The third lesson Covid is maybe up to make us learn is starkly political. It is somewhat cautionary. It’s being delivered as an irony that seems to want to confirm that Covid might effectively be a tool of Nature to preserve Planet Earth. As suggested in an earlier post, the mere fact that everything else but humans is being spared, as it not the case with other versions of natural disasters, legitimizes entertaining this thought.
Now, if that proposition is in any way true, it is most fitting that China, where Covid was initially detected, would have been a most strategic place for it to strike first. The dizzying numerical count of such population amounts to a sort of epidemical declaration of intent. For the same reason, India too has been a strategic population target for Covid to strike, as together their populations account for the higher output of green gas and carbon dioxide emission. And yet, the abysmal difference in the toll taken by Covid in India compared with the toll of Chinese souls taken would in appearance contradict speculative reasoning. For, having the two largest populations on Earth has not yet translated to equal or averaging numbers of sick with or fallen by the virus in China as in India. Thus, if in accordance with my speculative reasoning the virus is a blessing in disguise for what it means for the health of the Earth, Covid should have a Marathon of the Sicks and a Sabbath of the Dead equally in both populations. Instead, while India has been ravaged by sickness and deaths, China has seen in two years not more sicks and dead than at any other time before the outbreak. Here, it is of relevance that India’s, as well as the larger populations of others South Asian nations were in advanced outfitted by Nature with a gene that makes it for virus like Covid to ravage them into death. But it is precisely in this fact and within this context that the content of Covid’s political lesson for us is delivered.
Pointedly: democracy, in the restrictive, that is, undemocratic sense of this word has in the democracies of the West, appears not to be the best political ordering of government when it comes to confronting and prevailing over potentially mass-scale deadly events. And it appears this is truer when the danger is everywhere at once, and when everybody is equally exposed to it. Hence, India has been more at the mercy of the virus than China. There is then a case to be made that what in the West is pejoratively referred to as “autocracy” whenever in relation to China is far superior to democracy proves itself to be when it comes to respecting and obeying the laws and producing unanimous or collective national response in the face of serious threat to life.
We are seeing that, when the population size of a country is taking into consideration and relative to such population, the more “autocratic” the ordering of things political is, the lower the toll has been of the sicks and the dead. In other words, the resources and wealth, and access to science being relatively equal, the larger the population of a nation where democracy prevails, the more sickness and the more death Covid has wrought. Therefore, the US and India have been taking the prize in this score, followed by other democracies, like Britain, France, Italy, Spain et cetera et cetera.
And what is worst, the more wealth, resources, and accesses to science a democracy has, the more vulnerable to Covid it has shown itself to be. Just compere the numbers. But also, this too seems to be true: the louder a nation proclaims its democracy to the world, like the US does, the more ill-fitted it has shown to be to deal with Covid. The framework that accommodates the “Western values,” democracy, compares poorly to “autocracy” when the time comes to demonstrate the utmost of its worth not in words but in deeds. It is not to be doubted that in normal times, when nothing really important is at stake, democracy, because of its liberties and freedoms and its rights, as much as because of its social permissibility and political unaccountability, has greater appear than “autocracy.” But it is incapable of colossal deeds and has nothing on a nation like China, where ninety-four billion members of one political party can come together to obey and to act under a single rallying cry. Working with equal or even more resources, wealth, and scientific means than its rivals, patriotic communism denies the West any chance to outdo or prevail over China. One is even tempted to reasonably speculate that, in comparison to the West, China’s exemplary handling of life under Covid, an invisible enemy that attacks everywhere, is already a foreboding of the outcome from a military confrontation between it a d its rivals—visible enemies that they are.
Commucapitalism, or if you will, capitalnism—my coinage for the dual pragmatic principle on which China’s economic-political system is structured, is far superior to the bear-knuckle, for-profit democratic system of the West. Theirs is capitalism, indeed, but with profound political and social consciousness, and preset specific goals beyond endless material gains, just for the sake of it.
However, from the perspective of a virus as a tool designed by Nature for population control, as I not unreasonably speculate, China’s remarkable success in preserving and handling life under the pandemy, and at dominating Covid, is not a good thing in absolute terms. For, that means that China, a major contributor to environmental pollution by dint of its super-plus demography, is sabotaging the healing of the Earth by overdoing India and the Western democracies in preserving human lives. I, however, am aware why that must be.
Preserving human lives is the most effective way of measuring the sustainability of an economy and the strength of a society; the more human lives a nation shows itself capable of preserving from Covid, the more clearly it demonstrates its economic self-sustainability and reliability. Therefore, China’s economy has suffered only negligibly setbacks when compared to the India’s and the West’s economies.
Regrettably, economic prosperity does not necessarily align with planetary health; these two most desirable goods seem to compete against each other. If lives must be saved to keep the economy going, keeping the economy going represents a potential threat to an endangered Earth. From this perspective, then, neither is an absolute optimum. The preservation of lives leads to the endless reproduction of life and consequently goes against the population control necessary to take the heat off the planet, which Covid is attempting to do. That is the quandary in which the modern world is trapped.
There can be a way out of it only if new environmental technologies emerge with built-in methods of calculating their economic effectiveness proportionally to the growth in population, so that it can be automatically, or rather technologically controlled. There is an important role for philosophy alongside technological population control: the dismal way the modern world feels and thinks about death ought to evolve backwardly, to the manners of the ancients. Either way, the present is evidence that
China’s Commucapitalism, or as you will, capitalnism, will have a better shot at that, once that is decided on.
There are of course many more lessons Covid is failing to make us learn. I have attempted only to speculatively reason and pinpoint the method of its teaching. I allow that reasonably speculating on Covid is as an instrument of Nature for the purpose of world population control can be rejected offhand, even if at the same time it must be admitted that only the barrage of failures in “shutting down Covid” (as President Biden dodderingly promised the world he would do), makes speculating on this an intellectual necessity. But what cannot be denied is the opportunity Covid has given autocratic China to send the democracies of the West a stern warning. There is also a lesson in it; but whether it is being learned will not take long to be seen.