ASANNAGR_NADIA_150720

PARADIGM SHIFT IN LIFE AND LIVING DURING

IN-CORONA PERIOD: A PHILOSOPHICAL OVERVIEW
Ganesh Prasad Das

The topic of the webinar is “PANDEMIC AND THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS: A

PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION”. In my address as the Chief Guest, I intent to speak a few
words on the drastic change in our life and living during this in-Corona period, which has lasted
for a weak less than four months since the first shut down on March 25 th last. As it is still
continuing and continuing grievously, it cannot be dubbed as post-Corona period. Philosophy is
primarily concerned with life and secondarily with understanding of self within and or the world
without. Philosophy is, therefore, said to be a way of life, not away from life. Socrates is the
glowing example of a philosopher, whose quest was good life rather than formulation of a
system or theory. His quest was an applied one conducted amidst people in the market place, not
a speculative one conducted in the enclosure of a library or in the study room perched on an
armchair.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was rapid advancement in science and technology and
as a result of that establishment and expansion of industries. The impact of this was alienation of
the human being from his natural way of living. Routine-bound life with artificial job
distinctions, tagged identity, dead-line tasks, and mechanical stimulus-response attitude leaves
behind the simple, plain, care-free life, that is, existence on its own, and having lost it in the
fight for living, pines for it.

Human existence on its own raises anxiety. The systems of philosophy, rationalism,
empiricism, criticism, realism, idealism and all sorts of intellectualist philosophy make the
human being slave of reason and commands of culture. “What am I?” Descartes’ response is that
I am a thinking thing. This sets the ball rolling. What I do, I was obliged to do that. I am not free.
There is nothing except I and my ideas. I have no outside to move around freely and relate
myself to others intentionally and emotionally. This creates anxiety in me giving rise to anger
that smoulders within. The soft words for this state of being are loneliness and boredom for
which entertainment TV and yogic exercises are recommended as remedial measures.
 On January 30th, 2020, the first Corona patient in India was identified in Kerala and on
June 30th the number rose upto 5,66,840. Now, the number is 9,37,487 with 24,315 deaths.
Lockdown 1.0 began on 24th March, 20 when the number crossed 500 and it is now Lockdown
6.0 and Unlock 2.0. Lockdown involves shut down and containment of zones, hot-spots
according to local exigency. Let us take a pause to look at the style of marking installments of
Lockdown and Unlock. It is somewhat like IT software style! The same status is called
Lockdown as well as Unlock! There are simply Lockdowns of different phases with different
sets of guidelines of do’s and do not’s. Well, India is said to be a land of contradictions and let
one and the same phase be called Lockdown of a denomination and Unlock of another
denomination.

The Corona state of our isolated existence resembles the state of prisoners in Plato’s cave
and the state of operators in a wired telephone exchange (of primitive type, which is now
obsolete). Plato’s allegory of the cave seeks to bring out the ontological distinction between
Form (reality) and its copy (appearance) and correspondingly the epistemological distinction
between knowledge and belief. Men who are bound in fixed positions inside the cave see moving
shadows projected on the cave wall in their front and believe those to be real. Those are rendered
unreal for one, who, per chance, comes outside by perceiving objects in 3-D. If that person
comes back into the cave, he would no more believe shadows in 2-D as real existents. If he tries
to tell this truth to others, then he would be judged by others as crack-headed. Now, our state of
being in the webinars of this sort is like that of the prisoner who had gone out and then came
back to the cave! It is a virtual conference, where shadows talk to shadows and their (others’ and
mine too) delayed sounds are heard. It is virtual reality. It is going to stay as the reality.

John Hospers gives the analogy of pull and plug chord type of telephone exchange to
explain idea-ism of George Berkeley leading to solipsism. The operators hear hears sounds at
their eardrums. They have no chance to perceive any outside sound-emitting source and they are
not bothered about that. It is sounds and sounds alone that exist for them. This is the position at
webinars and at homes to some extent. We maintain contact with our relatives and friends over
audio or AV network. We are constructs of sounds and images, which are, in their turn, nano
electro-magnetic waves. You being acquainted with the plight of of Plato’s cave dwellers and
Hospers’ telephone exchange operators would be able to understand the situation of Corona
world dwellers. For us to go out of the cave and meet physically, with Namaskara without
handshake or embrace, in the old normal way is a distant possibility. The World Health
Organisation alerted yesterday that return to the old normal is not possible in foreseeable future.

