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| Utrecht Cathedral 2019 |
I am delighted to share with you that I have posted a draft of my essay, The Metamorphosis of COVID-19: State, Society, Law, Analytics .The final version will be included in the special issue (Vol. 15; issue 2) of Emancipating the Mind: Bulletin of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics which should be out shortly.
The essay considers the transformations in societal organization exposed during the first shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and what it suggests for the "new normal" going forward (there is no going back, no matter how strong the nostalgia for that past). The abstract sums it up this way:
Abstract: Almost from the start of global awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a general sense that it would be a transforming event. For some those transformations would be temporary, for others far more profound and long lasting. This essay examines the idea of transformation. And the emergence of its trajectories at the start of the pandemic. Focusing on the first half of 2020, the essay considers this idea of metamorphosis in four critical aspects of global and collective societal organization. That idea of metamorphosis is not based on the notion that COVID-19 has transformed the societal order into something else—rather the thesis of this essay is that COVID-19 has stripped away pre-pandemic pretensions and has made it possible for societal order to transform into itself—its more accurate representation of itself. Section 2 first considers COVID-19 as the virus of societal acceleration. That is of the way that COVID-19 accelerates trajectories already present and latent in collective bodies (and as well in the bodies of individuals within their own family collectives). Section 3 then considers the transformation of origin stories. The transformation of the story of the origins of COVID-19 align with the transformations of the relations between China and the US and between China and the international community. And these are not without consequence. Origins point to culpability, and the culpable might be held accountable. Section 4 then examines the moral transformation accelerated by pandemic. The focus here is on sacrifice—the sacrifice of the aged by the healthy, the sacrifice of the poor by those with greater means, and the sacrifice of women’s autonomy. Section 5 then considers the transformation of law. The science of law has been overcome by that of the science of data, of psychology, and of prediction. And with that transformation, an even greater transformation of the autonomy of the individual before the state. Where individuals were once assumed to be autonomous actors capable of adhering and culpable for lapses in conforming behavior to commands, now they are understood as the aggregation of the sum of their actions, actions which can be predicted and nudged through rewards and punishment. Entities, in turn, build policy by incarnating the aggregated mass of human behaviors within a community. Law is transformed into simulation even as the individual is transfigured as the incarnation of the sum of the data she generates. The essay ends with a brief consideration in Section 6, Metamorphoses, of the consequences of these transformations. It suggests the contours of the character of societal organizations that COVID-19 has revealed.
The Metamorphosis of COVID-19: State, Society, Law, Analytics
Larry Catá Backer[1]
1. Metamorphosis.
“Of bodies changed and other forms I tell; you Gods, who have yourselves wrought every change, inspire my enterprise and lead my lay in one continuous song from nature’s first remote beginnings to our modern times.”[2] So Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, an epic of not just transformation, but of acceleration,, of revelation, and of the unmasking of things to reveal their essence, especially in the face of stress.[3] In the process of transformation the world and its actors, it processes, and its desires (expressed in physical as well as abstract forms) is revealed. Metamorphoses in Ovid, then, is as much about revelation as it is about transformation; it is the means by which a thing, a relationship, an object, assumes a truer form under conditions of stress o challenge.
This essay, lightly footnoted,[4] takes that as its organizing theme. In our own time, the COVID-19 pandemic produce metamorphoses. Society—political, moral, economic, cultural—have worked diligently to deny metamorphoses.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world and left countless people longing for a pre-pandemic way of life. That desire is likely only further straining our mental health. “Our brains really are very eager to get back to normal, to get back to January 2020," Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of a book about adapting to "the new abnormal" of COVID-19, told USA TODAY. But that's simply not possible, Tsipursky said.[5]
Essay examines the metamorphoses of COVID-19 on global social orders. It does so from the perspective of the initial encounter with the enormity of the pandemic. The perspective is thus both predictive and historical, and helpful to the reader perhaps precisely because of its way it is situated in both. Only time will reveal the extent of the transformations—like Ovid, the object is to reveal those transformations and to watch as its objects then stagger towards their futures—sometimes both changed and ignorant of the outward manifestation of the changes triggered by COVID-19.
That this is possible suggests the essence of metamorphosis—it merely reveals, it accelerates, it activates—that which was already latent in the object of change, whether that object was an individual or some form of human collective. The greatest tragedy of CVID-19 also serves as its great triumph—its power to rip away the decay that marked the bodies of those things transformed to reveal their essence. It is to an examination of the forms and consequences of this this stripping away, to the alignment of internal and external, that this essay focuses.
