Covid, Climate Change and the Imperative of Planetary Decolonization
Op-ed
Vikramaditya Prakash
July 7, 2021
As we are surrounded, or so it seems, by the perfect storm of a global pandemic, climate change, mounting racism, fascism and drastic inequity in global wealth distribution, the question arises: are all these somehow connected? Is this really a perfect storm, a coincidence of disconnected events, each with its own individual history? Or, is there a pattern here? I speak from the perspective of a cultural theorist and global historian trained to see incipient patterns via collage. My favorite American artist is Rauschenberg. I think of the present as a montage of ‘ruins of the past’ overlaid with ‘dreams of the future’. In our present catastrophe, this duality seems double charged, an exceptionally clear lens of our past and our future. From this vantage, here is what I see:
Disease and epidemics have of course always been with us. Pandemics and plagues have abounded in history. The Bible celebrates them; the paintings of the so-called Renaissance mourn them. Even the Kama Sutra offers solutions to keeping the plague at bay. Along the way, disease and the resultant immunities, in pre-modern times, amongst particular groups and not in others have exacted significant civilizational tolls. Homer’s Iliad opens with a plague visited upon the Greeks at Troy. The populations of Eurasia were repeatedly, literally, decimated by plague. Native America, in combination with colonial genocide, paid a deadly price for them. But today is different. Starting with the mid-19th century, never have we ever had such a vast infrastructure of health and hygiene. Modern medicine has given us a lot, including the vaccines that we are today relying on to deliver us from this virus. In concert with modern medicine, modern cities with their plumbing, sewers, zones of exclusion and aesthetics of ‘clean’ white walls built up a culture of hygiene and control. All our spaces are now habitually sealed off from one another, designed to contain disease. So, this raises the question: Have we become too clean? Too protected? Perhaps our hospitals and buildings, vacuum sealed with in-built ventilations systems focused on delivering the ‘clean’ are in fact killing us. Perhaps we need a different more holistic perspective on health and well-being.
In the same way, inequity has always been with us. No civilization anywhere, regardless of our mythologies of the ‘polis’ of the past, was ever egalitarian. The Greeks enslaved vanquished populations, engaged in slave trades, and leashed women. The Hindu castes institutionalized social inequity. Shamans were figures of privilege and priority. But it was only with the industrial revolution and the global reach of raw materials and markets that came with colonization, that we got not only vast amounts of wealth generation, but also wealth concentration. Never in human history have we generated so much wealth; but the mechanisms that produce wealth also require a deprivileging of the health of the Earth and other species and result in concentrated wealth in the hands of the very few. For all its advantages, the nexus between industrialization and capitalism has delivered us not into a realm of unbridled freedom but of excessive waste and disparity. The American lifestyle is poised to literally kill us. Clearly, we need a more passive - equitable and renewable - way of generating and sustaining wealth. But there are no clear paths to that future, at least as of yet.
I have yet to read a document in world history that does not carry assumptions of bias and competition. Difference is always and inevitably accompanied by hierarchy. War has always been knocking at our doors; so much of the literature of the world - from the Mahabharata to King Lear is indexed to war. Even so, it seems clear to me that that the level of warfare that we have unleashed on the world in the last century and a half, with the weapons to back it, in the name of egalitarianism and equality is unparalleled in history. This is a difficult one. How can we not be subscribed to the great modern Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity, the ‘self-evident’ truths that “all are born equal”. It's difficult, but perhaps we need to balance the myth of “equality”, in the name of which we have brought war to more people with greater devastation than any other idea, with other new more accountable cultural norms that work with difference and division. Live and let live, might be a value at par with egalite.
Along the same lines, humanism, the idea that our epistemologies and values must privilege the human experience, and not mythologies of other worlds or divine interventions, has given us modern literature, sociology and the other disciplines of the humanities; and correspondingly, it has also given us the great advances of science, reason and rationality. What would we ever do without all these? But while humanism has given us much in terms of the celebration of human art, culture and civilizational achievement, it has also alienated us from all other forms of life on our planet and indeed from the planet itself. There is no obvious evidence that the experiences of the human animal are in fact singular and unique. We are a very special accident of the universe, that is very fragile to say the least. We cannot afford to continue thinking that it is all about us, for us. Disciplines and specialized professions have generated great expertise and great wealth; but they also become victim to interests of hegemony and capitalist exploitation. They have lost grasp of the larger truths of life. Life is not disciplinary, in particular when viewed from a non-human centric point of view. As NASA’s Voyager I Spacecraft was about to leave our Solar System in 1989, it took one last picture of Earth appearing as a “pale blue dot” about which Carl Sagan famously remarked: we are all on this planet together, a fragile pale blue dot in the vast emptiness of space.
It feels difficult to face this, but it seems clear that modernity and modernization - with all its attendant gifts of science, reason, democracy, universal human right, and the rest - comes with its shadows of inequity, racism, genocide and war. This is a consequence of the unholy nexus of modernity and modernization, with colonization and its processes of global resource extraction and exploitation. Colonization created modern global civilization and perpetuated the singular myth of progress focused on ‘man’. The idea that we use asymmetries in wealth to drive our industrial engines, the assumption that we could exploit our planet and our atmosphere as if it were a limitless resource for our own benefit, the belief that a singular measure of man and society, however progressive, could and should be applied to all peoples and civilizations - all these have yielded great dividends to us and our project. We call this the march of progress. But perhaps, just perhaps, we may have to face the reality that the two - progress and barbarism - are just two sides of the same coin, constitutively intertwined. You cannot have one without the other.
Covid and climate change, in other words, are symptoms of a planetary crisis, the crisis of modern civilization. It calls for planetary decolonization. We need new stories to tell about ourselves, our place on our planet, our present and our possible futures. We need other, more inclusive narratives, not just in our tales and movies, but in every walk of our lives – in our disciplines, our professional identities, our core beliefs and in our understandings of, in the language of legal trusts, family, friends, health and well-being. These will take a long haul to imagine, and even longer to build into reality. Our present crisis does well seem like a clarion call to push this work into high gear.
The author is a Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington in Seattle.
