Catherine Malabou / Rethinking Mutual Aid: Kropotkin and Singer in debate

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Catherine Malabou

Peter Kropotkin / Photo: PD-US - Peter Singer / Photo: John Donegan/1826

Since the beginning of the current sanitary crisis, many reflections on the necessity of mutual aid, solidarity, and cooperation have emerged here and there. It is important to notice from the outset that mutual aid, understood as a genuine concept, is not a temporarily limited set of actions determined by the emergency of a crisis. Mutual aid, in the eyes of its most influent thinkers, is an actual revolutionary dynamism, the motor of a totally renewed vision of the  social. As we know, mutual aid has been one of the most important theoretical and practical tenet of XIXth century anarchism. His prominent representant is of course Piotr Kropotkin, author of the famous 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.[1]

I got deeply involved in the exploration of this concept when I started to write my new book on the philosophical dimension of anarchy and anarchism.  What gave me the incentive to begin writing this book was the revelation, so to speak, that anarchism was the most plastic of all political theories to the extent that it does not refer to any fixed political doctrine, does not dogmatically set up a well constituted body of doctrines, and is made of a myriad of theories and concrete practices all over the world. The plasticity of anarchism, and consequently the anarchism of plasticity itself, appear in the making, they invent their own forms while asserting the necessity of such an invention. The absence of principles (an-archy) implies the production of prefigurative formal creations and actions.

Mutual aid is one of these forms. 

It has become necessary to go back to its anarchist birth place, in order to situate its political value. Once again, mutual aid is not just care, or solidarity. It relies on a biological theory, pertaining to evolutionism. It is defined by Kropotkin as an evolutionary trend, that he contrasts with Darwin’s notion of natural selection. Living beings do not only compete Kropotkin does not negate the existence of natural selection), they also help each other in order to survive.

Before I develop this point, I have to remark that because of its biological roots, mutual aid has been ridiculed and rejected. First, it was judged too naïve, too confident in a kind of natural benevolence. Second and more seriously, it was judged dangerous because of its anticipatory flirting in with socio-biologism (Edward Wilson, Sociobiology, the New Synthesis, 1975), and its vision of a naturalistic and essentialist basis for politics. Third, it was proven (supposedly) untrue by a great number of biologists and ethologists who, in a great many diversity of ways, have undertook to demonstrate, from the end of the XIXth century on, that all forms of altruistic behaviors in animals as well as in humans were just forms of veiled selfishness. We would only help others when this can benefit us (or our genes, cf Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) in a way or another.

Altruism. Such is the key concept associated with that of mutual aid. Kropotkin does not make an extended use of it, but we understand, when we read Mutual Aid, that it constantly sustains his analysis. I have also to remark that the term “altruism”, coined by Auguste Comte, has not become a canonical philosophical concept, outside some anglo-saxon moral theories. An altruistic behavior may be defined as « a behavior that benefits others at some cost to oneself ». It is clear that mutual aid may be regarded the highest form of altruistic behaviors. Once again, altruism, and consequently also mutual aid, have not received the philosophical attention they deserved. Not a word about them in Levinas’ ethics for example. 

Too naïve once again, too morally simplistic, and essentialist.

Biologists on their end agree that some animal behaviors are altruistic: food sharing, groom exchanges in monkeys for example. In their views though, altruistic behaviors are forms are always reciprocal. Helping the others would only possible if sustained by the expectation that others will help us in return. Kin altruism (the sacrifice of the individual to preserve its kinship, behaviors meant to improve the genetic prospects of my children surviving and reproducing), group selection (preservation of the group at the cost of destruction of other groups), are be the most well-known forms of altruistic behaviors. Later on, economists like Robert Axelrod have established that the formal pattern of altruism was just “tit for tat”.

Time has come to reexamine the link that exists between mutual aid and altruism. If I chose here to confront Piotr Kropotkin and Peter Singer, two very different thinkers to say the least, both claim the existence of non-reciprocal altruism. Mutual aid as conceived by Kropotkin implies the suspension of reciprocity. Non-reciprocal altruism is the basis of Singer’s effective altruism.

As I  just mentioned, the two thinkers have little in common. Kropotkin inscribes his theory of mutual aid within an anarchist critique of capitalism. Singer does not attack capitalism, on the contrary. Effective altruism is a way to modestly and tentatively repair the inefficacy of governments regarding extreme poverty and precarity. It is not a challenge of the concept of government per se. Besides, capitalism is not antagonistic with mutual aid and altruism. Singer affirms that hyper rich people like Bill Gates or George Soros actually help by giving huge amount of money to charities or environmental organizations. He writes : « (…) Effective altruism typically value equality not for its own sake but for its consequences. It isn’t clear that making the rich richer without making the poor poorer has bad consequences, overall. It increases the ability of the rich to help the poor, and some of the world’s richest people, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, have done precisely that, becoming, in terms of the amount of money given, the greatest effective altruists in human history. (…) It would not be easy to demonstrate that capitalism has driven more people into extreme poverty than it has lifted out of it ; indeed there are good grounds for thinking that the opposite is the case. »[2] Singer mentions Kropotkin in several of his books, but only rapidly and in passing. It is clear that Singer would never present himself as an anarchist — even if this point could and should be discussed.

Yet, I do think that Kropotkin and Singer share much more common traits than it seems. They are, as far as I can judge, the only two thinkers who propose a vision of the link between biology, ethics and politics without elaborating a biologism. This link is precisely mutual aid for the former, effective altruism  for the latter. For Kropotkin, mutual aid is an evolutionary trend for the former, for Singer, it a rational calculation that follows from biological evolution.

If I am touching on this topic now, it is because I think that a reevaluation of the political potential of the biological — that, once again, has nothing to do with the effort to assign a biological basis to politics — has become urgent. The systematic critique of biopolitics, as I tried to demonstrate elsewhere, has become insufficient to conceptualize the point of encounter of the evolutionary and the historical that structures, in different ways and degrees, all living beings.

Inverting the order of exposition, I will start with Singer’s vision of this point of encounter, then will turn to Kropotkin.

For Singer, effective altruism is not a matter of generosity, but of calculation. « Effective altruism » is  a specific branch of utilitarianism. It is about “maximizing happiness” on the basis of equal consideration of interests. “We should give similar importance to similar interests.”  

So what does maximizing happiness mean? « Effective altruism », Singer writes, « is based on a very simple idea : we should do the most good we can. »[3] Effective altruism is « the project of using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis. »[4] What is “good”? “Good” is everything that prevents suffering and death from precarious conditions of life. And preventing, here, implies giving. Or more exactly, earning to give. « Earning to give is a distinctive way of doing good. »[5]  The principle is apparently simple : people from affluent countries should give money to people from poor countries. This without any central control. 

Effective altruists only gives to strangers, to people they do not personally know, so that the giver should not expect anything in exchange. « Genuine, non-reciprocal altruism toward strangers does occur »[6] . It is also clear that effective altruism is a way to struggle against self-interest: « [effective altruists] are able to detach themselves from personal considerations that otherwise dominate the way in which we live. »[7]  

Before going more into details about the process of giving, let’s explore its relationship to the biological. Kinship or group altruism form a “circle”, Singer explains, the biological circle of reciprocity (or “nearness”). Reciprocal altruism is inscribed biologically in the species. Non-reciprocal altruism then implies an enlargement of the circle. To what extent is it also based on biological grounds? Such are the fascinating questions that Singer raises in his book  The Expanding Circle, Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress, first published in 1981 and constantly revised and republished ever since.

Photo: Handshake / PD-US

Is effective altruism the continuation of reciprocal altruism understood as a biological trend? Yes and no. The expansion of the circle is accomplished by reason. It is true that reason is initially a biological phenomenon, a result of evolution. At the same time, the emergence of reason marks an interruption of continuity within the continuity of evolution. This interruption is not a clean cut, but, once again, an expansion, an opening. « Altruistic impulses once limited to one’s kin and one’s own group might be extended to a wider circle by reasoning creatures who can see that they and their kin are one group among others, and from an impartial point of view no more important than others. Biological theories of the evolution of altruism through kin selection, reciprocity and group selection can be made compatible with the existence of non-reciprocal altruism toward strangers if they can accept this kind of expansion of the circle of altruism. »[8]  The emergence of reason appears to be a discontinuous continuity. We see how the idea of « expansion » implies both a rupture from- and a preservation of- the biological. In Hegelian terms, we might characterize the expansion of the circle as an Aufhebung.

Rational calculation is both the continuation and the metamorphosis of the initial mutualistic biological trend. Expanding the circle implies that the gift should benefit  not only rational beings but also animals,  plants, [or perhaps] [and] even mountains, rocks and streams […] »[9]

What is the altruistic calculation about?

