We will bid farewell to this year and greet a new one in less than a week. The world spent three quarters of this year fighting the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic, and there are indications that this struggle will go on until further notice.
One cannot talk about 2020 without referring to the COVID-19 crisis, which gave this year the taste of a pandemic, one which left its mark on people’s spirits, thoughts and strategies and generated all kinds of confusion. It was a fast-paced year brimming with symbolic and material quakes. It seems that it took the world from one intellectual and analytical epoch to another whose shape is not clear yet.
What is certain is that 2020 was difficult and will go down in history as the year of the pandemic and all the suffering, sickness, death and the change to our daily lives. It would be hard to assess this year in terms of countries that won victories, countries that stayed in their place and others that went backward. While countries protected themselves from it to divergent degrees, this pandemic struck the whole world. Indeed, it hit what we call the club of strong and developed countries hard - despite the resilience of their healthcare infrastructure and their immense material capacities, they lost lives to the virus in far greater numbers than poor countries did.
The best way to sum-up the pandemic’s repercussions on the world, after it killed millions, is to say that it had been one in which we underwent a real ordeal, whether we had been infected or have so far managed to evade contagion... We say this because this virus has infected the poor and rich, ministers and presidents, the young and old, the healthy and those who suffer from chronic diseases. So it would be difficult for a conversation about 2020 to be devoid of its hallmark feature, the COVID-19 pandemic, both now and in the future, after it becomes history.
It is the year of the scourge then. And of course, scourges leave their mark on imaginations and perceptions, rearranges thoughts and change our assumptions, sometimes reversing them. The assumptions that humans have defeated nature and that it has been tamed forever by technology are among those that were shot down this year.
We lived through divergently stringent lockdowns imposed because of our fear of the virus, and our minds became programmed to maintain physical distance. That is to say, we returned to a time when nature was feared, the fear that had been the primary reason we improved our living conditions, built houses that protects us from its cold, heat, hyenas and lions.
With the return to this state of fear, it appeared as though the time and achievements that separated us from it had vanished. Humanity thus went back to relying on science and scientists, glued to our televisions, listening to the doctors and trying to do what was necessary to avoid contagion. People did not rush to clergymen and mosques. Instead, doctors were our recourse, especially since religious spaces were shut for long periods to prevent public gatherings, and religious people were more compliant and rational than one would expect. This means that the fear of dying because of the virus and the dread of death, especially in the first weeks of last March, were more potent.
Liberal Capitalist ideology was also dealt a heavy blow this year. Its greed for profit went so far that it confounded nature and the environment. Its flagrant assaults on them led to fingers being pointed at it as questions about its negative repercussions on humanity became real and acute points of discussion. Capitalism’s exposure further, as the fight against the pandemic left people seeking help from the state, thereby reinvigorating the debate about states’ social role and how the abandonment of this role for private and business interests is a crime against the poor and even the middle class. Indeed, treatment costs are very high and beyond citizens’ financial capacity.
This experience comes at a time when specific policy shifts in some countries of the Arab world, for example, towards privatization, are at their peak. The pandemic thus embarrassed these countries’ agencies and institutions, which had not been prepared, and it showed that betting on private capital to solve health issues is an idea that must be abandoned or, at the very least, significantly scaled-down.
But it is evident that the pressures and economic crises hit poor countries hard, whether due to the cost of containing the pandemic, the disruption of work, the paralysis that struck tourism or workers in large sectors being laid off en masse. These issues have drained rich countries and those with limited capacities, indicating that the fall of capitalism, in the symbolic sense, is still theoretical and circumstantial.
The need for capital will be great in the aftermath of these ordeals, as is typically the case. Indeed, despite our disappointment with the role played by capitalists and businessmen in healthcare, like their management of clinics, or with the fact that large numbers of employees and private sector workers were fired, the lesson worth learning from 2020 is that marginalizing the state is risky and that the maintenance of the state’s control over social functions is in the peoples’ interest. The ideology of statehood is founded on the concept that it is of benefit for everyone. On the other hand, the private sector deals with customers, not citizens, and the difference between them is vast.
As we have realized, shooting down assumptions does not imply disregarding them inasmuch it implies their symbolic and ideological demise.
