Mark Kingwell Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His most recent books are On Risk (2020) and The Ethics of Architecture (2021).
philosophy
I
started thinking about risk and community many months ago, and I have pursued those thoughts at greater length in a short book about risk under pandemic conditions.1 But the spur of that now-distant moment of first thought, pre-pandemic, was a remark made by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2019. This was when riskto-community still meant mainly ideological and perhaps resource-based threats, not primarily epidemiological ones. Mr. Putin said that “the liberal idea has become obsolete.”2 I took this to mean that the putative president-for-life of Russia wanted us to understand that liberal-democratic institutions and the rule of law, at least four centuries in the making but even older in the Roman legal tradition, had been rendered obsolete by the populist-authoritarian movements of the early 21st century. In my mind, the 400-plus years of liberal thought has been about creating community through inclusion of the Other – accommodation of different religions, genders, races, geographies, rather than the exclusion so dominant in other ideas of “community” based on bloodline, cultural uniformity, and shared belief (indeed, most commonly, the shared belief that shared bloodline was even a feature of life). It strikes me that Putin was correct about then-current “populist” political movements, which were in fact not populist at all but rejections of the liberal idea and hence regressive attacks on the idea of Otherness. The Putin Doctrine (if we can grant such a grandiose title to such a minuscule notion) poses this choice for humanity circa 2020: do you want people to come inside the magic circle of protection and potential affluence, or do you want to keep them out? National borders are the traditional thresholds here, as we were forced to see in Mexico and elsewhere by the depredations of the American president who demanded that a wall be built and also that someone else pay for it. This is fortress America, of course, but much magnified. Here is how writer Ken Kalfus describes the situation in his brilliant novella Coup de Foudre (2015), which fictionalizes Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s 2011 sexual assault of a Manhattan hotel housekeeper: Widowed, infected, illiterate, and impoverished, Marianna sought a more humane life for her child in the sanctuary of the West. The sanctuary is heavily guarded, of course; from the outside, it looks more like a fortress, with high-tech, weaponized ramparts. Every day thousands throw themselves at its walls in leaky boats that wash up on the beaches of the Mediterranean, or by trekking through the American desert, or by boarding airplanes with vague dreams and papers that will be contemptuously scrutinized – dreams and papers both.3
It is, or was, also the architectural basis of many parts of Europe. One does not have to see the dead body of a child refugee, washed up on the shores of a Mediterranean coastline, to appreciate the stakes here. The walls are high, and grow higher by the day. But that was then and this is now. The global pandemic of early 2020 was no respecter of borders – though its effects were felt disproportionately, as always, according to race and class. What then of community, and the very idea of inclusion? Before, the main problem was walls: some figurative (financial, cultural), some material (border fences, passport checkpoints). Now the problem of community becomes one where walls and border, indeed thresholds of all previous kinds, simply do not apply. Let us, then, consider the idea of community under these conditions – which are not so much new as more vivid, which is to say, more willing to limn the contours of reality. Immunity One’s thoughts and memories turn, maybe unwillingly, to Thomas Robert Malthus’s “principle of population.” There is geometric increase in population, Malthus contentiously argued, but only linear increase in food. Hence there would be an inevitable eventual famine, or a resource scarcity of some other disastrous