation: Democratic hopes, political possibilities and critical education. Bergin and Garvey. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps towards an ecology of mind. Ballantine Books. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press. Chu, S. S., Dixon, B., Lai, P., Lewis, D., & Valdes, C. (2020). The social impact of viruses. Retrieved March 25, 2020, from https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/pro jects/2000-01/viruses/social.html#timeline. Foucault, M. (1988). Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings, 1977– 1984. Routledge. Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Harvard University Press. Honigsbaum, M. (2019). The pandemic century; One hundred years of panic, hysteria and, hubris. W.W. Norton and Company. Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital research in the time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8 Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000 Koonin, E. V., & Martin, W. (2005, October 11). On the origin of genomes and cells within inorganic compartments. Trends in Genetics, 21(12), 647–654. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/16223546 Kucharski, A. (2016). Post-truth: Study epidemiology of fake news. Nature, 540(7634), 525–525. https://doi.org/10.1038/540525a Limbaugh, R. (2020). Overhyped coronavirus weaponized against Trump. Retrieved March 13, 2020, from https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/02/24/overhypedcoronavirus-weaponized-against-trump/ March for Science. (2020). Unite behind the science. Retrieved March 25, 2020, from https://marchforscience.org/. Nature. (2020). Viral evolution. Retrieved March 25, 2020, from www.nature.com/ subjects/viral-evolution.

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Peters, M. A. (2019a). Alain Badiou’s Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy, educational philosophy and theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1644500 Peters, M. A. (2019b). Truth and self-knowledge. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1682489 Peters, M. A. (2000). Writing the self: Wittgenstein, confession and pedagogy. Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 34(2), 353–368. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00178 Peters, M. A. (2020a). On the epistemology of conspiracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. www.tandfon-line.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2020.1741331 Peters, M. A. (2020b). Wittgenstein, anti-foundationalism, technoscience and philosophy of education: An educational philosophy and theory reader (Vol. VIII). Routledge. Peters, M. A. (2020c, in press). Wittgenstein/Foucault/anti-philosophy: Contingency, community, and the ethics of self-cultivation. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Peters, M. A., Jandrić, P., & McLaren, P. (2020). Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi. org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1744226 Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvoenen, M., & Besley, T. (Eds.). (2018). Post-truth, fake news: Viral modernity & higher education. Springer. Peters, M. A., Tesar, M., Jackson, L., & Besley, T. (2019). Postmodernism in the afterlife. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1686947 Reitz, C. (Ed.). (2013). Crisis and commonwealth: Marx, Marcuse, McLaren. Lexington Books. Reitz, C. (2016). Philosophy and critical pedagogy: Insurrection and commonwealth. Peter Lang Publishers.

4 ON THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF CONSPIRACY Michael A. Peters

One way of looking at conspiracy is to consider it a deliberately enhanced political weapon cultivated by those who push ‘fake news’ in a post-truth media environment. Thus, the story that Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery was just not a viral set of beliefs fuelled by erroneous alleged connections and causal links that seem to amount to more than sheer coincidence. It was deliberately promulgated and crafted as misinformation by political interests to cast doubt on a person and institution. The fake news, post-truth environment that thrives on deliberate misinformation and its fabrication for political purposes is a major characteristic of our times (Peters et al., 2018). Arguably, we seem to have left the civic safety of a relative value consensus of the period of Liberal Internationalism to embrace a regime change that actively disputes commonly accepted beliefs. There are different kinds of conspiracy and conspiracy theory—political, scientific and religious. The epistemic status of conspiracy theories is fraught with difficulties of facttracking plots and testing evidential claims that often seem improbable. It is clear that conspiracies exist. It is true they exist and also sometimes (even often) conspiracy theories might actually be true, for instance, in the Watergate case. The conspiracy involved a June 1972 break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters. It was famously detected by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who led an investigation revealing the abuse of power by the Nixon administration that also revealed Nixon’s role in the conspiracy, forcing him to resign. In this useful example, both the conspiracy and the conspiracy theory were true, that is, the break-in actually took place by members of the Nixon administration. It was planned and carried out with the intention of discrediting the Democratic Party. Woodward and Bernstein, once becoming aware of the conspiracy, used conventional fact-checking and normal methods of investigative journalism to expose the conspiracy for what it was. In this sense, the conspiracy theory, against received mainstream and common-sense accounts,

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turned out to be true. The method of verification was an evidence-based investigation that established incriminating links between events, actions, agents and intentions. Here the exposure of political conspiracy is a combination of detective work and investigative journalism that conforms to standard scientific means for verifying a theory (but it is not a fail-safe method and takes time). Sometimes, while the conspiracy is true—it is true that there is a conspiracy, however unlikely it may seem—a theory about the conspiracy may also be true. This represents a certain congruency between fact and event. It is the case that often conspiracy theories are false and that they do not fairly or objectively represent events in the world. In many cases they may be scientifically or factually untested. Indeed, among the believers it may well be impossible to rigorously test claims against reality. So, for instance, in the case of flat-earthers or those that believe the first man walking on the Moon was a NASA hoax, or those who think that vaccinations are bad and ineffective. The source of the conspiracy might be hard to detect. If discoverable, it may be fabricated deliberately on the basis of false information. The difficulty comes with sincerity of belief by both propagators and believers. Often the more improbable the claim and the less it is open to any form of testing, the more it incites false belief. The structure of belief by believers is also an interesting issue as quite often the believers become cult-inspired and act as viral carriers of beliefs that get accepted by others without much by way of evidence. What counts as evidence also is another epistemic feature—sometimes these conspiratorial beliefs cannot be easily dismissed without elaborate argument and testing. In the case of flat-earthers, and Moon walk deniers, the evidential chain might be relatively easy to achieve. In other cases, like climate change/warming denial, the evidential chain requires a scientific understanding of complex physical events beyond the normal understanding of most non-scientists. The issue of believing on the basis of authority is also a relevant concern that takes place, for example, on the basis of religious, political or scientific authority. This is then part of the evidential chain in term of authority, witness, hearsay, opinion and both ‘argument’ (where the case seems to follow standard argument form but misses a step or draws a wrong conclusion) and narrative. The fervour and passion with which some conspiratorial beliefs are held commonly reflect an underlying belief structure that works as an ideological superstructure and predisposes believers toward the acceptance of an improbably story. The fact that many anti-science stories coalesce with fundamentalist worldviews tend to endorse this view. Quite often also political pundits actively know that various groups are open to persuasion through the manipulation of prejudices. Conspiracy theories that are false can be damaging and can affect the moral and ethical climate in a society. For some this is a practical problem that crops up from time to time. For others, it is part of a shift in political regime that trades on ambiguity and deliberate lies based on a constant and immediate set of tweets that are seemingly made up on the spot. The difficulty is tracking all of the lies as they create an atmosphere of conspiracy. Indeed, the regime trades on conspiracy

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where the leader is the ‘fountain of truth’, of telling the population the plain unvarnished truth, which often endorses existing prejudices. This kind of analysis might suggest that the problem of conspiracy and conspiracy theorizing is that is has been harnessed as a political weapon in an age of social media that can bypass traditional fact-checking journalism. Juha Raikka (2018, fn 1) has pointed out that the philosophical literature has tended to follow Karl Popper’s famous criticism and pointed out that conspiracy theories tend to be unwarranted. He writes: Modern debate on conspiracy theories started when Karl Popper (1902– 1994) criticized what he called the conspiracy theory of society, namely the claim that ‘all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results’ (Popper, 2013, p. 307). In 1999 Brian L. Keeley published a paper titled “Of Conspiracy Theories” in The Journal of Philosophy and, after that, the philosophical debate on conspiracy theories has largely centered upon the question of whether the acceptance of particular conspiracy theories commits conspiracy theorists to a view that public institutions, companies and media are untrustworthy in general, and whether it is problematic if it does. Keeley (1999, pp. 116–118) argued that it is usually irrational to believe in conspiracy theories, as they entail “an almost nihilistic degree of skepticism about the behavior and motivations of other people and the social institutions they constitute”. Critics have opposed the argument by denying that belief in a conspiracy theory entails “skepticism”, and by claiming that skepticism of “people and institutions” is actually unproblematic, as we have excellent historical reasons not to trust in public institutions and authorities. Yet, against Popper’s analysis and in the light of Foucault’s historical ‘truthregimes’ I would argue that the societal truth-regimes are characterized in a social media age of interconnectivity with conspiracy thinking; that as a result of mass participation conspiracies and conspiracy theories are more common and that such scepticism can be healthy especially in relation to corrupt political institutions and authoritarian governments; that neither conspiracies nor conspiracy theories are necessarily unwarranted nor irrational (although they may be false); and that one of the aims of education ought to be teaching our students how to recognize both conspiracies and conspiracy theories and how to test and check them out. These propositions together tend to suggest a historical epistemological thesis that might also be seen to highlight the contemporary distrust in authority, authoritarian and even authoritative sources, reflecting a shift from top-down hierarchies of news and information distribution to flatter horizontal and more democratic structures sometimes privileging highly stylized peer, interest and religious groups. There is always a kind of deep attraction to some mistrustful souls that operates when conspiracy theories purport to explain something different to

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mainstream accounts by reference to a secret group of actors who are operating unlawfully in their own interests at the expense of the public. What really is important here is the concept of ‘openness’ especially as it operates in open science, education and publishing activities that attempt to test and rigorously analyze conspiracies and theories to fathom the facts and to provide the best interpretation in the light of the available evidence. It also most certainly involved the attempts to quell nasty toxic stories and viral narratives that are AI generated in order to manipulate the population and discredit and demonize honest individuals. Raikka (2018) seems to think that openness as in democratic discussion is the best way to respond to conspiracy theories. In this respect the epistemic basis of democracy and democratic approaches based on openness shares some epistemic characteristic of open science, yet in politics, religion and culture it is also necessary to evaluate motive and the possibility that the narrative is being generated, not in the name of truth but in the name of private interest that mitigate against the public sphere. The situation is more complex in practice when it is considered that official narratives and officially endorsed accounts often transparently serve sectional interests. In this case, the encourage of scepticism against official narratives is fully justified, thus overcoming the view that all conspiracies should be rejected and treated as irrational. In some cases of ‘true conspiracies’ and theories, it is clear that the pejorative view of conspiracy must be abandoned. In such cases, scepticism is eminently justified and represents a healthy epistomological attitude. Prooijen and Douglas (2018) suggest that their review of the literature on conspiracy theories demonstrate they are a social phenomenon that are noted for four basic principles: conspiracy theories are consequential as they have a real impact on people’s health, relationships, and safety; they are universal in that belief in them is widespread across times, cultures, and social settings; they are emotional given that negative emotions and not rational deliberations cause conspiracy beliefs; and they are social as conspiracy beliefs are closely associated with psychological motivations underlying intergroup conflict. Here the notions of healthy scepticism and ‘true conspiracies’ are not recognized. ‘A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Psychological Research on Conspiracy Beliefs’ by Goreis and Voracek (2019) comment on personality factors ‘such as low agreeableness (as disagreeableness is associated with suspicion and antagonism) and high openness to experience (due to its positive association to seek out unusual and novel ideas)’ even though the association remains unclear. They comment: The psychological literature on predictors of conspiracy beliefs can be divided in approaches either with a pathological (e.g., paranoia) or

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socio-political focus (e.g., perceived powerlessness). Generally, there is a lack of theoretical frameworks in this young area of research. Joseph E. Uscinski (2018) draws our attention to the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories and the fact that ‘when people believe conspiracy theories they may act on them’, which may encourage bad decisions when the theories drive stereotypical thinking and policies about minorities or when conspiracy theories encourage people to believe the political system is rigged, decreasing political participation. He asks: ‘Are we currently living through the conspiracy theory renaissance?’ Kathryn S. Olmstead (2017) also noted that Americans believe that conspiratorial thinking is reaching new heights and ‘many Americans began to suspect the U.S. government itself of plotting against them’, a state of scepticism that becomes more credible ‘after the revelation of real government conspiracies, notably CIA assassination plots, the Watergate scandal, and the Iran–Contra affair’. As Raikka (2014) points out, It is often claimed that political conspiracy theories are of limited falsifiability. . . . Government officials’ public statements that contradict a conspiracy theory can be interpreted as signs that support the theory. Almost all potentially falsifying evidence can be construed to be actually supporting evidence. Because conspiracy theories seem to be irrefutable, many people reject them from the outset. Yet Harris (2018) now follows a growing consensus that ‘standard criticisms of conspiracy theorising fail to demonstrate that the practice is invariably irrational’. At the same time, he adds, ‘it would be a mistake to conclude from the defence of conspiracy theorising offered here that belief in conspiracy theories is on an epistemic par with belief in other theories’. His analysis of epistemic errors committed by conspiracy theorists is enlightening: First, the refusal of conspiracy theorists to accept the official account of some target event often seems to be due to the exercise of a probabilistic, and fallacious, extension of modus tollens. Additionally, conspiracy theorists tend to be inconsistent in their intellectual attention insofar as the effort they expend on uncovering the truth excludes attention to their own capacities for biased or otherwise erroneous reasoning. Yet it is clearly the case that conspiracy theorists who are sceptical of government or official narratives or policies and actions also sometimes follow epistemic practices correctly and reveal the true substance of conspiracies to demonstrate the shabby actions of individual and groups bent upon public mischief. In the age of Trump, it may be permissible to talk of ‘government by conspiracy’. Certainly Trump’s conspiracy against Hillary Clinton and her emails was very destabilizing, and the right-wing media repeated unproven allegations and

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directed them through algorithms to targeted populations through Facebook. The conspiracy campaign was highly effective. Yet the Russian conspiracy that had some basis in fact against Trump has been less damaging. Either way, these cases demonstrate how ‘government by conspiracy’, an effective method of control, depends upon control of social media and the manipulation of millions of Facebook followers through algorithmic ‘management of truth’, active disinformation and the promotion of viral narratives.

References Goreis, A., & Voracek, M. (2019). A systematic review and meta-analysis of psychological research on conspiracy beliefs: Field characteristics, measurement instruments, and associations with personality traits. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 205. https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00205 Harris, K. (2018). What’s epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorising? (Harms and wrongs in epistemic practice). Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 84, 235–257. www.cambridge.org/core/journals/royal-institute-of-philosophy-supplements/volume/ harms-and-wrongs-in-epistemic-practice/E414E8DB2DC83AC16C62123993D04B87. www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190844073.001.0001/oso9780190 844073-chapter-19. Keeley, B. L. (1999). Of conspiracy theories. The Journal of Philosophy, 96, 109–126. Olmstead, K. S. (2017). Conspiracy theories in U.S. history. In J. E. Uscinski (Ed.), Conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/oso/9780190844073.001.0001 Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvonen, M.,  & Besley, T. (Eds.). (2018). Post-truth and fake news: Viral modernity in higher education. Springer. Popper, K. (2013). The open society and its enemies (New one-volume ed.). Princeton University Press. Prooijen, J-W., & Douglas, K. M. (2018). Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(7), 897–908. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2530 Raikka, J. (2014). On the epistemic acceptability of conspiracy theories. In J. Raikka (Ed.), Social justice in practice. Studies in applied philosophy, epistemology and rational ethics (Vol. 14). Springer. Raikka, J. (2018). Conspiracies and conspiracy theories: An introduction [Special Issue], Argumenta, (6). www.argumenta.org/issue/issue-6/ Uscinski, J. E. (2018). Conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. Oxford University Press. Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018. https://doi. org/10.1093/oso/9780190844073.001.0001

5 LOVE AND SOCIAL DISTANCING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 The philosophy and literature of pandemics Michael A. Peters

The next pandemic will erupt, not from the jungle, but from the disease factories of hospitals, refugee camps and cities. —Wendy Orent, ‘How Plagues Really Work’, https://aeon.co/essays/ the-next-pandemic-will-be-nothing-like-ebola

COVID-19 marks the return of a very old—and familiar—enemy. Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than the viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause disease. Not natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes. Not war—not even close. —www.bbc.com/future/article/20200325-covid-19the-history-of-pandemics

There is a literature and philosophy of viruses, of the plague, the epidemic and the pandemic. Albert Camus’ The Plague is a classic example of the existential philosophical novel. Camus’ attitude is that in a world without meaning, the plague provides a moral opportunity for people to find themselves in the struggle of sacrifice to work for the greater good: ‘What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men [sic] to rise above themselves’. As I commented in relation to Camus’ The Plague, ‘Empathy is a prerequisite for a healthy world and empathy demands community’ (Peters, 2020). Jacinda Arden’s maxim is act as if you have COVID-19—which is a complete ethical reversal designed to sensitize the population and create community cohesion. It’s the perfect principle that enhances moral life and as simple as the folk wisdom ‘put yourself in someone’s else’s shoes’. The ‘as if’ helps to give it the force of a moral law expressed as a moral obligation to the other.

