Pandemic! 2. Slavoj Žižek

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INTRODUCTION WHY A PHILOSOPHER SHOULD WRITE ABOUT BRINGING IN THE HARVEST

      Something is rotten in north-by-northwest—and I don’t mean Hitchcock’s classic film but Gütersloh, a town in the north-by-northwest of Germany where in the middle of June 2020 more than 650 workers at the meat processing plant tested positive for Covid-19 and thousands are now quarantined. As usual, we are dealing with class division: imported foreign workers doing a dirty job in unsafe conditions.

The same bad smell is spreading all around the world. In late spring of 2020, something is rotting in the Southern state of Tennessee—tons and tons of unpicked fruits and vegetables. Why? Because 100 percent of the workforce at one farm in Tennessee, nearly 200 employees in total, tested positive for Covid-19 after one of the workers came down with the virus.¹

      This is just one of many examples of the threat posed by the pandemic to food supplies: products that must be hand-picked rely on hundreds of thousands of seasonal, mostly immigrant, workers who are moved around in crowded buses and sleep in cramped dormitories—an ideal breeding ground for Covid-19 infections. Cases are sure to climb since harvesting has to be completed quickly in the short window of time when the produce is ripe. These seasonal workers are in a very vulnerable position: their work is hard and insecure, their earnings are modest, their healthcare is as a rule inadequate, the immigration status of many is illegal. This is another example of the pandemic revealing class differences, the reality that we are not all in the same boat.

      Cases like this abound all around world. There are not enough people to harvest fruits and vegetables in the south of Italy and Spain, tons of oranges are rotting in Florida, and similar problems are to be found in the UK, France, Germany, and Russia. Because of the pandemic, we are faced with a typically absurd capitalist crisis: thousands of eager workers cannot get work and sit idly by while tons of produce rots in the fields.

It is not just harvesting and distributing that are beset by difficulties—the growing of plants is also affected. Locusts are now ruining harvests from East Africa to the western parts of India, which are also threatened by droughts. Summing all this up: we are facing the prospect of considerable food shortages, if not outright hunger, and not only in Third World countries. The problem goes beyond we in the West having to pay a little bit more for our usual box of strawberries. The situation is not hopeless, but a fast and internationally coordinated response is needed—much more than calls for volunteers to help in the fields. Government organizations need to be involved in mobilizing people to avert the crisis.

      At this point, I can hear the laughter of my critics (as well as some friends) who mockingly note how the pandemic means that my time as a philosopher is over: who cares about a Lacanian reading of Hegel when the foundations of our existence are threatened? Even Žižek now has to focus on how to bring in the harvest.

But these critics couldn’t be more wrong. The ongoing pandemic hasn’t just brought out social and economic conflicts that were raging beneath the surface all along; it hasn’t just confronted us with immense political problems. More and more, it has become a genuine conflict of global visions about society. At the beginning of the crisis, it looked as if a kind of basic global solidarity, with the accent on helping those most threatened, would prevail; however, as John Authers puts it, this solidarity has gradually “given way to a bitter factional and cultural battle, with rival moral principles hurled like metaphysical grenades. Different countries have taken antithetical approaches while the US has split itself almost into two nations, divided between those who wear masks and those who do not.”²

      This conflict is a serious existential one, so that one cannot simply make fun of those who refuse to wear masks. Here is how Brenden Dilley, an Arizona chat-show host, explained why he doesn’t wear a mask: “Better to be dead than a dork. Yes, I mean that literally. I’d rather die than look like an idiot right now.” Dilley refuses to wear a mask since, for him, wearing one is incompatible with human dignity at its most basic level.

That’s why it is now entirely appropriate for a philosopher to write about bringing in the harvest: the way we deal with this problem ultimately depends on our basic stance toward human life. Are we, like Dilley, libertarians who reject anything that encroaches on our individual freedoms? Are we utilitarians ready to sacrifice thousands of lives for the economic well-being of the majority? Are we authoritarians who believe that only strong state control and regulation can save us? Are we New Age spiritualists who think the pandemic is a warning from Nature, a punishment for our exploitation of natural resources? Do we trust that God is just testing us and will ultimately help us to find a way out? Each of these stances rests on a specific vision of what human beings are. To that extent, in proposing how to tackle the crisis, we must all become philosophers.