As the Coronavirus pandemic rages across the globe, shaving off billions from the global economy and bringing normal life to a virtual standstill, self-reflection has set in.
Questions are being asked. They are not new — many have asked those questions in pre-Covid-19 times as well. But they have acquired a new degree of urgency. How do we define security? Take the example of the United States. As always, with an expenditure of USD 748 billion, it ranked first. China, the second biggest spender at USD 178 billion, was miles behind in second place.
According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), “US investments in weapons procurement and R&D alone were larger than China’s total defence budget. The United States’ defence investments in weapons procurement and R&D were also worth around four times as much as European states’ combined.”
In fairness to the US Department of Defence, it had warned of the Corona virus threat. As recent reports have noted, “The 103-page ‘USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560: Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response’” studied and noted the threat and “warned that the country would be massively underprepared.”
“Competition for, and scarcity of resources will include…non-pharmaceutical MCM [Medical Countermeasures] like ventilators, devices, personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves ... medical equipment, and logistical support,” Business Insider wrote, quoting the report.
The New York Times has also noted that a cascade of warnings went unheeded. In other words, the current outbreak was not an issue of whether but when. It also means that, despite warnings, states, most notably the top spenders on defence, remained straitjacketed by the traditional definition of security. Will that change?
The other issue, which I have earlier talked about in these pages, is a different query: what kind of state is best suited to fight such broad-spectrum adversity and through what means. Let’s look at it from the allied concepts of extraordinary circumstances and exception.
Romans practiced the concept of iustitium. Georgio Agamben in his State of Exception describes it thus: “Upon learning of a situation that endangered the Republic, the Senate would issue a senates consultum ultimum [final decree of Senate] by which it called upon the consuls … to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the state … [Let them defend the state, and see to it that no harm come to the state]. At the base of this senates consultum was a decree declaring a tumultus (that is, an emergency situation in Rome resulting from a foreign war, insurrection or civil war), which usually led to the proclamation of iustitium [which] literally means ‘standstill’ or ‘suspension of law’ [and] implied, then, a suspension not simply of administration of justice but of the law itself.”
Put another way, the juridical void which iustitium created was paradoxical because the law through this decree — the decree having been contained in the law — denoted its own absence for the period of the emergency. This, as should be obvious, has huge consequences for individual liberties and the ordinary functioning of law.
As with other forms of exception, which have become a norm (for instance, in relation to ‘terrorism’) on the pretext of collective security, will we now have to live with an overbearing state post-Covid-19?
The issue would be relatively less threatening if the tools the state has to use with reference to tracking and surveilling infected people and, in many cases, even providing support to them could, miraculously vanish after the virus was defeated. But that does not happen. Information is voracious and insatiable. It is also power. It shapes and controls peoples and outcomes and expands itself interminably. The tools used now will not end with Covid-19.
The degree will likely vary. States and societies have evolved differently over centuries. Some societies are stronger than others. They have created legal-constitutional structures to thwart and impede the state’s overreach. They will hold out better, but for how long? The important point to note is the central trait that inheres in all states: the desire to be the Leviathan. The USA and China are very different. But one just has to read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide to understand a state’s desire — in this case the US —to accumulate information.
The big tech corporations are already fully engaged in the commodification of personal information, what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” There’s a wealth of information available through information technology. States just have to tap into that goldmine.
The problem is that we, too, are complicit in the rise of surveillance capitalism. We are hooked on tech and connectivity: we just can’t think of life without it. It’s impossible to live without our smartphones. Not only are they convenient but now they serve as the portal to everything, from ordering food to a cab to getting meds delivered to making quick searches to mine information et cetera.
In Pakistan, we have data to track people – not very extensive but extensive enough – courtesy of the Benazir Income Support Programme, National Socioeconomic Register, NADRA etc. Without these databases and cross-referencing them, there’s no way the state can reach out to people in need of support. Used for welfare purposes, this is a crucial capability. If the state doesn’t have it, it is blind to what needs to be done and where. The paradox, however, is whether such data will always be used for doing good? That’s an open question. To use military lingo, the threat doesn’t come from intentions alone but capabilities. Intentions can change.
Writers like Yuval Noah Harari have already been warning that 21st century digital technology, unlike technology in the past century, has more closer affinity to control than we realise or are prepared to accept. There’s also nothing in nature that promises liberal democracy to be an inevitable condition. If anything, given the timeline, it’s a blip on the radar screen.
We might be self-reflecting while being quarantined, but that’s because of the immediacy of this adversity. Once this is over, we will go back to our bad ways like the schoolboy who relapses into his old ways. We might assign some more time to fighting another pandemic, but we will be back to the structural constraints of geopolitics (we haven’t gotten out of it, anyway); politics will be back to what it always is; the states will love Big Data and mega-tech that strengthen them in relation to people; well-being will acquire the dimensions of Huxley’s Brave New World and we will come to accept it. Our lives will be governed by algorithms and AI.
