A Talk for the Simone Weil Center on Pandemic and Technocracy
Photo Credit: Marchutz
Fr. Stefano Zamagni, FSCB
Our current circumstances represent something novel in history: Covid-19 is the first epidemic that post-modern society has faced. We are offered a propitious opportunity to consider what conception of man, what concept of his relationship with his fellow men and with God, has guided Western society in the last fifty years.[1] What anthropology is presupposed by the reaction of the political world and cultural elites to the first epidemic of the technological age? This is most basic question that we must address.
At the beginning of the epidemic, some journalists and intellectuals, especially in Christian circles, pointed out that we were observing the defeat of science, which had to retreat and recognize its own powerlessness. This was a naive and superficial reading of the events, to the extent that it identified science only with what happens in research laboratories or hospitals, as well as with the technological tools that scientific progress provides.
In truth, the mobilization of science and bio-technology in the face of the epidemic has brought to light the true face of post-modern Western culture. In fact, the decision to impose a general lockdown is not an indication of the defeat of science, but entirely to the contrary. It shines a light on the common presupposition that, confronted with any serious issue, only science can possibly offer a way forward. When science was (temporarily) in difficulty, there simply could be no other possibility but to stop all of public life and wait for scientific and technological development to take its course, offering the necessary conditions for a return to life. The lockdown, which was then followed by the vaccine, marks, then, the victory of a scientistic and pragmatic anthropology according to which man’s life is determined by his ability to adapt to ever new conditions through ever-new inventions.
A distinctive feature of pragmatic scientism is its practical rejection—followed later by the intellectual denial—of ancient and medieval metaphysics. In fact, the latter is accused of describing the world in a static way, as it is populated by beings whose essence appears fixed and unchangeable. In the eyes of modern man, however, nothing is established once and for all and indeed the negation of what is presently given is actively sought. In the spirit of pragmatism, disease and death, which humanity has to deal with in a special way during a time of epidemic, are conceived as “problems to be solved,” instead of “realities to be faced.”[2] The question about ‘how’ man can overcome this or that problem crowds out the ‘what’ question—in other words, it crowds out the question: ‘what is the reality that we are confronting in the first place?’ Since nothing is ‘fixed,’ this ‘what’ ends up being continuously built and rebuilt.
From this point of view, the time of epidemic presents itself as a propitious time for the development and the progress of science, and, indeed, it is also such for all the other aspects of bourgeois society. The modern mentality is characterized by the search for novelty as a value in itself, so much so that present and past lose meaning except in so far as they serve as material for progress toward that perfect society that is always in the process of coming into being. Homo progressivus will either deny, or otherwise exploit for his own ends, anything that does not adapt to the unstoppable flow of history. This evolutionary-progressive mentality has now established itself as all-encompassing. Indeed, it is only with great difficulty that this mentality can even be named, much less questioned. Scientism and technocracy constitute the ocean in which we swim, so much so that the possibility of framing human existence in any other way hardly comes to mind.[3]
Far from allowing man to live in a true and good way, restrictive measures such as lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination, prevent man from being what he is, i.e., a creature that is called to love the other and ultimately to love God. The logic of technocracy makes obsolete the subject’s answer to the objective call to love. Man is a relational being, who fulfills his nature from within the constitutive relationship with God that expresses itself in the spiritual being’s relationship with one’s own body and with the other.[4]
I will focus the rest of my presentation on the anthropology that made possible the initial ideological commitment to vaccination, and which continues to legitimate it. Two reasons, it seems to me, justify this choice of subject matter. Firstly, the current political debate on vaccine mandates is founded on the technocratic anthropology that, however implicitly and silently, underlies both science and politics. For the sake of brevity, I will address the scientific question and not the political one. Secondly, it would be interesting to understand why the need for vaccination has, from the very beginning, oriented Western society’s response to the epidemic, to the point that other treatments developed at an earlier stage, though likely of use in treating the disease, have been marginalized. In short, I suggest that both lockdowns and mass vaccination pursue the same universal, undifferentiated, pre-emptive strategy.