1) Maximizing happiness, Singer says, means maximizing the effects of the gift by calculating how many people it will be beneficial to, and choosing each time the larger quantity. « Toby Ord has given another example of the cost differences between helping people in affluent countries and helping people elsewhere. You may have received appeals for donations from charities in affluent countries providing blind people with guide-dogs. That sounds like a case worthy of support — until you consider the costs and the alternative to which you could donate. It costs about $40 000 to supply one person in the United States with a guide dog ; most of the expense is incurred in training the dog and the recipient. But the cost of preventing someone from going blind because of trachoma, the most common and preventable blindness, is in the range of $20-$100. If you do the math, you will see the choice is to provide one person with a guide dog or revent anywhere between four hundred and two thousand cases of blindness in developing countries. » 

2) determining and calculating how much you can give.

3) calculating what the most urgent issue is, and determining what the most reliable charity, or NGO is.

4) setting limits: « We ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility, that is the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift » the limits beyond which giving would become counterproductive. [10]

Singer adds: “It is true that effective altruists talk more about the number of people they are able to help than about helping particular individuals”.[11] “Consistent with the points just made, many of the most prominent effective altruists have backgrounds in or are particularly strong in areas that require abstract reasoning, like mathematics or computing.”[12] “My favorite example of the combination of effective altruism and numeracy is the website Counting Animals, which has the subtitle ‘A place for people who love animals and numbers’.”[13]

Singer defines such a mathematical morals so to speak as grounded in the equal considerations of interests and oriented toward consequences only.[14] It is in that sense that it is said to be “effective“.

Effective altruists should “living modestly and donating a large part of their income — often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe— to the most effective charities ; Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators ; Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so they can do more good ; Talking  to others, in person or on line, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread ; Giving part of their body — blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney, to a stranger.“[15]  The effective altruist must ask:  “how they can make the biggest possible reduction in the suffering in that larger universe of suffering.”[16] 

*

Selection and competition between living beings and species are not the only evolutionary laws: such is Kropotkin’s fundamental affirmation. There exists a natural trend toward solidarity and cooperation among living beings.

Such a view  does not contradict Darwin proper. Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, acknowledged this trend to solidarity. It rather contradicts social Darwinism, founded, according to Kropotkin, on a Hobbesian vision of society, a state of permanent war and competition. Protection against enemies, the necessity of survival, unity and mutual support for the sake of the community, are the reasons for mutual aid. In the first part of his book, Kropotkin analyzes the behavior of ants and bees, the mutual protection systems among birds, cranes, parrots. He mentions the unity of birds during migrations, the way in which wolves associate in hunting, and a lot of other examples.

Kropotkin operates a radical transformation of the philosophical core of anarchism. He does so by promoting “life” as what Yusuke Katakura calls “ a principle of becoming always already existing in and as multiplicities, not only in Europe, but in all regions of the world”.[17]  

As a geographer, Kropotkin elaborated his theory on the basis of his observations made during field trips in Siberia and Manchuria where he discovered that many animals were able to survive extremely severe conditions of life, wandering through immense territories devoid of artificial borders. What he specifically calls “mutual aid” is not only cooperation but more fundamentally a type of relation that allows for the maintenance of small variations in individuals (whereas Darwin argues that variations are sorted out by a selection that leads to the elimination of the weakest). Katakura very rightly declares: “contrarily to the widely shared opinion that anarchism relies on a belief in the fundamental character of the Good, Being or the Individual, mutual aid does not constitute the substance of life, but only a contingent dynamic relation between living beings, always anterior to individuals, that forms the individual and preserve its variation (…). In short, preservation of anteriority leads to the creation of a set of new states and of an increased diversity. In Kropotkin’s theory, multiplicity is always made possible by the return of the ancient.”[18]  

In the second half of his book, Kropotkin analyzes the social destiny of mutual aid, living animals behind in order to examine human behaviors. He describes the multiplicity of the social egalitarian forms in contemporary world: clans, guilds, village communities, agricultural cooperation, unionism, etc as social forms of mutual aid. These forms, he shows, resist and recreate themselves each time they are attacked, as it is the case with the development of capitalism and its link to State hegemonies, in Europe and elsewhere. 

Kropotkin does not say that these resisting egalitarian forms are “biologically determined”, that they just are remnants of an animal past. They bear witness to a historization of the biological, as they render manifest the point of contact between nature and the social, which partly erases the frontiers between evolution and history. “The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.” Such a statement has very often be misunderstood. It does not say that social forms of cooperation and mutualism are based on a biological trend, that they are evolved expressions of animal behaviors. Here also we find both a continuity and a break with the biological. What Kropotkin argues is that there can be no history without the awareness of the return of  anteriority. Primitive forms of mutual aid are not instinctual, they act as memories of a certain kind, without which history would not be possible. There are of course ruptures with this past, as proven with the emregence of capitalism, or the dissolution of small communities in current gigantic impersonal industrial cities . But the memories of a state of thing anterior to capitalism is never lost. The actors of mutual aid in contemporary societies are the “anonymous masses”. In Modern Science and Anarchism, Kroptkin writes :  “Every social safeguard, all forms of social life in the tribe, the commune, and the early medieval town-republics; all forms of inter-tribal, and later on inter-provincial, relations, out of which international law was subsequently evolved; all forms of mutual support and all institutions for the preservation of peace — including the jury, — were developed by the creative genius of the anonymous masses. While all the laws of every age, down to our own, always consisted of the same two elements: one which fixed and crystallized certain forms of life that were universally recognized as useful; the other which was a superstructure — sometimes even nothing but a cunning clause adroitly smuggled in in order to establish and strengthen the growing power of the nobles, the king, and the priest — to give it sanction.”[19]  

“Anonymous masses” organize resistance to political hegemonies not because they are driven by a stubborn, unconscious natural trend, but because they remember the past without having necessarily memorized it. Biological life is a specific form of remembrance of things past, that is why biological life is always already historical. 

*

For both Singer and Kropotkin, mutual aid and effective altruism do not have anything to do with love, guilt, empathy or charity, but with the logic of life.

I cannot analyze here the numerous differences and incompatibilities even that exist between Singer and Kropotkin. By reading them, my goal is in the end to affirm that it is impossible to evacuate the biological dimension of solidarity.

The current pandemic is the object of many philosophical analyses that heavily rely on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. Many thinkers argue that the crisis management — terms of confinement, selection of patients, lack of material, cynicism of global leaders — is the result of a biopolitical techniques of governmentality through which the lives of individuals are globally controlled, exploited, normalized and captured. It would of course be difficult to say the contrary. What I wish to argue is that these analyses only understand “life” as something passive and purely exposed to control and “states of exception”. The resisting potential of life to such captures is never envisaged. The diverse manifestations of mutual aid that we see currently emerging are precisely the expressions of such a potential. There exists a biological resistance to biopolitics, a resistance which is all at once empirical and political. Mutual aid is the biological monument secretely erected in our lives in memory of ancestral forms of equality. Life is not the passive, blind, obscure dimension of being, that would only be enlightened by culture, language and the cut from organic determinism. What my work on the brain has taught me is that the biological and the symbolic, the historical and the epigenetic, were inseparable. Therefore, we need a new reformulation of human rights, where the remembrance of the ancestral biological past should find its expression and formulation. Tentatively: “All human beings are epigenetically born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason, conscience and memory, and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Catherine Malabou

1. Kropotkin, P., Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902, PDF Anarchist Library.

2.  Singer, P, The Most Good You Can Do, How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, Yale Library, 2015, 50.

3.  Peter Singer,  The Most Good You Can Do. How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 2015, vii.

4.  “Effective Altruism An Introduction », (Essays in Philosophy: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 1). 

5.  The Most Good You Can Do, op. cit., 55.

6.  Singer, P., The Expanding Circle, Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981, 134.

7.  The Most Good You Can Do, op. cit. 85.

8.  Ibid., 135.

9.  Ibid., 120.

10.  The Most Good You Can Do,  op. cit., 241.

11.  Ibid., 89.

12.  Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14.  The Most Good You Can Do, 79

15. Ibid.

16.  Ibid., 94.

17. Yusuke Katakura, « Actualité de l’évolutionnisme anarchiste de Kropotkin », online publishing, my translation.

18.  Ibid, 5.

19.  Modern Science and Anarchism, PDF, Anarchist Library.

Catherine Malabou is a philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS and professor of modern European philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. She is known for her work on plasticity, a concept she culled from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has proved fertile within contemporary economic, political, and social discourses. Widely regarded as one of the most exciting figures in what has been called “The New French Philosophy,” Malabou’s research and writing covers a range of figures and issues, including the work of Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida; the relationship between philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis; and concepts of essence and difference within feminism.

Leonardo Caffo / COVID Manifesto

/SPRING BREAK 2020/

Leonardo Caffo

Tabatha Hannah, a student at St. Clair Community College, center, talks with Miami Beach police officers during spring break, Saturday, March 14, 2020, in Miami Beach, Fla. Portions of South Beach were closed late Saturday. [LYNNE SLADKY | AP]

Originally posted in Italian by Leonardo Caffo in his personal website on March 22, the same was published in English by NERO MAGAZINE on March 25, 2020.

