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Pandemic and power
15
May
A catastrophe situation is faced with solidarity, compassion with those who suffer
it directly, support for those who must face it head on, and especially with all the support of those who can and must give conditions to face the catastrophe.
It is also a new situation, which requires everyone to review actions, concepts and the lifestyle itself can and must change, those who behave trying to avoid the new routine, hinder the coping of the catastrophe and worsen it personally and socially.
All of this involves power, central powers and micro-powers, the philosopher Foucault developed the concept of biopower, that is, the control of collective phenomena from the processes of birth, longevity, mortality and fertility, already in recent philosophy Byung Chul Han created the concept of psychopower, one that through the media and communication controls the social environment.
The pandemic seems to have combined the two, and even more deeply human anthropology on its return home, uses both the issue of mortality control and communication, especially digital, for tasks, shopping and work at home, as well as the control by power.
State institutions are mobilized as soon as the Modern State enters the scene, to sympathize or to open its contradictions to the social environment, hospitals, educational institutions and mass media are all mobilized by the forces of power.
The more fraternal and more hostile faces of the idealistic model appear, in an eagerness to replace the health and power of the family’s intrinsically fraternal solidarity, spirituality and the common good. It may point to a way out or put the whole of life in check. .
Religious power is also in check, with the temples closed or they give serious and concentrated responses or they stay in the spiritual subjectivism of known phrases and buzzwords that do not explain or solve anything, the subjectivism / objectivism dualism collapses and asks for a transcendent.
In the Christian reading of John (Jn 15,15) you can read: “I no longer call you servants, but friends because the servant does not know what his Lord is doing”, and this is fundamental in a pandemic, and generates solidarity.
And for those who go beyond friendship and generate brotherly love, there is a divine promise that consoles and strengthens us at this moment (Jn 14,21): “Now whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and I will manifest myself to him ”, and they will have inner peace to face the external war that the pandemic generated.
Society in a transient moment
13
May
Life has changed all over the planet, the limitations imposed will certainly not
be permanent, but some concerns that were born with health, with the invisible and with new technologies will be permanent as to the importance and transformed when taking them more into account.
The transient also observes the idealistic dichotomies of subjects and objects, or subjectivity seen as a false model of the subject, that he is devoid of materiality or substantiality, the disease is a proof of this error, or of a false objectivity, our certainties about our empirical objects have failed and continue to fail in predictions and models, the old age of uncertainty, old because it has been a “theory” since the last century, now became narrative.
The old idealistic theories, which history made them fundamentalist ideologies, have as their epicenter the idea that we must develop and advance the economic models (in the end it is always the idea of “more production”) until an even greater exhaustion, before the nature and now of life itself on the planet put at pandemic risk.
Sloterdijk warns in an interview in El País “current life does not invite us to think”, and the reason that I have a relative optimism about social distance (I prefer isolation, as society as a whole works in a network), is in the reasoning he does in the same interview: “For Husserl and his phenomenology it was necessary to get out of the impetuous time of life, the most elementary device was to always take a step back. This action allows you to become an observer. ” .
And this is the basic assumption of uncertainty, that the observer is part of the phenomenon, the idea of science that we can repeat the experiment observing the phenomenon, must take into account that the observer is part of the phenomenon, in times of pandemic, if not me prevent pandemic affect.
The whole of this epoch change, since its foreshadowing came from the two great wars, which not by chance came from the worst pandemic that humanity faced was the Spanish flu, which is a good example when there is no social distance, which lasted 2 years (January 1918 to December 1920), infected a quarter of the planet (500 million people) and killed between 20 and 50 million people.
Two untruths exist about this pandemic, first #lockDown is not good (see numbers above) and that has not changed anything, it happened right at the end of the 1st. world war (from 1914 to November 1918) that had deteriorated Europe’s sanitary conditions and economic resources, but that’s when the League of Nations model emerged (installed in January 1919, shortly after the Versailles treaty), even though it insufficient to avoid the 2nd. world war, started the discussion of the basic principles of social rights.
Also the old truths about the invisible hand of the market, laissez faire, began to change, with the provident state, and after the 2nd. world war the UN with important departments like FAO, UNICEF and WHO itself, an organization of great influence now in World Health and that gives guidelines to face the pandemic.
