Neoliberal Virus and Systems View of Life

Tabish Khair insightfully writes, "The Coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease is the first neoliberal virus in the world."^[1] To say so is not to reduce its dangers( e.g., vulnerable people who cannot isolate without starving), but to criticize how most governments across the world have confronted it. For the past two decades, whenever corporations or significant banks have stumbled, national governments have pumped public money into them, while cutting public services (including health and research) to raise the money. This has happened anywhere, and still happening again and again! It has severe implications at least in two levels;

i)              Most of these buffer funds are not being strictly earmarked to preserve jobs, and the lowest wage earners are particularly ignored.

ii)            Almost no country has put incomparable amounts into health, social, and educational aspects of combating the pandemic.

Moreover, some western countries openly conceded with the neoliberal logic: financial value is the only value that matters! The lack of sufficient action to control the spread of disease evidenced another neo-liberal logic, as critics already pointed out;  "The virus mostly kills the old, the ill, and the undernourished poor, and we do not care whether such economically underproductive people live or die." More than this brutal oversight of the vulnerable people, the situation precipitated strong feelings of xenophobia, nationalism, and subterranean racism.

             The point is that we need to consider the whole ecology of Covid-19 seriously! Beyond the medical means of combating our current common predicament, we need to have a radical perspectival change in our approach to life. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi propose a new understanding of life, i.e., "Systems view of life" to combat the significant problems of our time, including our current health crisis. This new conception of life involves a new kind of thinking-thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context.[2] In Capra’s own prophetical words;

“ There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a  change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this realization has not yet dawned on most political leaders, who are unable to  “connect the dots.” They fail to see how the major problems of our time are interrelated.Moreover, they refuse to recognize how their so-called solutions affect future generations. From the systemic point of view, the only viable solutions are those that sustainable. A sustainable society must be designed  in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.”[3]

The new paradigm may be called a holistic worldview, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a disassociated collection of parts. From a Deep ecological perspective, it is an appraisal of fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in the cyclical processes of nature. Many scientific and religious resources converge at this juncture.  John Thatamanil beautifully connects this Systems view of interdependence sensibility to the Buddhist doctrine of Pratitya Samudpada ( Dependent Origination). Thatamanil pens; “You cannot build “big beautiful walls” against reality; no matter how we might try to sever connections between each other, inseparability will reassert itself. We are like spiders bound up with the webs they spin.”[4] Yes, the current social distancing and quarantining is a temporary mitigation strategy!

Furthermore, what is health from a systems point of view? In the biomedical model, health is defined as the absence of disease, and disease as the malfunctioning of biological mechanisms. An alternative conception of health, based on the systems view of life, begins with the realization that it is impossible to give a precise definition of health. The reason is that health is mostly a subjective experience whose quality cannot always be quantified. Health is a state of well-being that arises when the organism functions in a certain way. Systems thinking is process thinking, and hence the systems view perceives health as an ongoing process. Rather than defining health as a static state of perfect well-being, the systemic conception of health implies continual activity and change, reflecting the organism’s creative response to environmental challenges.

Health is a multidimensional process. The systems view of life recognizes that living systems in nature include individual organisms, parts of organisms, and communities of organisms, and they all share a set of common properties and principles of organization. Accordingly, the systems view of health can be applied to different levels, with corresponding levels of health being mutually interconnected. In sum, the systems view of life leads us to see health as a process and as a multidimensional and multileveled phenomenon, which demands an integrative system of health care. An integrative system of health care is based on the recognition that the health of an entity is determined, above all, by the health of the environment- which is intentionally overlooked by any health care system grounded on neo-liberal values.

A careful study on the social-ecology of the current neoliberal virus-attack reminds us that we desperately need a different economic system. There is no way to avoid the conclusion that the present global economy itself has become a fundamental threat to our health. Moreover, it is also increasingly evident that social and ecological health- the health of this beautiful blue planet-are inextricably intertwined. Therefore, the current “quaran-time” should be followed by another radical "quality-time” replete with planetary love, organic practices of justice, liberative economic practices of care, redeeming touch, and costly in[ter]carnations.

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^[1] Khair, Tabir, The Age of Neoliberal Virus (The Hindu, Tuesday, March 24),10.

^[2] Capra, Fritjof, and Luisi, The Systems View of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), xii.

^[3]  Capra, xi.

^[4] Thatamanil, John. The Butterfly Effect and the Coronavirus: The Truth of Interrelatedness – Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, https://www.counterpointknowledge.org/the-butterfly-effect-and-the-corona-virus-the-truth-of-interrelatedness/?