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The philosophy of pandemic is truly a philosophy for all peoples. It reflects not only the human significance of pestilence and plague, or the rise of modern viruses like COVID-19 that show the transition across species but also themes of individual/ community self-interest and collective responsibility, the sacrifice of first-contact health workers, and all of those who in the ethic of the other, provide a level of care in a neoliberal age less bound by duty or ethos of service and more by market values. The philosophy of viruses and pandemics is often conceived of as an ethics of self-isolation and of the human effects of social isolation, as well as its community breeches. Such a philosophy may also be seen as an ethics of care for those infected, a duty of treatment. Heidi Malm and her colleagues argue [n]umerous grounds have been offered for the view that healthcare workers have a duty to treat, including expressed consent, implied consent, special training, reciprocity (also called the social contract view), and professional oaths and codes. (Malm et al., 2008) They critically examine these grounds to find that generally they are asserted but not adequately defended. In their inquiry, they argue ‘none of the defenses is currently sufficient to ground the kind of duty that would be needed in a pandemic’ because they do not take accounts of the conflicts faced by health workers who, exposed to vulnerability in the front line, experience ethical conflicts with separation from family and long hours, as well as the possibility of deadly exposure. The duty of treatment and ethic of care requires a situational logic that modifies the ‘flat’ universalism of an ethical imperative with real life cases, experience and ‘sacrifice’ where frontline workers offer themselves in the service of fellow citizens, even at huge personal cost. There is also the ethics of self-isolation and social distancing. The epidemiological profile of at-risk groups in relation to COVID-19 with a clear disproportional probability affecting the 70+ age group, and especially men who suffer from compromised respiratory diseases, has not been lost on the young millennials who were caught partying in Florida during Easter break or the predominantly younger Australians sunning themselves on Bondi Beach after various lockdown measures and social distancing had been announced. Perhaps the best case of contravening the ethics of social distancing that relies on the responsibility of people to keep a two-metre distance from each other is panic-buying, where everyone standing in long queues very close to other consumers with their laden supermarket trolleys filled to abundance with rolls of toilet paper. The panic-buying for self-isolation and staying at home easily slips into a siege mentality. It was clearly evident in New Zealand and Australian supermarkets where consumers compromised all safety standards to stockpile household goods even though they had been repeatedly told that the supply chains were intact and that supermarkets would be open and would not run out of goods.

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Yet in these cases, it could be argued these people at one level act from fear or self-interest despite clear information and also national arguments for the greater good. On the one hand, they are fearful and display their behaviour as consumers panic-buying and thus also knowingly depriving others and creating possible shortages. This is an example of cumulative collective irrationality, either based on an extreme version of competitive individualism—rather than a form of collective community responsibility and care for the other—where it is sane and rational from an individual viewpoint but weird, crazy, irrational from the community, public, collective (often also long-term) viewpoint. In epistemological terms the social repeats the biological: the virus exists as long as it can spread, otherwise it faces a natural burnout; successful isolation depends on the social responsibility of all citizens to self-isolate and respect the ethical principle that a population is only as healthy as its weakest link. This is an epistemology question in part involving epidemiological knowledge about the rate of infection and models of transmission, the way in which viruses can mediate the cell wall. Epidemiology is the science of the measurement of disease in relation to a population at risk, ‘clues to aetiology come from comparing disease rates in groups with differing levels of exposure’.1 Some philosophers have addressed themselves to moral risk and science within a democratic society and others to traditional themes of social isolation, selfalienation, the seeming absurdity.2 Phillip Kitcher discusses the ineffectiveness of screening in America that increases the rate rather than lowering it and suggests the US follow the example of two weeks’ social isolation.3 The philosophical significance of pestilence and plague in human society, its religious interpretation as God’s wrath and a spiritual punishment, its symbolic representation and political ‘emergency’ uses (Agamben’s ‘state of exception’) clarify the meaning of human being, of self-isolation, of suspicion of the other, and whether there is indeed meaning outside human communities. The ‘contagion novels’ of the 20th century give rise to the novel of postapocalyptic fiction and its place in modern literature. St. Sebastian, who died in 288 and was the patron saint of plague victims, exemplified a selfless martyrdom that was a common theme in Renaissance art and returned in the modern era.4 As John Dugdale of The Guardian notes, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Dan Brown’s Inferno, Louise Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy, Terry Hayes’s bestselling thriller I Am Pilgrim, the TV series Utopia—stories about pandemics (whether already raging or in danger of being unleashed) are currently rife, drawing on past outbreaks but also seeming to uncannily anticipate fears of the Ebola virus. While such fictions can often be formulaic or trashily sensationalist, the theme of infectious diseases has long attracted illustrious authors. (www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/01/ plague-fiction-writers-infectious-disease)

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Jeffrey S. Sartin (2019) notes that infectious themes dominated horror fiction dating back to Babylonian and Hebrew texts, to certain ‘pivotal texts’ of Victorian horror fiction and the birth of horror movies.5 Michele Augusto Riva et al. (2014), reflecting on the nature of pandemic fear and literature, provide an analysis of Jack London’s 1912 The Scarlet Plague as ‘one of the first examples of a postapocalyptic fiction novel in modern literature’.6 As they note, London’s early novel in this modern tradition reflects on ‘the ancestral fear of humans toward infectious diseases’. They write of the calamity of pestilence and plague in the ancient world where pandemics were seen to be provoked by offences against the gods.7 They also mention Boccaccio and Chaucer, who commented on themes of corruption and greed in the time of the plague, Mary Shelley’s (1826) The Last Man, and Edgar Allan Poe’s (1842) short story ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. They conclude: Even though it was published a century ago, The Scarlet Plague presents the same concerns we face today, as demonstrated by the subsequent great success of this novel and the continuing literary topos of plague. Indeed, in the following decades, London’s novel inspired other literary works, including Earth Abides by George R. Stewart in 1949, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson in 1954, and The Stand by Stephen King in 1978, as well as modern blockbuster movies such as 12 Monkeys (1995), 28 Days Later (2002), Carriers (2009), and Contagion (2011). (Augusto Riva et al., 2014, p. 1756) Severance is a 2018 pandemic zombie dystopian novel by Ling Ma; apocalyptic satire traces Candace Chen, ‘a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood’ (blurb). Station Eleven is a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel that explores a viral pandemic (the Georgia Flu) that has exploded ‘like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth’, wiping out almost the entire global population. The Travelling Symphony is a travelling road show that entertains what is left of small-town America. The postapocalyptic novel in modern literature that focuses on contagion and the pandemic is also the basis of zombie dystopian themes that have gripped postmodern novels, movies, TV and popular media. Zombies have a complex literary and film heritage derived from folklore. ‘Zombie’ is from the Haitian French and Haitian folklore to depict a dead body reanimated through magic, which experienced an upsurge of popular culture so that ‘zombie culture’ is found in horror and fantasy genres. ‘Zombie’ is first recorded in 1819 in English by a poet in a history of Brazil. Literary antecedents ranging drawing on European folklore of the undead including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an early film, White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin, starring Bela Lugosi. Popular culture draws on a new version taken from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Michael Jackson’s 1982 music video ‘Thriller’ broke all box office figures. The zombie metaphor of the undead

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is a spin on contagion and pandemic but also reflects consumerism, public health and politics. The indoctrination of the public by social media conspiracies and youth via the education system are also examples of zombism especially when students are expected to regurgitate information (Peters & Besley, 2015). The figure of the zombie heightens a cultural anxiety of loss with the mysterious outbreak of a highly infectious plague that transforms people into the living dead. (The COVID-19 virus can apparently survive on hard surfaces for up to 72 hours.) Some commentators argue that these apocalyptic fictional narratives provide an opportunity to work through the trauma of the break-down of ethical frameworks after globalization and to deal with the seemingly endless appetite for human violence demonstrated in a multipolar world with the rise of multiple forms of terrorism and shown in all forms of media. These dramas are essentially about ourselves and represent our ethical attempt to come to terms with deepseated fears about death and extinction. In Zombie Politics & Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Henry Giroux (2011) seized on the popularity of zombies in popular culture, exploring the relevance of the metaphor they provide for examining the political and pedagogical conditions that have produced a growing culture of sadism, cruelty, disposability and death in America. The apocalyptic tradition is deeply rooted in Judaic and Christian narratives as a source of revelatory literature that is oriented toward the ‘end times’ (Derrida, 1982; Derrida et al., 1984). This genre and tradition has reasserted itself as a form of thinking strongly relevant to framing thought concerning philosophy and education in the ‘end times’—an Anthropocentric era threatened by ecological, nuclear and biological extinction (Peters, 2011). The celebrated Colombian prize-winning novelist and journalist Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), an acknowledged master of the Spanish language, wrote Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del co,lera) in 1985. It was published in English translation in 1988 and was made into a movie directed by Mike Newell released in 2007. The action takes place in the Colombian walled city of Cartagena in the late 19th century, involving a love triangle between Florentino Ariza, who falls in love at first sight with Fermina Daza, who marries her father’s choice, Dr. Juvenal Urbino. When the doctor dies, Florentino immediately resumes courting Fermina. The term ‘cholera’ in Spanish in the feminine form can also mean ‘passion’ as well as the disease, witness the meaning of the word ‘choleric’ in the English language often rendered as ‘bad-tempered’ or ‘irritable’. Choleric in Greco-Roman medicine was regarded as one of four temperaments, along with sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic (related to the body’s vital fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Hippocrates regarded the four temperaments as part of the system of humorism, a concept translated from the Greek chymos (sap) that had helped to formalize insights from Ayurveda and Egyptian medicine. Márquez’s title is based in this systematic ambiguity—cholera as both disease and passion. Love is a sickness comparable to cholera and creates physical symptoms and effects as lovesickness. Márquez is often called a magical realist,

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a label that defines a style that adds to and modifies realism by adding a fabulous and fantasy ingredient through fables, myths and the use of allegory, often with supranatural elements presented in a deadpan way. It is a style that has come to describe a particular form of Latin American fiction that draws on fabulism and surrealism with a conceptual connection to postmodernism (D’haen, 1995). This is in conformity with Lyotard (1984) who suggests postmodernism is ‘the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts’ (xxiii). Fredric Jameson (1984), in the Foreword, writes that Lyotard poses postmodernism ‘not as that which follows modernism and its particular legitimation crisis, but rather as a cyclical moment that returns before the emergence of ever new modernisms’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. xvi). Magical realism is a historical moment in Latin American fiction in which the old justifications for metanarratives concerning foundationalist rules for knowledge, literature, religion or politics no longer cohere: myth and poetics are blended into new narrative ecologies that create new genres and perspectives (Faris, 2016). Cholera as both disease and passion point to suggestive parallels but not an exact copy. Symptoms for 20 percent of people who contract the cholera bacteria experience severe diarrhea, vomiting and cramps, as well as dehydration, septic shock and even death, sometimes within a matter of just a few hours. But there is fever, hot temperatures and delirium. Delirium causes mental confusion and emotional disruption. Sometimes it makes it difficult to think, or remember, or sleep. These secondary symptoms can be seen to be like a lovesickness. Cartagena in the late 19th century escaped the ravages of cholera of the first cholera pandemic that spread from the Ganges Delta (1817). The second pandemic of 1833 reached Latin America and the 1991–1993 epidemic killed nearly 10,000 people in Latin America, it is thought mainly from contaminated shell fish and poor water treatment (Guthmann, 1995). The threat of contagion creates two opposite negative emotions—the carefree, extreme individualist attitude of people who think the lockdown can be disregarded and that it provides all kinds of opportunities by breaking isolation; and the other extreme, based in deep fear about an imminent and painful death that stigmatizes, silences and shames those who are suffering from the sickness (Songtag, 1978). Both are a breakdown of the solidarity that is minimally required to protect the people.8 It also creates an ethos of community, uniting citizens in a fight against the invisible virus, visually presented in scientific terms, and calling upon the community to ‘be kind, stay home, and wash your hands’: ‘Together we can slow the spread’.9

Notes 1 www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-readers/publications/epidemiology-uninitiated/ 1-what-epidemiology 2 https://ppe.unc.edu/event/ppe-in-a-time-of-pandemic/ 3 https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/coronavirus-welcome-america/ 4 https://theconversation.com/philosopher-in-italian-coronavirus-lockdown-on-how-tothink-positively-about-isolation-133859

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5 Contagious Horror: Infectious Themes in Fiction and Film, www.clinmedres.org/con tent/17/1-2/41.long 6 Retrieved 27 March 2020, from www.researchgate.net/publication/268450283_Pan demic_Fear_and_Literature_Observations_from_Jack_ London’s_The_Scarlet_Plague 7 See ‘Invisible Bullets: What Lucretius Taught Us About Pandemics’, Stephen Goldblatt www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/invisible-bullets-what-lucretius-taught-usabout-pandemics 8 See Richard Brody’s ‘Coronavirus Diary: Antisocial Distancing’, www.newyorker.com/ culture/the-front-row/coronavirus-diary-antisocial-distancing and www.newyorker.com/ tag/coronavirus 9 https://covid19.govt.nz/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwpfHzBRCiARIsAHHzyZpaKqa6L83NZ 5NL-1i7UoEMDtytrvvhyMoieaP5c2bjGk0hk_0hiaoaAttiEALw_wcB

References Augusto Riva, M., Benedetti, M.,  & Cesana, G. (2014). Pandemic fear and literature: Observations from Jack London’s the scarlet plague. Retrieved March 27, 2020, from www.researchgate.net/publication/268450283_Pandemic_Fear_and_Literature_ Observations_from_Jack_London’s_The_Scarlet_Plague D’haen, T. L. (1995). Magical realism and postmodernism, MR: Theory, History, Community. In Magical realism: Theory, history, community (p. 193). Duke University Press. Derrida, J. (1982). Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy (J. P. Leavcy, Jr., Trans.). Semeia, 23(1982), 63–97. Derrida, J., Porter, C.,  & Lewis, P. (1984). No apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives) (C. Porter & P. Lewis, Trans.). Diacritics, 14(2), 20–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/464756 Faris, W. (2016). The Latin American boom and the invention of magic realism. In B. McHale & L. Platt (Eds.), The Cambridge history of postmodern literature (pp. 143– 158). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781316492697.011 Giroux, Henry, A. (2011). Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. New York: Peter Lang. Guthmann, J. P. (1995). Epidemic cholera in Latin America: Spread and routes of transmission. Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 98(6), 419–427. Jameson, F. (1984). Foreword. In The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (B. Massumi & G. Bennington, Trans.). Manchester University Press. Foreword Fredric Jameson. Malm, H., May, T., Francis, L. P., Omer, S. B., Salmon, D. A., & Hood, R. (2008). Ethics, pandemics, and the duty to treat. The American Journal of Bioethics, 8(8), 4–19. https:// doi.org/10.1080/15265160802317974 Peters, Michael A. (2011). The last book of postmodernism: Apocalyptic thinking, philosophy and education in the twenty-first century. Peter Lang. Peters, Michael A, & Besley, Tina (2015). Pedagogies of the Walking Dead. Pedagogia y saberes, 43. https://doi.org/10.17227/01212494.43pys49.68 Peters, Michael A. (2020). The Plague: Human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857. 2020.1745921 Sartin, Jeffrey S. (2019). Contagious Horror: Infectious Themes in Fiction and Film. Clinical Medicine & Research, vol. 17 no. 1–2, pp. 41–46. doi: 10.3121/cmr.2019.1432 Songtag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

6 THE PLAGUE Human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe Michael A. Peters

The Plague  67

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men [sic] to rise above themselves. —Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947

Many novelists and philosophers have commented on the theme of the resilience of the human spirit in times of struggle or catastrophe—the collective overcoming of human suffering, the existence of the human spirit in brutalizing environments, the resilience by communities and countries in times of war or terrorism, forms of community self-help and sacrifice when earthquakes, floods or storms strike. The capacity to recover quickly from tragedies, the adaptability, strength and flexibility to overcome vulnerabilities especially of the weak, the attitude to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis, to cope with pain and discomfort and ultimately to contemplate and face death, especially one’s own, is a common set of related themes for those who want to highlight the ability of human beings as a species to transcend hardship. Catastrophes can bring out and highlight the difference between individual self-interest and social responsibility as we have already witnessed in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some individuals, doctors and nurses have sacrificed themselves for the greater good, exposing themselves to the ill and full of exhaustion, weakening their own vulnerability. Some humanitarian groups and associations have risked their own lives to save others, while others— individuals and groups—simply look for profit or advantage in the misery of others. How the majority in a society act under the threat of disaster determines what kind of society it is—indeed whether it is a ‘society’ at all. The public health consequences of hate can be hugely damaging, as Sandro Galeo (2020) notes: ‘Population health scholarship over the past two decades has illuminated how prejudice, discrimination and segregation, linked to inter-personal hatred and antagonism, have a pernicious and pervasive effect on the health of populations’.1 Empathy is a prerequisite for a healthy world and empathy demands community. The question of how to encourage citizens to do the right thing—to self-isolate rather than consciously not care of spreading the virus—can be developed and enhanced by official narratives, sometimes by punishment and sometimes, it is claimed, through the ‘nudge theory’, a concept in behavioural science that suggests positive reinforcement can influence compliance sometimes better than education, legislation or policing. For my part, I am sceptical of ‘nudge theory’ and would argue it depends upon the prevailing societal norms; thus, nudge theory is less likely to work in a society that is based on individual self-interest rather than community self-help. In any disaster, given societal norms, people are likely to act first in terms of self-preservation on the basis of fear, anxiety and panic (witness ‘panic buying’). Group preservation is another response that may come later that requires some changes in behaviour; followed by blaming and justice-seeking. Finally, ‘renormalizing’ might indicate that people have accepted that they have to adapt to the crisis.2 ‘Resilience’ has become a psychological theory and field of wellness research focused on the ability to cope or adapt when confronted with adverse life events