So, after this war that is now a war for everyone, against an invisible enemy and one can still say unpredictable, there will be changes and they must be thought out globally, but we are in a transient where the old ideas still resist seeking the previous normality of a consumerism and a society of inhuman and unequal tiredness.
Media, networks and social isolation
12
May
The three factors now combine and unveil the reality that many “theorists” pointed
out, while neo-theorists stay in abstract philosophies that barely interpret the pandemic reality. One who foresaw reality, Manuel Castells who wrote “Sociedade em Rede” (Social network), explains why we were unable to foresee the virus, its potency and violence were not biologically possible to know, but the need for a health policy and education for the future did not only he pointed out, as well as Sloterdijk, Edgar Morin and many others.
About the current crisis Castells says it is necessary to understand the applause of the balconies of the buildings to doctors, nurses and health professionals and they take health more seriously, this could have been predicted and we would be in another stage, the defender of technology also blames her idolatry, but is necessary now.
He stated that the overvaluation of technology in the case of health has delayed the system as a whole, and at the same time the devaluation and misunderstanding of its application in education and at work has led to a delay that is now being tried to overcome but with a certain lag.
Social networks, whose media enhance, but are not the same thing, as is the case with tele-medicine as a secondary possibility now, as the patient with covid needs a physical place and to be assisted in person, even though decisions and online conferences are many useful.
Social isolation has boosted the use of media in the home and has now more deeply influenced the world of work, shopping and online services, and education runs after lost time, the most obvious finding is that online education is not simple and it is not the even if in person.
The global change must be made if we want to fight the virus efficiently, leave warnings on the ground and prohibit people from traveling, it is possible temporarily, and the worst favors the neo-nationalist view that led many countries to the pandemic crisis, it was thought the problem is in China.
Castells said in a recent interview: “An interdependent global system requires global governance, not necessarily global government. But nation-states resist losing their power and each uses supposedly global governance mechanisms to defend their national interests ”, despite the barriers I would say that the virus does not know that there are borders built, even with national“ isolations ”by protective barriers”.
What we need says Sloterdijk is a “global shield”, co-immunity, now with serious investments, like global co-governance and taking health, work and education seriously in a new normality, we can go back to the previous frivolity, but we will be irresponsible with the future that may come, or a new wave of this virus or its mutation, or another that is certain to come.
Balance and calm in times of crisis
08
May
Given the worsening of the pandemic crisis in Brazil and some countries in
the Americas, the arrival of the cold in this hemisphere and the exhaustion of the Health System, without the preventive #LockOut (in Brazil), we will now have to make an emergency intervention, with the consequences that it brings.
In this situation, we need a discipline that we do not have culturally, an awareness that is not always well understood, there is only awareness of something, and in this case it is public health and the extremely necessary and urgent care for the curve to start a retreat process.
Those people who have some spirituality, who achieve balance in this situation need to help the population as a whole, defend the doctors, nurses and support staff working in health (drivers, secretaries, rescuers, etc.) to have working conditions.
There are several ways to find personal balance, physical and breathing exercises, reading, music and relaxation, but it is the state of the soul that counts most, and in the turbulence of the danger of a pandemic, it is essential to find a form of spirituality, thoughts and to be.
For Christians who believe in the existence of an omnipotent and sovereign God over all the things that govern their lives, he knows that the inner attitude is one of passivity, tolerance and a deep Love for all those around him, and in this pandemic having attitudes of protection for all.
The comfort of their souls, for true Christian spiritualities, is the belief in the Love of God. It is written by the evangelist John (Jn 14,1-2): “Do not let your heart be disturbed. You have faith in God, have faith in me too [Jesus]. In my Father’s house there are many addresses. If not, I would have told you. I will prepare a place for you ”, and his earthly #StayAthome is now a refuge.
The road to Emmaus: from intelligence to the heart
24
Apr
The Part 2 of the book How to Live in a Time of Crisis is written by Patrick 
Viveret and in addition to a look of admiration for the work of Morin, the co-author, he has an even more generous look at humanity, despite the serious question of the chapter title : What will we do with our life?.
