Risk Society and Coronavirus

Coronavirus threatens the fundamental convictions of our industrial society, which is globalized. The states and governments who believed their capacity to control international complications seem to control so little as we look at the developments. They were prepared for terrorists who benefited from developing transportation technology and communication to carry out their attacks. The states organized, developed strategies, coalitions to neutralize or arrest the terrorists. However, they were not prepared for an enemy who had no gun, no bomb, and neither a life. They found themselves unprepared in the wake of spending billions on arms and military technologies. How can we interpret this Coronavirus pandemic with the perspective of reflexive modernity and risk society, which were theorized by Ulrich Beck in the 1990s?

Firstly, we can clearly see an unplanned and a latent transformation of our modernity. It is replaced by another kind of modernity, an epochal change that involves a contradiction, a self-confrontation, and even self-destruction. The industrial society produced its very side effects, which are increasingly come to the forefront and changing its founding system. Meanwhile, political and economic orders remain “intact” and decision-makers use mechanisms and try to implement solutions belonging to industrial society while the debates and conflicts are representing novelty. The experts confront each other; there is no certainty in this old elitist “technocracy”. Coronavirus pandemic shows these what I mention clearly. We have produced a neoliberal orientation, focusing on private enterprises and diminishing the size of the state, leaving individuals (considered them separately from their families) to their own responsibility to succeed and fail. Now, these individuals are in an existential, moreover, paradoxical situation. They face reflexivity of their responsibility to produce (in industrial society) turning against them. They have to go outside and have to work for which the industrial society forced them to earn their life themselves in all aspects, yet now they are a potential danger (since there is a virus that has a high rate of contagion) for the society and individuals next to them if they do this. They have to confront the reality of reflexivity: that the very industrial system they belong, is impotent to this novel “risk”, implying that they are now on their own.

Secondly, as Ulrich Beck claims, the industrial society turned into a “global” risk society. In the early phase of the industrial society, the risks were residual risks, which could be legitimized by the decision-makers. The distributional conflicts and solutions were over “income, jobs, social security” and employment. However, now they are over “bads” such as unemployment, terrorism, nuclear and chemical research, threats to environment, and pandemics. In the Coronavirus pandemic, most of the states started to organize themselves according to “prevent” spread of the virus. There are lockdowns to minimize the risks, as we can see it in the discourse of “flattening the curve”. Moreover, the risk aspect of this pandemic period shows itself in this contradictory consequence: the lockdowns minimize the risk for deaths but they also contain another risk: the economic crisis. The industrial society, now, is unable to deal with the dilemma of its structural mechanisms. How do the institutions which are already “clinically dead for a long-time” deal with such a novel risk? Furthermore, the risks of today cannot be contained locally; they have a global character. The results of industrial society (which thought to be essentially beneficial) also produced their disadvantageous potentials. A person getting infected from a local wild animal food market in China led to the chain of a global pandemic. It did not stay local but travelled to the other side of the world and spread exponentially. Now, therefore, we do not have local risks where we live closer but risks involving the entire globe. We are held not only responsible for our own neighborhood or geography but also for all the globe, we are all participants of this pandemic, globally…

Finally, I want to mention the aspect of the political which intrudes our private life and politicizing private life. As Beck mentions, the political “makes its invasion” in the passage through the private sphere. Life-and-death politics (a new “identity of the political”) arise, here, from the “loss, danger, waste and decay” in the old bourgeoisie left-right politics. What we eat, what we wear, what we use have become the objects of our questions in the hysterical sense. As Beck says, “those substances lie in ambush everywhere”. Isn’t it so also true in the Coronavirus pandemic? We don’t even know if our food is contaminated, we don’t know whether the environment we encounter has viral particles in the air. Our private life has become a “plaything of scientific results and theories” and “public controversies”. In such pandemic, “If the citizen does not go to politics, then politics come to the citizen”. It is clear that our very private life is penetrated by a political decision of the Chinese government which gave permission to the wildlife market. Our “natural fate” forced the “microcosm” of our private life to interconnect with “insoluble” global problems. In such pandemic, the political became our “existential” problem of personal life. Now most scientists try to find the medicine or vaccine to cure the disease or preventing lethal symptoms, and we follow the news in social media and jump to the littlest fragment of hope, try to get ourselves relieved from the anxiety of risks. The littlest misunderstanding of words that there is a drug that might be effective gives us an incentive to spread this to everybody we know. The political does not just intrude our private life, but it renews and redirects itself from there to a sub-political sphere.

In conclusion, reflexive modernization pushes us to self-confront, participate (responsibility), and to reform our rational assumptions. Today, global risk society forces everybody to be participants, to be politicized. Our private life, which we have assumed, has no borders to prevent intrusion of a mistake that is made on the other side of the world. Will such pandemic lead to a reflexive (rule altering) transformation? Time will show.