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and committed to the idea that individuals can learn techniques to build resilience: cognitive reframing techniques, character-building, stress management, viewing crises as challenges, learning to accept things you can’t change, sharing feelings and keeping things in perspective. In positive psychology, resilience theory studies resilience as a biopsychosocial and spiritual phenomenon which is ‘the developable capacity to rebound or bounce back from adversity, conflict, and failure or even positive events, progress, and increased responsibility’ (Luthans, 2002, p. 702).3 It is clear that the understanding of social vulnerability also requires an understanding of context and how different groups are prone to hazard because of socio-economic factors, age, gender, race or ethnicity (Fleming & Ledogar, 2008). I tend to revert to my philosophical training and tend to emphasize philosophical models or theories rather than psychological ones although both need to be tempered with history and political economy. In this regard, the work of Albert Camus stands as a monument to human dignity and solidarity in a world that often seems meaningless. The Plague (La Peste) is a novel published by Albert Camus in 1947 that investigates the human condition when a plague epidemic strikes Oran, an Algerian city, set in the 1940s. A cholera epidemic struck the city in 1849, decimating the town’s population and the city has suffered from multiple attacks of cholera from the Middle Ages through to modern times. The novel is said to elucidate the human response to the absurd, a notion that stands at the centre of Camus’ philosophy. The novel is now recognized as a classic piece of philosophical literature and has been adapted as a cantata (Roberto Gerhard, 1965), a film (La Peste, Luis Puenzo, 1992) and a play (The Plague, Neil Bartlett, 2017).4 Camus begins the novel with an epigraph from Daniel Defoe: ‘It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not’. The ‘imprisonment’ has been taken as referring to the Nazi occupation of France and the struggle of the European resistance against the Nazis. Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) was an account of London’s bubonic plague some 57 years after sweeping the city. Defoe includes the following on the opening page: being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public before5 Echoing the growing prevalence of conspiracy theories in the time of coronavirus, Defoe describes ‘the apprehensions of the people’, that were strangely increased by the error of the times; in which, I think, the people, from what principle I cannot imagine, were more addicted to prophecies and

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astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since. Whether this unhappy temper was originally raised by the follies of some people who got money by it—that is to say, by printing predictions and prognostications—I know not; but certain it is, books frighted them terribly, such as Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Astrological Predictions, Poor Robin’s Almanack, and the like; also several pretended religious books, one entitled, Come out of her, my People, lest you be Partaker of her Plagues; another called, Fair Warning; another, Britain’s Remembrancer; and many such, all, or most part of which, foretold, directly or covertly, the ruin of the city. Nay, some were so enthusiastically bold as to run about the streets with their oral predictions, pretending they were sent to preach to the city; and one in particular, who, like Jonah to Nineveh, cried in the streets, ‘Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed’. Camus, needless to say, was strongly influenced by Defoe’s account. La Peste was Camus’ second novel, after L’,Etranger (1942; The Stranger). He had been troubled by periodic attacks of tuberculosis. Living in Algiers as a student of philosophy, Camus gained his aggregation on the writings of Plotinus and St. Augustine. Strongly influenced by both André Gide and André Malraux, Camus in the forties contributed landmark plays to the Theatre of the Absurd, following his influential essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ (1942) that indicated the human situation is essentially absurd and devoid of purpose, giving rise to the question of whether the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide. Three consequences follow from acknowledging the absurd: revolt, freedom and passion. As Camus suggests in the opening sentence: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.6 In The Plague, Camus is seeking a way of overcoming nihilism exemplified through the fight against an epidemic. Without a characterological analysis or plot, the structure of the novel in five parts revolve around the plague—its arrival, its duration and decline: thousands of rats begin to die in the streets; hysteria develops. A doctor (Dr. Rieux) concludes that the bubonic plague is sweeping the town. The authorities are slow to accept the diagnosis or situation. The town is sealed off. A group acting together decide to fight the epidemic but the situation

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becomes worse. Violence begins on a small scale and people trying to escape the town are shot. The main characters visit an isolation camp and one dies. One character profits from the plague. Finally, the town gates are opened as the plague declines. The narrator reflecting on the experience concludes there is more to admire in human beings than to despise. In his book blog for The Guardian, Ed Vulliamy (2015) notes, ‘The fascist “plague” that inspired the novel may have gone, but 55 years after his death, many other varieties of pestilence keep this book urgently relevant’.7 Marina Warner (2003) writes: Far from being a study in existential disaffection, as I had so badly misremembered, The Plague is about courage, about engagement, about paltriness and generosity, about small heroism and large cowardice, and about all kinds of profoundly humanist problems, such as love and goodness, happiness and mutual connection.8 Sales of Camus’ book have rocketed, tripling in Italy and selling 1,600 in a week in France in the last week of January 2020.9 The World Economic Forum names The Plague as one of ‘5 books to read for context on the coronavirus outbreak’.10 The site also usefully provides ‘COVID Action Platform’ and a number of brief articles, including ‘Coronavirus isn’t an outlier, it’s part of our interconnected viral age’.11 Sean Illing (2020), inspired by Camus’ novel, writes: ‘This is a time for solidarity: What Albert Camus’s “The Plague” can teach us about life in a pandemic’.12 He suggests COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate: ‘Whoever you are, wherever you live, you’re vulnerable, at least in principle. While some of us may fare better because of our age or health, the microbes themselves are impartial’ which means ‘we’re all in the same boat’ but accepting this is ‘uniquely difficult in America’ because ‘this country is built on a cult of individualism’. What can the novel coronavirus COVID-19 tell us about contagion and the human condition? That ultimately the only answer metaphysically is solidarity, based on a kind of love for our fellow human beings—not ‘me first’, not ‘America First’ but, indeed, the exact opposite, a responsible form of globalization that recognizes that we are only as strong as our weakest link.

Notes 1 www.bu.edu/sph/2015/01/18/the-public-health-consequences-of-hate/ 2 www.sandrogalea.org/healthiestgoldfish/2018/5/15/disasters-and-public-health 3 https://positivepsychology.com/resilience-theory/ 4 See the translation by Stuart Gibert at https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/ uploads/2018/03/the-plague.pdf 5 www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm 6 https://www2.hawaii.edu/freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf 7 www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/05/albert-camus-the-plaguefascist-death-ed-vulliamy 8 www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/26/classics.albertcamus

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9 www.actualitte.com/article/monde-edition/italie-a-l-ere-du-coronavirus-la-peste-decamus-devient-un-best-seller/99478; https://twitter.com/edistat_actu/status/1234450 836538957824 10 www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-books-pandemic-reading-covid19/ 11 www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-global-epidemics-health-pandemiccovid-19 12 www.vox.com/2020/3/13/21172237/coronavirus-covid-19-albert-camus-the-plague

References Camus, A. (1947). La Peste. Gallimard. Fleming, J., & Ledogar, R. J. (2008). Resilience, an evolving concept: A review of literature relevant to aboriginal research. Pimatisiwin, 6(2), 7–23. Galeo, S. (2020). The public health consequences of hate. www.bu.edu/sph/2015/01/18/ the-public-health-consequences-of-hate/ Illing, S. (2020). This is a time for solidarity. www.vox.com/2020/3/13/21172237/corona virus-covid-19-albert-camus-the-plague Luthans, F. (2002). The need for and meaning of positive organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23(6), 695–706. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.165 Vulliamy, E. (2015). Albert Camus’The Plague:A story for our, and all, times. www.theguardian. com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/05/albert-camus-the-plague-fascist-death-ed-vulliamy Warner, M. (2003). To be a man. www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/26/classics. albertcamus

7 PHILOSOPHY AND PANDEMIC IN THE POSTDIGITAL ERA Foucault, Agamben, Žižek Michael A. Peters

Michael Foucault described the ‘plague towns’ and street-level administrative procedures for quarantine in the Middle Ages in terms of ‘strict spatial partitioning’ as an early form of panopticism. As he writes: ‘It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment’ (Foucault, 1975/1995, p. 195). Giorgio Agamben, basing his work partly on Foucault, by contrast, writes about the way COVID-19 has enabled the tendency to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government. He argues: Faced with the frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of coronavirus . . . why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to spread a state of panic, thus provoking an authentic state of exception with serious limitations on movement and a suspension of daily life in entire regions? (Agamben, 2020a) Some critics find Agamben’s suggestion that the measures taken were imposing an ‘authentic state of exception’ and that the ‘invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext’ for further limitations to basic freedoms too paranoid and far-fetched. The European Journal of Psychoanalysis provides a dialogue called ‘Coronavirus and philosophers’ that includes Foucault on ‘plague towns’ and ‘panopticism’ as well as the brief reflection by Agamben with responses by J.L. Nancy, R. Esposito, S. Benvenuto, D. Dwivedi, S. Mohan, R. Ronchi and M. de Carolis (Foucault et al., 2020). Agamben (2020b) elaborates his well-known argument about ‘state of exception’ to apply it to COVID-19. Nancy responds by emphasizing: We must be careful not to hit the wrong target: an entire civilization is in question, there is no doubt about it. There is a sort of viral exception—biological,

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computer-scientific, cultural—which is pandemic. Governments are nothing more than grim executioners, and taking it out on them seems more like a diversionary maneuver than a political reflection. (Nancy, 2020) In Italy, the disaster struck because the government failed to act quickly enough or to pursue the right policies. As Pisano et al. (2020) point out: ‘In a matter of weeks (from February 21 to March 22), Italy went from the discovery of the first official COVID-19 case to a government decree that essentially prohibited all movements of people within the whole territory, and the closure of all non-­ essential business activities’. It is a different situation in the US and in the UK where Trump and Johnson discounted the virus threat, instituted a huge bail-out for business and talked freely and against their own medical advisors of getting back to work by Easter. Maybe, in Italy, Agamben’s thesis applies. In other countries, the logic of government follows a different line based on propping up markets and the economy even at the risk and expense of large numbers of infections and deaths. The thesis must be able to take account of a nation’s health ­infrastructure—a fact that differentiates between social democratic models of public health and market-based forms like the US, where there is no universal provision. Trump wants to get everyone back to work as soon as possible and his government policies reflect this privileging of capital and the expense of labour. It seems likely that all the digital home-delivery companies and supermarkets that depend on cheap, mostly Black and Latino, labour that are still able to operate in the US will do so on the backs of low-paid and temporary jobs. In the US state with its continual state vs. federal tensions, government operates differently than Italy (or China, for that matter). The emphasis of the twotrillion-dollar ‘Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act’ (CARES Act; The Senate of the United States, 2020) is to keep American workers paid and employed, to provide assistance to workers’ families and businesses, and to support the health care system, with an accent on public education and innovation prioritizing zoonotic animal drugs. Title IV, ‘Economic stabilization and assistance to severely distressed sectors of the United States economy’, looks at emergency relief and taxpayer protections as well as debt guarantee and hiring flexibility. Surely the form of governmentality represents another example of the ability to use reverse logic of neoliberalism to socialize any losses and privatize gains? The stimulus package of two trillion is the biggest in American history. John Cassidy (2020) remarks, ‘As a comparison, the Obama stimulus package that was passed in 2009 was about 4.5 per cent of G.D.P., or half as big’. It’s too early to dismiss Agamben’s theory, for it may well prove to be correct, especially as the time of the US elections draws close: it is entirely possible that Trump will use a ‘state of emergency’ to take exceptional government powers to declare a postponement for a year or two. In Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World, Slavoj Žižek (2020) comments on the panic globally facing us in the times of COVID-19 when ‘we live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection.

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When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds’. He touches a chord when he writes with customary irony: An average consumer reason[s] in the following way: I know there is enough toilet paper and the rumor is false, but what if some people take this rumor seriously and, in a panic, start to buy excessive reserves of toilet paper, causing an actual shortage? So I better buy reserves myself. It is not even necessary to believe that some others take the rumor seriously—it is enough to presuppose that some others believe that there are people who take the rumor seriously—the effect is the same, namely the real lack of toilet paper in the stores. Is something similar not going on in the UK and California today? (Žižek, 2020) Toilet rolls are a prime example of bourgeoise Western culture, a pinnacle of consumer capitalism that provides thousands of choices of quality, material, perfume, strength, decoration etc. Indeed, most of the world does not yet have Westernstyle toilets let alone specialty toilet paper. The WHO reports that in 2017, only 45 percent of the global population (3.4 billion people) used a safely managed sanitation service and 2.0 billion people still do not have basic sanitation facilities such as toilets or latrines with many defecating ‘in the open, for example in street gutters, behind bushes, or into open bodies of water’ (World Health Organization, 2019). The WHO makes the conclusion that poor sanitation is linked to transmission of pandemic diseases and reduces human well-being. If ever there is an indicative index of development, it would have to be closely connected with sanitation and the ability to manage human waste hygienically. No doubt in poor countries like India, Middle Eastern and African countries where there is little or no national health infrastructure, we are about to witness the devastation of entire communities that will linger on well after conditions elsewhere improve and the global economy restarts. This will be the greatest generational setback for these countries. Western panic buying of toilet rolls based on a viral rumour creates the problem of shortage, as I observed many times in New Zealand supermarkets at the beginning of the lockdown when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made public announcements that there were no shortages of any supermarket item. People stood for a long time in queues that stretched around the aisles, jammed up against one another, contravening social distancing rukes aimed to preserve individual isolation. Panic buying of toilet rolls in NZ increased 87 percent over last year (Shaw, 2020). Hoarding and panic buying are examples of herd behaviour where conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy operate to cause the shortage that most fear. Consumer behaviour theory mostly addresses ‘single decision-makers faced with making economic choices in relative social isolation’ rather than ‘collective action such as fads and fashions, stock market movements, runs on nondurable

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goods, buying sprees, hoarding, and banking panics’. As Strahle and Bonfield (1989) go on to note, ‘[p]anic, as historically conceived, has been represented as a polar case of collective disorganization . . . clearly resting beyond the explanatory power of economic theories which depend on the rationality assumption’. I prefer to use the argument from ‘cumulative collective irrationality’ that contradicts the theory of efficient markets. Christoph J. Merdes, in his dissertation on collective irrationality, notes: collective (ir)rationality finds application in all areas of human social life, and a better understanding of the phenomena, the underlying processes and the evaluative standards could greatly improve our ability to organize everything from markets over democratic government to cooperative scientific inquiry and the social norms of everyday life. (Merdes, 2018) Collective irrationality is an endemic feature of human life that has been around since the beginning of social life, predating capitalism but the market provides some classic examples and raises questions about the ability of the market to operate efficiently or rationally in times of disaster. When Žižek suggested ‘that the coronavirus epidemics may give a new boost of life to Communism’, he has in mind what the World Health Organization is saying: ‘We should mobilize, coordinate, and so on . . . like, my God, this is a dangerous situation. They’re saying this country lacks masks, respirators, and so on. We should treat this as a war. Some kind of European coordination . . . maybe even wartime mobilization. It can be done, and it can even boost productivity’. He acknowledges that ‘the strong approach to the crisis by the Chinese state has worked—or at least worked much better than what is now occurring in Italy, the old authoritarian logic of Communists in power also clearly demonstrated its limitations’ (Žižek, 2020). The COVID-19 virus infection began in China and despite Western scepticism about the number of confirmed cases, it seems that the number of new confirmed cases of the coronavirus originating within China, as opposed to Chinese returning home, has stopped indicating an effective period of social confinement of some 3–4 months. As David Cyranoski (2020) reports in Nature: ‘Researchers are studying the effects of China’s lockdowns to glean insights about controlling the viral pandemic’. It seems obvious that China’s extreme lockdown has been successful in limiting the spread of the virus. The only problem was that the lockdown started too late and also that the free flow of important scientific information (and whistle blowing) was halted in the early stages. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic provides an ideal philosophical and political experiment not possible except in speculative terms during normal times, and Western governments have responded very differently from one another. In terms of political theory, the question is whether State-led policies work better in times of crisis and emergencies. Panagiotis Sotiris argues that the shift from the power

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of the sovereign as a right of life and death power to state guarantee of the population’ health and productivity led to an expansion without precedent of all forms of state intervention and coercion. From compulsory vaccinations to bans on smoking in public spaces, the notion of biopolitics has been used in many instances as the key to understanding the political and ideological dimensions of health policies. (Sotiris, 2020) Biopolitics is Foucault’s depiction of the administration of life and a territory whose population is its subject, an administration the aim of which is to create conditions for life for survival and increase and above all for putting life in order economically and politically. An aspect of this paradigm that is missing from Foucault’s analysis—he died before the genomics revolution got under way— is bioinformation, and the bioinformational paradigm where these two forces of new biology and information coalesce, overlap, and intermingle in the logic that drives bioinformatics and bioinformational capitalism that is self-renewing in the sense that it can change and renew the material basis for life and capital as well as program itself. The viral experiments of globalization, interconnectivity and pandemic in the postdigital era, disastrous as it has been, involving incalculable human suffering, at the same time provide the opportunity to raise some questions rather than embrace a theory dogmatically (see Peters et al., 2020). This is my theme of openness in philosophy that proceeds without too much dogma. These questions, in no particular order, may not be the best questions but they indicate a forward-looking experimental philosophy: • • • • • • • • •

Which political system works best at quarantine and social isolation—American individualism or Chinese collectivism; democracy or one-party state; freemarket or welfare state? What are the bioinformational cross-border flows that postdate the nation state? To what extent can financialization and finance capitalism, whether state-led or market-led, be seen as part of the bioinformational paradigm? In neoliberal times, how well do Westerners vs. Chinese cooperate, obey the rules, become compliant and willingly work for the greater good? What are the problems of the community ‘free-rider’, or those who do not follow newly established community norms of self-isolation? What are the complexities of individual self-interest vs. community or public interest? What are the new relations between virus pandemic and sustainability practices? Can the freedom of information, including scientific communication and open science, outrun viral self-replication? How have governments interacted and interfaced with science, including examples of suppression of information and forms of disinformation?

