The Plague

INTRODUCTION

This book has been written in the heat and chill of its moment. It begins with the first UK pandemic lockdown in March 2020 and then takes us forward to barely two years later, when Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had just begun. As I write these pages, war has broken out in the heart of Europe, shattering the illusion, partly fostered by the pandemic, that the world is united in the struggle against needless dying. Such unity was in any case a myth, honed to Western privilege and blindness, as the slew of wars across less newsworthy continents – from Yemen to Syria to Ethiopia – so clearly testifies. One of the most difficult aspects of these past years has been to square what felt at the start like a new global solidarity in response to the pandemic with the inequalities which slowly, or not so slowly, rose to the surface of public life, exposing the brute vulnerability of the subordinate, marginal, oppressed and the poor. No amount of common purpose has been able to thwart the power of wealth and status to determine who lives and who dies – whether in the guise of big pharma blocking patent waivers on Covid-19 vaccinations, or the surge in domestic violence, or the daily threat of racist killings on the streets. The pandemic struck like a force of nature, but, like the climate catastrophe, it also laid bare just how far nature is a plaything of human whim.

And then, as Russia’s violence in Ukraine ratcheted up on a daily basis, the world found itself faced with the megalomaniac tyranny of state boldly proclaiming its capacity to destroy the world. When violence takes the form of tanks on the street, we can no longer assign it to the heavens. One of the strangest and most perverse gifts of war is its capacity to shred any delusion that death is somehow random and innocent of human calculation. Instead, death belongs at the heart of the very legal authority to which we have been appealing to subdue it. In reality, death is always stalking among us, at once the starkest measure of unjust social arrangements, the prized monopoly of statecraft, and a reminder of the limits of human power.

What do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind? How do you live with death or rather how do you ‘live death’ – a formula which might seem at first glance to defy understanding – when death comes too close, pervading the air you breathe? In what follows, ‘living death’ will appear as something of a refrain, a reminder that to think of death as an unavoidable intruder into how we order our lives, especially in the West, is an act of defiance that is doomed to fail. In the thought of the philosopher Simone Weil, it is only in admitting the limits of the human that we will stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power, as if we owned the world we live in.

Perhaps, then, if those limits were acknowledged, the world would look less murderous. Killing is one of the most effective, but also desperate and self-defeating, ways of warding off one’s own death (a fantasy demonstrated by the need of serial killers to kill over and over again). For Putin, being president for life is not enough. He is aiming for the stars. The goal to finish off Russia is ‘centuries old and unchanging’, according to pro-Kremlin news host, Dmitry Kiselyov. In the words of Ukrainian writer, Oleksandr Mykhed, Russia is a country that ‘lives by the holy conviction that it will exist for ever’. It is in the name of ‘eternal Russia’ that missiles rain down on Ukraine (even if the Western powers had up to this war preferred to treat Putin as a rational technocrat with whom they could do business). Dictators always believe – or rather act as if they believe – that they are invincible, although somewhere they know this to be a lie. Which is why they respond to every sign of possible failure – a forty-mile convoy of Russian tanks, which Ukraine could never match, grinding to a halt in the early spring mud at the outset of the war – by lashing out even more. Like warriors, what invading armies want, Weil writes in perhaps her most famous essay ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’ is ‘everything’. ‘They forget one detail, that everything is not within their power.’ For the Russian people, any victory will be hollow. They will be left with the death bowl of their dreams.

We need a different mental dispensation, one that does not flatten the world to its own worst contours but rather bends and moves against the grain, following the most sinuous, risky and creative pathways of the mind. Can we imagine a world in which the deepest respect for death would exist alongside a fairer distribution of the wealth of the earth so that each individual has their share? How can we ensure that death, as much as life, is given its dignity? How to honour the nameless Covid-stricken corpses burning in the night on the streets of Indian cities, or the woman in Kyiv spooning the shards of glass from her shattered balcony window while her building, its foundations blasted to pieces, teeters on the verge of collapse? These images are just two of the many that have haunted me over these past years, raising questions to which I return repeatedly in what follows. What can we ask of the polity in apocalyptic, plague-ridden times, when the worst of such times has manifestly arisen out of the decisions of the polity itself? What can we ask, or rather what should we be asking, of ourselves?

(…)