In 2017 I published Fragile Umanità (Fragile Humanity, Einaudi) where I claimed humanity to be at the verge of collapse, as our ecological niche and our “regular” life would have soon succumbed under the weight of either an epidemic, or an environmental catastrophe or a bad management of resources. The Homo Sapiens’ fragility can be read as twofold: (1) conceptual—we do not know what “humanity” really is, where the extension of this concept begins or ends, as we do not really understand whether there would be a best model applicable to all human beings (for instance, what kind of problems the Yanomami will face in case of Covid-19? Would it be a resource for them?); (2) objectual—we do not know when humanity will give up interpreting progress as a continuous pushing its own limits and planetary resources.

Neglectful of the issue of fragility, most of humanity is currently fighting against a virus: if it will be acted only upon the effects (the virus itself) rather than on the causes (the conditions which made the virus possible), the battle will be lost. Society as we know it will survive—perhaps by finding a vaccine with periodic recall within a few months, or by radically changing the rules of sociability and introducing periodic quarantines—or definitively collapse. It is clear that survival and collapse are the two movements most associated with the current state of affairs. If our society survives now, it will collapse at the next epidemic or ecological crisis; if society collapses later, it might instead be able to immediately establish a new paradigm of coexistence between the planet and Homo Sapiens.

Ideas on progress which were so far considered obvious have turned out to be  fatal misconceptions for the whole human species. Progressive philosophies and technologies giving for granted that we would have lived forever, contributed to fill the planet with piles of technologies and urbanized the world, believing that it would be enough to fix co2 emissions or to sell water bottles over single-use plastic, and actually did nothing but definitely thwart the chance for Homo Sapiens to spend a life on this planet worth living. These days, the expression “return to the normal world” is often used, as if what was there before Covid-19 could be considered “normal”: social disintegration, poverty, animal exploitation, environmental destruction, ever-increasing damage on the planet and on nature. All these could perhaps appear normal to the tiny slice of Western humanity convinced that the last fifty years of widespread well-being were the norm rather than an alteration based on other peoples exploitation, wars, famines and brutal elimination of diversity.

The unconditional development of globalization and technologies has inflicted irreparable damage to the texture of reality causing—we have infinite names to describe this state of affairs, from Anthropocene to Capitalocene—a very long period of painful damage adjustment. We are now at the dawn of this very long painful period.

In the various positions of power we have held, all of us have contributed to reduce every living organism and lifeform to commodities. Animals and biodiversity have become food, as we see today science has turned them into  useless bodies for testing drugs and vaccines, while nature has been considered as something external to us. Today we end up being surprised that a bat eaten alive has blown up our ordinary lives, although social diversity and poverty have been institutionalized. Our world—while it collapses we become aware that it won’t be over but for the world-as-we-know-it—has averted investing into things that would have been particularly useful today, such as universal health, mandatory ecology, the end of animal exploitation, the end of the ideas of nation-state and local citizenship. Today, humanity at large is united against what could have saved humanity itself—nature.

Obviously, when the general system would suddenly collapse, the consequences will be extremely painful: none of us is really ready to change their lifestyle and this could inevitably lead to some kind of natural selection, or some sort of new species. Nevertheless, as most radical philosophies have suggested for decades, it should be clear to us that if the system tries to grow back after Covid-19 boasting new periods of economic happiness at the expenses of ecology, the final result will not be the pain of many but the end of us all. Today, we find ourselves at this crossroad, institutional politics is completely unprepared for.

It doesn’t matter at all when this will happen, whether in ten months or ten years, what matters is an immediate awareness toward the end of the exploitation of collective ignorance (the real scourge to fight against), to tell what will come after, after the end of all quarantines, in which way and how much should we prepare for the reconstruction, joyfully. We all know that even if the internet would fail us for overload these days, a definitive collapse of sociality would lead us to an unimaginable revolution.

Instead of mimicking our ordinary lives, through Instagram conferences or parties on Facebook and Tik Tok, we should immediately instruct the population for the extraordinary: countryside over city, nature over technology, a short life worth living over mere survival, the end of time-spending and the beginning of the pursuit of life.

As home confinement poses issues related to class struggle we used to ignore while living the false myth of collective well-being, when confined in our homes today each of us knows now that nothing will be as before: we are terrified of change, and none of us has perhaps ever felt as alive. A newfound time to think, to read, to write, to love, but also to experience depression: to understand that what we used to call normal life was actually the very condition that made this tragedy possible.

It doesn’t matter to understand whose fault was it, because evil is widespread; what’s important now is to attempt to govern fragility, by understanding that this kind of world no longer exists and time has come for “a new human species” (as I said in Fragile Humanity) to appear in the world.

In the muffled society we now feel rejected from, we needed a minimum effort to have everything: food, water, fun, travel. Probably, another kind of world is waiting for us instead, where everyone will have to be the maker of their own existence, thriving otherwise. Will we be less people? Maybe. Will we live less? This might as well be. So these ideas according to which technology would make us immortal and perfect were all false? Obviously so. But then shall we prepare ourselves to consider some diversions as over, in favor of achieving real goals? I’m afraid we must.

In the upcoming days and months, the situation may even worsen: if science won’t find an immediate cure, home confinement will generate frustration, domestic killings, self inflicted violence, alienation, follies and personality disorders. Everything we concealed in the drawer, hoping to be rescued by all the “obligations” on our agendas, now will suddenly resurface. It will hit hard, it will be necessary to work for this above mentioned world conscious of the fact that it is not us who design the real, but rather the real that tailors our selves.

These few pages are a simplification of a thought that for years philosophers and intellectuals considered to be minorities have been producing against the widespread technological enthusiasm, against the idea of a “better” future always better than the past. Today’s humanity—as fragile as never before—can enter a new evolutionary phase by considering itself unique and united, with no ethnic groups nor nations, no divisions nor selfishness. Was our world full of comfort and certainties? Surely, but it was also a world full of wars, violence, killings and biodiversity massacres … certainly not the “normal world” we might think to return to.

Our addiction to certain practices has been too often a force way more powerful than the most important aspiration of our species: freedom. Eventually we will of course leave these houses, but we won’t get back on a crowded tram to work twenty hours a day because that world, fortunately, will collapse either today or tomorrow. We naively thought we had an immense power over nature, a power that turned out to be a shortcut towards self-destruction. Therefore the question is: how many other models are already there to exist in this world? Please don’t be dogmatic and smile, these few pages are only an approximation to truthful questions that deserve pages and pages; the future of Homo Sapiens is more similar to his distant past than to all the ideologies we had filled our pseudo-certainties with.

I may be wrong, maybe it will not be Covid-19 but Covid-25 to give us this “chance” but the time to think and prepare for everything that has been said it’s still too short. Let’s get going right away.

Leonardo Caffo is philosopher and curator. Currently, he is co-curator of the Public Program at La Triennale Milano and professor of Ontology at Politecnico, in Turin. He is professor of Philosophy of Art at NABA, in Milan.

Leonardo Caffo / Human Fragility

/SPRING BREAK 2020/

Leonardo Caffo

Published by NASA / ISS039-E-005762 (March 29, 2014) One of the Expedition 39 crew members aboard the International Space Station on March 29 photographed a pre-winter storm off the coast of southwestern Australia.

This is the first chapter of the book Human Fragility a forthcoming translation for Lantern Book (New York) of Fragile Umanità (Einaudi, 2018) by Leonardo Caffo. Translation in English by Steven Ombrello, Università di Torino, Italy.

“The ethical axis: the first transformation
It is so difficult to find the beginning.
Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning.
And not to try to go further back”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

First Part: Transformation
Chapter 1

SHORT NOTE: What is speciesism?

Speciesism, or the discrimination by Homo sapiens of other animal species, is the first axis, and perhaps the most resistant and dangerous, of this powerful and complex set of phenomena that we call "anthropocentrism". Our whole society is built on the institutionalized exploitation of non-human animals: killed for food, clothing, entertainment of various kinds and scientific research. Non-humans are basically in the world to guarantee total well-being for the Homo sapiens species. Speciesism, a neologism by the psychologist Richard D. Ryder, is the idea that all this is justifiable through a series of arguments that are anything but easily falsifiable. The question of whether the chicken or egg came first, even in the case of speciesism, is clear: speciesism is a prejudice, as argued in the 1975 book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, or perhaps it is a justificationist ideology of a phenomenon that has historically occurred? It matters little, speciesism is a phenomenon that becomes possible, at least conceptually, because a series of arguments widely spread, also in what is considered ‘common sense’, that makes our social possible. These are possible, but unfounded, as I will try to show. When philosophical justifications are sought for speciesism, it is a mistake not to refer to Descartes, who claimed that the animal is an automaton without language, or to Martin Heidegger, who even claimed that the animal is a poor subject of being-in-the-world and lacking in capacity to die. They are errors, but I will try to not make the same mistakes. Here, in fact, I prefer to understand just what speciesism is and why, for millennia, it has been regulating the lives of those who have never heard of Descartes or Heidegger, and who, in any case, live a mutually violent relationship with animals.