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• • •

What have been the government/science relationships during this pandemic? To what extent has viral fake news, social media and conspiracy theory generated public and global damages and to what extent is this an aspect of contemporary biopolitics? In the innovation race to invent an anti-COVID-19 vaccine, where do the major advances come from and what organizations are well placed to make huge profits?

References Agamben, G. (2020a). The invention of an epidemic. The European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/ coronavirus-and-philosophers/ Agamben, G. (2020b). The state of exception provoked by an unmotivated emergency. Positions Politics. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from http://positionswebsite.org/ giorgio-agamben-the-state-of-exception-provoked-by-an-unmotivated-emergency/ Cassidy, J. (2020, March 26). The good, the bad, and the ugly in the two-trillion-dollar stimulus. The New Yorker. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.newyorker.com/news/ our-columnists/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-in-the-two-trillion-dollar-stimulus Cyranoski, D. (2020, March 17). What China’s coronavirus response can teach the rest of the world. Nature. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-020-00741-x Foucault, M. (1975/1995). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage. Foucault, M., Agamben, G., Nancy, J. L., Esposito, R., Benvenuto, S., Dwivedi, D., . . . de Carolis, M. (2020). Coronavirus and philosophers. The European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/ coronavirus-and-philosophers/ Merdes, C. J. (2018). Collective irrationality: An agent-based approach. Dissertation an der Fakultät für Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und Religionswissenschaft. Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from https://edoc.ub.unimuenchen.de/24447/5/Merdes_Christoph.pdf Nancy, J. L. (2020). Viral exception. The European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ Peters, M. A., Jandrić, P., & McLaren, P. (2020). Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1744226. Pisano, G. P., Sadun, R., & Zanini, M. (2020, March 27). Lessons from Italy’s response to coronavirus. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from https://hbr. org/2020/03/lessons-from-italys-response-to-coronavirus Shaw, A. (2020, March 26). Covid 19 coronavirus: By the numbers—what Kiwis have been panic buying. New Zealand Herald. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.nzher ald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12319948 Sotiris, P. (2020, March 20). Against Agamben: Is a democratic biopolitics possible? Viewpoint. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.viewpointmag.com/2020/03/20/ against-agamben-democratic-biopolitics/. Strahle, W. M.,  & Bonfield, E. H. (1989). Understanding consumer panic: a sociological perspective. In T. K. Srull (Ed.), NA—advances in consumer research volume 16 (pp. 567–573). Association for Consumer Research.

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The Senate of the United States. (2020). Coronavirus aid, relief, and economic security act. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.politico.com/f/?id=00000171-1429-d270a773-777f92a00000 World Health Organization. (2019). Home/newsroom/fact sheets/detail/sanitation. Retrieved March 30, 2020, from www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sanitation Žižek, S. (2020). Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world. OR Books.

8 THE DISORDER OF THINGS Quarantine unemployment, the decline of neoliberalism, and the COVID-19 lockdown crash Michael A. Peters

Rarely in economics does the field see such unambiguous causation as in the case of the COVID-19 shut-down of the global economy. Pretty well every economist would agree to this proposition and while they are in tune with each other about the nature of the viral lockdown and its unemployment and GDP effects, they are uncertain about of measures to treat the problem—current policies are seen as part humanitarian disaster relief and part recession stimulus. Epidemiological economics is the field that studies economic policy responses to epidemic diseases but I want also to use the term ‘epidemio-economics’ (E-E) for the economic effects of the pandemic. No longer simply a calculus and framework for estimating and predicting the relations between individual behaviour, trends of transmission and the control of populationwide disease dynamics, E-E might be turned toward an understanding of what Christina Romer, the economist from Berkeley, calls ‘quarantined unemployment’: It’s not cyclical unemployment. It’s quarantine unemployment. Businesses aren’t allowed to operate. People aren’t allowed to be out of their home. The idea that if you just give people money it’ll somehow prevent the unemployment rate from skyrocketing makes no sense. No amount of demand stimulus will get people to go to restaurants if they’re closed.1 Estimates of COVID-19-related unemployment vary: US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned of an impending 20 percent without COVID-19 rescue and indicated that there would be generational economic damage. Already at the end of March, US unemployment claims were the historically the highest at well over 3 million.2 The Washington Post reported that in the US there were 22 million unemployed in the month since Trump declared a national emergency, ‘wiping out a decade of job gains’.3 Many families have yet to receive their ‘stimulus check’

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and the lines at food banks have reportedly grown longer. The St. Louis Fed has estimated that coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, and the unemployment rate may hit 32 percent.4 There has been talk of technological unemployment now for well over a decade. Under the COVID-19 impact companies are more motivated than ever in providing intelligent manufacturing systems and fully autonomous, labour-free transport and trade. The downturn in production has affected most industries with historic declines in those industries that depend upon mass international mobility—tourism, travel, hospitality, international ­education—but also an abrupt halt to many export industries with disruptions to global value chains. Public health systems have rapidly reached their capacity and there have been price hikes for certain medicines and hospital supplies. Now they face unprecedented health spending and hospitals, like universities, are experiencing financial blow-outs. The factories have closed and manufacturing and construction have come to a juddering halt. All of which adds to further lay-offs. Experts seems to agree that the situation is unprecedented: ‘tectonic shift’, ‘global economic catastrophe’, ‘no analogue to it in the modern era’. The global scale of the shut-down is unprecedented. The IMF’s Chang Yong Rhee reports, ‘This is a crisis like no other. It is worse than the Global Financial Crisis, and Asia is not immune’.5 While Asia looks better than most regions, growth is stalled at zero, ‘the worst performance in 60 years’. For the first time since Xi Jinping introduced the concept of the ‘Chinese Dream’ (中国梦; Zhōngguó Mèng) at the Nineteenth Congress in 2012, the miracle of the Chinese economic juggernaut upon which it rested has come to a shuddering halt under the Wuhan and China lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is the worst economic downturn since the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. While China’s economy has been slowing since the end of the GFC, moving from double digits to single figures, the effect of the COVID-19 virus has brought it to its knees. China reported that its first quarter GDP contracted by 6.8 percent in 2020 from a year ago, revealing a 8.4  percent drop in industrial production, a 16.1  percent decline in fixed investment and a 19 percent fall in retail sales.6 This downturn was expected but it also reveals the trade interdependence of the world economy: China’s continued recovery is a huge factor in the recovery of the world economy and as the world’s largest trading nation its continued success depends in part upon China’s bulk purchase of raw materials of coal, iron ore and precious metals from South Korea, Japan, the US and Australia, and the sale of Chinese industrial and consumer goods internationally. China as the second largest economy accounts for roughly 20 percent of the world’s GDP and substantially more of the Asia-Pacific region. While there is universal agreement that this is an economic crisis—‘The Great Lockdown’—there is no such agreement on its treatment or its long-term economic damage. Can we vaccinate the economy to stop the viral symptoms of volatile finance markets and mass unemployment? Some, like Larry Summers, think we must first eliminate the virus before we can go back to work.7 Others, like advisers to President Trump, do not want to shut the economy down despite the fact that social distancing implies economic distancing. The two-trillion-dollar

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CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) stimulus seems cleft between the treatment of conventional recession which might be offset by fiscal and monetary policy, and a disaster relief for economic hardship. But not everyone thinks that depression is inevitable: Yglesias, for instance, argues, ‘It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy’.8 The two-trillion stimulus is too timid, he argues. But what should the stimulus, any stimulus, be aimed at? It has at least two parts—temporary disaster relief for several months while the virus burns out after self-isolation and quarantine measures, and, perhaps, massive state-led infrastructure projects. These might not be simply based on the privatization of profits and socialization of losses formula that ruled the Global Financial Crisis. This time it is not primarily a financial crisis, although it may become one. Rather it is a problem of maintaining full or near-full employment, more like the Great Depression but with some essential differences. The emphasis has been on ‘cash flow and confidence’9 but nobody has yet addressed the significant probability of a shutdown of all financial institutions, especially banks, already at lending at historically low interest rates. It’s hard to contemplate. One commentator has remarked: ‘The thing that is scarier about it is you’ve never been in a scenario where you shut down the entire economy’.10 COVID-19 is a global economic catastrophe and it is to be seen how well the global financial architecture works during this crisis. The financial markets have been served a reprieve after a disastrous crash, although their longer-term stability is in jeopardy. Even before COVID-19, many businesses and people in the neoliberal debt economies were existing hand-to-mouth with few cash reserves or personal savings. Some argue that a debt crisis was inevitable but the virus has made it immediate. Banks have stayed the pain with debt and rent freezes but this only postpones the day of reckoning, while the debt servicing burden grows and the prospect of cancelling debt seems highly unlikely.11 Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, talks of ‘Four Waves of Pain’ with some government actions already followed: •

Wave one is ‘the sudden stop’, the unexpected cessation of economic activity all across the country • Government stimulus and disaster relief • When the economy stops, and GDP plummets, workers lose their jobs • Subsidizing the wage bill • Nest-egg wiped out for retired people with panic roll-back of all future expenditure • Businesses cut or postponed investment.12 There are fundamental differences to both the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis. The Development Committee of the World Bank released their Communique emphasizing ‘that the development community increasingly faces global challenges requiring decisive, collective action and innovation. Multilateral cooperation is needed to contain the pandemic and mitigate its health, social, and

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economic consequences’. The emphasis is on debt forgiveness in repayments for the poorest countries and the recommendation of up to $160 billion to strengthen financial systems. What caught my eye was the emphasis on learning and innovation: ‘The pandemic has already profoundly impacted human capital, including lives, learning, basic well-being, and future productivity’,13 although the concept of innovation was not theorized or elaborated. By contrast, I found the post made by Nela Porobić Isaković on the website of The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom refreshingly candid in the assertion that this is now time for a fundamental rethinking: ‘What Has COVID-19 Taught Us about Neoliberalism?’ The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the toxic effects of a system that has for far too long dominated every aspect of our societies. Neoliberalism, as an economic ideology of capitalism, has depleted our public services, turned our education and healthcare into profit-driven businesses, hoarded profits at the expense of undervalued and underpaid workers, favoured profitability of a militarised world over human security and well-being, and aggravated inequalities between people and countries.14 She indicates we face a stark choice: The choice we face—locally, regionally, nationally and globally—is whether we are going to succumb to disaster capitalism and the neoliberal mantra of each person/country for itself, or are we going to use this opportunity (as unwanted and dangerous as it is) to build societies that encourage solidarity, equality, and caring for the environment and our fellow human beings. And she argues COVID-19 exposes the significance of public sector for our collective well-being. Group solidarity matters and there are alternatives as we have observed and experienced the way in which a change in daily practices have already taken place: ‘Young people forming groups to deliver food for the elderly or walk their dogs, or people sharing their books and recipes, how to do gardening, and other ordinary things that in times of crises become a testimony of our humanity, a testimony to the importance of the collective’. Other critics also have been quick to point out that the COVID-19-induced crisis has caused an inversion of neoliberalism15 or pointed to the failure of neoliberal capitalism.16 Thomas Fazi asks, ‘Could COVID-19 vanquish neoliberalism?’17 and Jeet Heer inquires whether neoliberal globalization in unravelling.18 There are many articles now pouring forth on similar themes concerning the ‘end of neoliberalism’, the unjust distribution of wealth, the sacrifice of the poor, of women and children, the way in which stimulus policies hand over public funds to rich corporations, and the need for some new form of community or solidarity with an emphasis of collective responsibility and community action. As commentators have argued, COVID-19 has brought forth spontaneous new forms of

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solidarity where people are looking after the most vulnerable.19 Even Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, argues, ‘The recovery from the COVID-19 crisis must lead to a different economy’. He suggests either ‘we can go back to the world as it was before or deal decisively with those issues that make us all unnecessarily vulnerable to crises’.20 ‘Solidarity’, ‘community’, ‘collective responsibility and action’ are the key words ringing out as a response, and all the neoliberal agencies and governments are themselves echoing these sentiments. After decades of market-speak, of Chicago School free-market economics, of individualism and individual responsibility, suddenly without a moment’s reflection everyone is chanting the same message, even if their policies contradict the intention. Even the universities have been called upon to reshape the world in terms of new social solidarities. Thus, Ira Harkavy, Sjur Bergan, Tony Gallagher and Hilligje van’t Land (18 April 2020) argue that ‘this civic spiritedness, this social solidarity, needs to extend beyond the COVID-19 crisis and become higher education’s defining characteristic’.21 We can do this, we are told, by ‘sustaining a culture of democracy’ and reinstituting ‘education as a public good’. This is similar to David Miliband’s four contests that ‘will shape the post-COVID-19 world’: globalization, democracy, privacy and inequality. He argues it’s the common sense answer to our common humanity.22 This is the argument for a return to social democracy and liberal internationalism with open borders. While the argument for social democracy is important, I doubt the ease or readiness to return to a softer form of internationalism. More likely we may see greater decentralization to communities and regions with an emphasis of community work schemes, community care and responsibility, the return to cooperatives and other SSE enterprises including schools and universities that are able to pick up this mandate for new forms of sociality.23

Notes 1 www.vox.com/2020/3/31/21191561/coronavirus-depression-recession-unemployment 2 www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemployment-rate-coronavirusbusiness 3 www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/16/unemployment-claims-coronavirus/ 4 www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-job-losses-could-total-47-million-unemploymentrate-of-32percent-fed-says.html 5 https://blogs.imf.org/2020/04/15/covid-19-pandemic-and-the-asia-pacific-region-lowestgrowth-since-the-1960s/ 6 www.cnbc.com/2020/04/17/china-economy-beijing-contracted-in-q1-2020-gdp-amidcoronavirus.html 7 www.vox.com/2020/3/31/21191561/coronavirus-depression-recession-unemployment 8 www.vox.com/2020/3/31/21191561/coronavirus-depression-recession-unemployment 9 See, for instance, Adrian Orr’s (NZ Reserve Bank Governor) statements: www.rbnz.govt. nz/news/2020/03/mahi-tahi-working-together-to-ensure-cash-flow-and-confidence 10 www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-19/the-great-coronavirus-crash-of-2020is-different 11 www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubilee-is-only-way-avoiddepression/

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12 www.vox.com/2020/3/23/21188900/coronavirus-stock-market-recession-depressiontrump-jobs-unemployment 13 www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/04/17/world-bankimf-springmeetings-2020-development-committee-communique 14 www.wilpf.org/covid-19-what-has-covid-19-taught-us-about-neoliberalism/# 15 https://discoversociety.org/2020/03/26/the-covid-19-induced-crisis-and-three-inver sions-of-neoliberalism/ 16 https://apwld.org/covid-19-highlights-the-failure-of-neoliberal-capitalism-we-needfeminist-global-solidarity/ 17 https://unherd.com/2020/04/could-covid-19-vanquish-neoliberalism/ 18 www.thenation.com/article/world/globalization-unravelling-internationalism-coronavirus/ 19 www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/covid-19-coronavirus-solidarity-help-pandemic/ 20 www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/launch-report-socio-economicimpacts-covid-19; see the report SHARED RESPONSIBILITY, GLOBAL SOLIDARITY: Responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. 21 www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200413152542750 22 www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2020/04/four-contests-will-shape-postcovid-19-world 23 www.ilo.org/global/topics/cooperatives/news/WCMS_740254/lang–en/index.htm

9 ‘REALITY IS AN ACTIVITY OF THE MOST AUGUST IMAGINATION’. WHEN THE WORLD STOPS, IT’S NOT A COMPLETE DISASTER— WE CAN HEAR THE BIRDS SING! Michael A. Peters

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night, We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late. It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust. There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round, Under the front of the westward evening star, The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins, As things emerged and moved and were dissolved, Either in distance, change or nothingness, The visible transformations of summer night, An argentine abstraction approaching form And suddenly denying itself away. There was an insolid billowing of the solid. Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air. —Wallace Stevens It was not Wallace Stevens’ poem that affected me most when I was an undergrad studying American modernist poetry, but its title that was more captivating to me because it raised the question of imagination and reality in the same sentence. He wanted ‘to interpret the external world of thought and feeling through the imagination’.1 He wrote in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, ‘The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them’ (Stevens, 1965). The poem itself seemed to me not to live up to the grandiose promise of the title and yet it carried forward Stevens’ philosophical orientation to reality and naturalism that accorded the imagination a central place. His mature work can be considered almost meditative and

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FIGURE 9.1 The Tui

is a New Zealand native bird with a wonderful distinctive song.

Photo by Andrea Lightfoot on Unsplash.

spiritual, and his poetry was highly abstract—a ‘poetry of ideas’—where reality is considered an aspect of imagination in actively shaping the world.2 For Stevens imagination is the necessary faculty to understand and interpret the world as a forever-changing reality. Imagination is indispensable to the search for meaning as part of a passionate engagement with the world that seeks to understand the evolving organic whole. At an intuitive level I found this thought embedded and locked in the title. I found attractive the thought that reality is not something to be grasped once and for all, guaranteed by some method whether it be scientific or historical, but rather a product of a poetical imagination that can entertain an idea of the emerging whole. It reminds me of Wittgenstein’s desire to write philosophy as poetry, the highest calling. A fragmentary insight provides an oblique angle that reveals the whole and how the parts fit with one another. This explains in part why Wittgenstein himself preferred the tradition of the aphorism going back to Lichtenberg. After the death of God—Stevens was deeply influenced by Nietzsche—poetry provides insights into essences. Such an approach is seen also in his beautifully and intriguing poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird with the mystical lines: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

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In his notes, as various scholars have observed, he provides the following: Proposita 1 2

God and the imagination are one. The thing imagined is the imaginer. The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one. Hence, I suppose, the imaginer is God (914).