Viveret will link wisdom to love, quoting Martin Luther King: “We must prepare to live as brothers and sisters, or prepare to die as imbeciles” (p. 55), and complete it with “collective” emotional intelligence (it is an important differential) which is not psychologism. The author states “if we do not deal with the relationship between reason and heart, of the reasons of the heart that Pascal spoke of, purely mental intelligence, the famous science without conscience that is nothing more than ‘soul ruin’ as Rebelais said, it can build worse monstrosities ”(Pages 55-56). He said about the previous crisis what is much more appropriate for the current crisis: “humanity is in danger of prematurely ending its own history, but it can also take advantage of this crucial moment to experience a qualitative leap. “(P. 56) We cannot look at millions of deaths and say, thankfully it was not with me, or a little more humanly, we cannot even mourn the lost ones.
Numbers parade coldly without authorities touching each other, there will probably be 3,000 dead at the peak of the curve in São Paulo, but we can think of opening the trade little by little, in Wuhan where the crisis began they hoped there would be no death to open, but here we think that there is no way to save lives, they say the economic cost can be high, but how much does a life cost?
The crisis may be worse than we imagined, yesterday Wuhan’s patients tested positive again, I think we will not come out of this crisis if we do not give what Morin said and Viveret reaffirms: “We can only reach this if we face the issue of inner barbarism ”(P. 57), what Peter Sloterijk used as a metaphor talking about co-immunity, is now an embodiment, are we ready to help the Other to protect ourselves?
We need to produce wealth even if it costs lives, it wasn’t exactly a parable and yet that’s how it happened in history, but now it’s exactly a personification, figure of speech (like parables and metonymies) that is giving to what was “object ” of the Being.
The biblical passage that Jesus uses the personification is the road to Emmaus, when he walks all night apparently asking metaphors, and these will only discover the personification through the heart that awakened their intelligence (Lk 24,31-33): “In this the eyes of disciples opened up and they recognized Jesus. Jesus, however, disappeared in front of them.
Then one said to the other, “Wasn’t our heart burning when he spoke to us on the way, and explained the Scriptures to us?” At that very hour, they got up and returned to Jerusalem where they found the Eleven gathered with the others. ”
This is not an apology for religion, just to think that we often do not hear what is said to us as clearly as possible, but our intelligence is not linked to the heart.
What is the divine medium
21
Apr
In times of crisis, prophets, oracles, Plato’s “sages” and all kinds of false wisdom
come to the fore, as it is important and many seek a “divine” sign, the question is what is the “divine” medium for those who do not believe and for those who seek in faith a reason to hope.
For those who believe, the passage of John 3: 13-1 fits well: “If you do not believe, when I speak to you of the things of the earth, how will you believe if I speak to you of the things of heaven? And no one went up to heaven, except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man. Just as Moses raised the serpent in the desert, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be raised, so that all who believe in him may have eternal life ”.
The “things of the earth” are not so far away, says the reading, no one went up to heaven, except the one who descended, the Jesus son of God and those who do not believe the earthly Jesus, a historical man, who was later raised on a cross, to finally reappear resurrected.
Let us return to earth, explaining precisely the Divine Environment (Chardin, s / d), who wrote: “in their effort towards mystical life, men often yielded to the illusion of brutally opposing the spirit and the flesh, the body and the soul, as if it were good and evil. Despite certain current expressions, this Manichaean tendency was never approved by the church … “(p. 117).
Thus, understanding the complexification of human life, concentration in large urban centers, agitation, excessive noise and mainly the purely economic view of life led to the “natural” thinking of idealism, the purely economic view and the omnipotence of the state.
So look at things from above, it does not mean “to leave the world”, even though there are purely contemplative orders and they are serious, when speaking of the Cross, Chardin shows that “every man persuaded that in the face of immense human agitation [writes this in the decade of 30 we have already said it] opens the way towards an exit, and that this path is to go up ”(p. 113), the emphasis is the author’s.
It points to this path of climbing, the choice of fundamental principles, in this case it is life, and they are among the brave who will triumph, says the author, and the scoffers who fail, because they did not climb and they do not rise.
Thus the author will affirm the reality of the historical Christ, which shows us how a life “in the world” can be a mystical and concrete ascent, “the passionate and unfathomable reality of the historical Christ” from which we draw many examples, and so is human life of a Divine Being.
