A sketch of human society after the COVID 19 pandemic

Emil Dinga

Professor in Economics and Economic Philosophy, Grade I Scientific Researcher at the Romanian Academy where he leads the “Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen” Seminar on the Logic and Methodology of Economic Knowledge.

1. Preamble

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unpredictable medical shock of a globalised “vocation”, affecting our health and endangering our lives while facilitated by the increasing globalisation of modern life. The risks of this pandemic have generated counteraction measures both institutional (public responses) and personal (private reactions) which introduced restrictions on behaviours and social interaction in all affected countries, which impact six aspects of human existence: a) the equilibrium between freedom and security at the individual level; b) the interpersonal dimension of social cooperation; c) the social division of labour; d) the relationship between the State and the individual; e) forms of cultural action (education, research, science and culture); f) forms of religious action.

2. The individual. The family.

(a) Diagnosis

The generic social contract is meant to cede part of an individual’s liberties to mutually-agreed representative structures in exchange for receiving the positive benefits of social cooperation – social justice, national defence, the protection of life, the assurance of collective opportunity – in one word, in exchange for individual security. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of a diminution in security through the very application of individual liberties, unbalancing the fragile equilibrium between the two in favour of the former (especially with regard to health and life).

(b) Generic effects

the quantitative limitation and qualitative changes to direct interaction at the individual level, compensated (or perhaps more likely overcompensated) for through virtual interaction;
the limits of individual freedoms will become less clear to the individual, as they are no longer “confronted” against the liberties of others, a situation which either formally or tacitly established these limits;
a process of individual introversion and, through it, the introversion of family will be set into motion; the individual and the family will establish stricter and more visible (more clearly signalled and defined) boundaries for others outside those units;
our perception of the purpose of life and our individual ideals will suffer a change in perspective, towards self-reflection and self-validation;
empathy and compassion (entirely dependent on direct, unmediated individual contact) will suffer a psychological recoil; consequently, alterity will at least partially return to its original definition of “Otherness” and estrangement;

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) an increase in individual (and familial) self-centredness, without forcing isolationism; (2) an increase in individual and familial self-reflexivity; (3) an impulse towards gaining an authentic knowledge of the self;
desirability: the cultural and institutional encouragement of the above-mentioned propensities, as they are meant to reduce human alienation in the current conditions of an-axiological capitalism (consumerism, substantive efficiency, power asymmetries).
institutional/cultural model: the model of societal individualism (MSI) – a cultural model that thwarts (or at the very least significantly reduces) the individual’s dissolution into society, without denying the underlying societal factors as generators and replicators of the individual. Naturally, from a conceptual viewpoint, we must elaborate the notions of a societal individual and of a societal individualism respectively, according to the new conditions for interaction at the individual level.

3. Society. Community.

(a) Diagnosis

Man is an intrinsically social being: causally, reproductively, functionally, and from his need for validation. Our need for sociality is constitutive, not contingent. The COVID-19 pandemic is changing our perception of sociality – and therefore of society/community – to a quite considerable extent, in order to guide us to an in-depth and prolonged reflection on the changes that might appear – or that we might wish to appear – at the level of the fundamental cultural structures of society and community, respectively. The entire architecture of sociality – from the size and structure of human settlements to subsistence activities, to human evolution – must be reanalysed and reconfigured.

(b) Generic effects

significantly, sociality will lose its unmediated character of mutual advantage (a generator of substantive cooperation), replacing it with a mediated character (a generator of symbolic cooperation);
social capital will register an increase in importance, relevance and significance, to the detriment of economic capital; a form of social capital will come into being that will necessitate mediated social cooperation, to the detriment of unmediated social cooperation;
the possible appearance of social alienation generated by the insufficient amounts of direct interaction within society / community – similar to economic alienation relative to goods;
“society” and “community” will receive more abstract connotations (in effect, also denotations), perhaps even more inaccessible to our direct experience.

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) a tendency to insulate communities and nations, respectively; (2) a (not merely economic, but also cultural and relational) recoil of globalisation; (3) the diminution of the spatial dimensions of human settlements; (4) a reduction in the significance of the social contract (and, in extension, of social justice);
desirability: (1) redefining human society; (2) redefining social cooperation; (3) identifying (cultural/axiological) means to reduce our tendency to de-anchor the individual from society/community; (4) the redesign of human settlements from the perspective of new avenues of interaction between individuals and social groups, in the context of a reduction in direct interpersonal contact;
institutional/cultural model: the model of the symbolic society/community (MSC) – a societal/communitarian model that integrates the reduction of unmediated social interaction at the individual level into a cultural (and institutional) model that might “rescue” the existence and sustainable/replicable operation of society/community, especially from the point of view of their significance for the individual.