The essay is divided into four sections. Section 2 first considers COVID-19 as the virus of societal acceleration. That is of the way that COVID-19 accelerates trajectories already present and latent in collective bodies (and as well in the bodies of individuals within their own family collectives). Section 3 then considers the transformation of origin stories. The transformation of the story of the origins of COVID-19 align with the transformations of the relations between China and the US and between China and the international community. And these are not without consequence.[6] Origins point to culpability, and the culpable might be held accountable.[7] Section 4 then examines the moral transformation accelerated by pandemic. The focus here is on sacrifice—the sacrifice of the aged by the healthy, the sacrifice of the poor by those with greater means, and the sacrifice of women’s autonomy. Section 5 then considers the transformation of law. The science of law has been overcome by that of the science of data, of psychology, and of prediction. And with that transformation, an even greater transformation of the autonomy of the individual before the state. Where individuals were once assumed to be autonomous actors capable of adhering and culpable for lapses in conforming behavior to commands, now they are understood as the aggregation of the sum of their actions, actions which can be predicted and nudged through rewards and punishment.[8] Entities, in turn, build policy by incarnating the aggregated mass of human behaviors within a community. Law is transformed into simulation even as the individual is transfigured as the incarnation of the sum of the data she generates.
The essay ends with a brief consideration in Section 6, Metamorphoses, of the consequences of these transformations. “What was before is left behind; what never was is now; and every passing moment is renewed.”[9] It is not law or politics (much less economics) that drives COVID-19; it is COVID-19 that drives masters of these fields and the shaping of these tools. In that driving COVID-19 transforms both form and object to suit an emerging era. That idea of metamorphosis is not based on the notion that COVID-19 has transformed the societal order into something else—rather the thesis of this essay is that COVID-19 has stripped away pre-pandemic pretensions and has made it possible for societal order to transform into itself—its more accurate representation of itself.
* * *
6. Metamorphoses[1]
This essay begins with Ovid and ends with Lucretius: nam quodcumque suis mutate finibis exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante [For if anything is so transformed as to overstep its own limits, this means the immediate death of what it was before].[2] Metamorphoses served as the theme of this essay, in its senses of change of form or shape. Metamorphoses is the signature marker of COVID-19 on the bodies of individuals and on their collective organizations. Yet to that theme of transformation is a moral—and that is supplied by Lucretius: that which has changed shape cannot ever assume its prior form. To is no longer capable of assuming its prior form. Metamorphoses augur the passing of one thing as it becomes another. That it retains the husk of what came before of little moment. It provides a (vain) hope for reactionary tendencies of those in human collectives who walk looking backwards , and it constrains those who by looking forward only (falsely) believe that transformation detaches the emerging essence from the husk of its past.
This essay has suggested the metamorphoses of COVID-19 on human institutions and the cultural premises on which they are founded. To that end, it has, like Ovid, started with origin stories. COVID-19 has played a central role in the transformation of societal self-conception, and on the authority of those forces that may speak to origins and their ordering power. But the great metamorphoses touch every aspect of the great structures of human (collective) organization as well as of individual (self) conception within the collectives in which they inhabit. Origins are a mirror of the societal self. It is at once an interior gaze (how a collective sees itself through its own “eyes”) and a projected gaze (how the collective expects others to “see” it). The seeing is not an objectification so much as it is the incarnation of the spirit of the place—its anima and animus exposed and raw in the face of deep challenge.[3] But it is also how one projects self-conception to others. In that respect as well COVID-19’s battle of the origin stories reveals as much about how states as moral orders see themselves and how they have come to expect others to see them.
And what is the self that society is becoming? That, in part emerges from what COVID-19 responses reveal in the areas considered. COVID-19 has revealed the authoritarian instincts not just of Marxist-Leninism, but that of liberal democracies when moments of stress reveals the underlying foundations. But that revelation of authoritarianism actually serves more pointedly to reveal not merely the embrace of authority (for that is what, in its essence what one speaks of when invoking the ideology authoritarianism), but of the arrangement of unquestionable authority vertically arranged. In Marxist Leninist states those structu8res revolve around interlocking leadership cores up a chain of command. In liberal democratic states it revolves around the unquestionable authority of knowledge keepers and technocracies.
COVID-19 has transformed morals. The moral panic[4] that is COVID-19 has exposed a view of the value of the most vulnerable. It has transformed the notions of social self-preservation (collectively) and then mimicked at the level of the individual, that is founded on notions of strength, power, and wealth. The morality of herd culling has been a strong undercurrent of COVID-19—as policy and individual choice. As well the morality of hierarchy, and the end of moral leveling—has also been exposed. That immorality touches not just on decisions of treatment and protection hierarchies, but as well on the way that government distributes the burden of responding to COVID-19. Taken together, these transformations suggest the emerging immorality of horizontal equity and of the equality of the individual.