Thus, in times of pandemic, not only the gesture of preventing oneself by using hygiene conditions, but also social gestures to help those who have no job and to the elderly and family members infected by covid-19, as well as help in the family are examples. of concrete divine life.And halfway through this night of crisis they leave their lesson of Love deeper, to give their Life for men.
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The crisis of Western thought and the pandemic
14
Apr
Old analyses still grounded in idealism, which study the state model, economic problems and
anthropocentric models do not account for the new reality, the global pandemic was caused by a virus and caught every society unprepared.
The net analyses continue with discourses about obviousness, we are one planet, the problem is everyone’s, we have to review values, etc. but those that point to the future still live in the dimness of a thought about ideals that have been exhausted, but not the discourses.
Edgar Morin, who has long been pointing to a planetary citizenship, approaching 100 years and keeping a lucid head, in an interview with the L ́Observateur of 03/18 said: “Confinement can help us detoxify our way of life”, and in the same interview points out that “this crisis shows us that globalization is an interdependence without solidarity”, and that it has produced a techno-economic unification of the planet.
In the same vein Byung Chul Han wrote in the Society of Tiredness, that we are all in active life and ignore contemplative life, however the pandemic has taken us out of activism and we still do not know what to do with the “idleness” of staying at home, there is even religious discourse that calls it a tomb, but we will talk about it when we speak of the night of God and the instrumentalized religiosity of today.
To those who do not believe in this analysis, I remember that successful programs like “reality show” are now in fact realities because each one lives in his home, and “master chef” now has to happen in practice in families because restaurants are closed.
As for the technological aspect pointed out by Morin we can not forget that in addition to the global news, now for work, for education and even for leisure videoconferences are now realities, there are still those who curse against them, but it is schizophrenia because they are now necessary and even to maintain trade are indispensable, online shopping are there.
The detoxification of our way of life did not come through a plan of government, nor by a great cultural change, although the pandemic suggests this, even in our homes we still seek the unrealities of contemporary life, the pandemic, however causes a change of this vision.
The East and some countries, I quote the case of Portugal, are succeeding because of a certain discipline in the #StayAtHome when Peter Sloterdijk in The rules for the human park spoke about the failure of “human domestication”, did not imagine that a virus could demonstrate its thesis, will come out of the crisis early and will have fewer dead countries with greater social discipline.
Finally, Social Networks (not to be confused with the techno media we talked about above), the dynamics of the spread of the virus follows the logic of networks, and so if these studies are taken seriously we may be more ready in the defense of lives, not by chance the infectologist Carl Latkin is one of the scientists with the greatest publication in this subject.
Social Isolation and small words
07
Apr
It has already been explained that social isolation is diferente of the #LockDown,
reducing the dynamics of physical proximity between people and social isolation, but the explanation that we are in networks, which makes a person from the outskirts of São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro move to the center, it is the fact that networks (which can communicate through media called “virtual”) in this case are physical networks.
The contact between people to be infected by a virus occurs because many people live in the so-called dormitory cities and need to travel to the big centers for work, and the essential jobs: transport, employees of health posts and markets, live in peripheries. and must return home.
In the study of Social Networks there is a phenomenon called “six degrees of separation” that was named after a play in 1990 by playwright John Guare, and a film by Fred Schepisi (see the picture), where a character says: “… everyone on this planet is separated from each other by only six other people. Six degrees of separation.
Between us and anyone else on the planet ”, these are the small worlds, each person says the character in the film“ it is a door that opens to a new world ”.
It is a profound idea, also says in the film, of the dynamics of large masses, we are going to see a form of microsociety where each one has a role and can provide a new world, a change in the worldview, and an important thing at this moment is the defense of life , perhaps the good economy.
Let’s stick to the proposal of social isolation, it slows down but does not reduce the number of infected people say experts and appeal to science, however, the science of networks shows that small worlds make this interaction possible, so a “type” of isolation vertical makes sense if we think of the small worlds.
It is not just about the elderly, a risk group, but the peripheries where contagion is arriving can cause the exponential call of contagion, due to both physical proximity conditions and sanitary conditions, this is where we put the serious problem, and no study has been done yet.