Being a speciesist means considering the life of one's own species as the only life that can be protected from a moral point of view even if there are - we think of how we treat a dog differently from a pig - different degrees of protection. I believe it is fundamental to understand this fact because, otherwise, we will continue to think of speciesism as a Cartesian phenomenon: animals all have no world and are not subjects. On the contrary, conscious speciesists know very well that animals are "subjects of a life", to use an expression by Tom Regan. Either way, adherents simply do not believe that this is a necessary and sufficient condition to radically change their lives. The image I would like to give of speciesism, however, is entirely conceptual[1] because it is part of a tripartite set aimed at composing my idea of anthropocentrism, that is, in our daily lives, animals simply do not "exist". In the United States of America alone, in a single year, and referring only to large mammals, fifty billion animals are killed for food reasons. Let me repeat it, fifty billion! This immense slaughterhouse, which is well hidden and allows us to define all this "civil society", is possible because animals are nothing but paradoxes: they are "non-existent entities". We know that they exist, and that they are precisely beings with biological characteristics not secondary to ours, but we do not know that these same animals are what make up the objects of our daily well-being.

The novelty of the speciesism that I propose here is above all the fact of understanding it as a forgetfulness: we have forgotten that we are not alone. Speciesism is the engine of the economy: with animals, and with what remains of their bodies, we literally produce anything - from films for cameras to wallpaper, from glue to hold the seams of shoes together to dyes used in gummy candies that are so loved by children. So, animals are everywhere but we cannot see them because, trivially, we have hidden them: speciesism is also a hiding. Of course, all of us will have the opportunity to see, but the potential of sight surrenders, often too easily, to the characteristics of the economic system that we live in.

"Speciesism" is a moral term, therefore internal to the encyclopedia of ethics, and shifts our attention from how we behave (descriptive ethics) to how we should behave (prescriptive ethics). Do we eat animals? We should stop. Why? Because there are no good arguments to continue to do so after realizing that it is not necessary, as would happen to obliged carnivores such as felines, and that the animals we feed on have equal rights as us eaters.

Anti-speciesism, which I will shortly say, is in its general connotations one of the most complex theories to be questioned: there are no good reasons for the daily massacre of millions of animals. Or, at least, they no longer exist.

Which kind of humanity follows from speciesism?

Speciesism proposes an idea of a humanity that, more or less transversely, crosses the planisphere, epochs, and geopolitics even if obviously it has not always been an explicitly chosen metaphysics. It suggests that Homo sapiens may dispose of what is not inside the fence that defines it, an imaginary fence however, or at least fleeting within its borders as we know from Charles Darwin, which is that of "our species". Where there is a bipedal body, we see otherness there, otherwise it is emptiness: the search for Emmanuel Lévinas' face-to-face relation stops at the human body, and the rest is outline. Yet "the body conceals", writes Deleuze, and "contains a hidden language"[2]. This humanity that follows speciesism is what I propose to call "blind solitude": we killed one life form born to blossom together with the others to create another, deeply alone, and unconsciously blind. Being a speciesist, an essential or better necessary characteristic of the strongly anthropocentric human, means believing that pain can only be found in those who behave as human. But thinking of oneself as the only sufferers really seems the only possible justification for the anomaly of life as continuous pain. Here, more or less, the idea of the animal as an automaton was born: for the animal, hence for those outside the enclosure, we essentially feel envy. We think, and sometimes we hope, it does not suffer, and upon it we enact the senseless violence that is speciesism as an business. This humanity, which emerges from the ethics of speciesism, feels special because it is suffering: what does not have the anguish of living on two legs must be punished. But everything, as it should be, is complicated - because "what the caterpillar calls the end of the world," says Lao Tzu, "the rest of the world calls a butterfly."

Speciesism has a fallacious logical structure that forces everyone, once they understand the catch, to put their nose out of this circle that we call humanity: if X is not the same species as Y, then it does not enjoy the same moral treatment. It is fallacious because it immediately brings to mind analogies, and so, as Peter Singer already said in his first books: if X does not have the same sex as Y, then they do not enjoy the same moral treatment, and so on, but let's stop here with the comparisons. Thus, from speciesism, a humanity built on the borders emerges: what is outside, precisely because it is outside, does not deserve respect and curiosity. Thus begins the first profile of anthropocentrism: a lonely person, poor in the world, who only makes a question of the metaphysical diversity of living - there are flowers, stones, and strange creatures around us. The consciously speciesist humanity asks few questions, and accepts strange answers due to blindness: where does our food come from? Why is the planet increasingly massacred by pollution? What are our clothes made of and who are our drugs tested on? There is a submerged world, invisible because we choose not to see it, which is what supports the visible world.

The human who follows speciesism, trying to go from the physical to the metaphysical, is the human who denies and represses animality starting with their own. But what is it, animality, if it is something (intuitively: the property of being animals)? Jacques Derrida, at least in his last phase of thought, as his famous speech for the Adorno Prize in 2001 shows, argued that it was the fundamental entity with which the philosophy of the future should have confronted. About fifteen years later, here we are doing it. I define, prima facie, animality as the necessary, but hidden (opaque) property of specialized human life forms; secondly, a topic that will accompany all the pages of this book. I define animality as the presence of oneself. The human has repressed its animality, and has denied animals their own; supporting the lawfulness of the "human and animal" conjunction - a conjunction, often understood as a (exclusive) disjunction that simply is not there. Why? Simple answer: because there is nothing to divide, and the animal, first of all, as the word "animal", compresses everything within itself, distorting the perception of biodiversity. Difficult answer: because logically one of the two conjuncts is false, and therefore the conjunction disintegrates. The first paradox is that, if the conjunction also compressed us, who pretend to be inside the enclosure, things would not be so terrible: being all animals, before starting to differentiate the species with articulated taxonomies, is an excellent point of departure. On the contrary, speciesist humanity places itself in a privileged ontological condition by living, de facto, the social world built by Homo sapiens as the only possible world (social ontology coincides with the whole ontology). The limit of philosophy, when it tries to face an articulated topic like this, is that it is not enough in itself and requires an expected intruder: as that ancient Chinese proverb says "An ant may well destroy an entire dam"[3]. The second paradox is that humanity that consciously chooses speciesism is deeply rational; not so much because it exercises reason properly, but because it makes reason its distinctive feature. Reason, within the image of ‘human’ that I am exploring here, is technically the cut, the divide, in the living: we think, therefore we are. And what is that human activity with which reason is exercised as an end in itself? Philosophy. It turns out therefore, that philosophy, while opposing speciesism, essentially attacks itself. Or, at least, attacks western philosophy (and I will return to this philosophical geography later).

In fact, speciesism is a use of reason as a not indifferent virtue: the human speaks, the animal does not; the human thinks, the animal does not; the human is self-conscious, the animal is not. The circus of stereotypes, although falsified on several occasions by specialist literature regarding studies on animal cognition[4], is not afraid of anything. But there is also a side of speciesism that uses reason precisely to undermine the stereotype that reason distinguishes us from animals, and which has even more speciesistic outcomes that we must face immediately This is because it is the first difference that I will bring out between the posthuman model - which I will defend at the end of this text - and other models of overcoming humanism; among the latter, the most famous is obviously the Übermensch or superman.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a great critic of a certain anthropocentrisms (although while being a defender of a kind of superantropocentrism), as well as a theorist of animality and its recovery in various, and not always happy, forms. His idea is that the human being must recover animality before turning to the superman by learning the use, without filters, the will to power like those of birds of prey: hit and terrify the prey, eliminate morals. Nietzsche's argument helps to give a further characterization to the image of man that emerges from speciesism: if you recover animality, opening the fence of anthropocentrism, you do it always and only for a recovery of instincts and basic functions of the animal that we are therefore. Being a speciesist, according to Nietzsche, means acting according to nature: everything is prey and predation, we eat and are eaten. Likewise, every form of asceticism (such as vegetarianism, which Nietzsche mocks several times in his The Gay Science) mortifies the essential structure of our form of life. Thus speciesism becomes a two-faced Janus: either solitary and without animals, or animal among animals - homo homini lupus, and that the weaker also succumbs among humans. Speciesism is a narrative: it describes and prescribes our behavior. We have always slaughtered animals and technology has only increased the quality and quantity of this massacre. Similarly, continuing to do so is right, noble, and, as in Nietzsche, it could even be a preferential passage for the humanity that is to come. Thus emerges a humanity that distances itself by philosophical choice from everything that cannot be said to be human: the planet is not our home, the planet is ours. Without this awareness, anthropocentrism would be nothing because, trivially, nothing would coherent: to act as we act we need a frame that orients our actions and speciesism is the frame of all the frames. The great ethical challenges that characterize the present, from deep ecology to radical feminism that rightly wants to definitively eradicate the position of inferiority of women in many of contemporary societies, all have the same limit: what is not human is simply absent. Speciesism, honestly, is the limit of all morals; all is well among those with whom you must be, of course, but what about those tens of billions of animals massacred every year? The conscious speciesist closes his eyes, keeps his back straight, and is still in anthropocentrism: we are everything.