4. Economy. Pragmatics.

(a) Diagnosis

Economic activity implies the massing of human and physical capital, through the mediation of financial capital. With regard to economic production, the COVID-19 pandemic currently restricts (and will continue to do so until man and the “novel coronavirus” will be able to coexist safely for the former) the unmediated presence of persons in the spatially-concentrated organizations driving economic activity. With regard to economic exchange, the reflexes of individual autonomy are transferred to three other reflexes: (1) the shift to a more analytic perception of activity exchanges; (2) an increase in the economic autonomy of small communities; (3) an increase in the autonomy of national economic systems.

(b) Generic effects

the territorial dispersion of economic activity, accompanied by (1) increased analytic perspectives on the social division of labour; (2) a reduction in the output of economically productive enterprise; (3) the adoption of a new criterion in assessing levels of economic independence: self-sustaining autonomy;
the search for a new equilibrium between economic (non-localised) mass production and local economic production;
economic inequality will cease to be a driver of economic growth (as fundamentalist libertarians still continue to believe);
economic logic will drift away from the production of luxury goods, attracting a redistribution of economic resources in favour of authentic goods to satisfy economic needs.

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) a tendency towards economic protectionism at the national, regional and small community levels; (2) a trend towards replacing hierarchical economic systems with networked economic systems; (3) an economic trend towards substituting the sale of long-term goods with their lease (where the items are returned to the producer once no longer used); (4) a trend towards the reduction of social transport infrastructure and the expansion of individual transport infrastructure; (5) a trend towards digitalisation, remote work and working from home; (6) a trend towards substituting physical tourism for digital tourism; (7) a trend to reduce individual consumerism and the shared consumption of economic services;
desirability: the support of those propensities that have the following likely sustainable effects: (1) a reduction in consumerism; (2) the development of an interstitial economy (the decentralization of industrial economy) as a social economy; (3) the development of a circular economy as a model of sustainable economics; (4) the limiting of economic actions to the mere satisfaction of economic needs (eliminating ulterior motives such as the accrual of economic, financial or political power or leverage); (5) the creation of national economic complexes, boasting a high degree of structural and functional autonomy in international economic exchanges;
institutional/cultural model: the model(paradigm) of a viable circular economy (MVCE) – an economic model in which nominal economics are completely covered and accounted for by the real economy (rendering financial/nominal economic bubbles, the source of economic crises, impossible in principle), while the real economy itself is completely integrated in natural-anthropic flows that are sustainably replaceable and primarily geared to meeting economic needs, not non-economic (for example, political) ends. All the above characteristics call for a recourse to the economic (and political) ideology of ordo-liberalism.

5. Politics. Nation. State.

(a) Diagnosis

Society is, by definition, a political structure; and politics will continue to be its organizing and leadership factor. The COVID-19 pandemic will, however, effect certain adjustments to the understanding, organization and political functioning of society, namely: (1) the weight of political actors will need to be dictated by their political competency and not exclusively by their political representativeness (currently provided by political parties), with the effect of a shift towards the technification of the political to the detriment of its politicisation; (2) the role and function of the State should be distanced from the political and adjoined ever closer to the administrative – whereby the political should be ever more concentrated at the individual (or group) rather than the state level; (3) the Nation should increasingly overlap ethnicity instead of economic, linguistic or cultural communities, including religious ones (N.B.: signals in this direction had already been given through the failure of the European Union’s attempted implementation of its projected multiculturalism model).

(b) Generic effects

representativeness in the application of popular sovereignty drifts ever further from its unmediated nature (specific to the agora of ancient city-states), while the degree of political competency of elected representatives increases correspondingly (the democratically-established representativeness in the exertion of sovereignty could introduce a supplementary filter – as is the case in certain states which elect their electors – in order to better intertwine political competence with political responsibility);
the functional hierarchy of society (specific to efficiency) will become more pronounced, while respective the equal liberties of individuals which, by virtue of this same equal liberty, demand/accept an expansion of the functional (not structural!) hierarchy of society; this effect is evidently compatible with the de-politicisation of the State and with its evolution towards a primarily-administrative superstructure of society;
the accentuation of nationalism as a solution for increasing autonomy in case of external shocks; a reconsideration of political borders from the perspective of decreasing permissiveness in their crossing.

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) a tendency towards a sui generis combination of two processes that evolve inversely proportional to one another: the “retreat” of the political from the state towards the individual level (while maintaining political parties and safeguarding their role as political representatives) on the one hand, and the “investment” of the State with predominantly administrative competencies on the other; (2) a tendency to limit international liberties (the freedom of movement of persons, goods, services and capital), with particular emphasis on the restricted movement of persons; (3) the recoil of globalisation;
desirability: (1) encouraging the return of the political to the individual level – meaning a return to direct democracy, at least through the lens of political decision-making, if less through the mechanisms of political participation (itself perfected through the introduction of two tiers of direct elections: the election of electors and the election of representatives, respectively); (2) an increase in national autonomy (yet not independence!) from the perspective of economic resources and the national capacity for self-sustainability (through the necessary reconfiguration of the process of globalisation);
institutional/cultural model: the model of the equally autonomous nation (MEAN) – a political model of the state and of the nation in which any form of cooperation between states and nations is predicated on autonomy, equal sovereignty and structural self-sustainability.