The notebook entry is ambiguous and quite dense. In ‘Final Soliloquy of the Inferior Paramour’ he suggests, ‘The world imagined is the ultimate good’ (444). The imagination has played an important role also in philosophy, as Amy Kind (2017) observes in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Imagination is a speculative mental state that allows us to consider situations apart from the here and now. Historically, imagination played an important role in the works of many of the major philosophical figures in the Western tradition—from Aristotle to Descartes to Hume to Kant. By the middle of the twentieth century, in the wake of the behavioristic mindset that had dominated both psychology and philosophy in the early part of the century, imagination had largely faded from philosophical view and received scant attention from the 1960s through the 1980s. But imagination returned to the limelight in the late twentieth century, as it was given increasing prominence in both aesthetics and philosophy of mind.3 She notes that the study of imagination has been traditionally significant for understanding ‘works of art, music, and literature’ and in philosophy of mind, imagination is essential for to understand the mental states of others. And she also notes its significance for ‘thought experimentation and modal epistemology’, and ‘the way imagination seems to justify beliefs about possibility’. This last sense comes close to my theme—imagination is required if we are to imagine the possibilities of a new world. There are useful arguments and fine distinctions in current philosophy concerning what Liao and Gendler (2020) call ‘imagination in the cognitive architecture’ that comment on the relations of imagination to belief, desire, mental imagery, memory and supposition. While imagination has figured largely in accounts of aesthetics it also has been recognized as important for knowledge acquisition especially the epistemology of modality where ‘facts about modality (i.e., what is possible, necessary, or impossible) are facts about how things could, must, or could not have been’. Vaidya (2017) explains the central question is ‘How can we come to know (be justified in believing or understand) what is necessary, possible, contingent, essential, and accidental for the variety of

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entities and kinds of entities there are?’ This is one of the reasons why realist accounts of science, especially those accounts linked to human emancipation such as Bhaskar’s critical realism (that developed during the 1970s) or ‘transcendental dialectical critical realism’, considered as a philosophy of social science, requires a role for imagination.4 COVID-19 has infected over two-and-a-half million people worldwide with nearly 200,000 deaths (2,719,897 as of the 25 April 2020) and the worst is yet to come, if we believe the Director-General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyeus. The latest ‘situation report’ reveals a huge increase in cyber-attacks on WHO, email scams targeting the public and forms of ‘viral media’ generating conspiracies about the origin of the virus and its treatment, including the preposterous and dangerous announcement that Trump made concerning drinking or injecting disinfectant as a means of cleansing the body. During the rupture and tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic that has cut a swathe through older and weaker populations in China and the West and with horrendous consequences yet to come for developing countries, I’ve been most impressed by a single paragraph highlighted and sent to me by Fazal Rizvi by the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, who cautions us not to be in a rush to ‘return to normal’ but rather to rethink and critique what ‘normality’ currently means for us. She argues that ‘in the midst of this terrible despair’ we should embrace the rupture and seize the opportunity ‘to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves’. She writes with such compelling logic: ‘Nothing could be worse than a return to normality’. Roy’s comment provokes the question what does ‘normality’ mean for 90 percent or more of the world’s population under neoliberalism and finance capitalism? What does it mean for those still suffering from ‘austerity politics’ in the West, and for those trapped by debt and poverty in countries comprising two-thirds of humanity—those for whom death is an ugly friend that provides a welcome relief from hunger, war, famine and suffering? She intimates this pandemic is a rupture between this world and the next. It is a ‘portal’, ‘a gateway’. Roy intones: We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.5 This is a plea not just to imagination but an invocation for global struggle, for greater equity and for a fair distribution of the world’s resources, for life and for a life worth living. It is a call to ‘imagine another world’ where struggle requires imagination because it is not simply opposition. It is a questioning of what ‘normality’ signifies and a reimagining of the new possibilities. For many, like the world’s indigenous peoples, the increasing numbers of those sleeping rough but also those in low-paid jobs, ‘normality’ is form of collective insanity based on the precariousness of life. For the middle classes it’s is a well-habituated mass consumerism of ‘more’ where desire is transformed into the lust for the latest model.

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Some seek a living wage, others a better balance between work and family life. Some concerned at the rapaciousness of global capitalism emphasize ‘limits to growth’, warning that exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources will lead to destruction of biodiversity. Some very trustworthy sources warn us that the pandemic is the result of ‘humanity’s excessive intrusion into nature’. Thomas Lovejoy, the US biologist who coined the term ‘biological diversity’ in 1980, says, ‘we did it to ourselves’.6 The human impact on wildlife is the likely cause of the pandemic a recent study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Exploitation of wildlife through hunting and trade facilitates close contact between wildlife and humans, and our findings provide further evidence that exploitation, as well as anthropogenic activities that have caused losses in wildlife habitat quality, have increased opportunities for animal–human interactions and facilitated zoonotic disease transmission.7 This is, then, part of human encroachment in the age of extinction. The quick impulse of finger-pointing and blaming does not recognize that the question is not country or region of origin but a generalized ecological crisis and problem of the world environment that will be still a dangerous global problem once and if COVID-19 finally burns itself out. Imagination is required to envisage the planet in its intricate evolution and wholeness (and its place in the universe); imagination is required to empathize with those at the receiving end of the relentless ‘doomsday machine’ that robs them of their livelihood and environment; imagination is required to rethink the modes of sociality that allows a stranger to die alone in a crowded apartment block; imagination is required to rehabilitate the Earth and to protect the living species; imagination is required to rethink and refeel a world that can be different, a world that is not driven by an insane frenzied grab for resources or commodities, a world in which we can hear the birds sing (and have the time to listen to them).8

Notes 1 www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens 2 https://archive.org/details/WallaceStevensTheNecessaryAngelEssaysOnRealityAnd TheImagination/page/n3/mode/2up 3 www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/imagination/v-2 4 See, for instance, an interview with Bhaskar in 1999 at https://web.archive.org/web/2012 0321205501/http://www.raggedclaws.com/criticalrealism/archive/rbhaskar_rbi.html 5 Arundhati Roy, Pandemic is a Portal, The Financial Times, www.ft.com/content/10d8 f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca 6 www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/ourselves-scientist-says-human-intrusionnature-pandemic-aoe 7 Global shifts in mammalian population trends reveal key predictors of virus spillover risk, Christine K. Johnson et al., https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.2736 8 Most mornings and often during the day I listen to the miraculous birdsong of the Tui, a bird that has two voice boxes and can make a staggering variety of sounds: www.you tube.com/watch?v=1xJNa8VIX6o

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References Kind, A. (2017). Imagination. In The Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy. www.rep. routledge.com/articles/thematic/imagination/v-2 Liao, S.-Y., & Gendler, T. (2020). Imagination. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2019 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/ entries/imagination/ Stevens, W. (1965). The necessary angel: Essays on reality and the imagination. Random House USA Paperbacks. Vaidya, A. (2017). The epistemology of modality. In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2017 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/ entries/modality-epistemology/

10 THE CHINESE DREAM ENCOUNTERS COVID-19 Michael A. Peters

For the first time since Xi Jinping introduced the concept of the ‘Chinese Dream’ (中国梦; Zhōngguó Mèng) at the Nineteenth Congress in 2012, the miracle of the Chinese economic juggernaut upon which it rested has come to a shuddering halt under the Wuhan and China lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.1 It is the worst economic downturn since the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. While China’s economy has been slowing since the end of the GFC, moving from double digits to single figures, the effect of the COVID-19 virus has brought it to its knees. China reported that its first quarter (2020) GDP contracted by 6.8 percent in 2020 from a year prior, revealing a 8.4 percent drop in industrial production, a 16.1 percent decline in fixed investment and a 19 percent fall in retail sales.2 This downturn was expected but it also reveals the interdependence of the world economy: China’s continued recovery is a huge factor in the recovery of the world economy and as the world’s largest trading nation it continued success depends in part upon China’s bulk purchase of raw materials of coal, iron ore and precious metals from South Korea, Japan, the US and Australia, and the sale of Chinese industrial and consumer goods internationally. China as the second largest economy accounts for roughly 20 percent of the world’s GDP and substantially more of the Asia-Pacific region. National dreams are linked to global economic conditions and indeed depend upon them. Narratives of the national dream cannot be fashioned at will but must bear some imprint of global events if they are to be believable. While such dreams can mitigate against unfavourable economic conditions in the short term, they must be congruent with world markets in the long term if they are to be effective and not a denial of reality. It is much easier to accept a national dream if it somehow displays a prophetic consistency with world events. If the Chinese Dream was dented with the US trade wars, COVID-19 has presented its own unique challenges. There were some problems with suppression on information on the virus in the early days as officials tried to control information and close down whistle-blowers but after this early stage China embarked on a

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mobilization unprecedented in global health history where, in a coordinated effort by the socialist government, a people’s war against the epidemic was declared. This national prioritizing involved the whole country with a lockdown of the city of Wuhan and the Hubei region, with over 40,000 medics dispatched to Hubei, and medical researchers focused on identifying the virus. Two new hospitals were built in two weeks to provide more hospital beds and the manufacturing sector devoted to producing the necessary medical supplies were given incentives. The WHO was praiseworthy of the staunch effort by the government to coordinate the lockdown and the medical response. The COVID-19 response was very successful: it locked down a country of 1.3 billion people; it isolated and treated the disease; it initiated the necessary quarantine management, preventing mass outbreaks of the COVID19 virus. This is the most responsible global set of actions in preventing the spread of the virus in China and the world. China has also cooperated with the WHO in exchanging information, including the genome discovered by a Chinese research team, which then become the basis for other research teams around the world searching for the basis of a vaccine. President Xi was quick to point out that the Chinese Dream could not be realized without major struggles. While local bureaucracy was responsible for early information glitches and suppression, the test of COVID-19 emphasized the capacity of the CCP to efficiently handle a national emergency. Its course during the COVID-19 emergency has been exemplary and the Chinese leadership and government has been rightly praised by the WHO. An unfortunate aspect of the pandemic has been the ‘information warfare’ (‘infodemic’) and conspiracy theories generated by the crisis. Some critics suggested that the Chinese Dream could be ‘shattered’ by COVID-19 indicating that the Chinese Dream could turn into the ‘Wuhan virus nightmare’.3 The origin and scale of the virus has been politicized with claims and counterclaims advanced by US and Chinese sources concerning who was responsible for it and whether it was linked to a biological weapons program.4 These claims have been very damaging to the global public infosphere and distract from fighting the virus, especially in developing countries, where the pandemic is in the early stages. The epistemic status of conspiracy theories is fraught with difficulties of fact-tracking plots and testing evidential claims that often seem improbable. It is the case that often conspiracy theories are false and that they do not fairly or objectively represent events in the world. In many cases they may be scientifically or factually untested. Indeed, among the believers it may well be impossible to rigorously test claims against reality. Often the more improbable the claim and the less it is open to any form of testing, the more it incites false belief. The structure of belief by believers is also an interesting issue as quite often the believers become cult-inspired and act as viral carriers of beliefs that get accepted by others without much by way of evidence. What counts as evidence also is another epistemic feature—sometimes these conspiratorial beliefs cannot be easily dismissed without elaborate argument and testing. Conspiracy theories that are false can be damaging and can affect the moral and ethical climate in a society. For some this is a practical problem that crops up from time to time. For others, it is part of a shift in political regime that trades on ambiguity and deliberate lies, based on a constant and immediate set

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of tweets that are seemingly made up on the spot. The difficulty is tracking all of the lies as they create an atmosphere of conspiracy. Indeed, the regime trades on conspiracy where the leader is the ‘fountain of truth’, of telling the population the plain unvarnished truth, which often endorses existing prejudices. This kind of analysis might suggest that the problem of conspiracy and conspiracy theorizing is that it has been harnessed as a political weapon in an age of social media that can by-pass traditional fact-checking journalism (Peters, 2020). Various high-placed US sources have encouraged a conspiracy that alleges that the COVID-19 virus originated in a level-4 biolab in Wuhan.5 This story has been countered by Chinese sources that suggest a story that the US military brought the virus to Wuhan. These are both conspiracy theories with no evidence to support them.6 The scientific consensus indicates that the virus originated in bats and was transmitted to other animals and then to humans. A paper published in Nature Medicine, ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’ (Andersen et al., 2020), concluded, ‘It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus’ and further suggested ‘the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone’. President Trump, engaging with the conspiracy theory as a means of deflecting his own mishandling of the pandemic, has withdrawn US funding to the WHO, insisting that it is too China-oriented. Eliza Barclay (2020) writes: This hypothesis [the Wuhan lab conspiracy] has been circulating in US, UK, and Chinese media since February, with fresh reporting and speculation this month in the Daily Mail, Vanity Fair, Fox News, and the Washington Post. A Tuesday op-ed drawing solely from circumstantial evidence by chief ‘labber’ Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) in the Wall Street Journal raised the question anew. Riding the wave of these reports, President Donald Trump is also now using this potential avenue for blaming China; on April 15, he said his government was looking into whether the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also said Beijing ‘needs to come clean’ on what it knows about the virus’s origin.7 Trump’s administration has badly mishandled the pandemic, first, scoffing at the danger of COVID-19, like so many right-wing leaders (‘it’s no more than flu’), then refusing to attend briefings after the press made fun of his suggestion to swallow bleach as a cure and other spurious cures. He is facing an election in November 2020 with over 30 million unemployed and an economy facing the worst disruption in history (even though the markets have not yet faithfully reflected this situation). Flailing around looking for excuses, Trump blames China, a classic diversion tactic. This is a continuation of Trump’s pre-election banter, followed by the beat-up on Huawei and the US trade wars with China. Now Mike Pompeo has jumped on the bandwagon and is pressing pushing the US anti-China rhetoric to new levels and encouraging allies to do the same. Most recently, Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has called for an independent review into the COVID-19 pandemic, a call that has been rejected

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as politically motivated by Chen Wen, a diplomat in the UK. It certainly seems to be the case, especially when scientists have already given evidence about likely origin and also the improbability of ever discovering its exact origin. Morrison should first read the scientific evidence before calling for an international review.8 In this case, it certainly seems that Australia is falling into line backing the US-led propaganda against China, in an extension of the ‘trade wars’ and a bid to halt the emergence of China as an economic superpower. The Australian Liberal government has followed the US anti-China propaganda line even at the potential cost of jeopardizing Australia’s $135 billion exports to China. Donald Trump has also repeatedly attacked China for its handling of the outbreak and yet the statistics speak for themselves with less than 5,000 deaths in China, where the virus is under control, and over 2.5 million confirmed cases in the US with nearly 125,000 deaths (26 June), and a situation clearly out of control. Some commentators have entertained the theoretical question of which political and economic system has been be more successful in dealing with the pandemic, Neoliberal America or Socialist China? Free capitalist federal America or State Socialist China? But are these even real alternatives? It may well be that in times of crisis, a strong state and strong leader is both necessary and desirable, not only for the management of a pandemic but also for the management of an economy. George Packer (2020), writing for The Atlantic, suggests, ‘The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken’.9 He continues: When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. The US virus response has been an inconsistent set of policies willing to sacrifice its population in order to ‘save’ the economy by ‘opening up’ early and against the advice of its major scientific and medical advisors. The effects have been catastrophic for older people and for those not covered by medical insurance ort unable to get tested—those members of Black, Latino and working-class groups, all deemed to be expendable. The world has entered into the second wave of COVID-19 with hues increased in confirmed cases and death rates. As with the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, the second wave is likely to be more deadly than the first wave: ‘The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans’.10 At the precise moment that the WHO needed global support, Trump pulled its funding. As the pandemic peaks in parts of Asia, America and Europe, and develops new epicentres in Brazil and Africa, the rather banal thought expressed by the media in

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different ways that the pandemic could perhaps reshape world order certainly bears further investigation. CNN’s Nic Robertson, for example, reporting on the WHO annual assembly May 21–27, writes: ‘Europe outright rejected US President Donald Trump’s vision of the world this week. Tensions between these historic democratic allies that have been simmering since Trump came to office three years ago have now come to a boil during the coronavirus pandemic’.11 He argues that the pandemic has accelerated a global change in the balance of power as evidenced in ‘Europe’s conciliatory approach to China relating to an investigation into the outbreak’ rather than the Trump administration’s accusatory witch hunt. As he argues, ‘almost every single geopolitical dispute [is] being exacerbated by the pandemic, sharpened by the complexity and urgency of the situation’, accentuating a threeway battle for dominance between US, China and Europe. The problem is that the anti-China rhetoric is dangerous, fuelling talk of a ‘new Cold War’ and suggesting a hegemonic future of either the US or China, rather than a multipolar world with a diffusion of power among new centres of power, city states, transnationals, global civil organizations and emerging regional trading blocs. The pandemic has been strongly politicized by the Trump administration: he began by praising China in its handling of the crisis only to turn around to point the finger of blame at China when the number of Americans dying from the disease drew attention to the inconsistencies, misinformation and conspiracies generated by the Trump regime, to deflect responsibility for its own mismanagement. The pandemic has heightened US–China tensions and been used to both deflect Trump’s mismanagement of COVID-19 and develop anti-Chinese sentiment in the countdown to the US elections in November. Perhaps more importantly, there are signs of a deeper split in US–EU relations with Europe no longer content to follow US policy or bow to US bullying. On the other hand, Australia under the Liberal Government wants to develop a closer relationship with Trump’s administration. This speaks to a split in the Western alliance with US, China and Europe, representing different blocs and perspectives with the English-speaking countries of the US, Britain and Australia forming a neoliberal economic bloc. At the same time, the full economic consequences of the pandemic—of the second wave and opening up too soon—as well as massive unemployment appear to be more crippling to the neoliberal bloc with China, by comparison, ready to emerge strongly and to pursue a more assertive, pragmatic line of trade-backed international politics. In this environment we must inquire into the governance and politics of global health and its consequences for global health management philosophy. Meanwhile the Chinese Dream, like any national dream, is not simply a reflection of a history, or a set of policies, or even a collection of operative cultural values; rather more complexly, if it has life, it is also embedded in global political events that have a strong influence on the credibility of the narrative, helping to determine its achievement. At the same time, the Chinese Dream, no doubt, has exercised a strong influence on the evolution of global politics, and will continue to do so, and, like all national dreams, must develop resources to defend the dream against distortions and conspiracies. In the current global pandemic, all signs point to China ‘getting back to work’ even although new cases of infection