The Ministry of Health said it would do this study over the weekend, but the bad policy hurt, the small world of politics suffered a contagion, which within the government itself suffered vertical isolation, but there was already social isolation, 76% of the population it supports the Ministry of Health policy in Brazil (different vision of the president), but the analysis of expansion in the periphery was left aside.
The changing worldview
03
Apr
The Ptolemaic model changed the Aristotelian worldview by creating a model of
spiral movement for stars and planets known at the time, changing the worldview, but it was Copernicus who changed the view that took the Earth from the center of the universe and placed the Sun, this model helped the anthropocentric worldview by opposing the theocentric worldview.
Galileo’s great controversy with the theological view was not the cosmological view, but the question of interpretation and biblical reading by the “common”, not by chance the first popular version was called “vulgate” and when deepening the biblical reading some interpretations exegetical activities have been set aside.
However, Galileo before the Holy Office actually affirmed “E pur si muove” (translating Italian and then moves) that today he could look at the whole universe saying “E pur tutto si muove”, everything is in motion and the dynamics no longer resist the classic worldview Being and Not Being, there is an excluded third party that can be thought of as Not Being is still Being, quantum physics and the string model indicate a third state, which is already used in quantum applications.
So the theoretical models and the idealistic worldview together with their universe model collapsed for some time and even the Standard Physics Model that explained particle physics seems in check with the studies of dark matter and energy that are nothing more than 95% of the universe.
The vision of seeing the world through a shock of opposition is gradually crumbling, when admitting an excluded third party (as the Sourbone professor Florent Pasquier calls it) admitting not a synthesis (the result of idealistic opposition, thesis and antithesis), but a third possibility that conjugates with the other two. It must affect the religious world, it is a great support for a time to unite minds and hearts to fight the world pandemic, and it can be the germ of great changes.
A biblical reference to the subject is the moment on the cross that Jesus cries out to God, who no longer calls him Father, the tradition says in the Aramaic language of his mother Mary, and feels separated from the Father, prays in the Trinitarian vision in that Jesus is also God, it is a paradox to separate from the Father.
Jesus on the cross is repeating Psalm 21 “My God, my God, because you abandoned me”, and it seems to be the cry of all humanity in the face of the pandemic, and it is also possible to read the “excluded third” where we learn that the opposition has time and the answer must be everyone’s.
However, the mystical explanation is precisely the third excluded, the human nature of Jesus is reconnecting it to the Father, if we want Teilhard Chardin’s noospheric vision to the Universe, the reading says that it was a great night.
Current cosmology is a worldview
02
Apr
Current cosmology is one that considers the universe as having a beginning, which
may be a multiverse or a bubble, and that expands in a constant between Hubble’s H0 and the rates measured from the supernovae, whose reconciliation may be the new theory of universe in a bubble launched by Lucas Lombriser whose article appeared in this month’s Physics B magazine.
But this cosmology considers the mystery of the energy and dark matter that makes up 96% of the unknown universe and this puzzle modifies cosmology and also our worldview.
This cosmology postulates the idea that this dark matter does not interact with ordinary matter and the hypothesis something that “swallows” all known matter (called baryonic around it, including light) evolves to the idea that it has a high mass density and collapse of supernovae and their gravitational interaction has an effect on visible matter, stars, galaxies and clusters.
Of what it is made, it is certain that it does not have matter like the now stable model called Standard Physics, which we explored in the previous post, so it goes beyond this model and one of the most interesting theories is that of supersymmetry, which explores the concept of standard physics that each particle has a symmetric, just like bosons and fermions,
What this theory about dark matter proposes is that for every known boson there is an unknown fermion and vice versa, but there is a difference with the theory of antimatter, because antiparticles have opposite charges but the same mass and when they come into contact they produce energy, which would also explain dark energy.
Fermions as well as protons, electrons and neutrons, make up our material world and bosons are the ones that generate the forces of nature, the discovery of the Higgs boson or “God particle” was important because it made us understand the mass, while fermions explain the quantum state because two fermions occupy the same quantum state.
The fact of the existence of dark energy, more interesting than its mystery and presence in 70% of the universe (25% is dark energy) in addition to our ignorance is the fact that it is this “matter” that gives us a complete worldview of our universe , not only because it is dark because it is not visible, but also unknown.
James Gilles’ TED below, seen by more than 2 million people, explains the dark matter theory.
