Honestly, I am not trying to add to all of our fears and sadness. I do think, however, that we need to face some substantive issues, if we want to learn from this crisis before the next one, climate catastrophe, hits on an incomparably larger scale than Covid 19.

Therefore I decided to introduce a paradigm today that has been in my thoughts. Fascists in Germany revived a concept in the 1930s of “Thinning The Herd” which goes back to the 18th century belief that when the population exceeds resources government should use war, famine or widespread disease to thin the herd. Now why am I thinking of that?

To counterbalance the heaviness of the topic, photographs today are of chalk arrows that I found on Sunday’s walk in the neighborhood park. In my imagination they point to the goals we are all trying to reach. Should be trying. MUST try!

Achille Mbembe is a distinguished Cameroonian historian and political philosopher, one of the most brilliant thinkers on the African continent as well as in the US – he holds dual appointments at Duke University and in South Africa. Among the honors he received for his work on social grievances, postcolonial politics and racist thought structures was the 2015 Geschwister Scholl prize (members of the resistance group the White Rose executed by Hitler) and the 2018 Ernst Bloch prize (a German philosopher known for his seminal work The Principle of Hope,) for his philosophy outlining the need for a more humane world.

Mbembe has developed the concept of Necropolitics, the idea of the subjugation of life to the power of death in our contemporary world. In simple words: There are powers that get to decide who lives and who dies, using proximity of death as population control. Before we apply this to our current situation let’s acknowledge that not everything is about the virus. Instead, there are ubiquitous ways in which large populations have been politically and economically managed: people exposed to wars, genocide, refugee crises, prisons, in Syria or the Gaza strip, as well as those whose poverty and precarious living circumstances have been increased through political removal of safety nets, all are governed through direct or indirect proximity to death.

The philosopher talks about new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of “living-dead,” calling them death-worlds. They are governed by certain forms of economics, which withholds public goods and rights, making existence precarious. They are structured through confinement of precarious populations in certain spaces, most often in camp-form. Refugee-camps, prisons, ghettos, banlieues, suburbs, favelas, all serve as examples. Often these are policed or militarized spaces in which human beings are controlled and can be killed, “a permanent condition of living in pain.” Underlying these management structures is the key characteristic of those in power accepting (e.g. the refugee camps on the Greek Islands) if not actively pursuing (e.g. war in Syria) the possibility of death on a large scale.

We can find these kinds of politics not just in authoritarian, but also in democratic states, where the state confines, imprisons and persecutes certain populations. Not that violence is a state monopoly: when private groups in a society separate into those who arm themselves, and those who are not armed (militias vs citizens,) the idea of killings as something acceptable is normalized. The production of weapons, both for private use or in the context of expanding wars, is a source of economic revenue in these political systems. Exploiting natural resources for economic gain also tolerates that populations are endangered, displaced or eliminated, or future generations sacrificed (Amazon rain forest destruction, for example.)

What moral justifications can possibly be given for the way human populations are treated by the powerful? Mbembe offers a catalogue of their excuses, such as the eradication of corruption, different types of “therapeutic liturgy”, “the desire for sacrifice”, “messianic eschatologies”, and, importantly, “modern discourses of utilitarianism, materialism, and consumerism.” The underlying causal mechanism for necropolitics to be performed and expanded in a given society, allowing for exploitation and natural elimination of poor or powerless populations? Racism, both in its institutional and private forms. It’s beyond my scope here to go into detail – here is his book. (And here is the article that I relied on heavily for the summary of the concept.) Eye-openers.

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Back to Covid 19. Doctors and first responders who have to make utilitarian decisions about who gets to live and who will die are not to be faulted in this crisis. Younger lives are weighed against older one, existing conditions against healthy bodies, parenthood against singles, how else can you justify distribution of scarce resources. There are, however, whole governments who have also made utilitarian decisions – this time to benefit individuals (keep the numbers low so my re-election is not endangered) or political ideologies (the free market rules, I am not invoking the Defense Production Act for manufacture of rescue items, or the closing of beaches) or, as I write this, to choose a structural system – our economy and its value – over people’s lives (scrap “expendable” scientific offices, fire “expendable” administrative personell, remove social distancing rules to restart production.)

When someone literally says that the cure cannot be worse than the disease in this situation, they imply that lives need to be sacrificed for profit. And whose lives will this be? Who are the disposable people that no-one is directly mentioning? For every single middle-class or wealthy person there are masses of those who are already going to work sick, because they cannot afford to lose their wages. For every safely ensconced work-from-home person there will be those stuffed into public transportation and factories. There are those who live in cramped quarters because of poverty, or imprisonment, who will drop like flies. There are those who have no access to medical help until it is too late, for fear of cost, or absence of clinics in their counties. There are the homeless who have a high percentage of underlying conditions.

We should say it out loud: those who are deemed disposable are, for the most part, poor, uneducated, deprived of resources, and, in the US, all that is correlated with being black or brown. You think I’m making this up? Look at yesterday’s comments from the Republican right after our dear leader started to get impatient with the duration of the shut-down: here is but one example

Or the Texas Governor suggesting that lots of grandparents would be willing to die to rescue the economy for their grandchildren (never mind that 3.6 million children are raised by their grandparents in this country…) – an expendable group is identified.

Our task, then, first and foremost, seems to me to identify who is in power, who employs necropolitics, and who benefits from them. That is where the first change has to be forced, by putting someone else at the helm. Secondly we have to pinpoint the underlying economic systems that have enthroned their representatives for their purposes, and figure out how they can be shifted towards a more just and balanced distributions of our communal resources. We can no longer rely on a patchwork of individual support, non-profits, mutual aide societies who try at alleviate the worst of the suffering. Structural change is the only thing that will save us. Quite literally save us, as it turns out.

Music today are cheerful African acoustic tunes (Happy birthday, Lieblingsschwester!)

And Rest in Power: Cameroonian Jazz legend Manu Dibango has died from Covid-19 at age 86. Here is his 1972 hit, “Soul Makossa”