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have surfaced in Beijing. While 2020 is not going to be a great economic year with massive global unemployment and the crash of tourism, aviation and international education, the Chinese economy and the Chinese State seem set to emerge rather more strongly than its US counterpart, with Chinese capital poised to buy up distressed assets. At the same time, the US mismanagement of COVID-19 and the solidarity of the Black Lives Matter movement as a significant historical episode in US Black civil rights coalesce in the critical period before the US elections in November, with the very real possibility of preventing Donald Trump from regaining the presidency.12

Notes 1 See Peters (2019) on the Chinese Dream. 2 www.cnbc.com/2020/04/17/china-economy-beijing-contracted-in-q1-2020-gdp-amidcoronavirus.html 3 https://asiatimes.com/2020/01/chinese-dream-turns-into-wuhan-virus-nightmare/. See also www.miragenews.com/china-s-dreams-could-be-shattered-by-covid-19/;   https://time.com/5778994/coronavirus-china-country-future/;   https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/chinas-coronavirus-information-warfare/. 4 www.bbc.com/news/world-52224331 5 The  Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. It was commissioned in collaboration with the French government’s Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie and opened in 2015; http://english.whiov.cas.cn/News/Events/201502/t20150203_135923.html. 6 See a summary of the scientific evidence for the first conspiracy at https://science. slashdot.org/story/20/04/18/1836218/claim-that-covid-19-came-from-lab-in-chinacompletely-unfounded-scientists-say 7 www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus-china 8 See, for example, How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus, www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunteddown-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ 9 ‘We are living in a failed state’, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/ underlying-conditions/610261/ 10 www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic 11 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/23/world/pandemic-world-order-trump-intl/index.html 12 The Economist predicts that Joe Biden will beat Donald Trump in the Electoral College, https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president

References Andersen, K. G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W. I., Holmes, E. C., & Garry, R. F. (2020). The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine,  26, 450–452. https://doi.org/10. 1038/s41591-020-0820-9 Barclay, E. (2020). Why these scientists still doubt the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. Vox. www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus-china Packer, G. (2020). We are living in a failed state. The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/ Peters, Michael A. (2019). The Chinese dream: Educating the future. Routledge. Peters, Michael A. (2020). On the epistemology of conspiracy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1741331

11 BIOPOLITICS, CONSPIRACY AND THE IMMUNO-STATE An evolving global politico-genetic complex Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

1 Biopolitics—the relation of politics to life, and the state to the body a

The literature on biopolitics emerged 1970s with Michel Foucault’s (1979) ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, part five of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Volume 1): For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to ‘dispose’ of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. (p. 131)

The juridical form was the power and right to appropriate ‘a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects’ (p. 136). This form of power evolved in the 17th century into an anatomopolitics of the human body (power exercised by the disciplines) and a biopolitics of the population (propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity). As he indicates ‘this great bipolar technology—anatomic and biological’—was to invest life. ‘The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life . . . there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower” ’ (pp. 139–140). b The Birth of Biopolitics: In the course summary to this work Foucault writes: The theme [for this year’s course] was to have been ‘biopolitics,’ by which I meant the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the

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problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race. . . . We know the increasing importance of these problems since the nineteenth century, and the political and economic issues they have raised up to the present. He examines problems of the health of the population in terms of a framework of political rationality that he attributes to liberalism focusing on the problematic: ‘In the name of what and according to what rules can [the legal subject, the individual] be managed?’ c  The State of Exception: Giorgio Agamben identifies how the two elements in Foucault’s work—political techniques of the State and technologies of the self— we might say ‘subjection’ and ‘subjectification’—enter into a double structure of modern power whose locus allegedly remains unclear or unsettled in Foucault’s work.1 Agamben infers that while Foucault began with the prison and forms of spatial internment (grande enfermement) his biopolitical studies never led him to the analysis of the concentration camp. He concludes Homo Sacer (1998) with 1

The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion). 2 The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios. 3 Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West (p. 102). d  ‘The Invention of An Epidemic’: Agamben (2020) endorses in the way COVID-19 has enabled the tendency to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government. He argues: Faced with the frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of coronavirus . . . why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to spread a state of panic, thus provoking an authentic state of exception with serious limitations on movement and a suspension of daily life in entire regions?2 Agamben is concerned about ‘the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government’ where the law has imposed serious limitations on freedom, and he lists the following: (a) prohibition on the removal from the municipality or area concerned by all individuals present in the municipality or area; (b) prohibition of access to the municipality or area concerned; (c) suspension of events or initiatives of any kind, of events and of any form of meeting in a public or private

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place, including cultural, recreational, sporting and religious, even if held in closed places open to the public; (d) suspension of educational services for children and schools of all levels, as well as the frequency of school and higher education activities, except for distance learning activities; (e) suspension of the opening services to the public of museums and other cultural institutes and places . . .; (f ) suspension of all educational trips, both on national and foreign territory; (g) suspension of bankruptcy proceedings and of the activities of public offices, without prejudice to the provision of essential and public utility services; (h) application of the quarantine measure with active surveillance among individuals who have had close contacts with confirmed cases of diffuse infectious disease. . . . It would seem that once terrorism is exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext to extend them beyond all limits. . . . In a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that has been prompted by the governments themselves who now intervene to satisfy it. (www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia) e  ‘A biopolitical dream’: Philipp Sarasin (2020), commenting on Foucault’s biopolitics in order to understand the pandemic, sums up the apogee of the modern conception of politics constituted in terms of the biological: It looks like a biopolitical dream: governments, advised by physicians, impose pandemic dictatorship on entire populations. Getting rid of all democratic obstacles under the pretext of ‘health,’ even ‘survival,’ they are finally able to govern the population as they have, more or less openly, always done in modernity: as pure ‘biomass,’ as ‘bare life’ to be exploited.3 He indicates three models by which modern societies have regulated populations during pandemic events: first, ‘The complete lockdown of Wuhan rigorously follows the plague model, and every curfew ultimately does so, too’; second, the liberal smallpox model of power—‘The strategy to #flattenthecurve means to reckon with the pathogen and to know that it cannot be eradicated, but to “extend” its distribution over time in such a way that the health system can handle it’; third, the old leprosy model ‘is lurking in the background . . . let old people die “to save the economy” ’—or abandon retirement and nursing homes. In terms of COVID-19 we can significantly add to the analysis of FoucaultAgamben line by acknowledging a political rationality for the quarantine and social distancing of the pandemic that seems to suggest a common theme: the ‘quarantined subject’ and ‘staying at home’. This is simultaneously a kind of social isolation at the physical level but reunification at the level of the command state and nation through the spectacle of the media, including daily briefings,

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that asks individuals and households to willingly curtail their freedoms in the interests of the popular imaginary of a resilient and caring society.4 The crucial difference is that there is no camp but rather ordinary life is turned inward on itself with enforced police and neighbourhood surveillance. One problem with both Agamben and Foucault (to a lesser extent) is that the analysis is unrelentingly the dark side that connects the logic of the biopolitical to a state where the elimination of an ethnic minority in the name of national unity bypasses constitutional questions and sovereignty to lead us to a one-way historical street. By contrast to Foucault and Agamben, Roberto Esposito offers an affirmative bio-politics. f

Roberto Esposito: ‘Bios, Immunity, Life’

Roberto Esposito is an Italian philosopher, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and one of the founders of the European Political Lexicon Research Centre and the International Centre for a European Legal and Political Lexicon.5 He is an important philosopher, alongside Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, in theorizing biopolitics over the last 20 years, especially the origin and destiny of community in relation to what he calls the ‘The Immunization Paradigm’, exploring immunization as a discourse and developing an affirmative biopolitics based on the three concepts included in the titles of his trilogy: Communitas (2004, orig. 1998), Immunitas (2011, orig. 2002) and Bios (2008). In the essay ‘Epidemic Paradoxia: Treated to the Bitter End’ for Antinomies, Roberto Esposito (2020) writes: The fact is that today anyone with eyes to see cannot deny the full deployment of biopolitics. From biotechnology interventions on areas once considered exclusively natural such as birth and death, to biological terrorism, to the management of immigration and more or less serious epidemics, all current political conflicts have at the center the relationship between politics and biological life.6 Esposito argues that politics and medicine have become mutually linked and transforming, including both ‘a politicization of medicine’ and ‘a medicalization of politics’, creating a politics very different from its classic role and profile. Commenting on Italy under the virus, nevertheless, Esposito suggests that limitations of freedom ‘has more the character of a decomposition of public powers than of a dramatic totalitarian grip’. Esposito’s work over the last 20 years has explored immunization as discourse of the self and state and how both are constructed in relation to foreign bodies with the potential for conflict. The sources for Esposito’s ‘Affirmative Biopolitics’

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are to be found in Mauss (gift-exchange), Hobbes’ social contract, Locke, and Bataille’s concept of sacrifice (Tierney, 2016). His major work, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, examines the relations between bodies and societies and argues that ‘just as the human body’s immune system protects the organism from deadly incursions by viruses and other threats, law also ensures the survival of the community in a life-threatening situation’, protecting and prolonging life. The major paradox, is that ‘like the individual body, the collective body can be immunized from the perceived danger only by allowing a little of what threatens it to enter its protective boundaries’.7 The nature of immunization, Esposito argues, is at the heart of contemporary biopolitics, characterizing both the nature of the self and society. The paradox is that immunity functions to incorporate within the body exactly that foreign elements and external entity that threaten its existence. g  The Immune Self: A significant range of ontological and epistemological studies have been focused on theme of ‘the immune self’ as ‘the central motif of biological identity in the context of immunity’, invoking immunological conceptions of selfhood, including personal identity, self-image, constructivist and poststructuralist notions of identity, as well as questions in ecology and evolutionary biology. As Swiatczak and Tauber (2020) explain: Immunology, from its earliest inception, has been concerned with biological identity—its establishment and maintenance. In its original iteration, immunity was conceived as that function that preserved the integrity of the organism in terms of protecting and restoring its individuality. Thus, immune functions testified to the persistence of a stable, core identity defined in terms of its insularity and autonomy. Indeed, individuality undergirded the science from its inception, for the defense against pathogens was framed by an attacked patient (individual) pitted against alien others, the invaders. A major shift of thinking has occurred as dominance of ‘the immune self’ and individuality-based biology has given way to communal ecological perspectives reflecting some larger changes in biology to recognize environmental studies, ecoimmunology and symbiotic ecosystems, leading to fundamental insights challenging notions of individuality and pathogenization. Early notions of autonomy as a theoretical foundation for biology ‘complemented Malthusian economics, liberal political philosophy, and Comtian sociology to instantiate the autonomous body as a political, social, economic and medical entity’ and failed to comprehend ‘the dialectical relationship between the organism and its environment’ (Swiatczak & Tauber, 2020). By contrast, a number of critical philosophers (Foucault, Agamben, Haraway, Esposito) have dismantled the old view suggesting ‘the “immune self” appears as a metaphor to model Western culture, by invoking “immunization” as an explanatory model for understanding the core dynamics of post-industrial

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societies’ (Swiatczak & Tauber, 2020). These criticisms also apply also to notions of the state—’the immuno-state’—that is theorized on the basis of a dialectics of border and exchange, intrusion and defence, within an ecological and dynamic systems conception of the state within an increasingly interconnected and globalized planet, helping to reconceptualize contemporary immunology through collectivist models of molecular interaction. [The] ecological orientation has inflected immunology from its earlier insular conceptions of the organism to a dynamic interactive view that highlights how life experience alters the immune response to external challenges and opportunities. With this broadened perspective, the idea of immunity extends beyond defense of an atomistic individual, to include the mediation of the organism’s ecological economy, both defensive and assimilative. (Swiatczak & Tauber, 2020) China as immune-state demonstrated the role of a strong socialist state that could act quickly to provide social and geopolitical isolation of neighbourhoods, towns and cities, as well as an enforcement regime. (Generally Chinese people welcomed and understood the need for such measures in the collective good.) By contrast the ‘immuno-state’ in the US under the Trump regime has proved controversial, often setting itself against experts and its own scientific advisors, creating an ongoing fight with governors on safety measures and on ‘opening up’. Trump himself has added to the contradictory nature of advice to the American people through his own example (e.g., not wearing a mask, championing false anti-­products) and through his briefings. He puts great emphasis on a busno-­technological fix of a vaccine. These two styles of government—American capitalist vs. Chinese socialist (in all their differences)—may also determine how successfully these countries ‘open up’ and also capitalization of global market opportunities, including buying distressed strategic companies.

2 Global governance, viral politics and government by conspiracy a  Pandemic I: The First Modern Pandemic: Bill Gates writes: ‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus. The damage to health, wealth, and well-being has already been enormous. This is like a world war, except in this case, we’re all on the same side’.8 He emphasizes global innovation and the production of a vaccine. Immediately after Trump announced the freezing of funds to the WHO Bill Gates criticized the action and the Gates Foundation announced it was increasing its emergency funding over and above the $100 million global response funding made in February by an additional $150 million of grant funding for diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.9

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b The global governance of health Chong (2020) suggests that at the international level, global governance is tied to the control of borders and the security of the state that can threaten civil rights and the erosion of civil liberties necessary for democracy: Much of the public alarm triggered by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is greatly bound up with the management of cross-border security threats. COVID-19 resembles a 21st-century medieval plague in terms of how little we understand its character and how vulnerable we are to its effects. . . . The coronavirus crisis is emblematic of the difficulty of constructively extending good governance across borders. An effective response requires governments, medical authorities and civil society to consider a new spatialisation of threats to human security when making decisions.10 Chong (2020) argues that the global biosecurity threat depends upon information and intelligence sharing in real time, for the COVID-19 virus afflicts everyone irrespective of political allegiance or nationality, and he suggests, ‘The global north and global south must find a common depoliticised platform to exchange relevant information about the latest viral threats in much the same way cyber security firms and national cyber agencies monitor digital viruses in real time’. So far the very opposite has occurred, with the White House stepping up its conspiracy campaign against China over the origin and distribution of the virus, and against the WHO for its alleged mishandling of the pandemic when its own mismanagement of the pandemic crisis has been injurious to the American people and the viral crisis has been politicized as a crucial factor in the coming US election. c  ‘Government by conspiracy’: The political rationality, based on a state of exception where the US ‘national emergency’ permits new powers to dispense billions, gave three trillion dollars—the historically largest bail-out—to businesses and unemployment benefits to keep the economy afloat when borders are closed and will remained closed for the foreseeable future. Trump’s border security territoriality seems to be achieved in one set of health/­ economy measures that ruptures daily economic life. Yet there are clear governmentality differences between socialist China and neoliberal America in the philosophy of public health management. After early suppression of information and cover-up attempts, China acted swiftly and effectively to embrace a total shutdown of Wuhan and Hubei that quarantined the outbreak. In the US by contrast, management was interrupted by a denial of COVID-19, the consequent lack of testing and a disregard for public safety with attempts to prematurely open up the economy again. As a consequence, the US’s grim COVID-19 statistics have ballooned out to 1.5 million confirmed cases of infection and nearly 100,000 deaths (May 18).

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d  The Constitutional Challenge to Lockdown: Increasingly, echoing the president, people in strong Republican states are contesting lockdown by citing their inalienable rights enshrined in the US Constitution. As Geranios (2020), for instance, reports: In deeply conservative eastern Washington state, a prominent state lawmaker kicked out of his Republican Party caucus labels the coronavirus as a foreign bio-weapon, accuses Marxists of using the pandemic to advance totalitarianism and rails against lockdown restrictions imposed by the Democratic governor. . . . Across the U.S., elected officials from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma suspicious of big government and outraged with orders to close churches, gun stores and other businesses deemed non-essential insist that the public health response is being used as an excuse to trample constitutional rights.11 The Far Right suggests that a national emergency has been used to limit civil freedoms of citizens of the United States. Some are worried about the Stateenhanced surveillance powers and the control over information; others express concern about the suspension of rights, especially freedom of association. The ‘Stay Home. Saves Lives’ campaign’s focus on social distancing, quarantine and breaking the chain of transmission is now an argument about the constitutionality of government actions. Paradoxically, the challenge comes from the both the Far Right and those wishing to prevent a totalitarian state. Critics are concerned that the COVID-19 government responses have been and are being used for ends that are not related to the preservation of public health.12 The confusion around lockdown limitations on freedoms in the US are partly a result of the contradictions between the federal and state levels of power, often determined by whether governors are Democrat or Republican, and the extent to which they are tuned to the centre. This structure of formal authority and power is made more complex by the fact that President Trump contradicts his own official announcements and policies (by tweeting opposing content). There is also often a clear conflict between what Trump says at briefings and the advice of his scientific-medical team. These Science—State conflicts relate to the significance of epidemiological sciences of prediction and mathematical modelling to estimate exponential rates of infection and infection-deaths ratios, and the role they play in national emergency policies. There are also calls for ‘opening up the economy’ in the US that Trump privately supports in his tweets to his followers while at the same time stressing the importance of social distancing in public. President Trump has unveiled Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, including ‘downward trajectory of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) reported within a 14-day period’, core State responsibilities in ‘preparedness’ in terms of testing and contact-tracing, plans to protect workers and guidelines.13 The moral choice of further deaths, especially of frontline workers, and other trade-offs of economy and risks to health—a choice now

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left to governors—has become a calculus that operates at the State level, generating a significant level risk for all cross-border activities.

