THE POOR AND THE NEW NORMAL

By Daniel Franklin E. Pilario, CM



 [This is an unedited paper delivered at the DAKATEO Online Colloquium, 13 January 2021. I am posting it here for the benefit of people who were not able to attend, and for those who did to continue discussing.]

Introduction

In this tentative essay, I would like to do two things. First, I would like to problematize one word which has gained currency during the pandemic – the word “normal”. This is the “new normal”, people say, so we better adapt, the church included. Second, this new normal and the process of becoming normal (“normalization”) is seemingly necessary but it actually also excludes, victimizes and marginalizes the poor, as we experience it today. I feel that we need to examine these now taken-for-granted categories before we start rethinking theological themes and ecclesiological praxis. This is a necessary prolegomenon (discursive introduction) to theological reflection.

I will divide this essay into four short sections: (1) the new normal; (2) the process of normalization; (3) the plague and quarantine: a case study; (4) the Philippine response to the pandemic. To avoid long reading, I split into is a series for four parts.

  1. 1. The "New Normal"

I have read this in a newspaper somewhere. But it looks like this idea is all over: “As the world prepares to resume its normalgrind, people across the globe will have to adapt to the new normal way of doing things.”

At the moment these are the things equated with the new normal: face masks, social distancing, hand washing, alcohol, temperature check, contact tracing slips, online classes, work from home, online Christmas parties – activities which were not common or even unthinkable like foregoing the Sinulog or Nazareno – but have become possible or necessary, in short, they have become “normal”.

However, what is often hidden in the new normal discourse are also some realities: closure of small businesses and loss of work, fear and suspicion, depression and anxiety, high prices and hunger, corruption and repression of dissent, incompetence and impunity, etc. These things have become normal, too, and we are socialized through media that we accept them.

At the start of the pandemic, this government projects a war. The distinct police uniform, check points, high-powered firearms, curfew – all these project a war on human consciousness – war against “corona virus”.

But the “war against the virus” slides into the war against terrorists, communists, indigenous peoples and, earlier, drug addicts and pushers. Here, different fields coalesce into one – medical field, military field, political field, etc. With their thousand and one rules combined – some of them funny and irrational (like the infamous motorcycle dividers or bringing marriage contracts when you have a backrider, etc.) – tell us that we are at war. If you want to survive, obey. No questions asked. This is the new normal!

  1. 2. The Process of Normalization

But what is “normal”? How does the process of normalization happen?

Let me quote Michel Foucault, the famous French philosopher, in his book Discipline and Punish: “The “Normal” becomes an instrument of coercion and power imposing not only necessary standards, but also limits, hierarchization and surveillance”.

As we know, Foucault studied “normalization” as an instrument of power in its emergence around the onset of the 18th century. He studied the symbol of the panopticon and the shifting concept of penal law, the standardization of education and the establishment of normal schools (ecoles normales) in the training of teachers, the shifting concepts of mental illness in an age when all should be rational, etc. In all these, Foucault wants to argue that normalization – with surveillance as one of its elements – has become a mechanism of power at the start of modernity. As people praise the modern to be our liberation from the abuses of the medieval ages, it also ushers in new oppressive powers.

The “Normal” becomes a principle of coercion, an act of social discipline – classifying us, locating us in hierarchies, segregating people imperceptibly, even as we are made to believe that we belong to one homogeneous body. By becoming “normal”, we are conformed to one and the same model – in our time, we are made to believe that we belong to one and the same democratic space. But we are actually coerced to “subordination, docility, attention in exercises, and to the correct practice of duties and all the parts of the discipline. So that they might all be like one another”.

If we had longer time, it would have been beneficial to trace the development of the concept from the mentor of Foucault – Georges Canguilhem – on the concept of the “Normal and the Pathological”. As historian of science, Canguilhem problematizes the concept of the pathological and the “normal”. Who is sick? Who is normal? These are not clear-cut categories.

Echoing his mentor, Foucault writes: “If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal; if you are abnormal, then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.” For example, in a heterosexual world, homosexuals are deviants, thus abnormal, thus pathological. Homosexuality has long been considered a sickness. Now we know that this conflation is deadly and catastrophic.

  1. 3. The Plague and Quarantine: A Case Study

What actually proves helpful to my point today is Foucault’s research on the shifting responses to social diseases, in particular, leprosy and plagues. In the Middle Ages to around the beginning of the 18th centuries, the European solution to leprosy was exclusion. The lepers were cast out “into a vague, external world beyond the town’s walls, beyond the limits of the community,” “cast out into outer darkness,” as it were. The exclusion of lepers was “accompanied by a kind of funeral ceremony during which individuals who have been declared leprous were declared dead.”

