The Uncertainty of Pandemic

The silent spread of Covid-19 took local and international authorities by surprise. Its arrival highlighted the scandalous absence of effective policies for the prevention and management of contagious diseases, the enormous inequalities that exist in the world, and the lack of coordination of health strategies on a global scale.[1] The threat of the invisible and unknown virus has sown fear among populations, bewilderment and a profound feeling of vulnerability.

We have all begun to realize with unusual clarity how fragile we are physically and psychologically, but the collapse of health systems and economies, changes in habitual behaviors, employment insecurity, social distancing and, above all, the awareness of death as an imminent possibility have all created in the world a generalized climate of incertitude and uncertainty.

Now we ask ourselves: does this uncertainty have its origin in the current pandemic situation, or has it only been reinforced by it? In other words, is the lack of certainty we are experiencing something new, or had we previously prepared the ground from which it has now exploded with such force on a personal and social level? Does this situation, which is described in generalized terms, take for granted that we all share the same uncertainty? These are questions that must be answered in an interdisciplinary way, and that is how we will now address them.

Let us begin by setting out the premises that support our argument. First of all, we must recognize that many inhabitants of our planet have found themselves for many years – too many years – mired in the uncertainty caused by poverty, marginalization, precariousness and social exclusion. Secondly, “liquid modernity,” wherever it is present with its multiple social and individual dynamics, causes a constant state of uncertainty in a large part of the population. In other words, the uncertainty that today envelops us in a generalized way due to the health crisis has found a sociocultural humus in which to take root, and therefore, if we intend to seek a solution to this crisis, we must look beyond overcoming the viral threat we are facing today and formulate responses that recognize the diversity of current uncertainties and the social structures that feed and foster them.

Poverty as a pre-existing condition

We have seen how Covid-19 has affected older people and those in poor health: for example, those with diabetes or suffering from hypertension. But there is a prior condition that goes beyond the clinical aspects and arises in the socioeconomic field, affecting all the reality of those who live it: poverty.[2] Wherever social services and health services are not available, vulnerability increases,[3] death often features, and uncertainty is a state of life. As a result, poverty is a pre-existing condition of the lives of millions of people, aggravated by the presence of the virus; at the same time it feeds and increases the state of inequality in many countries.

It is enough to take a quick look at the data provided by the United Nations to see the profound uncertainty involved in living in conditions of extreme poverty: “Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making. In 2015, more than 736 million people lived below the international poverty line. Around 10 percent of the world population (pre-pandemic) was living in extreme poverty and struggling to fulfill the most basic needs like health, education, and access to water and sanitation, to name a few. There were 122 women aged 25 to 34 living in poverty for every 100 men of the same age group, and more than 160 million children were at risk of continuing to live in extreme poverty by 2030.”[4]

For much of the world’s population, uncertainty is not a new experience. The experience of those who suffer from this new or increased destitution does not come from a sudden awareness of their physical finiteness or from the surprising discovery of the vulnerability of basic social structures, but is the result of a structure of marginalization, precariousness and exclusion[5] that deprives them of the opportunities they need to lead a dignified life.[6] Covid-19 has merely aggravated this situation.

Let us quote another UN document: “The pandemic is exacerbating and deepening pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political, economic and biodiversity systems, which are in turn amplifying the impacts of the pandemic.”[7] In this way, the pandemic, exclusion and marginalization trigger a troubling symbiosis that, in the case of the poor, turns the dream of a decent future into utopia. As we have established, for millions of people Covid-19 did not mean the advent of a state of uncertainty, but simply highlighted its presence.

If this is the premise, a question arises: will we all ever be able to get out of the generalized uncertainty that we experience today at the human level? Unfortunately, we are instinctively inclined to answer in the negative. It is not only from a general sense of pessimism, or because of pandemic fatigue; there are two principal reasons for this answer: first, as outlined, the uncertainty we perceive as general actually has different origins and consequences depending on which social groups and cultures we examine, and therefore this very diversity requires differentiated solutions. Second, unlike the prolonged health crises in many countries of the so-called “Global South” – due to malaria, dengue, cholera, Ebola, Zika, HIV – the current health crisis, thanks to the death rates in developed countries, prompts us to reflect on uncertainty in a different dimension to the one caused by marginalization, social exclusion, poverty and precariousness. Pope Francis has written: “The Covid-19 crisis seems unique because it affects the majority of humanity. But it is special only because of its visibility.”[8]

What has been said presupposes that, if we want to find a common solution to the current crisis, we must start from the recognition of the “epistemic diversity”[9] of the uncertainty we experience and, consequently, integrate interdisciplinary approaches and multidimensionality in analyzing the situation and also in formulating appropriate proposals to solve it. Thus, effective vaccines, the availability of pulmonary ventilators or ongoing medical observation of the effects of the virus are not enough. Nor is a simple return to normality sufficient, since this would leave a large part of the world’s population in uncertainty, the result of social structures that generate inequality.