3 The immuno-state: biosafety, biosecurity, bioterrorism, biowarfare a  The concept of Biosafety Level as a set of precautions and containment procedures to isolate dangerous pathogens in the laboratory originated after World War II and took shape during the 1980s through a set of conferences to develop a formal organization, The American Biological Safety Association (ABSA), in 1984 and, later, four levels of biosafety expressed as BSL1–4. Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, first published in 1984 and now in its 5th edition (Wilson & Chosewood, 2009), is an advisory document outlining best practices.14 It provides guidance on biological risk assessment, principles of biosafety including biosafety levels, laboratory safety level criteria (specifying standard microbiological practices, special practices, safety equipment and laboratory facilities), animal biosafety level criteria and principles of laboratory biosecurity, as well as a summary statement of microbiological agents. The Introduction makes clear the risks associated with expansion of research and bioterrorism: We are living in an era of uncertainty and change. New infectious agents and diseases have emerged. Work with infectious agents in public and private research, public health, clinical and diagnostic laboratories, and in animal care facilities has expanded. Recent world events have demonstrated new threats of bioterrorism. For these reasons, organizations and laboratory directors are compelled to evaluate and ensure the effectiveness of their biosafety programs, the proficiency of their workers, as well as the capability of equipment, facilities, and management practices to provide containment and security of microbiological agents. (p. 1) The occurrence of laboratory-associated infections seems limited, with some 168 deaths recorded between 1930 and 1978, and 22 deaths in the following 20 years (p. 2). Risk levels evolved with BSL-4, defined in the following terms: ‘Exotic agents that pose a high individual risk of life-threatening disease by infectious aerosols and for which no treatment is available are restricted to high containment laboratories that meet biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) standards’ (p. 4). b  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have more than 1,700 scientists working in some 200 laboratories across the US with the appointment of one official responsible for overall laboratory safety.15 BSL-4 laboratories, as the highest level, require work to be completed within level II biosafety cabinets, with decontamination procedures, restricted entry, the wearing of protective suits and chemical showers on exit. Research takes places on easily transmitted pathogens that can cause death, including Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, viral hemorrhagic fevers

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(VHFs) and Variola virus (which causes smallpox) in two research centres, one in the US and one in Russia. c  There are some 70 BSL-4 reported laboratories globally with 15 in the US alone, although the number is not verified. It includes the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases that has specified BSL levels.16 The WHO Consultative Meeting on High/Maximum Containment (Biosafety Level 4) Laboratories Networking (2018) reports, BSL-4 laboratories represent the highest level of biological containment, offering unparalleled protection for the user, sample and environment. At present, more than 50 maximum- and high-containment facilities around the globe handle some of the world’s most hazardous pathogens to human and animal health for research and diagnostic purposes [see Annex 2, pp. 46ff]. BSL4 laboratories are located in all WHO regions. While most are in North America or western Europe, a number have been built in Asia, and construction projects are underway in China, Japan and subSaharan Africa, raising questions related to sustainability in low-income countries (p. 1).17 There has been a shift from prescriptive to performance-based biosafety, emphasizing ‘the use of practical measures to mitigate risks, including thorough risk assessments and evidence-based approaches to biosafety, rather than reliance on rigid classification systems’ (p. viii). The meeting document provided updates on BSL-4 facilities, including planned high-containment laboratories (Japan, China, UK), high-containment laboratories under construction (Côte d’Ivoire, US, UK, China), recently constructed BSL-4 laboratories that are operational (China, Korea, Australia, Germany), as well as high-containment laboratory networks. d  There have been fears about biosafety and human error rates with these labs, as well as criticisms of the lack of government regulation in the US.18 Alexandra Peters (2019) writes of ‘the global proliferation of high-containment biological laboratories’: Disease-causing pathogens have been with humanity for as long as the species has existed, but the world has changed. The human population is increasing and becoming more globalised. Meanwhile, the international system remains unstable and biotechnology is advancing at a breakneck speed. Humans are coming into contact with new and reemerging pathogens as they spread into previously uninhabited environments. Pathogens play an increasingly global role, and infectious disease is becoming less confined by geographical or climatic boundaries. In order to meet these new challenges, both states and the private sector have been building an increasing number of high-containment biological laboratories (HCBLs) that work with biosafety level (BSL)

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3 and 4 pathogens. This rate has increased sharply since 11 September 2011, and most states that have the means to build such laboratories do so. Pathogens do not stop at borders, and the more prepared a state is to deal with them, the better for its national security. (www.The_global_ proliferation_of_high-containment_biolo.pdf) In a case study of the US, Peters indicates that there has been a rapid proliferation of HCBLs and issues to do with the lack of oversight and reporting with discrepancies in reporting and threats posed by accidents at government facilities, including the mishandling of anthrax. In terms of future challenges there are threats of both biological weapons and bioterrorism. While there has been some progress in terms of better oversight of HCBLs and an increase in international cooperation, ‘the measures that have been taken so far are not yet adequate, and the degree of oversight and control that states exert over their HCBLs varies considerably’ (p. 866). e  The COVID-19 virus became politicized early on, as Trump by turn first praised China’s handling of the crisis, then as the situation got worse, pointed the finger and blamed, in order, the media, the governors, the WHO (freezing funding) and the ‘Chinese virus’, drawing attention to the Wuhan Lab and deflecting responsibility for the crisis—what we call ‘government by conspiracy’. The Wuhan Lab conspiracy was supported by Trump, Pence and Pompeo, but contradicted by their own intelligence and health advisors like Anthony Fauci, who echoed the scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was ‘natural’ and showed no signs of being genetically engineered.19 f  Biosecurity: The concept and preventive measures of biosecurity developed quickly in the 1990s in relation to the increasing interconnectivity of globalization to prevent the transmission of infectious crop and animal diseases that could damage people, the environment and agrobusinesses. Later it was extended to include modified organisms (GMOs) and invasive alien species. The first GMO plants and animals date from the 1970s but it was not until the 1990s that the first commercial genetically modified food began production. Bacteria are the easiest to modify and they have been used in research and food production. Viruses also are modified through transduction (inserting genetic material), especially in gene therapy. In the 1980s biosecurity was extended to preventing forms of bioterrorism. Most recently, biosecurity has been extended again to cope with the growing exigencies of synthetic biology. The movement toward securitization at the international level came to include a number of other risks including generalized public health risks to entire populations, such as epidemics and pandemics. Increasingly, states within the international system looked to control malevolent uses of infectious biological diseases by state and non-state actors. As Koblentz (2010) argues: Advances in science and technology, the rise of globalization, the emergence of new diseases, and the changing nature of conflict have

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increased the risks posed by naturally occurring and man-made biological threats. A growing acceptance of a broader definition of security since the end of the Cold War has facilitated the rise of biosecurity issues on the international security agenda. (p. 96) Biosecurity has come to encompass a wide range of biological threats that include natural, accidental and deliberate disease outbreaks, and states now need a comprehensive framework to enforce border security increasingly at the viral level.20 Some argue that the greatest risk to states and the international system is from biotechnology and deliberate introduction of alien invasive species, including acts of economic sabotage by so-called friendly countries. It could be argued that global public health infrastructure is underfunded in poorer countries and the democratization of ‘garage’ biotech represents new dangers that are not considered comprehensively in terms of national biodefence21 (Ord, 2020). g  The risks of bioterrorism: Bioterrorism using micro-organisms or infected samples to cause terror and panic in populations is an ancient form. Hittites sent infected rams to their enemies and the British in 1763 reportedly gave indigenous people blankets infected with smallpox. In the modern context these threats have been highlighted following the World Trade Center attack of September 2001 with the ‘anthrax’ scare (FBI code Amerithax) where spores were mailed to Democratic senators, killing five people and infecting 17. Already in the COVID-19 pandemic, White supremacists who have tested positive have been encouraged to infect Jews and cops.22 h  Biowarfare and bioweapons: The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC, 1972)23 was the first international treaty to effectively prohibit an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. It has been confirmed by 183 states, including the US and UK. The BWC bans the development, stockpiling, acquisition, retention and production of (i) biological agents and toxins ‘of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes’ and (ii) weapons, equipment and delivery vehicles ‘designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict’.24 Despite the international treaty, it has failed to stop countries from conducting offensive weapons research and large-scale production of biological weapons. The BWC has no inspection or verification procedures and while only a few countries are known to have bioweapons programs, the development of bioweapons compared to nuclear weapons are inexpensive and both easy to acquire and to hide behind benign research institutions. To add to these difficulties, much of the information concerning the production of harmful pathogens are available on the Internet. i The immuno-state faces increasing levels of risk from globalization and the transmission of harmful viruses, bacteria and infectious diseases across international borders that are difficult to detect and police, especially air-borne

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and ocean-borne agents. The threat of biological weapons seems weak. The argument has been that rational state agents are unlikely to use this means of warfare given the risks of blow-back and control issues. Natural and accidental pathogens are more likely risks, and threats to the environment and to agriculture also represent a greater cause for concern. Modern immunology since its inception has used a philosophical language consisting of ‘self’ and ‘nonself’ or ‘self/foreign’. Such language has given way to community and ecological models that recognize mutualism and symbiotic relationships between the organism and the environment. The state as an organism is part of an underlying political environment that seeks to manage the macro immune system. In classical politics the metaphor of the natural body to the body politic operated on a metaphor that compared diseases to political afflictions (civil conflict, dissent, resistance). The body politic has passed from a sovereignty of death to a body politic to preserve life and health of the population. The interpretation of the social in biological terms has led to Social Darwinism and the racial state governed by a notion of population hygiene that has been adopted and refined recently by the Far Right to fuel contemporary notions of nationalism and populism. Esposito provides an affirmative biopolitics arguing that ‘all current political conflicts have at the center the relationship between politics and biological life’ Esposito (2008). In light of this analysis, new ecological models of the immune system based on open networks, interdependence and mutual determination between organisms, reversing the philosophy-biology line of influence, may offer the prospect of a new global political language about how human communities can protect, adapt and govern themselves. The shift in immunology from philosophical metaphors of ‘immune self’ to dynamic ecologies may well indicate a necessity in the choice of political vocabulary metaphor that no longer models itself on Western culture with its liberal and neoliberal emphasis on individuality and homo economicus, but adopts an immune-biopolitics of the state that looks to a transformation of social relations, anticipating future pandemics, climate change, sustainability and coexistence that helps to guarantee humanity’s survival.

Notes 1 This crucial starting point is well recorded in two of Agamben’s 2009 videos—Forms of Power and The Problem of Subjectivity—available from his faculty profile at the European Graduate School. See www. egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/biography/. This site also carries full text articles and interviews (some in English) as well as lectures and links. 2 Agamben, 2020, www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia 3 Sarasin, Philip (2020), Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault? Foucault Blog, March 31, 2020. DOI: 10.13095/uzh.fsw.fb.254 4 ‘The Quarantine Subject and the Pandemic Spectacle: Metaphors for Our Historical Condition and the Politics of Staying at Home’, Alexander Jakob Husenbeth, Critical Edges, https://criticaledges.com/2020/04/11/the-quarantine-subject/

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5 www.sns.it/en/esposito-roberto 6 Esposito, Roberto, (2020) Cured to the Bitter End—Roberto Esposito’s response to JeanLuc Nancy, Mar 22nd 2020 Antinomie. https://crisisandcommunitas.com/news/cured-tothe-bitter-end-roberto-espositos-response-to-jean-luc-nancy/; www.antinomie.it/index. php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza; https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirusand-philosophers/ 7 www.wiley.com/en-us/Immunitas%3A+The+Protection+and+Negation+of+ Life-p-9780745649139 8 www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation 9 www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2020/04/Gates-FoundationExpands-Commitment-to-COVID-19-Response-Calls-for-International-Collaboration 10 A. Chong, Governance for Global Pandemics, East Asia Forum: Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific, 26 March 2020. 11 https://apnews.com/61d9bbe247e03a90b8071d3529d35e31 12 www.icnl.org/post/analysis/u-s-current-trend-covid-19-and-civic-freedom 13 www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/ 14 www.cdc.gov/labs/pdf/CDC-BiosafetyMicrobiologicalBiomedicalLaboratories2009-P.PDF 15 www.cdc.gov/labs/index.html, www.cdc.gov/labs/safety-history.html 16 https://fas.org/programs/bio/research.html; http://www9.who.int/ihr/publications/WHOWHE-CPI-2018.40/en/ 17 www.WHO-WHE-CPI-2018.40-eng%20(2).pdf 18 https://nationalpost.com/news/a-brief-terrifying-history-of-viruses-escaping-from-labs70s-chinese-pandemic-was-a-lab-mistake 19 www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/fauci-dismisses-trump-claim-coronavirus-startedwuhan-lab-200505170558959.html; www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhanlab-coronavirus-source-dismissal/ 20 www.who.int/foodsafety/fs_management/No_01_Biosecurity_Mar10_en.pdf 21 www.biosecuritycommons.com/?title=Main_Page 22 https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-supremacists-encouraging-members-spread-corona virus-cops-jews/story?id=69737522 23 https://www.unog.ch/80256EE600585943/(httpPages)/04FBBDD6315AC720C12571 80004B1B2F?OpenDocument 24 www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/bio/

References Agamben, G. (2020). The invention of an epidemic. www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-linvenzione-di-un-epidemia Agamben, H. S. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (Daniel Heller-­ Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Bird, G., & Short, J. (2013). Community, immunity, biopolitics. In Greg Bird and Jon Short (Eds.), Roberto Esposito, community, and the proper, special issue: Angelaki, 18(3), 83–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.834661 Chong, A. (2020, March 26). Governance for global pandemics. East Asia Forum: Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific. www.eastasiaforum. org/2020/03/26/governance-for-global-pandemics/ Esposito, R. (2004). Communitas: The origin and destiny of community (T. Campbell, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Esposito, R. (2006). The immunization paradigm. In T. Campbell (Ed.), Special issue: Bios, immunity, life: The thought of Roberto Esposito, diacritics, 36(2), 2–22.

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Esposito, R. (2008). Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy (T. Campbell, Trans.). Minnesota University Press. Esposito, R. (2011). Immunitas: The protection and negation of life (Z. Hanafi, Trans.). Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality: An introduction. Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Coll‘ege de France, 1978– 1979 (G. Burcell, Trans.; A. Davidson, Ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Gates, B. (2020). Pandemic I: The first modern pandemic. www.gatesnotes.com/Health/ Pandemic-Innovation Geranios, N. (2020). Far-right US politicians label lockdowns anti-constitutional. https:// apnews.com/61d9bbe247e03a90b8071d3529d35e31 Husenbeth, A. J. (2020). The quarantine subject and the pandemic spectacle: Metaphors for our historical condition and the politics of staying at home. Critical Edges. https:// criticaledges.com/2020/04/11/the-quarantine-subject/ Koblentz, G. D. (2010). Biosecurity reconsidered: Calibrating biological threats and responses. International Security, 34(4), 96–132. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2010.34.4.96 Ord, T. (2020). Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/06/worst-case-thinking-prevent-pandemicscoronavirus-existential-risk Swiatczak, B.,  & Tauber, A. I. (2020). Philosophy of immunology. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2020 ed.). https://plato.stan ford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/immunology/ Tierney, T. (2016). Roberto Esposito’s ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and the gift. Theory, Culture and Society, 33(2), 53–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276414561096 Wilson, D. E., & Chosewood, C. (2009). Biosafety in microbiological and biomedical laboratories. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Publication No. (CDC) 21–1112.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974 – 1975 (Foucault) 11 adult education 5 Africa 2, 3, 94 Agamben, G. 72 – 73, 98 – 100 airborne infection diseases 30 Aletheia 43 Allman, P. 46 American Biological Safety Association (ABSA) 105 Anderson, W. 2 antagonism 56, 67 anti-vaccinationist 25 – 31 anti-viral drugs 45 anxiety 4, 67; COVID-19 5; cultural 63; fear and 4 – 5; during pandemic isolation 4; panic 67 Archaea 9 Ardern, J. 59, 74 Aristotle 48, 87 artificial intelligence (AI) 13, 16, 21 Asia 2, 80, 94 Atlantic, The 94 Australia 80, 91, 94 – 95 Ayurveda 63 bacteria 9, 107 Baden, L. R. 19 – 20 Bakker, J. 28 Barclay, E. 93 Bartlett, N. 68 Bateson, G. 6, 15, 43