6. Education. Research.

(a) Diagnosis

With regard to education and research, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a problem analogous to that it introduced in the political field and with regard to participation in the democratic game, namely the issue of limiting (or abolishing) direct contact between professor/teacher/instructor and pupil/student, or otherwise between researchers active in the same field/speciality/topic. The primacy of safeguarding life over institutional efficiency (a natural prioritisation) poses a fundamental dilemma to general pedagogy: the question of the content and structure of the interaction between instructor and pupil, taken together (and consequently) with the content and structure of generic curricula outlining the instructional and educational process. With regard to research (both scientific and metaphysical, theological, artistic, political etc.), it would appear that a return to focusing research on the researchers themselves, instead of the research institutions they are active in, is both inevitable and (possibly) more productive, from the perspective of creativity.

(b) Generic effects

a return to corroborating education and instruction, leading to the formation not only of competent professionals but also of socially desirable individuals, where prior to the pandemic there was a structural dissociation between the two;
further pressure on rethinking the issue of pedagogy in the context of restricted direct contact between educator and pupil (a restructuring at once conceptual, methodological and especially technological);
the implementation of a welcome hierarchy to the research process: (1) “lone” researchers, creators of revolutionary or abstract ideas and systems (i.e. “fundamental research”), acting in an insular fashion; (2) “virtual group” researchers, attempting to develop and expand upon the above fundamental research (by way of virtual platforms); (3) “virtual group” researchers conducting testing research and seeking pragmatic applications to the above developmental research (virtually interconnected).

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) a tendency to return to the binomial of concurrency and (structural and temporal) inseparability of educational and instructional processes; (2) a trend towards an increased admixture of the role of the family and the school in the (in)formation of children or pupils; (3) a tendency to return to self-learning in the professional, scientific and personal development of the youth; (4) a trend towards re-centring research on the researchers, kept away from excessive insularity via virtual platforms for the exchange of ideas, articles or research results;
desirability: (1) encouraging familial involvement in the family/education – school/instruction binomial; (2) encouraging self-learning in the professional and scientific formation of individuals (an outlook with very notable results in the past) while reducing the scholastic nature of formal instruction; (3) encouraging “authorial” research, much more creative than “group” research.
institutional/cultural model: the model of individualised education and research (MIER) – an idiosyncratic model of professional and more broadly cultural formation, also applicable to research activity.

7. Ethics. Morals. Practice.

(a) Diagnosis

The hiatus between education and instruction has long been seized upon (and theorised), including highlighting its nefarious consequences for the trade-off between social and individual development (what was dubbed social progress accompanied by individual regress). The ethical dimension (internalised, idiosyncratic and legitimised) and the moral dimension (socialised, relatively exteriorised), essential for the practical (not pragmatic!) relations between individuals, groups and nations, lags behind the latest economic, technological and institutional developments (the unidimensional Marcusian man has been superimposed onto consumerism and an a-moral egotism). Paradoxically (albeit not entirely surprisingly), the COVID-19 pandemic has fostered a return towards an ethical individual and societal outlook despite (or perhaps due to) the given conditions of rarefied unmediated interaction. Re-centring the political dimension onto the individual necessitates an ethical reset of the latter, which in turn begets the transformation of the politician into a polietician.

(b) Generic effects

ethically appropriate behaviour becomes ever more congruent with morally appropriate behaviour – where “ethics” are understood as moral autonomy, and “morals” seen as the hard nucleus (overlapping consent, to borrow a term from social justice) of ethics at a societal level;
the Kantian practical relationship (being the relationship between subject and subject, centred on the subject) takes precedence over the pragmatic relationship of economics (the relationship between subject and object, centred on the object);
altruism appears to shift from focusing on charity to focusing on efficiency (based on consequentialist utilitarianism);
the Kantian maxim of behaviour within social cooperation, calling for the ethical interdiction of treating individuals exclusively as means (as is the case in contemporary capitalism) seems to be gaining ground in terms of the institutional adjustment of societies and nations under the imperium of the pandemic.

