Context
The Covid-19 epidemic has become a historical event. It has entered the global imagination as an act of crisis with lack of a literary imagination and absence of an ethical presence.
About
How do we retrieve a sense of ethics?
In search of new ethics
Citing two brilliant examples
1. From the book of Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree
Explanation: Simard shows that the idea of productivity, which we treat in hallowed terms, is instrumental, short-sighted. A tree is an act of cooperation. A science which sees trees as a lesser order of being is illiterate. Ecolacy has to be a part of ethics and science. We have to relate to nature in a different way. What is true for the tree is true for the earth. We need an earth ethics which tribes produced in sophisticated myths. We need an ethics of nature that mimics its generosity, its reciprocity, its celebration of difference. We need to immortalize the ethics of a tree as part of our constitutional ethics. We need myths and cosmologies, which are more life-giving than rights in a contractual sense. Ethically a tree, like any form of life, is a sacrament.
2. Ethics of memory: story occurred in a little town called Chirala, a weaving town close to Hyderabad
Learning: It is only civil society that can create this new dialogic ethics, an ethics that looks at different sciences, theologies, languages, to create life-giving sensibility. Gandhi had a sensibility about it. He talked of accounting (money), accountability (honesty), responsibility, trusteeship and sacrifice. Ethics has to embrace all and go beyond cost-benefit within this world. We go beyond the language of monoculture efficiency and show that an ethics of diversity is far more progressive than the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest. This search for a life-giving ethics has to be panarchic, different at different levels of life. One needs to alter the desiccated norms of professional ethics. The feminist reading of the body and nature should educate scientific ethics. It needs to be more than a collector of table manners.
What can be done?
Conclusion
Literature has to create a new language, a poetics of ethics, to challenge the idioms of progress. Thus ethics, in this sense, becomes both resistance and innovation, adding to the life-giving diversity of democracy.
Verifying, please be patient.