Yet one day, sooner or later, they happen to meet the gaze of an animal, or to feel that a tree is more than a source of timber, and something breaks. Philosophy becomes wider, it takes on a point of view that does not belong to it, and "the animal looks at us and we are naked in front of him. Thinking, perhaps, starts right here »[5].

SHORT NOTE: What is antispeciesism?

Antispeciesism is the opposite of speciesism, in the sense that the emerging world is literally a reversal of the speciesist one. Antispeciesism is said to deal with the "between" of things[6] - from the ethical point of view, more simply, it is the position that denies speciesism’s solid arguments of resistance. The idea is that belonging to a species different from ours is not, in itself, the ratification for a different moral treatment: the arguments for which we respect humans, if they are good arguments, then apply to all other animals. The boons of this theory, in its first formulation espoused by thinkers such as Peter Singer, Paola Cavalieri, and Tom Regan, is all in the ability not to be a simple moral animalism - that is to take care, in a more or less sophisticated way, of the fate of non-human animals. Antispeciesism is the crisis of anthropocentrism in its ethical connotations, as Tiziano Terzani explains better: "All society is built to give a chord to violence: and violence generates violence. For this reason, even my vegetarianism is a moral choice »[7]. If you want to go against violence, a typical expression of anthropocentrism, you need to question violence as such; one of the most heinous, but perhaps the most senseless, is the one that Homo sapiens dedicates to animals.

Being antispeciesist means considering one's own life less "proper" than we are used to thinking: life exists, and then its infinite and passing forms. We think of antispeciesism as the idea that the life of others cannot be abused, we think of others, within antispecismism, as of the body regardless of the animal form it assumes: "the animal was the other, the stranger […] did not appear individual»[8].

Which kind of humanity follows from speciesism?
The humanity that follows antispeciesism is an open construction site. I have proposed a weak approach to this theory[9], according to which the conceptual assumption of the animal's point of view, leaving the human one, is needed to break the barrier of anthropocentrism. Consciously antispeciesist humanity (it is rare, but it exists) lives the world with the awareness of being one of the countless living beings, not qualitatively superior to others, but strong of its specific responsibility. Unfortunately, we are the only ones to consume this planet for many more resources than would be needed. When Singer first uses the term in a technical way he believes he must attack a prejudice: species diversity leads to thinking about moral diversity. A prejudice that Singer analyzes by analogy with sexism or racism, and which has in its structure the vice of considering extrinsic or biological qualities as ethical qualities. The history of antispeciesism as a narrative is a recent history, too recent, and is therefore a history of islands: humanity organized in pockets of containment of the violence that is contested at the root. A history of associations, animal shelters, demonstrations and regulation of personal behavior that have no value other than that of civil disobedience. Antispeciesism makes manifest the practical and revolutionary value of certain forms of thought. In this case, however, unfortunately, the criticism exercised towards the social world is complex. The humanity that emerges is uncertain because it is unpredictable: we have always built ourselves in opposition to animality - our story inevitably coincides with our distancing ourselves from animals and nature. Antispeciesism, in this sense, is the demolition of the fence whose exterior we have never seen, except through mental experimentation. At this point, it's up to you to imagine it.

The possible rightfully falls within our field of investigation: in what way could a humanity that respects the animality of others and its own live? Without this imaginative passage, anthropocentrism remains firm because it is passes from human actions, and it is the limits that we give to our possible actions to be the limits of our possible worlds. The idea we call antispeciesism has some practical consequences that should never, however, be mistaken for causes.

From this moment on we will begin to define the contemporary posthuman through images and suggestions, which only at the end will be outlined in a complete way through a path that will intentionally depart from previous models. We think, by stereotype, of the image of the Zen monk and immediately move away from the image of the posthuman as a half-robot human that emerges from a philosophical literature that has confused posthumanism and transhumanism[10]. Antispeciesism attacks anthropocentrism, and contributes to the development of posthumanism, through an ethics that is not only, as too often has been said, unbalanced on customs and consumption but also, and above all, attentive to the observation of animality as "presence to oneself". Antispeciesism is not only denial of the species boundary as a moral boundary, but is the recovery of animality in an equal and opposite way to that of Nietzsche.

Let's start from afar, from the proposition 6.4311 of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, with a clearly mystical flavor: “he who lives in the present lives eternally”. But who is it that lives in the present, mysticism aside? He who, devoid of memory, or at least of long-term memory, does not enjoy consciousness that allows him to think about himself in the past or to project himself into the future. Children would be good candidates, but they have eternal time counted: they grow up, become adult humans, remember and hope - they are mortal and therefore doomed to despair. Martin Heidegger, where Wittgenstein saw a resource, complained of a limit: only the animal lives an eternal present, without the temporality added to the being that is the basis of being-there, the animal cannot die. But the limit, if we put the two arguments together, is quickly circumvented: the animal does not die because it lives in the present and is therefore eternal. Like the Borges tiger, “in his world there are no names and no past, nor future, only a true instant”[11].

We overlook the fact that there are many animals, and some (think of primates) as we know from cognitive ethology, have the ability to represent themselves not only in space but also in time, and we rather consider animality as the property that I have called "absolute presence to oneself". The problems of anthropocentric humanism, and of humanity which this therefore expresses, derive largely from the inability to live the "here and now"; antispeciesism is grafted on the resolution of this inability, not as an ethical movement for its own sake, but as part of the metaphysical process that leads to the posthuman. Why is the Zen monk the model? For the form of life it expresses: it seeks peace in the awareness of the moment, and accepts its limit. The question is what we learn from animality. And the answer is the negated: that nature, which is common to the living with humanity, as a concept, has been eliminated by humanity.

Human beings carry out their lives within a narrative that allows simplifying a justification for our current actions and for what we plan to do. If speciesism is paradoxically a positive narrative - you can do this or that without caring about the fate of animals because they lack moral status - antispeciesism is a narrative that is absolutely negative if it is an end in itself: you cannot do this, and you cannot do that, because the animals suffer. The idea of the world that is expressed by antispeciesism, in its various forms, is simply incorrect: we don't need something that expresses a more or less articulated set of totems and taboos, we need to know a possible alternative world compared to the one that is criticized. In this sense, the image of humanity that emerges from antispeciesism is useful here as part of a larger whole, but useless if left to its solitary destiny. The antispeciesism that I will use is the weak one: it is necessary to weaken arguments that are not aimed at eliminating the pain of the animals (for example, respecting them for ecological, political, health-giving reasons, etc.). In this way, the power of the conclusion is strengthened: animality must be unleashed, like the dancing star of Nietzsche, beyond any possible forecast.

The first transformation

The antispeciesist pill has a bitter taste and an apparently devastating effect, once taken. First of all, it acts on sight: what was invisible is now evident - the social world, regulated by us, is basically a slaughterhouse: everywhere around us lies the meaningless death authorized by speciesism. If you understand that it is possible to live without harming the billions of animals that we slaughter every year, what leads us to continue? The economy, politics, tradition, of course, but that's not enough. Our image of humanity, a recent invention of social sciences according to Michel Foucault, is a hologram projected on a wall without shadows. Being a speciesist helps happiness, a bitter topic that no antispeciesist philosopher has ever wanted to analyze: the simple awareness of being unique and special, and that everything else is ontological furnishing, is wonderful. The flavor of meat, which from prehistory to contemporary times makes the human being a more noble descendant than the cannibal in fur, is much more than a panacea for the palate: it is an anesthetic of the soul. The image of the monk, therefore, returns, because if you move the axis of happiness from needs, where it has always been, you need to find another place to orient it. A simple meal, a humble life and in harmony with nature do not seem to be able to compete with the manager's American dream of enjoying his hamburger while watching an NBA game on TV. And yet, if philosophy, even the most speculative and theoretical, does not pass by an overall revolution of the image of humanity that we call "western well-being", but which is actually a massacre of every living thing and every free space in this world, philosophy itself is useless. Without exemplary actions[12], progress is simply impossible[13].

The happiness of speciesism, however, is an empty happiness that has nothing to do with Wittgenstein's argument that “he world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man”[14]. Unfortunately, our world is common and always following Wittgenstein “the life of knowledge is the life that is happy despite the misery of the world”[15]: nothing more pertinent. Speciesism is the misery of the world that refuses the life of knowledge, refuses to know what exists beyond the muffled and false world in which humanity has locked itself up, that is, beyond our apparent order until it is disorder to knocking from the outside: a nuclear power plant that explodes, as in Fukushima in Japan in 2011, a truck carrying pigs for slaughter that stalls on the highway showing us the removed, or a blanket of smog that floods Delhi in the morning and that does not allow you to see anything between city traffic.