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) a trend towards combining close kinship (familial, tribal, national) with species kinship, and even with trans-species kinship (as is the case of social justice for non-human animals); (2) a trend towards the formation of morals (an informal social construct) through the coordinated superimposition of individual ethics (idiosyncratic constructs); (3) a shift of practical relations within society towards a self-reflexive and efficient altruism (helping another while consequentially following individual interest);
desirability: encouraging those propensities that have the potential to improve the following coordinates of social interactions: (1) social justice (both for the human species and for non-human species); (2) practical relations governed by altruism (both charitable and consequentially-efficient); (3) a reassessment of the individual as a centre of purpose and not (solely) as a means for the achievement of purposes external to them (as in the current capitalist system);
institutional/cultural model: the model of ethical innovation (MEI) – a model that will massively and permanently redirect innovation efforts (and the financing thereof) from technological innovation towards social innovation, centred on and guided by ethics and morals.

8. Axiology. Conscience.

(a) Diagnosis

Either formally or informally, explicitly or implicitly, human conduct (both at an individual level and in terms of the group or nation) is guided by values, “translated” into motivations and models of behavioural rationality, respectively. Through the intrinsically social channels by which it had to be counteracted in order to safeguard our lives and our health, the COVID-19 pandemic exerts both an intellectual (reflexive) and an intuitive pressure upon the axiological matrix of the individual and in particular of society as a whole (manifested both nationally and at the level of the entire human race taken together). In fact, the pandemic has the potential of calling even the most closely-guarded values that currently inform our social interaction and cooperation into question. We appreciate that, from an axiological / conscientious perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic will have (or should have, under the sanction of irrationality) radical effects that should be anticipated and actively directed institutionally and culturally, with the aim of maximising their desirable outcomes.

(b) Generic effects

restructuring the priority rapport between “living” (life/health) on the one hand and “social success” (career, social standing) on the other, by way of intellectual reflection;
a revival of philosophical and ethical debate on the two polarizing purposes of the individual: to be and to have – the re-prioritisation of being in relation to having, or the inversion of the causal link between them, in the following direction: being begets having, through the implementation of the having through being paradigm to the detriment of the current being through having paradigm;
a re-establishment of our fundamental values on a communitarian outlook – see the MSI model introduced above – which also implies a resumption of debates in social philosophy on the organisation and functioning of society;

(c) Propensity, desirability, institutional models

propensity: (1) a tendency towards a new harmonisation of the Self (idiosyncratic values) and society (communitarian values), by eliminating the ascendancy of one over another; (2) a trend towards virtualising (relative impersonalisation) the other (alterity) through the reduction/avoidance/remodelling of direct social interaction; a (beneficial) trend towards self-improvement (a return to the Socratic and Stoic concept of self-construction); (4) a trend towards accentuating non-verbal knowledge, developing intuitiveness instead of discursiveness; (5) a tendency to replace the personal need for social validation with a need for self-validation;
desirability: the encouragement of the axiological evolution of both the person and of society, in directions aiming to: (1) construct the self as a distinct component of the social, harmonically integrated into the latter and bereft of any primacy on either part; (2) a rethinking of our (individual and communitarian) value system, from the perspective of being for oneself and for others; (3) the development of a conscience of mankind being “in the same boat”; (4) rebuilding models of existential rationality and of behavioural rationality (i.e. interactional rationality) from the perspective of the common good rather than of success (even efficient altruism, guided by consequentialism, is preferable to egotism of egocentrism);
institutional/cultural model: the model of the reflexive self (MRS) – a model which will favour the (re)construction of the self on rational bases (in the understanding of Kantian rationalism) which include equally-justified alterity; a model that will necessarily generate a new sense of community found in a logical and axiological accord with the other models suggested above.

9. Quo vadis?

Any shock of notable intensity and significance, regardless of its nature, has the potential to awaken our need to examine and re-examine individual and social existence, both in terms of their ultimate purpose or the means by which such a purpose might be achieved, and from the perspective of the models of rationality involved. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception – on the contrary, owing to its massive and (seemingly) long-term impact on our fundamental modes of social interaction and cooperation, it seems to place great pressure on this need for self-reflection. Perhaps the most representative social (and theoretical) philosophers that mankind has produced over the past two and a half millennia should “reconvene” for a general, honest and responsible debate on the future of mankind in the current axiological, technological, political and cultural context in which this novel global shock surprised us. I believe it is imperative that we have in mind a series of coordinates if we wish to capitalise on this moment (of crisis, true, but also of grace) to the best of our ability:

an axiological re-evaluation – including a consideration of ethical perspectives – of our current economic and societal paradigms (predicated on capital), which has unsustainably supported a Ponzi scheme of resource exploitation, population growth, the encouragement of intercultural migration, egotism, the corruption of social justice, a lack of empathy and compassion and, in the most compelling and tragic manner, the ultimate perversion of authentic human values;
the development of a research project concurrently philosophical, metaphysical, scientific and institutional to focus on Romania’s desirable and sustainable social model and, why not, of integrated institutional systems, as is the singular case of the European Union.

How will the world look like after the Pandemic?