There is allusion to the cave in Francis Bacon in dealing with dogmas and prejudices,
biases, or, what he calls, idols. One such idol is ‘idols of the cave’, that is, the unreasoned
beliefs, which we ourselves generate stupidly in vacant states. They do a lot of them during
Corona idleness. (“Principal aamaku schoolre 7 ghanta jabardast rakhuthile!” “Na tame ebe
jabardast 24 ghantaa ghare rahiba containmentre?”) (As the Idols of the Cave are undoubtedly
an allusion to Plato, it is no surprise that as an example Bacon argues that Aristotle's particular
interest in logic over-rode and distorted his understanding of natural science (4.59))

People have begun to call it the New Normal. Some try to add philosophical colour to
this idiom. But let me clarify here – philosophy alone can give clarifications and sanitise the
mind and the intellect, so that one could meet any problem with comfort and contentment with
whatever resources one has at one’s command. The New Normal is a business concept. It is
coined and explained by Peter Hansen in a book of even title in 2010. The sub-title of the book is
“Explore the Limits of the Digital World”. According to the author, the idea behind the ‘New
Normal’ is quite simple: “We are half way there.” This book is about the trend spotting and
creative thinking needed to prepare ourselves for the world of possibilities awaiting us in the big
ocean of the New Normal. It is advancement of technology which is creating a ‘new normal’,
where relationships with consumers are increasingly in a digital form. Business need to reinvent
themselves to create new interactive business models. Technology is no longer an enabler. It has
become a game changer. The new normal stance is to invade and pervade consumer markets. If
there is a dichotomous division of people in the society, then we have producers and consumers.
The producers want to produce more, sale more and profit more. The consumer wants to acquire
more, consume more and be satisfied more. The former does not admit any limit to his profit and
the latter does not admit any limit to his acquisition. This has brought us the whole tragedy. We
have been swiftly drifted to disaster as the inevitable aftermath of industrial civilization. The
tragedy is graver still as the policy makers are not sagacious enough to see the repercussions of
their decisions. There was a worldwide Great Depression for 43 months in between 1929 and
1933. Economists are at a loss to find out the means to overcome it. The classical economist’s
point of view was that markets will clear in the long run, they are self-regulating. (Descartes
said that nature abhors a vacuum.) The Labour Government in Britain was told by Treasury
officials to keep the budget balanced by increasing tax and cutting employment benefits. J.M.
Keynes, the famous logician-philosopher-economist described this as economic madness and
argued just the opposite. His argument was that government must intervene and actively
stimulate economy. In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), he put
forward active demand management theory setting aside classical economics (as J.S.Mill, also a
logician). There he said things like “The government should pay people to dig holes and then fill
it up.” In the pre-Corona period, we observed Government’s stance to provide jobs to people by
ordering to dismantle and rebuild.

THIS ‘NEW NORMAL’ IDEA APPLIES TO BUSINESS PRIMARILILY AND THE

SOCIETY AT LARGE IN A GENERAL WAY. What is called now the new normal is the old
normal. The older normal – previous to the commercial new normal - is actually the new normal.

