Politics and Culture after the Plague

The troubled times we so unexpectedly found ourselves in urge us to reconsider the path we have been choosing for decades. In the present essay on the post-pandemic world, the plague metaphor serves to emphasize parallels between our collective history and our collective present and helps to shed light on the emergence of a new world. The philosophical approach offers a unique perspective on contemporary values and their practical realization in relation to today’s global trends and tasks. The fragility of our condition should be acknowledged and addressed with solid principles. Coping with insecurity requires a shared sense of purpose. Human decency is a prerequisite to defeat Covid-19 in a world plagued by fragmented economies and societies and in need of stability. To provide adequate solutions to end the pandemic, politics must remember what is to be a human. We need to distinguish between the economic and the social, the impassive and the compassionate, the autonomous and the cooperative. It is through acts of service that people, not machines or impersonal institutions, exercise their agency to give much-needed relief to their communities. Policy- and decision-makers have to ensure that economic sectors and civil institutions allow for interpersonal action. The crisis has sped up the trends many refused to acknowledge, and it is our hope that seeing the ongoing processes for what they are and acting bona fide with true liberality in mind will bring us back to the steering wheel of change to address multiple social, political, and economic questions. Consciousness and agency, despite (or due to) technology and democracy, are unequally distributed. With the rise of identity politics, it is once again obvious that power feeds on inequality. Beneficiaries of inescapable surveillance are far from being ordinary citizens. The newly found understanding of sovereignty by nation-states challenges political and social equilibrium worldwide. Economic or political utilitarian considerations alone leave little space to manoeuvre contested reality safely. Navigating the troubled waters of the virus-shaken world to a sustainable order means a certain injection of humanity and purpose to the predominant ideology. When we look closely and thoughtfully at the contested reality of today, there appear several possible iterations of liberalism: contemproary liberalism, antiliberalism, and postliberalism. Humble understanding of the true value and worth comes at a price, the plague has deflated our arrogance and the misleading sense of invincibility at the cost of economic and healthcare collapse, thousands of lives taken or broken. Thinking through what we had to endure coupled with the limitations we discovered might result in re-establishing the principles worth striving for – tolerance and pluralism.

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