That this is the case emerges through an initial consideration of the covid-19 vaccine. My point is that this particular vaccine more than others is a technological device, and thus it enshrines a technocratic understanding of the human being. It is the ultimate result of post-modern culture’s way of addressing the current epidemic. A vaccine of this type is not, properly speaking, an alternative to lockdowns and restrictive measures; rather, it is the ideal instantiation of the anthropology underlying these very same lockdowns and allied restrictive measures. It is the most powerful weapon in modern medicine’s “war against the virus,” in the context of modern man’s “war against suffering and death.” It is viewed as the best instrument of self-salvation on man’s part. In other words, the overall judgment on the anti-Covid vaccine cannot be severed from a judgment on the mentality that has filled it with meanings that, in their turn, find expression in the production and the functioning of the vaccine itself.
Many physicians and politicians have been affirming the necessity of vaccination as the only available instrument against the novel coronavirus. As a matter of fact, the use of the vaccine is viewed as the ideal therapy from the perspective of a technocratic society. Today, it is clear that the anti-covid vaccine is not a vaccine in the traditional sense of the word. It is an mRNA therapy, which reduces the symptoms of the possible contagion but does not prevent individuals from being infected or from transmitting the virus to others. My point is not that the mRNA vaccine has no therapeutic effect—it appears that it does—but that it achieves its ‘therapeutic effect’ by acting upon the body in a violent and manipulative way. A technological device is different from a technical tool insofar as the former defines the relationship between subject and object in terms of power, that is to say, independently from the final and formal causality of the object itself. Both subject and object end up being instrumentalized for a purpose that is imposed from outside of their mutual relationship, so that this latter is not only affected but deeply modified in its essence. In our context, the object on which the instrument operates is not the virus or the disease. It is the immune system and therefore the human body upon which the vaccine acts.
Traditional ways of vaccinating do not necessarily establish a manipulative relationship with the human body. Both live and dead vaccines introduce the pathogen in a mitigated or deactivated form, and nonetheless this is enough to cause an immune reaction. This kind of vaccine appears as a technical tool, insofar as its working depends on what we may term the integral goodness of the body, the body’s own health and self-healing capacity. In this case, the vaccine depends upon the body’s capacity to generate a natural immunity and preserve its own organic form, that is, its health. Instead of a subject-object relationship of controller and controlled, we see the dynamism of a dialogue between two “subjects.”[5] The body is not dumb matter, but rather it is human inasmuch as it has the “attention” and the “freedom” to take care of its own wholeness. Therefore, vaccination and medication in general are human when they are the extension of the human body’s immune system. Vaccines and medicine become inhuman when they take over the body’s task by introducing other goals that are extrinsically imposed at the expense of the object’s “subjectivity.”[6]
The bio-technological innovation that has been introduced with the mRNA therapy causes an interesting reversal of the relationship between nature and culture. It is not the vaccine that depends on the human body, in which case it could be defined as an “immunizing instrument” insofar as it is the extension of the body’s “self-immunizing” capacity. On the contrary, the acquisition of natural immunity is bracketed out and even totally neglected, so that the body is made (mechanically) dependent on the vaccine and defined as per se non-working and working only if and as “vaccinated.” Note that the political debate, in the U.S. at least, tends to ignore that there are millions of people who have ‘naturally acquired immunity.’ Only the vaccines are admitted as ‘therapeutic.’ Clearly enough, the ultimate reference of medical science—at this point reduced to the prevention of diseases that the patient does not actually have but may contract—is no longer the healthy body, that is, it is no longer the body whose parts constitute an integral whole insofar as they are ordered according to the form that is always-already provided by the whole itself. Rather, the reference point is the corpse, or at any rate the ill body, meaning, the body that has no form or is de-formed to such an extent that it needs a re-ordering intervention.[7]
Rather than educating the body to be what it is in its wholeness, it appears more efficient to “order” the body how to behave according to a cause-effect relation that reduces bodily activities to mere physiological functions. Medical doctors—often unwittingly—approach the body as if it were a machine that needs to be fixed. The problem of modern medicine is the “bad anthropology” on which its success is founded. Its modern presuppositions deny the truth of ancient and medieval anthropology, which instead would provide the categories that medicine itself needs to look at the body as living matter. On the body’s life, i.e., on its intrinsic goodness, ultimately depends medicine’s very success. Man’s physical existence is from the get-go an integrated and ordered whole. The body grows organically precisely because it is informed by a soul, that formal and final causality which allows the organism to face potential pathologies.
A scientistic anthropology silences the “subjective” features of the human body, thus preventing the person from growing in adherence to the truth of her own being. As in the case of lockdowns, masks, and social distancing, the anti-Covid vaccine enshrines a non-relational anthropology, one which defines man’s historical existence regardless of the constitutive relationship with his own body, with others, and with God.
The systematic use of genetic therapy—and the mRNA vaccine is an example of a gene therapy, although at the lower end of the scale of what is possible—puts modern medicine, at least theoretically, in the position of being able to defeat every disease, or at least to appear to do so. Potentially, human suffering can be eliminated from human existence. That is to say, this can always be presented as the coming utopia toward which medical inventions are oriented. It will be enough to treat the body with regular treatments for each of the possible anomalies that can surface. From within this perspective, death is reduced to a mere possibility among other possibilities at man’s disposal, from among which man may ‘choose,’ with death itself being something that is continually put off until the physician (or the patients’ relatives) chooses to set a limit. This model, however, is the absolute negation of being’s intrinsic goodness in its actual reality, along with the pursuit of becoming’s infinite possibilities. The acceptance of such a paradigm represents a red flag that points to the technocratic character of modern medicine. Once the sense of nature as “being born” and hence “being made,” is lost, human action becomes limitless ‘self-determination’ or rather, it ends up being determined by technological progress. If, by contrast, medical practice respected the person’s organic form that is realized from within the body’s relationship with the soul and hence, ultimately, with God, even biotechnology could make a genuine contribution to the intrinsic end of the body itself, which is its self-healing capacity in order to preserve life.
NOTES
[1] I follow Augusto Del Noce in considering the students protests in the 70s as the reference point to establish the historical beginning of post-modern, affluent society. For the reasoning which leads Del Noce to this conclusion, see his The Age of Secularization.
[2] This is the language used by authors like S. Talbot and L. Kass, in response to the pragmatist one that has been dominating the scientific discourse since John Dewey’s Reconstruction of Philosophy.
[3] In his work, Dr. M. Hanby has repeatedly pointed out this difficulty that is unavoidable in our discourse on technology as “mentality.” On this see also, George Grant’s Technology and Justice. The fact that much of current debate on this topic happens on the Internet is but the clearest evidence of the point that I have just made.
[4] The fundamental thesis of my talk takes its lead from the assumption that, from a theological and anthropological point of view, there is nothing in the world that is neutral. The reason for this is rooted in the revelation that man is a created being, created in the image of God. Man defines himself as a subject in history from within this original relationship. On this see in particular, D. L. Schindler’s Ordering Love.
[5] My emphasis on the subjective characteristics of the object comes from reading the work of Robert Spaemann on what “nature” is.
[6] It is well known that vaccination often aims at purposes that are not strictly medical but rather social. Modern medicine is so entangled with the political and social organization of the modern city, that it has often enabled the instrumentalization of the human body, which has been progressively deprived of any intrinsic dignity. I do not want to deny that vaccination, as any other human enterprise, necessarily has social consequences, but these will be admissible to the extent that they respect the physical and spiritual integrity of the body—i.e., its health in the authentic sense of the word—as an end in itself and not as a cog in a social mechanism to preserve society’s well-being.
[7] H. Jonas has brilliantly made this point about the “dead body” as reference point of studies in biology, starting from the fundamental dualism between matter and spirit. In this regard, see his The Phenomenon of Life.