we live in the future that is now. Every day a virtual reality becomes just plain reality. There are
miracles and there are marvels, but there are also reminders of what made those old science-
fiction films so scary. What could be imagined, what can be imagined, is happening. Young men
really are inserting grain-of-rice-sized microchips in their fingers in order to unlock doors and
start cars-hoping that they will improve their employment prospects. Fast-food restaurants really
are taking orders with apps (“centralized ordering systems” that could “make cashiers
redundant”) and preparing them with robots (“automated kitchen equipment”). Multinational
corporations really are investing in global knowledge-sharing schemes that openly propose to
replace universities and community colleges – liberal arts and poetry, history and political
science – with “distance learning certificate” programs that train workers for a task, not a career.
This is the theory of now. And much of it is very fine, indeed. There is nothing wrong with
disrupting drudgery, nothing wrong with making it easier to communicate, nothing wrong with
trying new approaches that might work better than what came before. But there is something
wrong, something that is destructive rather than disruptive, something that is simply absurd
about engaging in the wishful thinking that says a capitalistic system that by its system prioritises
profit somehow evolve for the better. It does not work like that. It never has and it never will.
 We are confronted with the stark reality of our progression. Ask a Kodak worker, if you
can find one. Founded in 1888, Kodak was an iconic American company that put affordable
cameras in our hands and gave us all kinds of ways to share the pictures we produced in the pre-
digital age. Committed to innovation, Kodak employed the engineers who developed the digital
camera and many of the photo-sharing innovations we now utilise. And this firm created and
sustained lots of family-supporting jobs in the United States - especially in its headquarters city
of Rochester, New York-and around the world. In 1988, one hundred years after its founding,
Kodak employed 145,000 people. But history, innovation, and a record of treating workers like
human beings was no match for the new age of cell-phone communication and instantaneous
photo-sharing using tools such as Instagram. In 2012, after the company filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection, it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange on a day when its
value fell to $0.36 a share. 11 Employment tumbled as the company reorganized and by 2015 the
total number of Kodak workers was less than 5 percent of what it was just a quarter century
earlier. 12 At around the same time that Kodak was going bankrupt, Instagram had thirteen
million customers, who did almost all the work of snapping, editing, and sharing photos. How
many actual human beings did Instagram employ when it was elbowing Kodak toward the dust-
bin of history? Thirteen. So it was that, while Kodak was crumbling, Facebook purchased
Instagram for $1 billion, bringing what might have developed into a rival social network within
its burgeoning monopoly. Kodak, the historically company that employed those pioneering
engineers and 145,000 other workers, was the past. Instagram, the company that let consumers
do the work of sharing while employing just thirteen people, was the future. Yes, Instagram
would grow as part of Facebook, but it would add employees at a at a microscopic rate: total
Facebook employment as of March 2015 was10,082, or only about 7 percent of the old Kodak
figure. “This, in a nutshell, is why digital technology is changing our societies in such a profound
way,” explains Australian journalist Ian Leslie. “In a wired world, it costs virtually nothing to
reproduce a photo or an e-book or a piece of software or to send it across the world. Small teams
of designers and engineers can make products consumed and paid for by billions, creating vast
wealth for their originators like Mark Zuckerberg. But the wealth doesn’t ‘trickle down’ because
digital goods require so few people to make them, and digitally organised workplaces require
fewer people to run them.”
 This is reality. But it is not a reality that discredits utopian dreams or confirms dystopian
cynicism. Rather, it is a reality that demands that Americans adjust their thinking about
democracy such that the evolution of how we express our popular will keeps pace with the
evolution of how we communicate, shop, and work. We cannot prevent that advance of digital
technology and automation today. Then, 200 years back, Ludd and his men could halt the
advance of power looms and spinning frames.) It is pointless to be against progress. The point is
to shape progress, not as customers or consumers, not as clicks to be counted or employees
struggling to synch ourselves into automated work places, but as citizens engaged in a
democratic process of organising a new economy that reflects our values and our needs.

The World Bank hits upon ‘a changed world’ in the global economic outlook during the
Covid-19 Pandemic. The Covid -19 pandemic has spread with alarming speed, infecting millions
and brought economic activity to a near-standstill. Countries imposed tight restrictions on
movement to halt the spread of the virus. As the health and human toll grows, the economic
damage is already evident and represents the largest economic shock the world has experienced
in decades. India has 80 Crore mouths to feed free for 3 months at a cost of 90 thousand crore.
This is a measure of social justice.

