Covid-19’s Agathokakological emodiversity was universal.

                                      Covid-19’s Agathokakological emodiversity was universal.

It ranged from paranoia to pronoia with too many prescriptions and pastimes.  For some persons every dawn was a matutolypea and for some others it was unending extensions of  Dolce far niente.

The lockdown of COVID-19 not only took many away from various busy activities and grueling routines which ranged from extremely vital, useful, entertaining and meaningful to the band wagon of boondoggles.

It also took in many to look farther using Bayesian reasoning and be ready to make reasonable adjustment in terms of priorities, post covid-19 possibilities, personal life of pleasant and leisurely time with family, parleys into proverbial Russell’s In Praise of Idleness [1] pronouncements which were prevalent all over social media with everyone displaying and sharing their hidden talents, new skills, creativity etc.

However, it also pushed some into deep worry about, at least their near future livelihood, worries about shattering disruption with cascading effects on the lives of many dependents of these people. Though most governments and organizations have pitched into help them tide over the difficulties to some extent possible.     

  

There were two stark realities: -

1. The nature of the pandemic and its impact which took the entire medical fraternity by surprise and Paul Romer’s concept of conditional optimism was the only probable answer without any concrete cause or remedy in site for some time.

2. Its impact was near universal wherein it gave an important message that evolution [especially evolutionary biology -either with zoonotic adaptations or otherwise- is a very important subject to be studied and human race has to primarily know at least a bit of  evolution of  everything à la Matt Ridley’s way- his book Evolution of Everything] moves on unmindful of any of our definitions and explanations and the best tools to deal with the emerging world are rational, scientific [ be extension all advanced technologies], humanitarian and environmental friendly approaches to encounter  life à la Steven Pinker [ his work Enlightenment Now].

The beauty of life consists in the unknowns and the unending searches and researches –the unending process of evolutionary trends in everything.

Growing up and growing out of certain things are natural process of evolutionary metamorphosis both biologically and psychologically.

The ideology peddlers [ from religious and political outfits] and media sprayed some of the following negative attitudes like dystopian rhetoric zeal, immature emotional doomsday resignations, advocacy of outdated, unscientific (by which I mean not empirically tested documented, proven and universally accessible methods of remedy) methods hovering around in the name of much accepted conventional wisdom, preening of one-upmanship in crisis, radical responses, fanatical fights and many other irrelevant or irresponsible outbursts.

However, pandemic taught that there is no panacea and we cannot deny or defy the importance of anything and everything has to be prioritized according to contextual relevance.

Universe was vociferous in its sentimental outpourings and also whispered some sane perspective for everyone to involve in at least some amount of self introspection.

Talk of value of art, science, literature, philosophy, compassion, family values and health care, all resurfaced, in some cases merely as an academic outlook and in some others it gushed forth suddenly from a pipe burst.

If  ‘Death was a leveller’ as per James Shirley, Pandemic was a silent universal philosopher who made everyone to relook into many subjects and activities and what they must be viz à viz one’s life.

It revealed the lust for life, longing for relationships and value of togetherness [ironically when the wrong word was coined as ‘Social Distancing’ instead of mere ‘Physical distancing’].

Universe is UNI+VERSE. 

The romance of this verse manifests through many broad subjects of study and multitudes of activities. Ultimately, this VERSE teaches us that there are no more ‘this versus that’ demarcation or divisions but ' this and that' or ' these and those' interconnectedness, interdependence and interrelationships.

We must realize that the following versions have become too redundant i.e.​​

Science versus religion; Materialism versus spirituality; Tradition versus Modernity; Technology versus Humanity;  

Most of us are ambivalent and ambiverts, now, with Covid-19 we are also ambi-digital using palm and phalanx as well as knuckles and opisthenar.

From young students to successful professionals were reconnecting with fundamental subjects, debating about their importance, relevance and so on. I drafted a few sentences to convey to all how every subject is or can always be of importance and be part of  our life.

Art must be part of our life so that we look at things with sensitivity to grasp their aesthetic aspects;

Science must be interred in our sub- conscience to guide our perspectives;

Compassion must be in our emotion to guide our attitude with humanitarian values;

Philosophy must be in the trenches of our psychology so that we have rational approaches towards most things;

Environment must be felt as part of our tissue and not an issue apart and away from us; 

History must carry the story of our pride of ancestry and bring us maturity to bury the blunders;

Geography must sketch the photographic sketch of the splendors of topography of our wonderful planet;

Mathematics must reveal the tricks of underlying patterns of everything and enable us to revel in wonder;

Literature must capture the inner nature and intrinsic features of anything that it touches on;

Language must engage in eternal romance with increasing:- number of users, geographical areas, the wide range and variegated vocabulary to communicate and express as many ideas or events as possible in as many fields of human activity. It must have the syntactic plasticity; flamboyant flexibility suited to both simple and complex modes of expression, and an enormously evolved derivational morphology and also must entice people involved in various domains of activities to use that language. It must visit the harem of other languages add variety and spice; 

Sports must bring out all sorts of human enthusiasm;

Music must bring out the intrinsic vibrations of as many nice frequencies and create memorable melodies and hubristic harmonies;

Religions and cultures must nurture ventures to enhance a heuristic syncretism bringing out the interrelationships keeping intact individual identities;

Professions of all hues must be combinations of passions and/or trade off involving compensations useful for life/one wants and some freedom in terms of individual space and time ;

Social life of all hues preferably imbues with values of humanitarianism starting from firm foundation of family to further extended inhabitants all around and everywhere without any superficial and unreasonable discrimination;

Life is formed out of all these and not merely funded by the world of commerce and trade or engineered by social engineering of political ideologies or doctored to perfection through any doctrines, though they too play their part in our life.