Therefore, if we want to examine the reality in which we are now immersed in the light of its epistemic diversity, we must study “liquid modernity,” its cultures and its dynamics. We will derive from it the knowledge of how to welcome, understand and combat the sudden and unpredictable onset of a situation of vulnerability such as the one caused by the current health situation. This is a necessary precondition to be able to give plausible answers to this inescapable question: what should be the certainties on the basis of which we want to build our future and make it sustainable?

‘Liquid modernity,’ or the self-cultivation of uncertainty

As in any human process, positive and negative elements coexist in contemporary culture. Therefore, the fact that we focus on certain aspects that lead us to uncertainty does not mean that these are the only characteristics of the current era, but rather that they are the ones that in the present time of pandemic take prominence in the search for solutions to the various crises.

It may be appropriate, first of all, to refer to the anthropological assumption on the basis of which the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Janine Puget tries to understand incertitude: “Everybody needs to think of themselves on a consistent, predictable and stable basis, so that they can protect themselves from the intrusion of any ‘strangers’ with their correlates of unpredictability, and this becomes a defense against incertitude. In their solitude and with their ties, people illusorily sustain a need for certainty, truth and knowledge that make it possible to endure the alternatives of daily life. […] In various circumstances losing the illusion of predictability does not cause significant repercussions: some certainty decreases and new certainties take over. But in other circumstances losing the illusions produces suffering, which is experienced as a mental state characterized by bewilderment, hesitation, disorientation and anxiety and takes the form of both panic and fear, with various repercussions.”[10]

Against the backdrop of Puget’s reflection on an illusion of certainty, we can say that the postmodern individual endures life as an enormous burden.[11] Given the generalized belief that a shared human condition is impossible, the subject is continuously pushed to construct his or her identity[12] and sustain personal certainties without being able to receive help. We must constantly choose without references – neither traditions nor external authorities[13] – a solution that guarantees some security to our decisions.

All this takes place in the midst of an aimless, broken temporality[14] that causes a fragmented identity[15] and an absence of narrativity.[16] In this way, the contemporary individual bears the burden of widespread cultural individualism, which creates “the need to seek biographical solutions to systemic contradictions,”[17] and the person is thrown into a radical solipsism where autonomy, self-determination and independence are transformed into fundamental values that lead to self-referentiality and the risk of triggering dehumanizing dynamics. In short, contemporary culture, with its pronounced emphasis on the individual and its anxiety to generate self-sufficient lives, ends up nourishing precisely what it wishes to counteract: insecurity. This is what Niklas Luhmann stated: “All these strategies in the service of greater security are due, in general, to the uncertainties of the model of life typical of this world.”[18] Here we come up against the impossibility of developing autonomy as modernity has conceived and claimed it, and therefore the result is substantial reduction and compromise of freedom and its exercise in the form of concrete freedoms.

The fact is that the person, as a human being, is called to live in the encounter,[19] in sociality,[20] to walk together with others to make life a sustainable and fruitful experience. If these characteristics are missing, constitutive human dimensions are lost, such as, for example, mutual care,[21] trust,[22] the ability to empathize, solidarity and dialogue. The cultural claim to generate self-sufficient lives produces dehumanizing dynamics. Among these are: isolation, suspicion, meanness, indifference to the reality of the other, prejudice as the key to interpreting the situation of others, contempt without the right search for understanding, the hope of security based on an insensitive rigidity and violence as a response to difference.[23]

And yet, the “not knowing” that demands certainty is unlikely to find adequate answers, because certainty, in order to be inclusive, must be accompanied by the search for truth, and this, in turn, presupposes encounter, dialogue and the search for the good.[24] If certainties renounce the search for truth, it is very easy to fall into the absolutization of the only face of the polyhedron of reality that we are able to appreciate, that is, they become ideologies that favor sectarianism and fanaticism, in turn harbingers of incertitude, fear and violence.

