Lessons from Covid

Things once done will be done again

Following the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Michael Lewis (not this Michael Lewis!) is outraged by the Western response to Covid (Philosophy, Biopolitical, and the Virus). Throughout the world, nations “imposed explicitly and avowedly totalitarian measures in order to effectively legally prohibit a populace from becoming ill” (1). In our hysteria, we determined that “only the immortalisation of human beings was morally acceptable. Illness, and implicitly death, was legally prohibited” (13).

How, he asks, did leaders conclude there was no alternative to lockdown? Did anyone ask what effects lockdowns would have in the longer term, “not least because of the human being’s capacity to project a future, which was immediately and radically altered with the imposition of such measures”? Did advocates of lockdown how long it could last before it became counter-productive, “in the sense that it gives rise to other diseases and disorders – or causes them to go undiagnosed and untreated – which cumulatively or individually outweigh in seriousness the disease which the counterproductive remedy was designed to palliate?” How did we decide that “any significant kind of social, cultural, and educational life was all of a sudden outlawed” (11). One thing alone mattered: “one type of death, one type of suffering. One model, and one reading of one set of statistics” (8).