The first transformation is an invitation to look elsewhere before it is elsewhere, with an aspect that will be that of a monster, to come to us: philosophy is the only strategy of salvation. Our body begins to appear different: our legs don't seem so different from the legs of a pig, and our existence united by a common fate with all the other life forms already appears less special than before. The path is long, because something keeps us firm and it is often not enough to take care of the animals to begin the change: speciesism, pretending to be liberation, can keep us firm and anchored in the center. Yet it falters and we realize that it cannot be truly justified to produce the life of animals only to benefit from vices, tastes, and flavors, which are the same as those of a primitive human who should have disappeared millennia ago. And perhaps, in fact, it is not a question of reasoning in terms of consumption, but of the consumed; this is the perspective that we never succeed in assuming in change. Antispeciesism pushes out, but alone is not enough: the therapy is long, and until it is completed Deleuze will be right in saying that "the satisfaction of his [man's] desire is for the benefit of the only species, he has worked with dedication to an end that was not at all his»[16]. As long as it is as a human species that we think about it, without understanding that every living being is first and foremost a monad overlooking the outside, the construction site will remain open.

1. Obviously, in the past, I thought it important to also give an ethical illustration: cf. L. caffo, The pig does not make the revolution. Manifesto for a weak antispeciesism, Sonda, Casale Monferrato (al) 2013

2.  g. deleuze, Logic of sense (1969), Feltrinelli, Milan 2005, p. 247.

3.  P. Apsein, Chinese Proverbs. The ancient oriental wisdom to meditate, Biesse - Brancato, Catania 2009, p. 15.

4.  On the subject I refer to L. Caffo, In the Corridors of Animal Minds, in "Journal of Animal Ethics", IV (2014), n. 1, pp. 103-8.

5.  J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am  (2006), edited by M.-L. Mallet, Jaca Book, Milan 2006, p. 68.

6.  For this notion, see chapter i of G. Clément, The environment alternative (2014), Quodlibet, Macerata 2015.

7.  Anam the nameless. The last interview with Tiziano Terzani, edited by M. Zanot, Longanesi, Milan 2005.

8.  C. Pavese, The job of living. Diary 1936-1950, Einaudi, Turin 2014, p. 301.

9.  On several occasions, but for a quick articulation of his assumptions: L. Caffo, Weak antispecism, in m. Andreozzi, S. Catiglione and A. Massaro (ed.), Animal emotions. Research and disciplines compared, led, Milan 2013, pp. 77-88.

10.  A happy island in this sense, where the distinction is clear, is G. Leghissa, Posthuman by choice, Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2015.

11.  J. L. Borges, The other tiger (1960), in id., Poems (1923-1976), trad. by L. Bacchi Wilcock, Rizzoli, Milan 1980, p. 121.

12.  See in this sense the analysis of M. Ferraris, Emergenza, Einaudi, Turin 2016, in which the "Pharisaism" typical of a philosophy that preaches good and scratches badly is contested, and a philosophy of the future in which political thoughts and actions correspond.

13.  On the subject I argued extensively in the lesson dedicated to the Future in L. Caffo, Everyday life. Five philosophy lessons to learn how to stay in the world, Einaudi, Turin 2016.

14.  L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922), in id., Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Quaderni 1914-1916, edited by A. G. Conte, Einaudi, Turin 2009, 6.43.

15.  Id., Notebooks 1914-1916, ibid., aphorism of 13 August 1916.

16.  G. Deleuze, Instincts and institutions (1955), Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2014, p. 62.

Leonardo Caffo is philosopher and curator. Currently, he is co-curator of the Public Program at La Triennale Milano and professor of Ontology at Politecnico, in Turin. He is professor of Philosophy of Art at NABA, in Milan.

Peter Singer + Michael Plant / When will the cure be worse than the disease?

/SPRING BREAK 2020/

Peter Singer + Michael Plant

Medical workers treat patients in the isolated intensive care unit at a hospital in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020. (Chinatopix via AP). Published by CTV News, Saturday, February 22, 2020 12:55PM EST.

© 2020 Project Syndicate

MELBOURNE & LONDON – As of today, almost four out of every ten people on Earth, more than three billion people, are under government-mandated lockdowns in an effort to stop the spread of coronavirus.

How long should the lockdowns last? The obvious answer, to paraphrase Boris Johnson, is until we’ve “beaten” COVID-19. But when exactly is that? Until no single person on Earth has it? That may never happen. Until we have a vaccine, or an effective treatment? That could  easily be a year away, perhaps much longer. Do we want to keep people locked down, our societies shuttered – restaurants closed, parks closed, offices closed – for that long? 

It pains us to say it, but Donald Trump is right: “We cannot let the cure be worse than the disease”. Lockdowns have health benefits: fewer will die of coronavirus, as well as other transmissible diseases. But they have real social and economic costs: social isolation, unemployment, and widespread bankruptcies, to name three. These ills are not yet fully apparent, but they soon will be.

Some people insist that there is, in practice, no trade-off: lockdowns are better for saving lives and the economy. This seems to be wishful thinking. Presumably, such people are supposing lockdowns really will end soon. But if we end lockdowns before we’ve vanquished COVID-19, that means we’re prepared to allow some people to die from the disease who would otherwise have lived. It’s not so simple to escape the trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

It seems safe to say that the right time to end the lockdowns is sometime between today and ten years. But that’s not very helpful. If we want a more useful answer than that, we must think carefully about how to make trade-offs.

How should we do that?

First, we must not overlook the potential costs of containing coronavirus. Research in moral psychology has revealed an “identified victim effect”. People prefer to offer aid to a specific, known victim rather than provide the same benefit to each of a larger, vaguely defined set of individuals. We think the identified victim effect is a moral mistake – we should strive to do more good, even when we do not know exactly who gains.

Something equivalent – call it an “identified cause effect” — may be limiting our collective thinking about COVID-19: we are focusing on a specific known source of suffering, even if we do not know who suffers, and neglecting other problems. Could the images of people dying on stretchers in tents in hospital parking lots be blinding us to the greater harm we may be causing across society through our efforts to avoid those awful deaths?

Second, to make trade-offs we need to convert different outcomes into a single common unit of value. A problem with the current conversations about whether we should strangle the economy to save lives is that we cannot directly compare “lives saved” against “lost GDP” – we need to put them into some common unit.

One way to make progress is to consider that a lockdown, if it goes on long enough, will bring about a smaller economy that can afford fewer doctors, nurses, and medicines. In the UK, the National Health Service estimates that for about £25,000 (US$30,000) it can pay for one more “Quality-Adjusted Life-Year.” In effect, that sum can buy a patient an extra year of healthy life.

If we then estimate how much lockdowns reduce the economy, we can estimate the years of healthy life we are likely to gain now by containing the virus and compare it to how many years we are likely to lose later from a smaller economy.

We have not yet seen any sufficiently rigorous attempts to do this. Paul Frijters, an economist, has offered a back-of-the-envelope  analysis that reaches a startling result: it would have been better, in terms of years of healthy life lost, not to have started the lockdowns. In reaching that conclusion, a major factor is that most of those who die from COVID-19 are elderly, or have underlying health conditions. Frijters makes some questionable assumptions. He attributes all the economic downturn to government actions, whereas COVID-19 would have caused significant economic disruption anyway; and his estimate of the fatality rate per infection does not take account of the additional deaths likely to occur when intensive care units are overburdened and unable to admit new patients.

In any case, thinking solely in terms of health-years is still too narrow -- health isn’t all that matters. What we really need to do is compare the impact different policies have on our overall well-being.

How can we do that? We think it’s best to measure well-being by using individuals’ reports of how happy and how satisfied they are with their lives, an approach pioneered by academics in the World Happiness Report. 

Doing this means we can, in a principled way, weigh up otherwise hard-to-compare considerations when deciding how to respond to COVID-19 – or to anything else. 

To focus on one major concern, a record 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment last week in large part due to the pandemic.  In India, the lockdown has devastated migrant workers, many of whom have no other means of support. We all agree unemployment is bad, but it’s not obvious how we should trade unemployment against years of healthy life. 

Thinking directly in terms of well-being allows us to make this comparison.  Unemployment is dire for well-being, reducing individuals’ life satisfaction by  20%. With this information, we can compare the human costs of a lockdown to the well-being gained by extending lives. A broader analysis would include other impacts, such as social isolation and anxiety, and tell us when a lockdown should be lifted. 

COVID-19 will be with us for some time. Are months of government-enforced lockdowns the right policy? We don’t know, and as moral philosophers, we can’t answer this question on our own. Empirical researchers need to take on the challenge of counting the impacts, not in terms of wealth or health, but in the ultimate currency, well-being.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics, with a background in philosophy. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He is the founder of The Life You Can Save.

Michael Plant is a moral philosopher, founder-Director of the Happier Lives Institute and a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, Oxford. His research is focussed on whether and how to make people happier.

Franco Berardi + Andreas Petrossiants / Social Distancing and the Global Reset to Follow

/SPRING BREAK 2020/

Graphic by Josh MacPhee, part of Justseed's Care Package #2, https://justseeds.org/graphic/care-package-2/.