On the other hand, this current situation deceives us with the temptation that it is possible to alleviate the anxiety of uncertainty through the revolution of consumption. This can lead us to confuse purchasing power with freedom, and the sum of pleasurable experiences with the meaning of life. Zygmunt Bauman affirmed: “Traders of services and consumer goods advertise their products as infallible remedies against the abominable feeling of uncertainty and against veiled threats.”[25] In fact, it is no longer a question of the accumulation of material things, today attractively packaged in highly “personalized” advertising[26] but of commercializing experiences in the name of the insatiable search for intensity, which can only be temporarily appeased, but which each time demands to be indulged in a stronger way.[27] It is a veiled impulse to hedonism, which runs through our relationships with things and with other people,[28] closing us in on ourselves and leading us to constant dissatisfaction.

Finally, among the characteristics of “liquid modernity” that lead to uncertainty, we can note the importance of strong distrust. This distrust is not groundless: the collapse of traditional institutions has eroded many of the limits we had established between normal dangers and risks and the absence of security.[29] In any case, it is paradoxical that today, even with the greater amount of information available and the possibility of accessing it, there is a greater distrust in the world.[30] We have more data, but distrust is increasing.

Byung-Chul Han’s explanation is enlightening: “In the digital panoptic, trust is not possible, indeed it is not even necessary. Trust is an act of faith that becomes obsolete in the face of easily available information. The information society discredits all faith. Trust makes relationships with others possible without the need for exact knowledge. From this point of view, the current crisis of trust is caused by the media. Networking facilitates the collection of information to such an extent that trust as a social practice increasingly loses its meaning and yields to control. Thus the society of transparency is structurally close to the society of surveillance. Where information can be procured quickly and easily, the social system of trust shifts to control and transparency.”[31]

We certainly should not demonize social networks, but we must recognize the need for a greater capacity for critical thinking when examining the information received, in order to be able to accept or reject it for the purposes of a healthy human coexistence.[32] In this, the role of philosophy becomes indispensable. But critical thinking and a reflective gaze[33] must be accompanied by the conviction that the human being, as Esquirol says, “overflows with meaning,” that is, it implies “the irreducibility to mere observation or causal explanation.”[34] The encounter between human beings presupposes trust,[35] that is, the renunciation of the claim of absolute control over people and events. The need and the constant search for control in fact generate suspicion and mistrust and, ultimately, feed uncertainty and violence.[36] Therefore, the proliferation of fake news is a dangerous symptom of a deeper cultural dynamic that can degenerate, as has happened on many occasions, into intolerance, racism, fundamentalism of all kinds, and even terrorist acts.

The cultural dynamics described above – and others could be added – require lucid responses on the part of the various social players and institutions if we are to emerge in the best way possible from this generalized uncertainty. In the course of this crisis, we often hear it stated that “we are all in the same boat” and that “no one should be left behind.” How can this desire for unity and solidarity be realized? Where should the certainties capable of providing an answer to the current crisis come from?

Notes for Hope

If responses to the various overlapping uncertainties in this time of health crisis are to be adequate and sustainable over time, they will have to begin with recognition of the aforementioned heterogeneity, and then they will have to explore the mechanisms and lessons that arise from those experiences of uncertainty. Additionally, there is a need to be willing to learn from those who have extensive experience in the daily management of uncertainty: the poor. With this in mind, we propose three notes to keep in mind, drawing on the experience of the marginalized, to build the certainties that can sustain the post-pandemic future.

The first is interdependence. The poor know that they are interdependent, because deliberately ignoring this is tantamount to making survival impossible. Certainly, today this truth translates into an appeal to the world at large: we cannot try to live as if we did not need others, neither promoting the quest for self-sufficiency nor living with a dehumanizing selfishness that aims at isolated survival. A humanizing and sustainable certainty is based on recognizing that we are interdependent, and therefore called to fraternity, solidarity and co-responsibility (cf. FT 106), that is, to good practices that allow us to enter into the dynamics of recovery of the social bond.

A second note for hope, which we can add to the first, is to open the way to creativity and imagination. The excluded in our societies cannot remain paralyzed in the face of everyday uncertainties: passivity is not an option, because it means wasting the opportunities that arise in the austerity of the present. The response to the current crisis must come through our ability to think of new ways of organizing political and economic systems, as well as through responsibility for what is common in terms of health, education, ecology, and the like. Uncertainties are not countered by reiterating the dynamics that feed them. The desire for the past, for what was usual, for normality, can lead us to reproduce what we are now running away from.

