The sheer breadth of global public discourse that has been generated by the onset of the coronavirus is staggering! There is hardly a circumstance, a social context into which the coronavirus has not been fitted. Writers from across the various spectrums have had and are still having a proverbial field day.
A handful of months ago the world at large was preoccupied with its various other agendas, removed from the aura of crisis and uncertainty about the future. All that has changed to the extent that one writer asserted recently that “not since the plague of the Black Death in the fourteenth century (the world was of course a much smaller place then) has the planet been assailed by a potential health-related menace as worrisome as the coronavirus.” All of this, of course, depends on what we are inclined to believe.
Writing in March for the US-based media platform Fair Observer (“Social Distancing or the Danger of Life With Others”) contributor Peter Isackson raised the intriguing question as to whether “the global mobilization in the face of the coronavirus pandemic” could “presage a turning point in our economic and political culture,” on a global scale. The writer does not stop there. He pointedly asserts that “the COVID-19 pandemic has begun to deconstruct and remodel the accepted behaviours of our culture as nations across the globe” and endeavours “to artificially redefine everyday rules of their social life.” It is, Isackson contends, a matter of “an entire civilization attempting to understand and assimilate a new set of rules.” Critical turning point in human history or precursor to apocalypse?
Could the transformation resulting from the advent of the coronavirus be as earth-shattering as opinion leaders in various disciplines suggest? Will the advent of the virus create new themes for the end-times Soothsayers and Prophets, throwing up fresh surges of religious zeal focused on ‘selling’ the virus as Armaged-don’s clarion call.
In an odd sort of way the coronavirus could be the driver of all sorts of new ideas about our world and ourselves. That, of course, is, for the moment at least, a secondary matter.
A more immediate concern is with the requisites for surviving the virus. If we are to survive, experts in various fields say, it will be necessary for us to live, for a while at least by new behavioural guidelines that require us to keep our distances,’ one from another…social distancing is the term being applied here. It can be argued, of course, that the term social distancing has been spectacularly misapplied here. Social distancing implies the placing of strict limitations on social interaction between and amongst people. The truth is that even in the face of the coronavirus there exists a range of technological tools that can and do significantly close social spaces between and amongst people. Those tools, even now, are being pressed into service in work situations and in the education sector to compensate for the need that has arisen for physical distancing. The point to be made here is that the term social distancing cannot, in the full extent of its meaning, be used interchangeably with physical distancing.
What social distancing seeks to do is to place restraints on prerogatives that people, over time, have come to take for granted. It dictates that if we are to help fend off the virus we must extend ourselves to what one writer calls “a radical form of the extreme individualism,” a somewhat overdone description of what the expression is intended to convey.
The challenge that inheres in social/physical distancing, of course, is that it goes against the grain of how, by and large, we live as humans. It is true that from society to society and community to community families and individuals insist on their collective and personal spaces. Here, however, there are limits to enforcement which ensure that prerogatives of personal space do not unduly compromise social contact which, of course is an indispensable element of our coexistence as communities of people. Taken to its extreme there is every likelihood that an excess of social distancing can completely derail human existence as we know it.
A few weeks ago in a public pronouncement that appeared to be dripping with alarm the Resident Representative of the Pan American Health Organization (PAH0) declared that Guyanese, up until then, had evinced a less than fulsome response to the social distancing refrain and that it might well be that the authorities might have to take mandatory enforcement measures. To some extent (though significant sections of the population still remain largely indifferent to the social distancing refrain, a tendency which, of course, endangers larger numbers) the message appears to have gotten through. What cannot be denied, however, is that the assertive intervention by the PAHO Resident Representative drew pointed attention to the local socio-cultural pushback against what many Guyanese regarded as an unacceptable curtailment of a fundamental right to reach out to each other, to gossip in the marketplace and on the streets, to congregate in bars for ‘a drink and a gaff’ and (to deploy one of the more popular contemporary turns of phrase) to ‘hang out.’ What is significant here is that it appears not to matter a single iota to those who resisted (some still resist) the social distancing refrain that it is, quite literally, a possible life-saving intervention.
So that whilst, in other societies (where a certain level of social distancing is usually practiced as a matter of course, anyway) the idea of pushing back against a potentially life-saving measure might have seemed ludicrous, here in Guyana (and elsewhere in the Caribbean it seems) social distancing was certainly regarded, to a large extent as though it were an ‘alien intervention’; so much so that it required the authorities to strike a more assertive enforcement posture in order to make the point about the importance of social distancing.
Elsewhere, amongst the theorists on what is otherwise known as “antisocial protectionism” there are mixed views on social distancing. In the United States where the proliferation of media allow for views and perspectives to dash off in several different directions, the wisdom of social distancing has attracted its critics too. In a recent article in the New York Times, the American Sociologist Dr. Eric Klinenberg makes the point that people, especially in a time of crisis, have a very real need for solidarity rather than isolation; an odd point in the circumstances, one might think, since the ‘solidarity rather than isolation’ argument does not remove the reality of the role that proximity appears to play in the spread of coronavirus.
The real challenge (here in Guyana and elsewhere) lies in the difficulties associated with ‘enforcement’ of social distancing. On the surface the adjustment might appear to be simply a matter of ‘discipline.’ Social distancing, however, jerks many of us out of deeply entrenched comfort zones, affecting some far more than others. It does not only attest to differentiations in levels of discipline; It has to do as well with the influence of habits/circumstances that have, for one reason or another, shaped our social and physical existence for much, often most of our lives. The fact that, globally, we have had to go this far in barging in on people’s privacy, or as some may put it, their inalienable rights, is, in itself, a testament to the extent of the global menace that the coronavirus represents.