During specific catastrophic points in the historical crisis of capitalism such as this one, opportunities for new solidarities can emerge through reorganizations of popular power—perhaps novel conceptions of insurrection, even. However, most importantly, this moment may also allow for the re-imagination of a more inclusive “us,” constituted by a typically obfuscated precarious surplus population. If we cannot pay rent, if we cannot work, then perhaps we have already gone on to something resembling a general strike, as described in an excellent essay in the journal Chuang. They see the contours of new forms of being together in reactions to this virus, in social-distancing, in the closure of offices, and write: “The quarantine, then, is like a strike hollowed of its communal features but nonetheless capable of delivering a deep shock to both psyche and economy.”[1] How then to re-imagine our actions with intent? Will people feel the need to return to work, if reconfigured social lives are no longer dependent on the work place as such? Perhaps now is the best time in many decades to answer a series of questions posed by Kathi Weeks: “How might we expose the fundamental structures and dominant values of work—including its temporalities, socialities, hierarchies, and subjectivities—as pressing political phenomena? […] How might we conceive the content and parameters of our obligations to one another outside the currency of work?”[2] Franco “Bifo” Berardi and I have been emailing about these issues and others as we are socially distanced in our homes. Here is an edited conversation from those letters across time zones. 

—Andreas Petrossiants, March 31, 2020

Andreas Petrossiants (AP): 

To my mind, much writing on the pandemic is not giving enough attention to how statist approaches to propping up social reproduction carry the imperative to protect productive value, rather than lives; furthermore, government responses have been, across the board, a reactionary defense to work’s legitimation crisis. The US government’s paltry attempt at a temporary universal basic income, for example, is essentially a stimulus package for landlords, as rent payments have been forestalled, at best. The realities of the liberal welfare state died long ago, but liberalism’s incumbent mythologies have persevered, mutated, and grown stronger. Maybe now is when these myths will crumble once and for all? What do you see as the horizon of possibility at a time like this, when certain biopowers and tactics of modern social control age and grow obsolete, and the reaction to save them grows still more violent? 

Franco “Bifo” Berardi (FB): 

I see different conflicting possibilities. Most commentators stress the totalitarian effect of the present emergency. When people are frightened for their own life they accept limitations on freedoms they would not accept otherwise. Western media (particularly in the US) have harshly criticized the Chinese reaction to the outbreak, but in the long run we are discovering that the Chinese have been much more effective in containing the virus. In an article in El País, the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that Chinese people have a totally different approach to big data collection and ensuing forms of control.[3] They seem not so worried by this techno-control, and have a different approach to its collective dimension—let’s say that their culture has always been amenable to the swarm prevailing over the individual.

The hypostatization of the concept of personal freedom in the post-Romantic Western world is put to question in the Chinese cultural context, as is the very concept of the “private sphere”—in that context it has no translation and no meaning. However, the rhetoric of Western democracy is based on a Eurocentric prejudice that the imminent danger of extinction is forcing under scrutiny. So, we should expect that the current pandemic is going to prepare us for the full integration of Western Romantic individualism and eastern Confucian collectivism under the aegis of capitalist exploitation. The full implementation of the capitalist nightmare.

Nevertheless, I know that, as Naomi Klein puts it, “if there’s one thing history teaches us it’s that moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier.” All of a sudden, the pandemic has reactivated the future as a space of possibility, because the automatisms (both technological and financial) that disabled political subjectivity in the past neoliberal decades have been broken, or at least destabilized. 

The economic and social scenario that we are going to discover when we emerge from the present pandemonium is hardly imaginable. It will not resemble past recessions, because it will be a crisis of supply and of demand simultaneously, and because the collapse is exposing the prospect of stagnation that was already visible in the last ten years, notwithstanding the efforts of reviving economic growth. Growth has slowed to the point of creating a sort of “bad utopia” in recent decades. The reason was not a provisional crisis, but the exhaustion of the physical resources of the planet, notwithstanding technological increases of productivity. Paradoxically we have been unable to see the possibility of reducing work time because we have been obsessed with the superstitions of increased national productivity—which is not a measure of how many useful things we produce, but rather the measure of the accumulation of monetary value.

Now that spell is broken. Obviously, the economic slump, if not full-blown economic catastrophe, that the pandemic will continue to provoke will demand reconstruction efforts, but we are in the position to decide what it is that we want to rebuild, and what we want to forget. We can abandon the extractive model, and adopt non-polluting technologies, for example. Most importantly, we can abandon a model in which consumption is mandatory. 

Graphic by Josh MacPhee, part of Justseed's Care Package #2, https://justseeds.org/graphic/care-package-2/.

Now, one thing is crystal clear: the main cause of the present distress is the primacy of private profit over social interests. Neoliberal destroyers of the health system are responsible for today’s European, and US nightmares. In Italy, neoliberal austerity has slashed one-fifth of intensive care units, one-third of general practitioners. Private clinics have invested in expensive therapies for the rich while the impoverished public system has abandoned the production of sanitary masks. Nine percent of Italian doctors have been infected because they have been obliged to work in impossible conditions. The neoliberal pundits are now silent, those who destroyed the public system are hiding, but they will come back after the end of the pandemic. They must be impeached, so to speak—forced to show themselves; they must be treated as the fascists were treated after the end of WWII. 

AP: 

In the US, it’s a fucking nightmare—we have 924,000 hospital beds across the country, but 2.3 million prison beds. In New York City, where I’m based, we’ve lost 20,000 hospital beds in the last 20 years because of the continual privatization of medicine. In this context, it’s perhaps not so surprising that many people across political affinities, have become admirers of forms of authoritarian statism as certain governments have enforced strict lockdown measures, which are necessary of course. The equivalence is an illusion, of course. But, then how do we advocate for a popularly-organized response to containing the virus, without propping up the power of the state at the same time? 

FB: 

The neoliberal aggression on the public sphere, cuts to public spending, rightwing talk against so called “big government,” and so on have provoked a false conception: that if neo-liberal capitalism is anti-statist, then social opposition to austerity must necessarily be pro-State. I don’t think that we need a strong state to respond to this type of crisis or others; what we need is a strong coordination of grassroots social organizations—professional, cultural, educational, medical—that can become the concrete fabric of social reproduction. The current need for the centralization of public intervention in the emergency is an administrative, technical, and organizational question that need not be answered by a state formation. 

The political function of the State is another thing, and I think that the political function of the Modern State will not be revived by the present emergency. Modern statehood, the legacy of the early modern Absolutist Monarchies, have been theorized by philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli as central protectors of the function of political decision. The concept of decision (from the Latin: de-cidere, choosing one possibility from among many) is philosophically crucial here. Decision implies the ability to know all the relevant events in the social sphere, and the ability to enforce a prospective choice. These two abilities (to know and to enforce) are no longer granted to political subjects, and we must reclaim them. The vast complexity of today’s networked reality has grown beyond the possibility of any exhaustive knowledge and of effective enforcing—it is centralized. So, we must envisage a non-centralized form of political action, the dissemination of decision-making to the multiplicity of social life. The project of a new sovereignty of the State, which is the core of the theoretical proposals by people like Ernesto Laclau, Jorge Aleman, Chantal Mouffe, Carlo Formenti, and many others, is a delusion. The nation state is dead, it has been killed by neoliberal globalization and can only be revived in the form of an identitarian, totalitarian form of violence against the multiplicity of prospects that belong to new compositions of labor. The emergence of an even stronger, re-legitimized State is a dangerous possibility in the aftermath of the pandemic: a techno-totalitarian system of control of life and of language that we are already witnessing in China.

AP: 

On the public sphere as a site of action, the pandemic emerged on the heels of anti-neoliberal uprisings in Chile, Hong Kong, Iraq, Lebanon, Spain, and elsewhere (many of which are attempting to continue and we hope will only grow). In short, the neoliberal order was already being questioned and organized against (in anti-capitalist and reactionary formations). You ask in your recent piece in Nero (published in English on the Verso Blog), whether this pandemic is the end of that story.[4] Do you believe it is? As workers stage walk outs, even though they must continue working to survive? As incarcerated prisoners get sick and revolt, and are punished by the state further just for the prospect of wanting to live? Is it time for us to write new stories? I’m thinking of Amazon warehouse workers that organized a successful walkout in NYC to protest unsafe working conditions, and were punished for it.[5] I’m thinking of nurses and other medical front liners across the United States who are publically questioning private medicine. 

FB: 

The global revolt that erupted in the last months of 2019 was a sort of convulsion of the worldwide social body. These different rebellions were not able to find a common strategy—for now, at least. So, the convulsion resulted in a collapse. But, now we are in a something like a paralysis that follows collapse. What we are feeling now is the fear of contagion, of boredom, and of the world that we’ll find when we’ll be allowed to go out again. However, fear can be a condition for catalyzing the change that we need. Boredom can be turned into creative desire for action, curiosity for something surprising, the expectation of the unexpected. 

Mike Davis argues that global capitalism “now appears to be biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public health infrastructure.” I would be more radical: global capitalism is unsustainable for human life altogether. And we must invest our imaginative energies in re-programming the social machine beginning from the present lock down. This virus is the opportunity that we were waiting for: the accident that makes possible a much-needed reset of the global machine.