The World Bank forecasts that the pandemic is expected to plunge most countries into
recession in 2020, with per capita income contracting in the largest fraction of countries globally
since 1870. Advanced economies are projected to shrink 7 percent. Should COVID-19 outbreaks
persist, should restrictions on movement be extended or reintroduced, or should disruptions to
economic activity be prolonged, the recession could be deeper. Global coordination and
cooperation—of the measures needed to slow the spread of the pandemic, and of the
economic actions needed to alleviate the economic damage, including international support
—provide the greatest chance of achieving public health goals and enabling a robust global
recovery.

I feel lonely as if deported to an island. But I am not alone as I am situated amidst the
members of my family. However, I do not have aloneness, which is a creditable state. In
aloneness, I am totally face to face with myself. Swami Ranganathanandaji asserts that this
“aloneness is a great quality of meditation.”
 What is normal for a man in society at any time, human nature, his desires and aspirations
remain as they are, are there in all cultures. In Indian culture we find them in the Vedas, the
Upanisads, the Bhagavadgita, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Bhagavata, to name only a
few. Dust has settled on them because of non-use. We try to wipe out the dust and bring their
content to notice in s way that is intelligible to the modern mass. Borrowing the business idiom,
we may call this the ‘new normal’ to make it catchy. The content regarding what is normal is old
and time tested, but its packaging and showcasing for the contemporary man are new.

This is a period of great uncertainty. In the past pandemics like Covid19 have been there
changing the face of history. In 1918, Spanish Flu and in 1957 Asian Flu are outstanding
examples. Two world wars of the last century were periods of uncertainty. But Covid19
pandemic is a global pandemic war, in which the whole 611.51 crores of human population are
fighting against the invisible, extremely unpredictably lethal Corona virus. All the social,
political, economical, structures and systems of knowledge and faith - religion, science, arts and
philosophy – that human beings have developed over a period of more than 6,000 years
approximately have been shattered. With almost all the basic wants being fulfilled, man was
trying to ensure dignity of life. But now the dignity of death is not available.

A dignified life is a life without cares and anxieties, torments and torture, overwork and
no-work, seclusion and coercion. It is a life of happiness, good life. In a poem entitled ‘Leisure’,
the poet W.H. Davies sings:

A poor life this is if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

In the vision of the poet, leisure is a necessary facet of good life. Alexander Pope in his
‘Ode on Solitude’ writes:

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,
*****
Blest, who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
 Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixt; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Having limited wish and care, a healthy body, peace of mind, sound sleep, hours of study, ease,
leisure, recreation, meditation, self-dependence, incurring no loan, doing no harm to others, non-
covetousness, freedom from malice, helping others in need, serving neighbours as one would like
to be served by, are regarded as qualifications for good life.

In Western ethics, happiness (or pleasure) is regarded as one of the benchmarks of

judging a human action as moral. If a given action maximises pleasure and minimises pain, then
it is adjudged as good. This theory goes under the title of ‘Hedonism’ (Greek
‘hedone’=’pleasure’). Pleasure is regarded as the only intrinsic good. No one says, “I want to be
happy, because . . .” This sentence cannot be completed. If you could possibly complete it and
give a reason for desiring to be happy, then happiness would not be the ultimate end; it would
point to something beyond itself.

There is the ethical theory of utilitarianism, according to which one should perform those
actions, which maximises the aggregate good. Conjoining hedonism, as a view as to what is good
for people, to utilitarianism results in the view that all actions should be directed toward
achieving the greatest total amount of happiness (Hedonic Calculus). It might be noted in passing
that Jefferson understood happiness as something that was the same for all men, because it did
not satisfy their individual, variant wants, but satisfied their basic, human, common natural
needs.

