Social Boycott seems to be a unique form of social solidarity, which must be taken very seriously for the well-being of human's community as a whole. No pursuit could be serious enough to outweigh what is nearer and existential to human's species. Every creature or organism has a survival instinct; I don't know what really has happened with humans. They are concerned for all the commercial stuffs without considering what they are doing with their family members and fellow. Humans must, at least, pay heed to their instincts, if reason is baffling them to enter into the public sphere, so as to ensure a safe future for human as a species.
My little conscious or unconscious journey towards ethics and metaphysics compels me recast Gandhi and Kant for contemporary time; two greatest philosophers and practitioners of ethics, whose vision of cosmopolitanism may have profound effects on the existential questions of our age. Especially, when the world community is interested in the narrow vision of politics.The most dangerous threats are hanging out there, i.e., nuclear warfare and climate change. Possessive Individualism (McPherson) of our age has reduced human as a social being into "isolated silos", selfish and parochial, who is ready to sacrifice the whole humanity for the sake of self-pleasure and sadistic pain. Right to be "left alone" is the perfect catch-phrase, justifies what is happening around us, here and now. Perhaps, Adam Smith once wrote that for a Man the pain of little finger is more unbearable than the suffering of whole humanity. It appears to be true even today in the era of globalization. It has become "the human nature", if we remember Thomas Hobbes and his nasty Leviathan.
Ethics in sense of theology or metaphysical ethics were already killed when Nietzsche declared the "Death of God". It was a unique existential event in the history of humanity; A parable which was a symptom of freedom as well as crisis. Max Weber exclaimed, if you read his sociology with interest, "in the iron cage of rationality" the "disenchantment of the world" became a "real reality"! George Lucas called it "reification", Hegel named it "alienation", Michel Foucault finds at that very moment a possibility of "post-human" reality, an epoch came as an immense possibilities with peril of "gaseous identity" (Deleuze and Guattari).
Immanuel Kant, preceding the epoch of modernity, preferred hypothetical speculation of soul and God, even if it was not kept within the realm of knowledge. He gave that space to the faith even if it could not be strictly led to knowledge. The antinomies like, if God is or is not was impossible to prove, so he chose to have faith over the issue which cannot be rationally explained. He was aware about the absurdity of the instrumentalist vision of life, in which means is elevated at the cost of everlasting absurdity. Gandhi, a powerful critique of modernity, on the other hand, remained a devotee to the organic process of life. His experiment with food, village life, and non-violence do reflect his sincere commitment towards an embodied life. For him, "modernity was a good idea", not more than that.
Our faith in society disrupted due to so many other reasons as well, including the emergence of left and right wing totalitarianism, aftermath of the First World War and during the second World War, in form of Nazism and Stalinism. That moment in history was very crucial in the sense that that rupture ensured legitimacy for the neo-liberal political agenda and propaganda, which culminated into mass culture, commodification, and degradation of life in form of alienation from the nature and society as well. Karl Polanayi, the noted economic historian, coined very suitable term for this institutional development, "Market Society".
Political thinker, for example Milton Friedman, Walter Lipaman, Ludwig Von Mises, Hayek, Robert Nozick, etc., questioned the very possibility of society, and preferred individual as a rational agent, who could be instrumental in scientific discoveries and artistic-literary developments. He questioned, if at all society exists? And even if it exists, not anywhere but only in mind. For them, it has no utility in pursuit of excellence.This sense of "anarcho-individualism" was furthered in the name of 'autonomy', an abstract Kantian philosophical category, which dismantled every sense of community-life habituated in nature.
Nobody can deny that endemic or pandemic is not a new phenomenon. Not at all! However, we are caught in Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, Covid19 is transmitted and transmissible with ease, especially knowing the fact that this world is a globalized village, which was not the case 100 years ago, on the other hand, village is suffering from extreme strife so much so that the possibility of a single family, united as a whole, is a distant possibility, forget about the village as a single unity. This unique situation will definitely test human's capacity to survive, and particularly, their capacity to adapt what Darwin hypothesized in his great work, The Origin of Species. Whatever will be the outcome, but one thing is certain as per the stoic wisdom, "what does not kill you, make you stronger"(Friedrich Nietzsche).
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