There is a connection between the movement of morals and that of governance. COVID-19 has changed the shape and form of governance, of law and jurisprudence, and of the structures of governance. The husk of old law remains of course. Government appears unchanged. It still speaks through the arcane idioms of legislation, regulation, and jurisprudence, enforced through its structures of coercive authority. And yet, it operates now through the digestion of data. Data feeds systems of rewards and punishment grounded in values based analytics. Data also feeds models—the models used to construct scientific approaches to policy. These are, in turn, reification of ideal states concocted by those who deploy armies of coders and modelers to their tasks. It is in this way that the virus armies of COVID-19 have infected the body politics, and its collective expressions in other collective organizations.
And before these changes the populace stands mute. There is no other recourse in a context in which simulation substitutes for engagement, and the greatest value of the individual is as a disaggregated producer of data, and an object of transformation to fit closer to a simulated ideal state. And that individual has become passive and poor—dependent.[5] More tellingly, Societal collectives have more clearly revealed the relationship between the individual and the collective—irrespective of the ideological political order in which they may be situated. It is to leadership cores that the authority to take risks is increasingly vested. That authority may be exercised personally or through data driven analytics. The risks of that exercise, though, is borne by the masses. The nature of engagement has been transformed as well—from expressive politics, to data generation—from the active to the passive principle of political connection to the apparatus of the state, now more clearly revealed, in turn, as the product of an ecology of simulation.
The populace may find comfort in the reassurances, made by those with the power to do so, that people and their collective organizations will soon return to their prior conditions. Yet it may prove a formidable task to reanimate that corpse: “continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante.”[6] Perhaps one might take from this a final moral—the COVVID-19 virus has, in fact, reduced human society to a mere reflection of its nature, it purpose, and its methods. To understand society post-COVID-19 one may well have to study more closely the structures and organization of the communities of COVID-19 virus.[7] The autopoiesis[8] of the virus and of the human communities within which it now forms a relationship, may well reveal alignments that are worthy of further study.[9]
[1]Member, Coalition for Peace & Ethics; W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar, Professor of Law and International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University (B.A. Brandeis University; M.P.P. Harvard University Kennedy School of Government; J.D. Columbia University). He teaches classes in constitutional, corporate, and transnational law and policy. Professor Backer is a member of the American Law Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He served as chair of the Penn State University Faculty Senate for 2012-2013.
[2] Ovid, Metamorphoses (A.D. Melville (trans.) Oxford, 1986(c. 14 A.D.)), p. 1. In the original: “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.”
[3] The etymology of the word in the English speaking world reveals as well not just its origins in the changing of shape or form, but also the association of this change of shape of form (from the Greek “meta” (change) plus “morphe”(shape or form) but also of that transfiguration by witchcraft or magic, that is with the aid of a divine (immanent or transcendent) power.
[4] “The essay . . . tales the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure, and introduces concepts directly. . . . rhy gain their precision only through their relation to one another,” Theodor W. Adorno (Bob Hullot-Kentor, and Frederic Will, (trans), "The Essay as Form" New German Critique 32:151-171, 160 (1984; 1954) (it says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete—not where nothing is left to say” Ibid., p. 152; The essay silently abandons the illusion that thought can break out of thesis into physis, out of culture into nature.” Ibid., p. 159).
[5] Joel Shannon, “When will things go back to normal? Experts say that's the wrong question amid COVID-19,” USA Today (10 October 2020); available [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/10/10/coronavirus-when-return-to-normal-life/5882898002/].
[6] See, e.g., James D. Schultz and Sean Carter, “China needs to be held accountable for Covid-19's destruction,” CNN Opinion (20 June 2020); available [https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/20/opinions/china-needs-to-be-held-accountable-for-covid-19s-destruction/index.html] (“That the Chinese government has significant culpability for the global spread of Covid-19 and needs to be held accountable for its misconduct should not be a partisan issue. We already know that the Associated Press has reported the Chinese government concealed critical facts about the emergence of the virus; that local officials silenced voices of warning; and that as a result, actions of Chinese officials most likely deprived the world early on of critical information about the virus' transmissibility and lethality.”).
[7] Riley Walters and Dean Chang, “How to Hold China Accountable for COVID19,” Heritage Foundation (21 April 2020); available [https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/how-hold-china-accountable-covid-19].
[8] B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) (“As a science of behavior adopts the strategy of physics and biology, the autonomous agent to which behavior has traditionally been attributed is replaced by the environment—the environment in which the species evolved and in which the species the behavior of the individual is shaped and maintained.” Ibid., p. 185). .
[9] Ovid, Metamorphoses (A.D. Melville (trans.) Oxford, 1986(c. 14 A.D.)), p. 357 (The Doctrines of Pythagoras”).
* * *
[1] With irony: “Now stands my task accomplished, such a work as not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword nor the devouring ages can destroy.” Ovid, Metamorphoses (A.D. Melville (trans.) Oxford, 1986(c. 14 A.D.)), p 379.