When we become aware that everything is/was/will be within us, then, we enjoy the world around us without any inhibition but with a sense of belonging, sense of balance with sensible attitude without hurting the sensitivities of others and thus we can become better person with less ego but willingness to learn more.

Life's journey when it sails with awareness in the oceans of all the above then it is a journey of synergy between the composed inner self and comprehensive outer world.

[1] Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one percent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Corona virus - The demand for face masks unmasks many short comings of human race.

Corona virus - The demand for face masks unmasks many short comings of human race.

It unmasks the reality of lack of global preparedness and lack of international institutions geared towards shared responsibility to handle crisis or natural calamity.

But then, are there real solutions available out there?

The greatest outcomes of great problems are that they make us look at alternatives, multiple options, throw up lot of  suggestions, criticisms, ideas [ even if they are utopian or too idealistic or naïve ] and generate opportunities to look at implementation of new schemes to be better equipped for such future eventualities.

Are there lessons beyond, besides, much broader than scientific explanations and conspiracy theories?

Every natural calamity, disaster or epidemic is very sad and hard to console the affected and repair the damages even with all the modern technologically advanced methods and concerted efforts of many compassionate human beings, organizations etc.

The rippling effect of some of these calamities impact many parts of the world on various parameters at different scales, a very harsh way to make human beings realize that at last we are all interrelated, inter connected and interdependent amidst all our various ways of living from foods to faiths to frames and fences of identities around our political, economic , cultural, national characteristics.

Debates on environmental concerns, respect for other species, eating habits and so on are aplenty.

Awareness of many environmental issues and the obvious deterioration of our environment and depletion of many natural resources are all addressed by many in multiple ways, some scientists blame it on  many human activities [ perhaps rightly so] while  some scientists brush aside all as natural phenomena which will eventually rectify [ perhaps they too may be right]. 

Many of us do not venture into study in detail scientific facts but react to versions which are aligned with our predisposition, visible impacts that affect our life and start believing what we deem to be true and sometimes  think our beliefs to be the only truth.

When we talk of geopolitical economy, we call the world as a global village [ as if the atlas has shrunk] a wonderfully coined and calibrated expression carrying within it the masked macro motives and magnified micro optics.

When we talk of environment [in fact parade our environmental concerns more at international forums] we fail to really acquire knowledge to refrain from damaging it around us in whatever way we can.

When we talk of harmony, unity, peace and so on, we try to bring to the focus various and divergent religious, political and regional ideologies through mutual respect and tolerance; try to accept and forget many historical mistakes; minimize various regional disparities and so on.

When we talk of social engineering we have used most of the above factors namely, religion, politics, history, environment and used all the advantages that science and technology have provided to effectively and strategically implement policies [ sometimes euphemism for scheming and manipulating] in the interest of global community as a whole cutting across various barriers.

But through all these approaches based on various identities and economic status we have failed to monitor, regulate and maintain certain aspects in the interest of whole of humanity at present and we have also not created useful templates for posterity.

                                                                                                  

What are those aspects? What is the mindset that is required to even start looking at it? Let is chose this timing [Corona virus crisis] because at least now it would appeal to the caring hearts and calculative minds.

The mindset that is required is a sharing disposition, not as a sermonizing statement or a high sounding socio-political ideological concept but as a working and workable new model in the interest of all,

It is just a very loud thinking, utopian and idealistic in nature and therefore, too farfetched in terms of implementation.

However, with advanced modern technologies, huge number of educated people and overall larger number of matured concerned human beings there is a ray of hope that if the multiple outfits of UN, top world leaders and big business enterprises come together, then we may think of looking at the following options because they require macro level planning and implementation and the concomitant benefit is these activities may create lot of  new businesses, create more employment and push human mindset towards realization of  oneness and interrelatedness of all.

The options are: -

Most vital items for survival of human beings must be easily available always at all places, more so in times of natural calamities and epidemics.

Certain international organizations must ensure to have stock of such items for emergency supply.

They may be broadly classified as food items, common medicines, natural resources, products, technologies, tools, transportation, wealth, manufacturing of certain high utility items etc.

We must ensure that the availability of these items is not geographically confined to certain areas alone.

However, if a product or item is available aplenty only in certain geographical location, then organizations like UN and its various outfits must ensure minimum storage or easy and quick accessibility.

Hypothetically, if majority of high value secret wealth of many nationals are held in one country’s bank, imagine what if a major earthquake or some calamity destroys all of it.

If metals like gold, lithium, copper, steel are available only in certain mines in some countries [ we need not deprive those nations of the economic advantage but then they must be made available everywhere at least in minimum quantity.

There is no harm in thinking on these lines.

We must stop verbalizing and assign the whole lot of activities under the term ‘disaster management’ what we need is preparedness in place.

https://groundreportindia.org/monthly/reports/2020/02/corona-virus-the-demand-for-face-masks-unmasks-many-short-comings-of-human-race