Since the beginning of this year, our global village has been living on a daily basis under the pressure of a terrible disease known as the “Coronavirus”, or “COVID-19”. Geographically originating from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the phenomenon has rapidly reached the dimension of a global pandemic, which the World Health Organisation declared on the 11^th of March 2020.

The global human community is going through a crisis with no prospects of reaching an end and which, due to its impact and consequences can be considered the most lethal and destructive of our generation and of the generations to come, given the resilience of its after effects.

The decisions the governments and societies take and will put into practice during the next weeks and perhaps months will be produce significant shifts and changes. They will be felt not only at the level of our conventional identities, health systems, economies, but most of all, at the level of our mindsets, systems of values, social relationships and cohesion, as well as our very own cultural structure. They will also have impact on the livelihood, which define us as humans, as well as on the system of traditions, beliefs and convictions which define our society and give us national and social identities.

The people in the “Coronavirus Age” are threatened by a perspective of change disguised under the less vocal and even less official slogan “life for security”. However, the slogan itself is in danger of taking the terrifying shape of “security in exchange for liberty and a unique identity”.

Perhaps all this is the iron ball of anthropological inheritance cuffed to our feet by the chain that keeps us grounded in our sacred soil. And perhaps, it is the certainty of the relationship with our identity heritage what makes us carry these iron balls and care for them as an assurance of us being part of a condition which is unique and safer than the illusory rhetorical freedom used as a bargaining chip.

Life as a “State of Emergency”. The World Seen from a Distance

For the first time in half a century, humanity has been living in the throbbing pace of emergency, an expression that, while familiar in the therapeutic domain, has a repetition and replication valence. It has the tendency to transform human existence into a long sequence of emergencies with different time limits, interconnected through the same long sequence of isolations and non-communication that pull us away from each other. We are witnessing a compression and an acceleration of time itself – both historical and social. Decisions that in quiet times take longer to ponder and analyse before being adopted and implemented are now taken in a day or even less. In a state of emergency, technologies, instruments and cures, whether unreliable or unsafe, or even hazardous, are brought forth because doing nothing could be far more dangerous. Entire societies are used as test subjects in extensive social experiments and, for lack of other therapies, isolation and refraining from social interaction are put into practice. These terms did not exist until now in our day-to-day vocabulary, however, they became reference points without having tried beforehand to find answers, even if perfectible, to some fundamental questions. What will happen to the individuals and the community when everybody works from home and only communicates from a distance, via the means provided by technological progress? How far can “distance learning” go and how effective can it be?

A Geopolitics of Uncertainties

At a crossroads, when societies, governments and state institutions are facing the huge flow of the pandemic challenges, our cognitive and inner universe resembles more and more a dark and bottomless well where questions, hopes and anxiety simmer. And, more or less explicit, the attempts to identify possible answers and solutions seem to be more obviously and naturally contingent on the word “post”. In a world where we talk about post-terrorism, post-truth, post 9/11, or post-humanism, it is not surprising for our axiological turmoil to focus on what the world may, or may not be after the Coronavirus pandemic. Following the deadly Twin Towers attacks, the former president George W. Bush said that the world after [the attacks] would never be the same. And this world after has disappointed, as it brought religious wars instead of an awaited peace, the sharpening of the ideological or economic conflicts instead of a new world order, as well as a consumerist and mercantile globalization at the expense of national and cultural identities.

So how will the world be after COVID-19?

What memories will the lone and asocial human make, what will be the resorts to reanimating seriously ill economies if they have not already been unthinkably destroyed? How will we be able to understand the system of values, democracy, the concept of nation, the dimensions of human rights and liberties, the perspective of cooperation and cooperative multilateralism?

            There is, of course, the old anthropological dimension of hope, which tempts us to believe in a fast restoration of great balances; however, it is accompanied by the primal fear of possible social and identity deflagrations whose scale is difficult to know and predict. How deep and threatening will be the cleavage – widening before our very eyes – between the developed countries and nations, less affected by the “Corona” storm and the states that, given their deprivation, are more affected by the eye of the storm and by the mayhem it produces? What should raise concern and motivate preventive measures is the possibility that the scale of the pandemic will very fast lead to the collapse of some regimes and systems of government, with all the consequences such imbalances and uncertainties – more or fewer – may bring to the national destiny.

After the last World War and during the convulsions of the Cold War we have witnessed a furious campaign to transform the world into the famous global village – as a principle, theory and way of life. Yet, the political, intellectual and decision-making elites that have theorized absolute liberalism and globalisation for decades were the first who, at the first breath of the “Corona” storm, proceeded to national self-isolation and to closing down borders. What will the post-pandemic stage bring from this point of view? It would be risky to deny, with oratorical vehemence eventually, the perspective of a “deglobalization“ caused by the aftermath of the pandemic on a medium and long term. And, what argument would be strong enough to support the claim that avant-garde political ideologues such as the American Donald Trump, the Chinese Xi Jinping and the Indian Narendra Modi would not turn the crisis to their own interests and advantages?

To Survive Together or to Die Alone

Humanity is going through a global crisis, perhaps the most virulent and dramatic of our generation. The decisions and behaviours of governments and societies over the next few weeks will reshape the individual and collective structures and identities for many years to come. In the fight against the present challenges, lucid actions and global partnerships must focus not only on efforts to contain and eradicate the pandemic, but also on finding an answer to the fundamental question: “what kind of world do we want to live in?” Starting – in our actions and vision – from the belief the storm will pass and we will no longer be test subjects, we hope we will get back to what we used to be – homo cogitans, homo amans – thinking human, loving human. We live, temporarily in an abnormal way, determined by an abnormal time. A time that makes us face two choices – to live as outraged and isolated humans cocooned in their solitude (including a nationalist and isolationist solitude), or to embrace global solidarity. The epidemic itself and the crises that come with it are global phenomena with dimensions that can only be approached and dealt with through global solidarity. From this point of view, thinking humans, who pretend to fight an unusual war against an unseen enemy, should acknowledge that they are those who obsessively keep on fighting their own conventional wars, caused by the same triggers – cultural, ideological, confessional, ethnical and so on.

Unfortunately, while at the level of rhetorical discourse the pandemic is seen as global, we cannot say the same about the character of the reaction (as being worldwide and joint). And, from this standing point one may say that we are practically witnessing a collective paralysis of the international community. At the beginning of the crisis there was talk, in a low voice, about an emergency meeting of the world leaders and decision makers in order to come up with a joint action plan. This project fell silent very quickly, dead even before it was born. G7 managed to give to the world and their own citizens a simple videoconference, with no outcome as regards the joint measures and action plans.

We have to choose between active unity and self-isolation within the walls of our own helplessness. That is, the will to show our ability to rise to the challenge and prove our worthiness. Otherwise we sentence ourselves to the loss of our only remaining right – the right to hope. The right to hope while immersed for a long time, if not forever in the dark chasm of our solitude.