Editorial: The Vital Pedagogy of the New Coronavirus
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EDITORIAL
Editorial: The Vital Pedagogy of the New Coronavirus Nicoletta Dentico1
© Society for International Development 2020
‘The catastrophe will be triggered off by an unpredictable event […] What only a few could see will instantly become evident to the many: the economy organized with the aim to live better has become the main obstacle to living well’. Ivan Illich, Conviviality
what the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss referred to as a ‘total social fact’, an event that connects and unfolds its implications in the totality of society—the economic, legal, political and religious spheres. As Shiv Visvanathan warns us: Nature has always inspired performances, magnificent narratives, whether it incarnates itself as a deluge an eclipse, or a virus. Whether it was the great flood, the ice age, or the bubonic plague, it has shaped history and controlled our imaginations. Of late, man has been con-temptuous of nature and read the medieval plague as a thing of the past, while it is an imagination that should continue to haunt us (Visvanathan 2020).
The New Coronavirus in a Planet that Cannot Breathe After 10 months, the world remains trapped in the enigmatic suspension of COVID-19’s viral waves. In February 2020, the new coronavirus pandemic struck the world with the biggest shock since the second World War. The health crisis, which had long been predicted yet arrived as an unexpected event, marks a watershed, a piercing time before and after that changes the route of the twenty-first century and our way of looking at it. The catastrophic pathogen is not a metaphor this time. It attacks the human body and disrupts the overall growth mechanism. Systems of global value chains have shuddered as factories have shut down and countries closed their borders. The 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the 2008 global financial crisis—the two shocks that occurred at the dawn of the new millennium—had surely sickened the world and led to a backlash of ethical and political questions, including around the state of emergency and its unprecedented exercise of power. They had poisoned societies with austerity measures and the expanded exclusion of social groups. Yet, the course of history had not ultimately changed the image of an integrated world economy. The value frame of globalization—despite its fragmentation—resisted the shockwave. The celebrated narrative of progress and prosperity remained dominant. Things are different with the invisible, impalpable SARSCoV-2. The spill over this time comes from within. It evokes * Nicoletta Dentico [email protected] 1
Society for International Development (SID), Rome, Italy
Nature’s reaction this time reveals ‘the dark clouds over a closed world’,1 in the sense that the outbreak is not only the feverish spasm responding to the destruction of living ecosystems and wildlife encroachment, but also a response to the myths and falsehoods around the promised universal civilization of free markets and human rights. For the first time, a minuscule organism has paralyzed the ruthless pa
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