Finally, as a third note, it will be important to rediscover in vulnerability that threshold which makes union and necessary complementarity possible, that is, vulnerability should be understood not only as a state of precariousness or needy weakness, but also as an opportunity to bring into play the best energies of the human being (cf. FT 56-96). In a world where prejudice and mistrust raise walls and undermine natural solidarity, it is important to look at fragility, at that shared weakness that the pandemic has confronted us with and which manifests itself in many ways. It is precisely fragility that must make us face the question of what paradigms of justice should govern relations in a world where threats are becoming global, and therefore the mechanisms to prevent them must be shared in solidarity by all. Since feeding a stubborn self-sufficiency harms us all greatly, we must be able to recognize the shared vulnerabilities that open the way to the need for encounter and train the capacity for trust: deeply human traits.

If we want to counteract the current uncertainty, we must first of all recognize the dynamics that have favored its widespread dissemination, so as not to go back to sowing in the soil of our history what today, surprised by a reality that we were not able to foresee, we reap with perplexity.[37]

DOI: La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 6, no. 6 art. 4, 0621: 10.32009/22072446.0621.4

[1].    This is certainly nothing new: just remember the Ebola crisis. Cf. J. E. Stiglitz, La gran brecha. Qué hacer con las sociedades desiguales, Barcelona, Taurus, 2015, 207-209. On the effects of inequality regarding the health of populations, see A. Deaton, El gran escape. Salud, riqueza y los orígenes de la desigualdad, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015, 123-147; C. Peralta, “The philosophers of contagion. How intellectuals understood Covid-19”, in Civ. Catt. English Edition July 2020.

[2].    On the difficult task of defining poverty and its different modalities, see A. Cortina, Aporophobia, el rechazo al pobre. Un desafío para la democracia, Barcelona, Paidós, 2017, 125-137; S. Baker Collins, “An understanding of poverty from those who are poor,” in Action Research 3 (2005/1) 9-31.

[3].    “We can distinguish between two groups of vulnerable people. Those who are such because of their existential situation: mothers, children and persons of advanced age, the disabled or persons whose health is put at risk by the places where they live and work or by the ways in which they live and work; and those who are made vulnerable by their socio-economic status and by the way they are treated by society”, (Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, Organization – Activities – Members, Switzerland, CIOMS, 1994, 26).

[4].    UN, “Ending Poverty” (www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty).

[5].    “Rather, the mass problem is one of precariousness, of the multiplication of vulnerable individuals or groups who see themselves weakened, who lack sufficient resources to guarantee their economic and social independence and who, ultimately, may fall into what we call ‘exclusion’“ (R. Castel, “Los riesgos de exclusión social en un contexto de incertidumbre”, in Revista Internacional de Sociología 72 [2014/1] 17).

[6].    “Poverty inflicts injustice on people because it severely harms their well-being. It is a harm known as structural violence, that is, violence remotely metered through the conditions and consequences of poverty. Poverty mostly affects people who are already vulnerable. […] Poverty is an injustice because, given the human capacity to produce so much wealth and excess resources, it simply should not exist, and therefore is indicative of economic, political and moral failure” (L. Watts – D. Hodgson, Social Justice Theory and Practice for Social Work: Critical and Philosophical Perspectives, Singapore, Springer, 2019, 8).

[7].    UN, “A UN framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19”, April 2020 at https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un_framework_report_on_covid-19.pdf

[8].    Francis, Ritorniamo a sognare, Milan, Piemme, 2020, 9.

[9].    “The lived experiences of vulnerable groups are defined by a form of epistemic injustice: the rejection of knowledge about life and needs that socially marginalized groups have. […] Vulnerability occurs in the gap in global health between those who have the power to define and discard knowledge and needs, and those who are defined and discarded. A pandemic can be a call to recognize and repair the sociocultural, sociopolitical, and sociohistorical rifts that generate vulnerability within specific categories of marginalized groups” (A. Ahmad et al., “What does it mean to be made vulnerable in the era of COVID-19?”, in The Lancet, vol. 395, May 9, 2020, 1481f).

[10].   J. Puget, “Qué difícil es pensar incertidumbre y perplejidad,” in Revista de la APdeBA 24 (2002/1-2) 136.

[11].   “Today we live in an age strongly marked by stress, haste, anguish, depression, frustration, anxiety, individual overload, constant risk, and the uninterrupted threat of culpable existential failure, attributable only to ourselves” (G. Uríbarri Bilbao, La vivencia cristiana del tiempo, Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2020, 13).

[12].   Cf. F. Vidal, La última modernidad. Guía para no perderse el siglo XXI, Santander, Sal Terrae, 2018, 15.

[13].   Cf. P. Bruckner, La tentación de la inocencia, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1999, 21.

[14].   Cf. Byung-Chul Han, La sociedad de la transparencia, Barcelona, Herder, 2013, 62.