Beck, U. 5 belief: conspiracy 54, 56, 92; dependable and informed 6; disputes 53; false 54, 92; knowledge and 48; sincerity of 54 Benvenuto, S. 72 Bergan, S. 83 Bernstein, C. 53 Berry, W. 5 Besley, T. 1, 97 biodiversity 4, 89 bioinformatics 13, 35, 76 bioinformationalist 17 – 22 bioinformation/bioinformationalism 5 – 6, 13, 15 – 17, 31, 33 – 34, 43 – 46, 50, 76 biological vaccines 45 biological viruses 45 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) 108 biologization 17 biopolitic(s) 76, 97 – 102; birth 97 – 98; dream 99; education and 33; of truth 46 – 50 bioRxiv 20 biosafety 104 – 106 Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories 105 biosecurity 107 – 108 biosphere 13 – 14, 14 bioterrorism 105, 107 – 108 biowarfare 108 bioweapons 108 Black Death see Great Plague

Index  113

Black Lives Matter 96 blaming 67, 89, 93 Bonfield, E. H. 75 Brazil 1, 94 BSL-4 105 – 106 Burger, D. 28 Cameron, B. 30 Campion, E. W. 19 – 20 Camus, A. 59, 66 – 70 capitalism 47, 74 – 76, 89 cardiovascular diseases 3 Carolis, M. de 72 Cassidy, J. 73 catastrophe 66 – 70 Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) 1, 3 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US 2, 22, 24, 27, 29, 105 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 30 challenges: COVID-19 91; crises 68; interwar period 10; predigital 44 Chang Yong Rhee 80 character-building 68 Chen Wen 94 China 1, 32, 75, 88, 95, 102; conspiracy campaign against 103; economy 91, 96; GDP 91; mobilization 92; US-led propaganda against 94; US trade wars with 93 Chinese Dream 91 – 96 Chinese virus 2 cholera 63 – 64, 68 Chong, A. 102 – 103 Christoffersen, M. G. 4 chronic diseases 3 Clinton, H. 57 Cody, S. 31 cognitive reframing 68 Cohen, F. 15 collective irrationality 75 collective well-being 82 Communist Revolution 49 community 83; cohesion 59; research 22; responsibility 61; scientific 14, 19; selfhelp 67; self-interest 60; semiotic model of truth 43; spreading in US 29 competitive individualism 61 computer viruses 15 – 16, 42 Comtian sociology 101 Concept of Anxiety, The (Kierkegaard) 4 – 5 conspiracy 53 – 58; belief 54, 56, 92; existence 53; false 54; government by

102 – 104; openness 56; theories 92; unwarranted 55 constitutional challenge to lockdown 103 – 104 consumer behaviour 74 contagion 64, 70 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), US 73, 81 Cortez, Z. 28 COVID-19: academic publishers and 18; airborne infection diseases 30; anxiety 5; bioinformationalist response 17 – 19; challenges 91; crisis 2, 19, 83; emergency 92; epidemic 33; first case discovery in Italy 73; global biosecurity 103; global economic catastrophe 81; global pandemic 1; Google Scholar search for articles 19 – 20; impact 88; job losses 80; lockdown 79 – 83; outbreak 32, 34; pandemic 3, 5, 32, 44, 67, 75, 80, 88, 91, 93; politicization 107; preprints and publications 21; public health management 12; recovery 83; research 21 – 22; second wave of 94; spread 23; transition 60; Trump’s mismanagement of 95 – 96; virus infection 75 COVID-19: The CIDRAP Viewpoint (report) 4 crises: biodiversity 4; challenges 68; public 26; vulnerable to 83 critical realism 88 Croatia 32 Cultural Revolution 80, 91 curated databases 20 Cyranoski, D. 75 Daly, L. 16 De contaogione et contagiosis morbis (Fracastoro) 2 Defoe, D. 68 delirium 64 democracy 56, 76, 83, 102 Democratic Party 23, 53 democratization 108 Democrats 25, 27, 29 Denmark 1 Department of Agriculture 27 developing countries 3, 88 digitalization 16 – 17 disaster relief 81 discrimination 67 DNA genomes 41 Douglas, K. M. 56 Dugdale, J. 61

114 Index

Dwivedi, D. 72 Dyson, F. 17

Frankl, V. 5 Fuller, S. 21

East Asia 11 Ebola 3, 30, 61, 105 education 4, 67; adult 5; aims 55; biopolitics and 33; fake news 4; general theory of 50; informal 33; international 7, 32, 80, 96; philosophy 5, 33, 63; public 5, 32, 73 Egyptian medicine 63 Elden, S. 12 Elsevier 17 emotions: coping with 67; disruption 64; negative 56, 64 empathy 15, 59, 67 endemic 2 – 3, 75 epidemic 98 – 99; cholera 68; COVID19 33, 75; disease 12, 79; Ebola 30; endemic and 2; influenza 41; pandemics and 10; plague 68; threats 42; viral modernity 9 – 12 epidemio-economics (E-E) 79 epidemiology 2, 42 epistemology 49, 53 – 58 Esposito, R. 72, 100 – 101 ethics: criticism 50; self-isolation 60; social distancing 60 Eukarya 9 Europe 2, 31, 94 – 95 European Commission 17 European Journal of Psychoanalysis, The 72 evidence: based policy 2; circumstantial 93; falsifying 57; investigation 54; scientific 4, 94; truth and 43, 50 Existential Psychotherapy (Yalom) 5

Gaetz, M. 31 Galeo, S. 67 Gallagher, T. 83 Ganges Delta 64 Gates, B. 102 Gendler, T. 87 genomics 15 – 17, 76 Geological Survey, US 26 – 27 Geranios, N. 103 – 104 Ghebreyeus, T. A. 88 Gide, A. 69 Gillings, M. R. 13 Giroux, H. 63 GitHub 18 global biosecurity 103 global economic crisis 4, 81 Global Financial Crisis 81 global governance 102 – 104 globalization 3, 63, 76, 83, 108 Google Scholar 19 – 20 Goreis, A. 56 – 57 government by conspiracy 103 Graunt, J. 2 Great Britain 1, 73, 95 Great Confinement 10 Great Depression 81 Great Plague 10 Gregory, J. 23 group preservation 67 Guardian, The 70 Guidelines for Opening Up America Again 104 Guterres, A. 83

fabulism 64 Facebook 43, 58 facemasks 1 fake news 4, 15, 43, 53 Far Right 104 Fauci, A. 30, 107 Fazi, T. 82 fears 67; anxiety and 4 – 5; biosafety 102; existential 4; loneliness 5; pandemic 62; panic and 6; third-wave global reinfection 3 Florida 60 Foucault, M. 10 – 12, 31, 43, 47 – 49, 55, 72, 76, 97 – 100 Fox News 28, 46 Fracastoro, G. 2 Franck, T. 29 Frankenstein (Shelley) 62

Hacking, I. 49 Halperin, V. 62 Hannity, S. 27 Harkavy, I. 83 Harris, K. 57 Harvard, Population Health Studies PhD 2 hatred 67, 88 Heer, J. 82 hermeneutics 48 high-containment biological laboratories (HCBLs) 106 – 107 Hippocrates 2, 63 historical ontology 49 History of Sexuality, The: An Introduction (Foucault) 97 hoarding 74 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben) 98 Hong Kong 1

Index  115

Hubei 92 humanitarian aid 3 human resilience 66 – 70 humorism 63 hysteria 69 I Am Legend (Matheson) 62 Illing, S. 70 IMF 80 immune self 101, 109 Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Esposito) 100 immunology 101 – 102, 109 immuno-state 108 imprisonment 68 India 3, 74 individuality 101 inequality 83 influenza epidemic (1918–1919) 10, 41 infodemics 6, 22 – 25, 33 informal education 33; see also education information theory, viral modernity 15 – 17 information warfare 92 integral accident 35 international education 7, 32, 80, 96 Internet worm 42 isolation: anxiety during pandemic 4; pandemic 4; social 60, 74, 99; see also self-isolation Italy 73 Jackson, M. 62 Jameson, F. 64 Jamieson, D. 30 Jandrić, P. 9, 33, 41 Japan 80, 91 job losses 80 Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CCSE) 18 Johnson, B. 73 Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe) 68 justice-seeking 67 Kierkegaard, S. 4 – 5 Kind, A. 87 Kitcher, P. 61 knowledge: acquisition 87; belief and 48; capitalism 17; development 22; information and 6, 42; medical 42; public 21; skills and 6; socialism 33 Koblentz, G. D. 107 Koch, R. 2 Kucharski, A. 43 Kupferschmidt, K. 20

laboratory-associated infections 105 Lancet, The 3 Last Man, The (Shelley) 62 Latin America 64 legislation 44, 67 Lerner, S. 28 Liao, S.-Y. 87 Limbaugh, R. 29, 44 Ling Ma 62 Lively, S. 27 living and technological systems 13 lockdown: anxiety and fear 5; China 75, 80, 91; constitutional challenge to 103 – 104; COVID19 79 – 83; social distancing and 60; staged 1 logotherapy 5 London, bubonic plague in 68 London, J. 62 love and social distancing 59 – 64 Love in the Time of Cholera (Márquez) 63 Lovejoy, T. 89 Lugosi, B. 62 Lyotard, J.-F. 64 Madness and Civilisation (Foucault) 10 – 11 Malm, H. 60 Malraux, A. 69 Mandel, J. 62 Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl) 5 Márquez, G. G. 63 – 64 ‘Masque of the Red Death, The’ (short story) (Poe) 62 Matheson, R. 62 May, R. 5 McLaren, P. 9, 33, 41 medRxiv 20 Merdes, C. J. 75 Middle Ages 68, 72 Minnesota model 3 misinformation: conspiracies 95; deliberate use of 6, 53; disinformation 4, 43; global plague of 35; viral modernity 22 – 25 modus tollens 57 Mohan, S. 72 molecular interaction 102 Montaigne, M. de 5 Morabia, A. 2 Morris, R. T. 42 Morrison, S. 93 – 94 Morrissey, S. 19 – 20 Mosaic Law 10 multilateral cooperation 81 Mycobacterium leprae 10 Nancy, J. L. 72 – 73 Nasir, A. 9

116 Index

national biodefence 108 National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 27 National Park Service 27 National Weather Service 27 Nature 75 Nature Medicine 93 Necessary Angel, The: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Stevens) 85 negative emotions 64 neoliberalism 73, 79 – 83 new Cold War 95 Newell, M. 63 New England Journal of Medicine, The 20 New Zealand 1, 32, 60, 74 Nietzsche, F. 47 – 48 Night of the Living Dead (Romero) 62 non-curated databases 20 North America 4, 31 Norway 1 nudge theory 67 Obama, B. 53 Obamacare 26 Occupational Safety and Health Administration 30 O’Day, D. 26 Olmstead, K. S. 57 ontology of interconnectivity 13 openness 15, 33, 56, 76 open science 14, 19 – 22, 31 – 33, 56 Outka, E. 10 Packer, G. 94 Pakistan 3 Pandemic Century The; One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris (Honigsbaum) 42 Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World (Žižek) 73 pandemics 10, 24, 102; COVID-19 3, 5, 32, 44, 67, 75, 80, 88, 91, 93; isolation 4; philosophy 60; politicized by Trump administration 95; threat 3; transmission of 74; see also endemic panic buying 61, 67, 74 panopticism 72 parrhesia 48 Pasteur, L. 2 pathogenization 101 Pence, M. 27 – 28, 33, 107 personal protective equipment (PPE) 1 Peste, La (film) (Puenzo) 68

Peters, A. 106 Peters, M. A. 1, 9, 33 – 34, 41, 48, 53, 59, 66, 72, 79, 85, 91, 97 philosophy: education 5, 33, 63; pandemic 60, 72 – 77; viruses 60 Pisano, G. P. 73 Plague, The (Camus) 59, 66 – 70 Plague, The (play) (Bartlett) 68 plague towns 11, 72 Poe, E. A. 62 policing 67 political allegiance 103 political conspiracy theories 57 political economy 68 political rationality 103 Pompeo, M. 93, 107 Popper, K. 55 postmodernism 64 post-truth 41 – 51; biopolitics of truth 46 – 50; viral modernity 41 – 43; virologist perspective to bioinformational reality 43 – 46 prejudice 67 preparedness 104 privacy 83 privatization 81 Proceedings of the Royal Society B 89 Prooijen, J-W. 56 ProPublica 22 – 23 public education 5, 32, 73; see also education public health: crisis 1; infrastructure 3; management 9 – 12; measure 4; medicine and 3; officials 1; policy 2 – 3; services 1 public health systems 80 Puenzo, L. 68 quarantine 45, 79 – 83, 104; management 92; political rationality 99; viral modernity 9 – 12 Raikka, J. 55 – 57 reality 85 – 89; imagination 86 – 87, 89; naturalism and 85 Reitz, C. 49 renormalizing 67 resilience 7, 67 – 68 revolutionary intellectual 47 Risk Society (Beck) 5 Riva, M. A. 62 Rizvi, F. 88 RNA genomes 41 Robertson, N. 94 Robertson, P. 27

Index  117

Romer, C. 79 Romero, G. A. 62 Ronchi, R. 72 Ross, J. 28 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy 87 Roy, A. 88 Rubin, E. J. 19 – 20 Russia 49 Sarasin, P. 99 Sartin, J. S. 62 Scarlet Plague, The (London) 62 Schwadron, T. H. 23 – 24 segregation 67 self-alienation 61 self formation 47 self-interest 67 self-isolation 60 – 61, 81 self-preservation 67 Severance (Ma) 62 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) 1, 18, 93 Shelley, M. 62 Silk Road 11 social confinement 75 social conflicts 4 social digital networks 42 social distancing 1, 3, 60, 74, 99, 104 social formation 47 social isolation 60, 74, 99 socialization 81 social responsibility 67 social vulnerability 68 solidarity 83; Black Lives Matter 96; breakdown 64; freedom and civil rights 1; group 82; human dignity and 68; social 83 Sotiris, P. 75 – 76 South America 41 South Korea 1, 32, 80, 91 Spanish Flu 10, 94 Springer Nature 17 – 18 Stalin, J. 26 state of exception 98 Station Eleven (Mandel) 62 ‘Stay Home. Saves Lives’ campaign 104 Stengers, I. 35 – 36 Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) 15 Stevens, W. 85 – 86 Strahle, W. M. 75 stress management 68 Stroop, C. 27 Summers, L. 80

surrealism 64 Swanson, D. 21 Swiatczak, B. 101 Syphilis, or A Poetical History of the French Disease (Fracastoro) 2 Taiwan 1 Tauber, A. I. 101 tectonic shift 80 therapeia 48 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (poem) (Stevens) 86 ‘Thriller’ (music video) (Jackson) 62 toilet paper 60, 74 Trump, Donald 24 – 30, 57 – 58, 93 – 95; announcement for drinking or injecting disinfectant 88; biopolitics 33, 46; contradicting official announcements and policies 104; declaring national emergency 79; demagoguery 48; discounting virus threat 73; mismanagement of COVID-19 95; naming COVID-19 the Wuhan or Chinese virus 2; US containment of virus 22 truth: biopolitics of 46 – 50; evidence and 43; semiotic model of 43 tuberculosis 69 unemployment 79 – 83; businesses and 103; claims in US 79; COVID-19related 79; massive 6, 96; quarantined 79; technological 80; viral lockdown and 79 United States (US) 1, 10, 73, 91; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2, 22, 24, 27, 29, 105; COVID19, first suspected case in California 24; funding to WHO 93, 102, 107; Geological Survey 26 – 27; government regulation 106; infodemics and 22 – 25; mismanagement of COVID-19 96; national emergency 103 – 104; trade wars 91, 93; unemployment claims 79 University of Minnesota 3 Uscinski, J. E. 57 vaccination 25 – 31, 41 – 42, 54, 76 vaccines 25, 45, 102 Vaidya, A. 87 vandalware 16 van’t Land, H. 83 Vietnam 1 violence 26, 63, 70

118 Index

viral biology 5 – 6, 13, 44 viral-digital philosophy (VDP) 13 – 15, 31 viral information 42, 44 viral media 42, 88 viral modernity 5 – 6, 9 – 36; anti-vaccinationist 25 – 31; bioinformationalism 15 – 17; bioinformationalist challenge of open science 19 – 22; biopolitics and education 33; COVID-19—the bioinformationalist response 17 – 19; epidemics 9 – 12; genomics 15 – 17; infodemics 22 – 25; information theory 15 – 17; misinformation 22 – 25; pandemic 44; postscript 31 – 32; posttruth 41 – 43; public health management 9 – 12; quarantine 9 – 12; re-thinking collective 34 – 35; vaccination 25 – 31; viral-digital philosophy (VDP) 13 – 15; virus as pharmakon 35 – 36 viral politics 102 – 104; see also biopolitic(s) Virilio, P. 35 virocell 9 virologists 43 – 46 viruses: biological 45; computer 15 – 16, 42; existence 9; globalization 3; misinformation 22 – 25; as pharmakon 35 – 36; philosophy 60; social history of 41; threat 73 Voracek, M. 56 – 57 Vulliamy, E. 70

Warner, M. 70 Washington Post 79 Webb, J. 3 Web of Science 20 – 21 West Africa 3 White House 24 White Zombie (Halperin) 62 Wiles, R. 27 Will to Power (Nietzsche) 47 Wittgenstein, L. 43, 47 – 48, 86 Woodward, B. 53 World Bank 81 World Economic Forum 70 World Health Organization (WHO) 1, 17 – 18, 22, 32 – 33, 74 – 75, 92 – 93, 103 World Trade Center 108 World War II 105 Wuhan, China 1, 12, 17, 31, 80, 91 – 92 Wuhan virus 2, 92 Xi Jinping 80, 91 Yalom, I. D. 5 Yersinia pestis 11 Zandi, M. 81 Žižek, S. 73 – 75 Zombie Politics & Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Giroux) 63 zombies 62 – 63