Who said a nuclear winter was our worst-case scenario?
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times. He reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider
Questions are being asked. They are not new — many have asked those questions in pre-Covid-19 times as well. But they have acquired a new degree of urgency. How do we define security? Take the example of the United States. As always, with an expenditure of USD 748 billion, it ranked first. China, the second biggest spender at USD 178 billion, was miles behind in second place.
According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), “US investments in weapons procurement and R&D alone were larger than China’s total defence budget. The United States’ defence investments in weapons procurement and R&D were also worth around four times as much as European states’ combined.”
In fairness to the US Department of Defence, it had warned of the Corona virus threat. As recent reports have noted, “The 103-page ‘USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560: Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response’” studied and noted the threat and “warned that the country would be massively underprepared.”
“Competition for, and scarcity of resources will include…non-pharmaceutical MCM [Medical Countermeasures] like ventilators, devices, personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves ... medical equipment, and logistical support,” Business Insider wrote, quoting the report.
The New York Times has also noted that a cascade of warnings went unheeded. In other words, the current outbreak was not an issue of whether but when. It also means that, despite warnings, states, most notably the top spenders on defence, remained straitjacketed by the traditional definition of security. Will that change?
The other issue, which I have earlier talked about in these pages, is a different query: what kind of state is best suited to fight such broad-spectrum adversity and through what means. Let’s look at it from the allied concepts of extraordinary circumstances and exception.
Romans practiced the concept of iustitium. Georgio Agamben in his State of Exception describes it thus: “Upon learning of a situation that endangered the Republic, the Senate would issue a senates consultum ultimum [final decree of Senate] by which it called upon the consuls … to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the state … [Let them defend the state, and see to it that no harm come to the state]. At the base of this senates consultum was a decree declaring a tumultus (that is, an emergency situation in Rome resulting from a foreign war, insurrection or civil war), which usually led to the proclamation of iustitium [which] literally means ‘standstill’ or ‘suspension of law’ [and] implied, then, a suspension not simply of administration of justice but of the law itself.”
Put another way, the juridical void which iustitium created was paradoxical because the law through this decree — the decree having been contained in the law — denoted its own absence for the period of the emergency. This, as should be obvious, has huge consequences for individual liberties and the ordinary functioning of law.
As with other forms of exception, which have become a norm (for instance, in relation to ‘terrorism’) on the pretext of collective security, will we now have to live with an overbearing state post-Covid-19?
The issue would be relatively less threatening if the tools the state has to use with reference to tracking and surveilling infected people and, in many cases, even providing support to them could, miraculously vanish after the virus was defeated. But that does not happen. Information is voracious and insatiable. It is also power. It shapes and controls peoples and outcomes and expands itself interminably. The tools used now will not end with Covid-19.
The degree will likely vary. States and societies have evolved differently over centuries. Some societies are stronger than others. They have created legal-constitutional structures to thwart and impede the state’s overreach. They will hold out better, but for how long? The important point to note is the central trait that inheres in all states: the desire to be the Leviathan. The USA and China are very different. But one just has to read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide to understand a state’s desire — in this case the US —to accumulate information.
The big tech corporations are already fully engaged in the commodification of personal information, what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” There’s a wealth of information available through information technology. States just have to tap into that goldmine.
The problem is that we, too, are complicit in the rise of surveillance capitalism. We are hooked on tech and connectivity: we just can’t think of life without it. It’s impossible to live without our smartphones. Not only are they convenient but now they serve as the portal to everything, from ordering food to a cab to getting meds delivered to making quick searches to mine information et cetera.
In Pakistan, we have data to track people – not very extensive but extensive enough – courtesy of the Benazir Income Support Programme, National Socioeconomic Register, NADRA etc. Without these databases and cross-referencing them, there’s no way the state can reach out to people in need of support. Used for welfare purposes, this is a crucial capability. If the state doesn’t have it, it is blind to what needs to be done and where. The paradox, however, is whether such data will always be used for doing good? That’s an open question. To use military lingo, the threat doesn’t come from intentions alone but capabilities. Intentions can change.
Writers like Yuval Noah Harari have already been warning that 21st century digital technology, unlike technology in the past century, has more closer affinity to control than we realise or are prepared to accept. There’s also nothing in nature that promises liberal democracy to be an inevitable condition. If anything, given the timeline, it’s a blip on the radar screen.
We might be self-reflecting while being quarantined, but that’s because of the immediacy of this adversity. Once this is over, we will go back to our bad ways like the schoolboy who relapses into his old ways. We might assign some more time to fighting another pandemic, but we will be back to the structural constraints of geopolitics (we haven’t gotten out of it, anyway); politics will be back to what it always is; the states will love Big Data and mega-tech that strengthen them in relation to people; well-being will acquire the dimensions of Huxley’s Brave New World and we will come to accept it. Our lives will be governed by algorithms and AI.
Who said a nuclear winter was our worst-case scenario?
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times. He reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider