Meaningful life in the time of Corona-economics

Introduction

The coronavirus infection rate in the United States has barely flattened, and the overwhelming feeling is that we are being hunted. We hunker down in our homes, afraid to venture outside for the invisible predator lurking there. For many of us, the sense of powerlessness and the reality of rising death tolls have brought a familiar but uncomfortable visitor into our collective consciousness. Thoughts of mortality—our own, of loved ones, of our species—have become commonplace. Wherever we turn we are confronted with death tolls, excess deaths, projected deaths, and a cacophony of economists-turned-moral-philosophers explaining death. Even political discourse has given up its thinly veiled charade of protecting life in favor of returning to business-as-usual. Politicians on the Right have argued with passion—and unintended irony—that Americans will need to die to preserve the ‘American way of life’. Already faced with the specter of our own death, we must now rally to prevent the death of our fragile economy by throwing our bodies back into the breach where we will consume and be consumed.

Of course, there is calculus behind the callousness. The capacity to hurt to the point of letting die is inherent to capitalism at a structural level (Laurie and Shaw, 2018; Tyner, 2016, 2019). Left unfettered, capitalism must continuously expand because, virus-like, it kills its host—that is, living labor. The failure to provide adequate safety measures and procedures, the life-saving masks and ventilators and testing kits, is not solely the consequence of immoral individuals. It is not a failure of capitalism but a critical feature of a capitalist economy: it is simply not profitable to manufacture or distribute to people who are not productive. Furthermore, structural inequalities, deeply entrenched in American society, have left a landscape of suffering disproportionately experienced by precarious workers, often persons of color. Along these lines, a growing body of work is examining the interplay between structures of capitalism and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic (cf. Wallace et al., 2020). Such engagement is essential. But that is not our purpose here. Confronted as we are with our own mortality and the possibility of premature death, we wish to direct attention, briefly, from questions of how we got here, to how we will respond. In so doing, we necessarily engage with, but broaden, ongoing efforts to promote an ‘ethics of care’ within and beyond geography (Lawson, 2007; Williams, 2002). We begin with a question central both to philosophy and theology but marginal to geography: What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Furthermore, is such a life possible under capitalism? And what does a society that prioritizes meaningful life look like during and after this pandemic?

Meaningful life

Whether facing a pandemic or otherwise, humans are capable of contemplating their own death. This awareness of one’s mortality motivates the acquisition of those material necessities that perpetuate life: the collection and storage of food and water, the construction of shelter, and the cooperative organization of people to accomplish these tasks—the beginning of society. But an awareness of death also engenders questions of meaning and purpose. Why do we exist? What is the meaning of life? However, as Fischer (2020 : 2) explains, ‘When people ask about the meaning of life, they are not typically wondering about the purpose of human life in general. Rather, they are asking about meaning (or meaningfulness) in human life. What makes an individual’s life meaningful? What features make a human life more (or less) meaningful?’ Notably, questions about meaning in life direct attention toward attendant concepts such as alienation, suffering, misery, morality, and premature death—concepts that have, albeit unevenly, been addressed by geographers (Lopez and Gillespie, 2015; Orzeck, 2007; Proctor and Smith, 1999; Smith, 2000; Tyner, 2019).

In traditional moral philosophy, human action is explained as a consequence of either rational self-interest (hedonism) or moral reasoning. Through the former, humans are understood to behave in ways that maximize their happiness. Through the later, humans act in accordance with normative frameworks of good and bad. Following Wolf (2010) and Morrison et al. (2013), we propose that meaning in life emerges, in part, from a relationship with something outside oneself; a care and concern for the well-being of objects, people, institutions, and environments that cannot be fully explained through either hedonistic self-interest or moral imperatives. Indeed, we find the human response to COVID-19 replete with examples of a collective search for meaning.

Care and concern abound in the daily efforts of first responders and essential workers who place themselves in danger; in the seemingly simple (but often complex) task of staying home; and in the myriad material and discursive outpourings of support—charitable contributions, volunteering, and sacrifices of time and resources. Perhaps more controversially, we see care and concern expressed in the ‘COVID populism’ that drives many protestors who are desperate to resume a job, reconnect with loved ones, and heal the shattered fragments of life-as-it-was-in-February. Still others show care and concern when they flaunt public health warnings out of an unswerving obedience to the President’s brand of division politics. Popular and political responses to COVID-19 raise the uncomfortable prospect that care and concern may be directed toward destructive ends—harmful for oneself, for society, or both. But do all relationships of concern produce meaning in life? If not, how can we distinguish from concerns that are constitutive of meaning and ones that aren’t?

To be aware of one’s possible death is to be aware of the possible deaths of others. Furthermore, with shared mortality comes the realization that our lives are dependent on the actions and inactions of others; for the provisioning of food, water, and the avoidance of threats to our well-being. Likewise, certain actions we may take, or fail to take, could lead to the deaths of others. Framed in the positive, the manner in which we choose to produce our own lives may either complement or hinder the reproduction of others’ lives. From this, we offer that meaning in life is cultivated through those actions and inactions that advance and do not inhibit the life and well-being of others. In this way, the reproduction of meaningful life—not just biological life—can be understood as a social good.

Meaningful life under capitalism?

Is there a universal or transhistorical meaning in life? Or, conversely, is the concept of a meaningful life mediated by one’s material conditions—the requisite necessities for the production and reproduction of life itself? Following Orzeck (2007), Rioux (2015), and Tyner (2019), we situate our understanding of meaningful life within historical materialism. To begin, there is the ‘natural’ body, the living organism that must find food, water, and shelter to survive. There is also the ‘laboring’ body, that entity ‘engaged in the social production of material life by metabolizing nature through labor in order to meet human needs and survive’ (Orzeck, 2007: 500; also, see Rioux, 2015). Together, the dialectic of the living, laboring body mediates the reproduction of both life and society. Thus, any attempt to theorize meaningful life must be grounded in particular political economies and their attendant social relations.

This begs the question: Is meaningful life possible under capitalism? The COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the deliberate and unnecessary dichotomy forced on society between public health and the economy. Without gainful employment, we risk homelessness, starvation, and disease; in essence, our vulnerability to premature death is intensified. In response to policies promoted by the Trump Administration and several (mostly) Republican governors, we have been confronted with a Hobson’s choice of two equally—and potentially fatal—options: go back to work in unsafe conditions and risk exposure to a deadly virus, or stay home and get fired, thereby losing both income and health insurance.

Capitalism precludes a meaningful life for many because exploitation and the ever-present specter of premature death are built into the racialized and gendered organization of capitalist society (Laurie and Shaw, 2018; Pulido, 2016; Tyner, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic has not altered the logic of exploitation or premature death, it has merely exposed and amplified it. Of course, premature death is antithetical to a meaningful life not just because it precludes living, but because the very threat of premature death—made tangible by increasingly utilitarian political rhetoric—shifts attention toward the securing of bodily survival and away from the pursuit of a meaningful life. We are witnesses not only to the ravages of a pandemic and economic crisis, but the gradual unfolding of a crisis of indifference, one in which the plight of the poor and vulnerable are neglected and ignored. Alienated society eschews an ethic of care that would make meaningful life possible. Instead, it cultivates protests that demand public allegiance to the market’s false profits.

Prioritizing meaningfulness

Through alienation and the commodification of life, capitalism perverts and displaces empathy. It hijacks our care and concern and redirects them from worthy pursuits toward objects and ideologies that pay no meaningful dividends. It leads us into actions that obstruct, curtail, or violate another’s ability to experience meaningful life. Under an ethic of care, these actions are unjust. Indifference, intolerance, and the structures that reproduce them must be deemed unworthy of such care. Until these structures are abandoned, we will continue to feel hunted—if not by COVID-19, then by a society that has made the premature death of some essential for maintaining its parasitic way of life.

A meaningful life is only possible within a form of social organization that provides opportunities for the flourishing of all people, not some at the cost of others—that is, one that fosters meaningful life by making empathy its top priority. Such a society sees no dilemma between saving lives and saving a way-of-life. Indeed, unlike today’s corona-economists, it sees these as one-and-the-same.