[2] Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] i. 670-1 (also i.792-3, ii. 753-4, and iii. 519-20) (also translated as “For change in anything from out its bounds means instant death of that which was before”; from On the Nature of Things (William Ellery Leonard (trans.) Project Gutenberg ebook #785 (2008); available [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/785/785-h/785-h.htm]) .
[3] As well as its archetypes. See generally, Carl Jung, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” (RFC Hull (trans) (1936) reproduced at Bahaistudies.net; available [http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/The-Concept-of-the-Collective-Unconscious.pdf]. . Cf., Carol L.Berzonskya, and Susanne C.Moser, “Becoming homo sapiens sapiens: Mapping the psycho-cultural transformation in the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 20:15-23 (2017).
[4] Cf. Sander L. Gilman, “Moral Panic and Pandemics,” The Lancet 375(9729):1866-1867 (29 May 2010); available [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673610608628/fulltext?rss=yes&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter] (“A pandemic or an epidemic is actually not only how widespread a disease actually is, as Chan implied, but rather how it is perceived.. . . Real infectious diseases do have a powerful psychological effect. SARS quickly became a “moral panic”, which spread worldwide, being accompanied by a true sense of stigma.”).
[5] See, e.g., “UN: Pandemic Pushed 32M People into Extreme Poverty,” NewsMax (3 Dec. 2020); available [https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/pandemic-united-nations-extreme-poverty/2020/12/03/id/999799/]; Rusty Woo Yuniar, “Pandemic wipes out years of progress on Asian poverty, from Indonesia to the Philippines and Thailand,” South China Morning Post (13 Dec. 2020); available [https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3113654/pandemic-wipes-out-years-progress-asian-poverty-indonesia].
[6] Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things], supra., i. 670-1.
[7] Here Niklas Luhmann might prove helpful. See Niklas Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory (Peter Gilgan (trans) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
[8] Here one necessarily moves beyond the traditional notions of self-reflexivity within the husks of societal systems unmarked by the system transforming effects of COVID-19. Autopoiesis retains a connection with the old forms, Cf., Gunther Teubner, Law as an Autopoietic System (Oxford, 1993) ,” but its internal structures have produced a creature that is quite changed.
[9] See, e.g., Michael Rempel, “Power/Knowledge: A Foucaldian Reconstruction of Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 16(4):58-90 (1996).
* * *
[1] With irony: “Now stands my task accomplished, such a work as not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword nor the devouring ages can destroy.” Ovid, Metamorphoses (A.D. Melville (trans.) Oxford, 1986(c. 14 A.D.)), p 379.
[2] Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] i. 670-1 (also i.792-3, ii. 753-4, and iii. 519-20) (also translated as “For change in anything from out its bounds means instant death of that which was before”; from On the Nature of Things (William Ellery Leonard (trans.) Project Gutenberg ebook #785 (2008); available [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/785/785-h/785-h.htm]) .
[3] As well as its archetypes. See generally, Carl Jung, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” (RFC Hull (trans) (1936) reproduced at Bahaistudies.net; available [http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/The-Concept-of-the-Collective-Unconscious.pdf]. . Cf., Carol L.Berzonskya, and Susanne C.Moser, “Becoming homo sapiens sapiens: Mapping the psycho-cultural transformation in the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 20:15-23 (2017).
[4] Cf. Sander L. Gilman, “Moral Panic and Pandemics,” The Lancet 375(9729):1866-1867 (29 May 2010); available [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673610608628/fulltext?rss=yes&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter] (“A pandemic or an epidemic is actually not only how widespread a disease actually is, as Chan implied, but rather how it is perceived.. . . Real infectious diseases do have a powerful psychological effect. SARS quickly became a “moral panic”, which spread worldwide, being accompanied by a true sense of stigma.”).
[5] See, e.g., “UN: Pandemic Pushed 32M People into Extreme Poverty,” NewsMax (3 Dec. 2020); available [https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/pandemic-united-nations-extreme-poverty/2020/12/03/id/999799/]; Rusty Woo Yuniar, “Pandemic wipes out years of progress on Asian poverty, from Indonesia to the Philippines and Thailand,” South China Morning Post (13 Dec. 2020); available [https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3113654/pandemic-wipes-out-years-progress-asian-poverty-indonesia].
[6] Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things], supra., i. 670-1.
[7] Here Niklas Luhmann might prove helpful. See Niklas Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory (Peter Gilgan (trans) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
[8] Here one necessarily moves beyond the traditional notions of self-reflexivity within the husks of societal systems unmarked by the system transforming effects of COVID-19. Autopoiesis retains a connection with the old forms, Cf., Gunther Teubner, Law as an Autopoietic System (Oxford, 1993) ,” but its internal structures have produced a creature that is quite changed.
[9] See, e.g., Michael Rempel, “Power/Knowledge: A Foucaldian Reconstruction of Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 16(4):58-90 (1996).
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