[15].   Cf. Id., El aroma del tiempo. Un ensayo filosófico sobre el arte de demorarse, Barcelona, Herder, 2015, 9f.

[16].   Cf. F. J. Alarcos Martínez, “Religión y ética ante la incertidumbre,” in Id. (ed), Religión, espiritualidad y ética para tiempos de incertidumbre, Madrid, PPC, 2013, 32f.

[17].   U. Beck – E. Beck-Gernsheim, La individualización. El individualismo institucionalizado y sus consecuencias sociales y políticas, Barcelona, Paidós, 2003, 31; italics by the authors.

[18].   N. Luhmann, “El concepto de riesgo,” in J. Beriain (ed), Las consecuencias perversas de la modernidad, Barcelona, Anthropos, 1996, 150.

[19].   Regarding this idea, the magisterium of Pope Francis stands out. As examples, cf. Evangelii Gaudium, No. 220; Christus Vivit, Nos. 169; 183; 222; Fratelli Tutti (FT), Nos. 30; 47-48.

[20].   “We are primordially interdependent, and this interdependence is a constitutive feature of who we are, even if the ideology of individualism leads us to contradict this fact, even if ideologies of domination deny this reciprocity” (J. Butler, Sin miedo. Formas de resistencia a la violencia de hoy, Barcelona, Taurus, 2020, 60).

[21].   Cf. E. Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, New York, Routledge, 1999.

[22].   Cf. A. Giddens, Consecuencias de la modernidad, Madrid, Alianza, 1994, 40.

[23].   “And precisely because what is most proper to us is generation, the worst and most disturbing reality lies in the thousands of forms of degeneration. Violence is the main one, and its extension is vast: it ranges from the most heinous murders and the most brutal harassment to the countless modalities, manifest or disguised, of injustice and indifference” (J. M. Esquirol, La penúltima bondad. Ensayo sobre la vida humana, Barcelona, Acantilado, 2018, 4; author’s italics.

[24].   Cf. J. L. Martínez, Conciencia, discernimiento y verdad, Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2019, 287-378.

[25].   Z. Bauman, Daños colaterales. Desigualdades sociales en la era global, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011, 24.

[26].   Cf. G. Lipovetsky, Gustar y emocionar. Ensayo sobre la sociedad de seducción, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2020, 264-266.

[27].   Cf. Id., La felicidad paradójica. Ensayo sobre la sociedad de hiperconsumo, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2008, 90.

[28].   “The total absence of negativity today makes love atrophy into an object of consumption and hedonistic calculation” (Byung-Chul Han, La agonía del Eros, Barcelona, Herder, 2014, 34).

[29].   Cf. U. Beck, “Teoría de la modernización reflexiva,” in J. Beriain (ed), Las consecuencias perversas de la modernidad, op. cit., 251.

[30].   Cf. Francis, Encyclical Fratelli Tutti, No. 15.

[31].   Byung-Chul Han, En el enjambre, Barcelona, Herder, 2014, 99.

[32].   “Alvin Toffler already warned, in The Shock of the Future, that information saturation could create defense mechanisms in people, forcing them to simplify the world in order to understand it, to the point that this would end up reaffirming their prejudices. It was 1970” (M. García Aller, Lo imprevisible. Todo lo que la tecnología quiere y no puede controlar, Barcelona, Planeta, 2020, 19f).

[33].   Cf. J. M. Esquirol, Humano, más humano. Una antropología de la herida infinita, Barcelona, Acantilado, 2021, 14f.

[34].   Id., La penúltima bondad… , op. cit., 7.

[35].   “In circumstances of uncertainty and multiple choices, the notions of trust and risk find special application. Trust, I am convinced, is a crucial phenomenon for personality development, as well as for the enhancement of distinctive and specific aspects in a world of parcelin mechanics and abstract systems. In its generic manifestations, trust is directly related to obtaining a certain primary feeling of ontological security” (A. Giddens, “Modernidad y Autoidentidad”, in J. Beriain [ed] Las consecuencias perversas de la modernidad, Barcelona, Anthropos, 1996, 36).

[36].   The studies, in the field of psychology, on the “intolerance of uncertainty” are interesting. Cf. M. González Rodríguez et al., “Adaptación española de la Escala de Intolerancia hacia la Incertidumbre: procesos cognitivos, ansiedad y depresión”, en Psicología y salud 16 (2006/2) 219-233.

[37].   This article is the result of a paper given at the XXV International Conference on Philosophy (“Thinking the Incertitude”), held April 13-15, 2021, at the Pontifical Comillas University in Madrid.