Vyasa, the Big Brain, (Visala Buddhi), in the ‘Yaksa Prasna’ (Yaksa asks and
Yudhisthira answers in the ‘Araneya Parva’ within ‘Vana Parva’ of the Mahabharata), perceives
that good behavior is the locus of happiness (silam ekapadam sukham, 313-70), renouncement
of avarice makes men happy (lobha hitva sukhi bhavet, 313-78), contentment is the best of all
kinds of happiness (sukhanam tustih uttama, 313-74) and he who has many friends lives happily
(bahu mitrakaram sukham vasate, 313-113). Yaksa, then, asks Yudhistira as to which person
could be said to be happy (kah modate?). In reply, Yustisthira said, “The person who cooks in
his own house with scanty vegetables even on the fifth or sixth day of the week, is free from
debt, and does not stay away from his home is happy indeed (pancame ahani sasthe va sakam
pacati sve grhe/ anrni ca apravasi ca sa varicara modate //, 313-115) At the end, Yaksa, who
reveals himself as Dharma incarnate, makes it clear that his body is constituted by yasa, satya,
dama, sauca, arjava, hrih, acapalya, dana, tapa and brahmacarya, whereas the doors to get into
are ahimsa, samata, santi, anrsamsyam and asamatsara. We may call the former ten as the
structural and the latter five as the functional aspect of dharma, which a happy man practises.
When Dharma offered boons to Dharmaraja (his son), the latter begged of his father that he be
always capable of conquering greed, infatuation, and anger, and intent on sacrifice,
meditation and truth.

jayeyam lobhamohau ca krodham caham sada vibhoh/

dane tapasi satye ca manome satatam bhavet// (Op. cit., 314-24)

These are the attributes which confer on a zoological species, man, the title of happy
man. Happiness of man is within him. Out of ignorance, he searches it outside. As the Upanisads
put it, the inherent nature of man is ananda (bliss). Ananda (bliss) is happiness and more than
that. Its nature is described in the ‘Anandavalli’ of the Taittiriya Upanisad.

Prajapati Brahma’s prescription for devas was da (damyatam – do not violate limits,
behave), for danavas da (dayadhvam – be not be violent, care) and for manavas da (datta – do
not devour all, share). This wisdom of the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad is borrowed by T.S. Eliot in
his The Waste Land (1922), where he hears thunder speak da da da. He composed the poem on
the plight of war-ravaged world. In the Corona-ravaged society, the prescription from the ten
directions is: BE A MAN - MODEST, ACCOMODATIVE and NON-ACQUISITIVE! The
status of manava (man) is in between deva and danava. Devas stand predominantly for mental
power and danavas for muscle and material power. Man might choose to act virtuously
constantly, he attains devatva, or if he acts viciously irreversibly, he attains danavatva. Choice is
his. Yoga (acting with discipline, direction and discrimination) is the path to devatva and bhoga
(feeding and fanning psychic and sensory inclinations) is the path to danavatva. We all know the
mythological story of the first man Uttanapada (inclined to rise) having two wives, Suniti
(keeping to principles, ideals, values, dharma, yoga) and Suruchi (pleasure, passion, indulgence,
adharma, bhoga)
 A surprising lesson on how to be happy is available from an African tribe. Here is a story.
There was an anthropologist who had been studying the habits and culture of a remote African
tribe. He had been working in the village for quite some time. The day before he was to return
home, he put together a gift basket filled with delicious fruits from around the area and wrapped
it in a ribbon. He placed the basket under a tree and then he gathered up the children in the
village. The man drew a line in the dirt, looked at the children, and said, “When I tell you to start,
run to the tree and whoever gets there first will win the basket of the fruit.” When he told them to
run, they all took each other’s hands and ran together to the tree. Then they sat together around
the basket and enjoyed their treat as a group. The anthropologist was taken aback. He asked why
they would all go together when one of them could have won all the fruits for oneself. A young
girl looked up at him and said, “How can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”

Years later, the well known South African activist Desmond Tutu would describe the
little girl’s thought process by using the word ubuntu, which means “I am because we are.” Tutu
explained the concept as follows: We believe that a person is a person through other persons.

Africans have a thing called ubuntu. We believe that a person is a person through other
persons. That my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. When I
dehumanize you, I dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in
terms. Therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes
into its own in community, in belonging.

This is exactly the type of philosophy that the African community embraces. This is what we all
need during in-Corona period. We must realize that humanity comes into its own in community,
in belonging. Humanity breathes and throbs in belonging. Life is an act of connecting to
everything and attaching to nothing.
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Professor of Philosophy (Retd.),

‘Rutayani’, 396, Paika Nagar,
Bhubaneswar-751003, Odisha