The marginalization process was also equally applied to criminals, beggars, deviants, children and the “mad”. An example is the “Ship of Fools” where all people considered 'mad' were herded into a ship and made to sail to a point of no return.

In the beginning of the 18th century, however, the exclusionary model was gradually replaced by the quarantine model – in this case, the quarantine of the plague victims. The process is very familiar to us: all people must stay in their own homes, if possible, in one’s own room; the city was divided into districts under strict surveillance of inspectors; names were listed and daily reporting were made; police patrol the streets and as they pass by, persons had to appear by their windows, those who did not were considered sick; house to house disinfection, etc.

There was an observable shift -- from expulsion and exclusion (of the leper) to inclusion and surveillance (of the plague victim). While in the medieval society, a certain part of the population (lepers, beggars, mad) were labelled and expelled, in a modern society, what you see is a bureaucratized surveillance of space “within which each individual is constantly assessed in order to determine whether he conforms to the rule, to the defined norm of health”.

Upon further investigation, the same process happens in the “panopticon” prisons and “normal schools” – these are subtle techniques of State power to make everyone subject to the “norm”. But instead of using brute force like in the Middle Ages, subtle power of surveillance gets to be imposed on bodies, thus, naturalized, corporalized, normalized.

It is this bureaucratic normalization process that was later applied on the poor in other countries like England during the Industrial Revolution. When the poor threatened the health of the rich in a cramped up urban space like London, they needed to segregate people into their their "proper" spaces. They also subjected the poor to medical controls – compulsory vaccination, low cost medicines for the poor, segregation of residences – not so much to care for the poor as to protect the rich and maintain the labor force...

  1. 4. The Philippine Response to the Pandemic

I tried to recover Foucault’s historical research (archeology of knowledge) to bear on our present response to the pandemic. Let me forward some tentative observations.

First, in Foucault’s research as in today, a dominant field encroaches on another supposedly to solve its problem. The military-political approach to a medical problem as in the pandemic is a characteristic of modern society – lockdowns, surveillance, house to house searches. You can hear the same today – “gamot hindi bala”; “tulong hindi kulong”.The rule of the (ex)generals, not medical experts or, to call it with another name the "politicization of science" - describes what is presently going on. I was really amused to read Foucault come alive again – strict observance of rules forcing people to live in their own “bubbles”. But, in fact, we are not as serious as Foucault’s “surveillance society”. While this government is strict with the protocols on some sectors, it is lax with others. Remember the mananita? Another example: are we serious with the medical certificates for travel? Doctors only take your your temperature and they sign. If modern surveillance is precise and meticulous, the Philippine version is haphazard and whimsical. It is just for show, a hypocritical show of power.

Second, let me venture further. In Duterte’s response to the pandemic, what we have is regression to the medieval model. While modern surveillance was instituted to eliminate brute force reminiscent of medieval tyrants, Duterte’s rule is regression to medieval power by hunting down addicts, communists, dissenters, indigenous peoples; its purpose is archaic – “to purify the community”. To approve the Anti-terror Law in the middle of the lockdown, to restore to office people who have been seriously charged (Aguirre and company); to buy a more expensive vaccine from China which is 50% effective using people’s money and forcing it on people’s lives is to bring society back to medieval power – where the king is king; and he is accountable to no one but himself. This is not even benign monarchy; it is crude barbarism.

My last point: In this play of power, the poor are the usual victims. As the African proverb goes: “When the elephants play, it is the grass that die.” Foucault tries to unmask impersonal power in modern society. But whether it is the Ship of Fools, the expulsion of lepers or quarantine surveillance, it is the poor who are the real victims. It is always them who are eliminated by brute force or subtle State machinery or both combined – the first one to be detained from minor law infraction and the first one to be killed without hope for justice; the last one to be tested; the last one to be vaccinated with a vaccine not their own choosing.

And this is the new normal?

Conclusion: Towards Reflexive Theologizing

To end, let me invite everyone towards reflexive theologizing. Before we theologize, we need to step back and think again. Any theological insight on the “new normal” without an analysis of its discursive power – no matter how creative and necessary – is at best naïve or at worst an enabling of the victimizer, a complicity with the poor’s victimization.

To be concrete, the euphoria over online sacramental presence, or praise for the wonders of online education, or new ecclesiologies brought about by the “new normal” in fact also marginalizes and excludes the 70% of the population who have no internet, gadgets or even electricity. And most often, it is these people who are easily killed, expelled and excluded – either by the State’s brute power or the coercive manipulations of the capitalist machine.



Daniel Franklin E. Pilario, CM
St. Vincent School of Theology
Adamson University
danielfranklinpilario@yahoo.com
01.13.2021