AP: 

I agree with you, but we should be careful not to fall for certain pitfalls in anti-capitalist discourse, as I’m sure you will agree. It’s long been a fetish on the left (from Trotsky to Žižek) to think that specific catastrophes allow for the emergence of new political possibilities and the development of new forms of counter-power, which can be true but shouldn’t be something we depend on for imagining strategy. You’ve written very convincingly on how to sidestep this anticipation, and rather think much more specifically about crisis, and the chaos and noise that it produces. Naomi Klein, in a less sectarian way than those referenced above, wrote in The Intercept recently: “During moments of cataclysmic change, the previously unthinkable suddenly becomes reality.”[6] I want to ask why other, slower forms of crisis (climate collapse, precarity, military occupation and widespread ethnic cleansing) do not seem to have the same jarring effects, at least globally? Is it just because of the slowness of epistemic violence? Because the virus will affect wealthy parts of the world as well as the poor, that the wealthy cannot imagine themselves immune to this specific cataclysm? Because they can’t techno-engineer their way our of it, at least not yet?

FB: 

For decades, we have been obliged to work in dangerous conditions. Climate change and the degradation of the environment have not been stopped by protests and widespread awareness. Capitalism does not give a damn about protests and people’s awareness. But now it’s different: the living body of the humanity (and the interactive mind) have been somewhat paralyzed by the presentiment of the end: in short, a global trauma. Yesterday, the conditions for revolution were present: the sinking of democracy, the arrogance of the powerful, rampant poverty, violent exploitation, ecological devastation, and widely accessible information about what is going on. But, to quote the Invisible Committee: “reasons do not make revolutions, bodies do.” Now something new has happened: bodies are obliged to stop their economic frenzy. Only trauma can provoke this sudden stop and this unavoidable change of direction. And the pandemic is the trauma that we needed. But, trauma is not enough. Trauma may also lead (and it generally does) to very bad choices—for instance the establishment of a techno-totalitarian system for the greater control of society, in this case. So, what is needed now is a period of active imagination to re-program that which may follow the halt, the big reset of the global machine. 

Courtesy 5demands.global

AP: 

On this halt, perhaps we should listen to the virus itself. In Lundi Matin, a communique titled “What the Virus Said,” speaks on behalf of Covid-19. It declares: “But above all, quit saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not die from my action upon your tissues but from the lack of care of your fellow humans … The most honest among you know this very well: I have no other accomplice than your social organization, your folly of the ‘grand scale’ and its economy, your fanatical belief in systems.”[7] You’ve written quite a lot on the importance of coming to terms with our extinction, of refusing the illusions of “rebelling” against extinction. A key question now will be how to upend, or replace the call and response of temporary disaster socialism with its subsequent debt production and forced returns for a disaster communism. On a Salvage podcast I listened to recently, I remember one of the panelists pointing out the need to reconsider and create new rituals after capitalism's hollowing of ritual (like weddings, funerals, the gift). Death, and our reaction to it, are of course part of this matrix of hollowed rituals. I imagine much of the re-programming that you refer to should happen in the creating of new collective and shared rituals. 

FB: 

Rebelling against extinction is obviously a paradoxical idea. Typically, I like paradoxes of this kind because they can help us understand difficult ideas. But, no, extinction is not to be, and cannot be rejected. Rather, the fear of our impending extinction must be transformed into a condition for changing life. I think that Western culture became sick when it became unable to face death as the inevitable horizon of life. With this mindset, death turned into a condition to deny, to geo-engineer against, to techno-engineer ourselves out of—it also became the punishment for our sins. Well, the pandemic is also an opportunity for a new collective reflection about mortality, about the relation of organic life with time. 

AP: 

I’ve been thinking of lefts of the past, and reading a lot of historical fiction, particularly left-wing French roman noirs. I just finished Dominique Manotti’s Escape which reminded me of you often. It’s about the fragmentation of the Italian ultra-left in the late 70s and 80s, many of whom were exiled escaping police violence, and the secret service’s support for fascist terrorist organizations in the years that followed: how they pinned right-wing terrorism on leftists to splinter and destroy the legitimacy of groups like Lotta Continua, Brigate Rosse, and others. The novel centers on a few characters, one of which is a disaffected Roman youth, a petty criminal exiled in France. He reminds me of the protagonist in Nanni Balestrini’s We want everything somewhat, but with one important difference among many: unlike Balestrini’s character, the Roman youth never finds “political consciousness” because there is no longer any shared struggle—the years of lead have given way to a nascent neoliberal biopolitics, with its incumbent insistence on individualized, alientated existence. I’m mentioning this here not to re-open the past, but because it makes me think of connections with the present. The historical left, the ultra-left, has continued to splinter and fragment, notwithstanding certain moments of temporary reassembly (anti-globalization movements, Occupy, and so on). Do you think an internationalist left, or something like it, something new, has an opportunity here to regroup? 

FB: 

I don’t think in terms of “the left.” The left is a concept linked to past politics, and does not apply today. I prefer to think in terms of human evolution, and of the possibility of a social revolution as the only way to reactivate evolution as a progressive movement, rather than as one descending into darkness due to the mass fear of extinction, and reactionary responses to dealing with it—most of which just continue racialized violence, extraction, capitalist growth. The political games of the past, based on the right-left opposition are over. Democracy is over. Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Salvini, these kind of clown leaders, are not a return of old fascisms—they are the symptoms of a psychopathic reaction to the humiliation, the impotence that persuaded most of the population to vote for them as a form of revenge. But, the pandemic is exposing the universal ineptitude of such rightwing politicians. Only Trump will survive probably, because he is the expression of a nation which is constitutionally psychotic, a nation that was born from genocide, massive deportation, slavery—in short, a nation of criminals. I think that the geopolitical game of the century might be the final battle between humans and transhumanists. 

AP: 

In your diary, you write: “A semiotic virus in the psychosphere has blocked the abstract functioning of the system, by removing bodies.” What is left now that these bodies are shuttered away from what’s left of public space? What do we do with our bodies at home? 

FB: 

An Italian psychiatrist has written that the mandatory self-reclusion may be likened to psychiatric mandatory internment. I would say that all stuck at home should try to transform this period into a voluntary period of psychoanalytic therapy. I think that this is already happening, at least for some part of the secluded population. Many more people are questioning the social rule that has destroyed the public system, and are imagining a totally different organization of social activity. Some of my friends say that in these days they feel sort of relieved. They enjoy a long vacation for the first time in ten years. This is clearly the end, even if temporary, of capitalist acceleration, and people can finally spend their time caring about their selves and imagining their own future. 

But, there is another side to the present condition that is enormously interesting to me: what has this done to our view of the shift toward the condition of connectivity through communications systems. Throughout the last decades, we have undergone a mutation from a conjunctive form of bodily communication (physical contact in public space) to the connective form of purely operational communication facilitated by the internet. As you know, the pandemic has created a social environment in which all conjunction is forbidden: social distancing is the new law. What will be the effect of this obligation? One may think that the conjunctive mode will be practically abolished, forgotten, and social activities (teaching, learning, working, and so on) will shift to the digital, connective modes. But, this is not certain. On the contrary, I think that in the end, people (or some part of them) will identify online connectivity with sickness. Maybe people will associate sickness with the illusions of digital connectivity, and instead crave experiences that are haptic, shared, void of digital mediation. We must consciously act on this: the obligation, the alternative, the probability, and the possibility. All is there for us. 

1.  “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China,” Chuang, http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

2.   Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 35–36. 

3.   Byunng-Chul Han, “La emergencia viral y el mundo de mañana. Byung-Chul Han, el filósofo surcoreano que piensa desde Berlín,” El Pais, March 22, 2020, https://elpais.com/ideas/2020-03-21/la-emergencia-viral-y-el-mundo-de-manana-byung-chul-han-el-filosofo-surcoreano-que-piensa-desde-berlin.html. 

4.   Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Diary of the psycho-deflation,” Verso Blog, March 18, 2020, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4600-bifo-diary-of-the-psycho-deflation.

5.   Tamar Lapin, “Amazon fires workers who organized over coronavirus response,” New York Post, March 30, 2020,  https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/amazon-fires-worker-who-organized-strike-over-coronavirus-response/. 

6.   Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Capitalism—And How to Beat It,” The Intercept, March 16, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-capitalism/?fbclid=IwAR3JLYkpJ-Mte6dhuLY7Rtp5sBkXgLFthMRyRBoYdmPc1olEy_lGbs6ZYHQ. 

7.   “What the Virus Said,” lundimatin, March 27, 2020, https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said?fbclid=IwAR0oRd3WrjyiKouOixh-kzsy-Rk1yhHJzTUviOAgzIFU0-l9itkvRsVI0Q8

Franco “Bifo” Berardi is the founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist.

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and editor living in NY. His work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, View, Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, nuart journal, Exhibition Reviews Annual, and elsewhere. He is the editorial assistant of e-flux journal.