Crisis and Critique

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, I would often be skeptical about how a certain moralizing tendency insinuates itself into political debate. Take, for example, climate change. Every time someone expresses horror about the willful stupidity of the climate deniers, I find myself more concerned about what might happen if the deniers stopped denying. Wouldn’t the deniers opportunistically use the validity of the climate science to justify the most unthinkable of injustices, from new forms of colonialism to genocide? “We had no choice; it was either them or us,” they would respond, with their zero sum madness.

Where does such a dark thought experiment leave us? Must we now give up on critique altogether so as to settle for anything short of total annihilation? Not necessarily. The problem today is not with the content of our critique (COVID-19, let alone climate change, is, indeed, an existential threat), but with the very form by which we critique—a lazy, counter-productive habit that mirrors the principles of capitalism and that, ultimately, squeezes dry our deepest political and personal desires.

This same kind of lazy critique was at work when someone based their opposition to the United States-led invasion of Iraq on the fact that they were lied to about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. To moralize against Colin Powell or the New York Times is a mistake, and to somehow believe that everything would have gone meaningfully differently if only we would have been told the truth is a fantasy. Critique is never clean. And, sometimes, the truth does not set us free.

The harder position to consider is this: Even if Saddam Hussein did possess weapons of mass destruction, the US still should not have invaded Iraq. Regardless of where we might fall on this position, this “even if, still” logic forces us into the heart of critical thinking and into the limits and possibilities of critique amid COVID-19.

Anyone can argue against the system when it’s gone wrong—when a cop’s chokehold asphyxiates the innocent man, or when we catch the politician with his pants down. The real test of critical thinking is to resist this temptation to knock on the open door and moralize against the liars and cheats and deniers (however much they deserve it), and, rather, to attune ourselves to how even if the system seems to be functioning crisis-free (everyone acting to the letter of the law), it is still producing inequality and injustice. Even if the factory is clean and safe, the workers are still being exploited. Even if I am kind and caring, I am still part of the race problem. And, from the other direction, even if the system is producing inequality and injustice (not to mention so many immoral acts by those who live in it), it is still functioning according to plan. This is not some contrarian and easy cynicism; this attunement, rather, requires a rigorous and non-moralizing critique of capitalist logic and an unapologetic speculation about what can come after capitalism.

And now comes COVID-19. When Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro reject the medical experts, we are aghast. Likewise, when they accept the science we hold our breath hoping that this does not turn into another eugenics nightmare. The problem today in the midst of the pandemic is that we throw around terms such as crisis and critique without any precision. We know, for example, that there are current political decisions being made whose effects will shape our societies for decades to come. In economics, the left and right struggle over whether the banks, airlines, and other powerful corporations will take unfair advantage of the bailouts. At the same time but under the radar, there is also a discursive struggle being fought in which the very categories of crisis and critique are at stake.

Even if COVID-19 is only the flu, it is still a crisis. Even if COVID-19 is the great crisis of modernity, it is still nothing special.

For such perverted claims to make sense we need to rethink what constitutes crisis and critique in the first place. Crisis is not an exception (or virus) that disrupts the smooth operations of a system; rather, it is internal to the system itself (from economics to psychology to biology). Likewise, critique is not a moral judgment about the limitations of a system or its leaders; rather, it is an act that opens up space for another system to come into being.