Coronavirus and the New Paradigm

The reality that the modern-day man holds in his mind is that the world is a smaller place. Through the advances caused by the Renaissance and its predecessors, we now have a greater interconnectedness to the rest of the world. One can get to the opposite end of the world on a plane trip, arriving in just a single day. There is this fantasy that we can go anywhere in the world in an instant, using Google Earth to arrive in moments. Trade and movement are the law of the land, and everything is connected.

This Renaissance idea that “a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement” (Foucault 23) spread until everything was in motion. In comparison to the enclosed medieval village, a Renaissance city traded with the rest of the world and connected with it. We had assumed that these connections would work for our advantage, but it is now clear that some disadvantages exist.

The movement of goods and services is not the only thing that moves in this global economy. The sea lanes might boost the trade, “But the right to the sea very quickly became the right to crime, to a violence that was also freed from every constraint” (Virilio 65). The movement of goods made some forms of violence easier and allowed for large scale wars and confrontations. Just as trade became easier, so did crimes like pirating, and war. This interconnectedness also extends events around the globe, making small minor things that would usually have stayed in a small corner of the globe spread. Diseases, like the coronavirus use “the art of movement of unseen bodies; it is the permanent presence … of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when” (Virilio 62). Although Virilio was talking about the movement of fleets, it works even better for disease. The transfer of goods and constant contact with dozens of different people on a daily basis allows for a disease that most likely would have been endemic to China only spread across the globe, using the same routes set up for trade. This is just like the Black Plague, spreading along trade routes to be a global pandemic.

The coronavirus has almost set us back to the medieval era. It forces us to stay in one place, a walled off enclosure where we can feel like we are safe like a medieval city. The movement of goods has slowed, the economy is reeling, and it feels like all progress is halting. The seemingly small distance between home and work or school is now impossibly large as it becomes impossible to travel anywhere with certainty. The biggest difference between this and previous plagues is of course how the world is reacting. Previous outbreaks never resulted in entire nations closing down. There is a fear, not just of the plague, but of losing the ideas held sacred in the last century. Is our system that we have worked so hard on fragile enough to be destroyed in a matter of weeks by an invisible lifeform? Man was supposed to be perfectible in the Renaissance mindset, able to, with enough science, wrest control of a system. Now the whole world seems to be in chaos, degenerating to earlier times, and it truly seems like the apocalypse for some. This virus, although not strong enough to kill all humans, is contagious enough to be a wake-up call. It is now clear that we do not have full control of everything, that in the end, we are still mortal, and our fate is in the hands of some larger being or simply luck. A climate apocalypse does not seem so far out of reach when a flu can do this much damage to our current lifestyle. The apocalypse, chaos, and the morality of man are all medieval concepts from which lessons can be learned.

Other things to question include pollution. Places like Italy and China are experiencing lower pollution levels with the viruses intervention. This could be the best time to shift to green energy as the factories that cause this pollution are shut down. It will be interesting to see how much of an impact the pollution decrease has and whether the populace will notice and care to continue these ideas after the pandemic ends.

The decrease in pollution in Italy due to the quarantine

This disease is helping aid the current paradigm shift away from the Renaissance mindset. When the entire current structure is seen to fail on a large-scale as it is currently doing, people tend to question why things are set up as they are. Post-modernism as a whole has tended to simply question Renaissance ideas. After this virus, there might be a shift in forming more concrete ideas behind the movement. Right now, post-modernism displays a distrust of the past ideologies and a criticism of prior art and concepts. Ever since Watergate there has been a large distrust of the government in America. The coronavirus is sure to led to distrust of this and other established institutions and a look towards new ideas that focus on avoiding or on lessons learned from this pandemic. No matter the result, it is hard to image life returning to exactly as it was without attempting any change after seeing everything crumble as quickly as it has.

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Semiotext(e), 2006.