Covid-19: Towards a New Notion of Crisis

Abstract

The momentum and the rapidity characterising the spread of COVID-19 will cause it to be a defining moment in our history, with the global community focus making us aware of its escalation almost simultaneously. We are a world in crisis. This paper explores the notions of crisis in our recent past and proposes a new 21 Century position notion of crisis. It comments on the inherited notion of crisis, which is a point where unprecedented action is called for or required. The notion of crisis was very strong throughout the 19 Century, where it was believed that the foundations of human life and society rest on critical crisis foundations (whether in economics, biology or linguistics). This thinking continued in the 20 Century, but the range of crisis expanded due to social expectations and the informed constituencies which emerged through the knowledge economy. Both these notions of crisis are explored in the first part of the paper. In the second part, we argue that, given the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is room for a new (third) notion of crisis, one that is premised on the generation of expert (sic) constituencies which arise out of concerns or issues. Does this exacerbate the crisis, the notion of crisis and our understanding of it? Thus, while the 19th Century understanding of crisis was based on the fragility of the foundations on which civilization rests, and the 20 Century focus was on constituencies and the politics of rights, the 21 Century is around issues, such as COVID19. In this scenario, the relationship of the state, media and the public bear reference. New knowledge networks have arisen. Given the explosive COVID-19: Towards a New Notion of Crisis 117 dialectic which emerges when we are forced to acknowledge that perceptions of reality upon which we are reliant and which are established may prove to be fundamentally flawed when exposed to a crisis, the paper concludes that the pandemic has effectively dispelled certainty, and that we can only proceed with caution in crisis.