One day we will wake up to the news that there are no new cases of COVID-19. The British Prime Minister will take to the podium outside Number 10; he will announce an end to the lingering threat of new lockdowns and lift social distancing measures. This is the day we imagine, somewhere in our future, when life will seemingly go back to normal. But will we be happy with normal?
Shade and darkness - the evening of the deluge, by William Turner
A group of our final year Durham Theology and Religion undergraduates have been meeting weekly by Zoom during the long months of lockdown to reflect together on unfolding events. Speaking to others beyond our own ‘households’ has provided a helpful counter-point, air-pocket and sense of continuity for us all (I do not exempt myself from this – it has been a highlight of each week for me!) Towards the end of our meetings we decided to try to write up some of the strands of conversation as blog posts. The resulting blogs are collected here.
It is not an easy time to think or write, and the breadth of reflection here, honest and personal, drawing from our year long course in political theology but also ranging more widely, gives me hope. As the world we have been inhabiting has seemed both to shrink and yet also to become more truly – and at times horrifyingly – global, these pieces try to grapple with what all of this might tell us, and what kind of task might lie ahead. We wanted to write and share these as part of a spirit of meaning-making, of resistance to the fragmenting and isolating effects of the virus and its surrounding politics. Our conversations have not been private, but we have wanted to reclaim the public nature of academic reflection, and to speak and write as we have felt able at this time.
The themes of the blogs flow from a common sense that there is no ‘return to normal’ option available or desirable. But imagining beyond this very testing situation is not always easy.
Didier Muller writes of Tolstoy’s insight that our imaginations can shrink in the face of such challenge, and this needs to be overcome; we desperately need new social visions at a society-wide level. Other blogs are more diagnostic of the fault-lines and pathologies of the politics of this virus: the battle over ‘data’, the radical inequalities exposed and exploited, and the sanitising and co-option of grassroots responses by government. Barbara Pressendo writes about the Bolsanaro regime in Brazil and the radical inequalities exposed in death rates there. Florence O’Taylor, a PhD student who has joined our group, writes on the history of mutual aid groups and the importance of their radical past and future. Emma Wilkinson, about to become an ordinand in the Church of England, writes about the use of the symbol of the rainbow and its long history of association with themes of hope, renewal, and unity. She concludes that its migration as a political symbol suggests both its power and that it evades any final or narrow belonging to a single cause. Olivia Barnard writes of one of the pandemics within the pandemic: domestic violence. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, she writes thought-provokingly on the role social media and the beauty industry has played in keeping open public spaces for those in unsafe households, and the changing nature of what solidarity might mean in this light. Rachel Bedek, a Canadian student, draws on German thinker, Carl Schmitt, writing of the need to pay diagnostic attention to the conflicting narratives of human worth and good citizenship at play in a “state of exception” (Schmitt’s phrase), emerging in tensions between state actors and citizen actors. Sarah Cotes draws on William Cavanaugh’s work on the myth of the modern state as our saviour to argue that the state has failed to ‘save’, and that we need to look elsewhere for a more stable form of hope. George Batchelor draws on the work of mid-century French political thinker and mystic, Simone Weil to argue that the pandemic has further uprooted an already uprooted way of life, and explores Weil’s notion of affliction: a form of suffering that can be difficult to find language and speech to process. Only love and justice are the practices that make such suffering finally able to speak in its own right.
The principle of hope here has been speaking together, trying to make sense of things, and daring to imagine that we are capable of a fittingly human response to these events.
Dr Anna Rowlands is St Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham University, where she teaches a third year module in Political Theology.
Early into COVID-19 lockdown measures, poet and author Damien Barr wrote a poem which became the basis for an oft-repeated phrase: “We are not in the same boat; we are in the same storm.” The aphorism highlights an undeniable reality: that the effects of COVID-19 have not been experienced equally by all people, a dissonance which has roots in many of the ‘usual’ marginalisation crossroads which facilitate structural inequalities, including but not limited to race, poverty, mental illness, and housing.
Regimes never break cleanly. Hitchens and his allies are right that the removal of statues to slavers and imperialists marks an end. But their timing is badly out of kilter. Like the fall of Lenin in Kiev in 2014, the dismantling of statues now marks the end of a regime which fell a long time ago, the statues are shards of an older social and political order protruding into a world now governed by very different ideologies and principles.
It is clear that racism is the pandemic within the pandemic, which was once held at the inarticulate level or the politically unconscious level for the most part, but has now come to the fore. The whole world is waking up to the reality of racism, and there is a renewed desire for anti-racist action.
You are walking along the footpath and there is someone else walking from the opposite direction. To avoid collision there is a great dance of social awkwardness as you both move in the same direction. After a bout of feigned laughter and mutual hand gesturing the awkwardness eventually ends and you both carry on your merry way. That was pre-COVID-19, of course.
COVID-19, for all the ‘We’re all in this together’ sentiment, has illuminated the extent to which we are not: disproportionate numbers of BAME people are dying, and we see higher mortality rates in areas of densely-packed housing and in areas of long term, multi-generational deprivation. By itself, the term ‘interdependence’ masks entrenched and systemic inequality.
