Author: amelia.damy.19

Which one leads to the other? Is political unrest the popular reaction to a critical situation? Is political unrest rooted in the population’s anxiety, anger, miscomprehension of a current, consequential events? I will endeavor to explain how political unrest can be considered as a crisis in itself, themselves leading to  even more impactful, destructive crisis. If it is unclear how these two are correlated, it is undeniable that they are intrinsically linked together in a cyclical relationship.

Here are a few pictures of the so-called “political unrest” in a wide variety of countries:

First of all, it is important to define the scope from which I will look at the word “crisis”. The word crisis is overused and misunderstood. Its etymological root coming from the Greek word “krino” meant “separate”, “choose”, “judge” or “decide” (McIoughlin). It leads us to believe that the word crisis depicts a state in which the human being, able to reflect on what is happening around him, has the possibility to deliver a critical analysis of his surroundings. The very word crisis is inherently linked to the existence of a living soul with cognitive capacities.

Political crisis, economic crisis, sanitary crisis, psychological crisis, and especially existential crisis show us how the term is multifaceted. So multifaceted that, pushed to its paroxysm, it has lost all meaning. The term “crisis” only highlights that there is something wrong and undefinable that our lack of vocabulary pushes us to use the term “crisis”, a term to which everyone in the room will nod to, because they might not really know what we are referring to, but they know that there are many things they would like to change.

As far as crisis is an individual conception, the anxiety it creates can be transmitted to others, and especially with the rising influence of medias, as Carlo Caduff suggested in What went wrong: Corona and the World after the Full stop” (2020): “today’s fear is fueled by mathematical disease modeling…nervous media reporting”. There can be a general sense of crisis, a consensus on how people feel about a situation. However, it is possible to live in the denial of a crisis, just like Jim Callaghan was hoping to live in denial of the winter of discontent.

So here we have decided that a crisis arises from a common anxiety, or perhaps anger, that is decupled with the number of people exteriorizing it. If it can be seen solely as a human conception (or misconception) of a situation, it definitely arises from unavoidable events coming from an overpowering force: a government, a natural disaster, a disease…

In the context of HIV/AIDS, the sanitary crisis definitely led to political unrest, even though it has only been acknowledged quite recently. In both movies Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme) and 120BPM (Robin Campillo), the crisis is portrayed very differently.

Here is an actual footage of “Act Up” at Notre-Dame in Paris in the 1980s, an organisation working to the lives of people  infected with HIV and demonstrating in order to make the government change their policies and offer more funding for their cause.

The movies are strikingly different in the way they represent HIV and the people affected by it, and these diverging conceptions, even though they might highlight cultural differences, reside in the fact that both movies were released at different periods of time in the history of HIV: Philadelphia was released about ten years after the discovery of the virus when it was still unveiled in spiralling questions, whereas 120BPM is almost thirty years older. The HIV “crisis” seen in hindsight is utterly different, especially considering the swings that occurred in the public opinion, concerning a disease that was initially believed to be a “gay cancer”.

In Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett’s death caused me a lot of uneasiness: if the music (Wake, Neil Young) is undeniably dramatic, the chatter and laugher of all relatives attending the funeral seems out of place: children are running around, representing the renewal of life, adults look at a screen representing Beckett’s innocent childhood, a child not infected with HIV and this is how it ends. There is no crisis represented here, an individual has died but Demme decided to focus on this individual, forgetting all those left alive and in need of help and reaction from the rest of the world.

This is the last scene of the movie “Philadelphia” by Robert Demme

However, 120BPM shows the crisis from the point of view of someone acknowledging the existence of the crisis. And in these eyes, it does seem like a crisis affecting the whole world, creating in the audience a stronger reaction, and a will of revolutionizing the world and its institutions.

Two extracts of the Gay Pride Scene, a completely different portrayal of the population’s reaction to the HIV crisis. The first one is represent a gay pride scene, the second is the invasion of a medical research laboratory by members of Act Up. 

Therefore, we come back to the idea that the notion of crisis is highly subjective and that it is possible for one to avoid it completely if it does not impact one’s immediate environment.

To come back on the main question reflecting on how political unrest and crisis are intertwined, it does seem that in such a context, the original, sanitary crisis evolved in political unrest. However, this political unrest triggered a multitude of crisis to arise; the sanitary crisis exacerbated a political crisis which, in turn, would have dire consequences on the system.

Joe Biden’s election shows how political unrest can be the crisis in itself. His election as American president in December 2020 does not seem to be a crisis in itself: most people around the world seemed to be rejoicing about it. However, some of Trump’s supporters did not seem to agree with this election, creating a huge political crisis as the American democracy was jeopardized:

Here are two videos showing briefly what is referred to as the “Capitol Hill riots”

I strongly believe this political crisis is due to a more deep-rooted, insidious phenomenon: social medias and algorithms.

It used to be believed that there is nothing more unbiased and straightforward as statistics. Numbers do not take opinions into account, making them a pure reflection of reality. However, as the overarching use of statistics, and especially varying incentives hidden from the common human being looking at them to prove a point was a precursor for statistics’ loss of credibility. So as much as we used to believe that algorithms were a succession of numbers, the incredible development they have undergone now show us that they do take opinions into account.

We all go on social medias hoping to find the truth. But these social medias were not created to give us the truth. They are not non-profitable organisations working for the common good. They are working for themselves, selling our unconscious biases, our tastes, our personalities to other companies. We are the product, not the consumers. Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snapchat are free apps for us, because we are being sold. And to keep us on their social media as long as possible, they have to feed us with information we will agree with, facts we like, so that they can sell us more. They will never give us the counter-opinion of our beliefs, they can’t create frustration, they can’t afford to let us turn off our phones.

The constant political unrest the world has been undergoing in the recent years is a crisis in itself, which is due to misinformation and media manipulation. The crisis here is embodied by political unrest. The HIV/AIDS crisis was a precursor of political unrest leading to new crisis. Therefore, crisis and political unrest are entangled together in a myriad of different ways that are undefinable. This is probably due to the uncertain definition of the word “crisis” that is being overused, but I believe that recent events and the manipulation we are being the victim of are blurring the differences even more.

It used to be believed that there is nothing more unbiased and straightforward as statistics. Numbers do not take opinions into account, making them a pure reflection of reality. However, as the overarching use of statistics, and especially varying incentives hidden from the common human being looking at them to prove a point was a precursor for statistics’ loss of credibility. So as much as we used to believe that algorithms were a succession of numbers, the incredible development they have undergone now show us that they do take opinions into account.

This graph represents how democrats and republics are more ideologically divided than ever in the past: when people used to be quite “centrist” in their ideas, they are becoming more and more apart.

The main problem with algorithm is that they are so complex and difficult to understand that we tend to accept them without asking questions. And their complexity added to our lack of knowledge about them and our fear of getting into it leads us to be incredibly naïve about the damage they can cause. Watching the documentary the Social Dilemma frightened me completely and made me delete every social network app from my phone. The way these algorithms feed themselves with my unconscious biases is alarming. The way they manage to deconstruct my thoughts and analyse things I don’t even know about myself is terrifying.

We all go on social medias hoping to find the truth. But these social medias were not created to give us the truth. They are not non-profitable organisations working for the common good. They are working for themselves, selling our unconscious biases, our tastes, our personalities to other companies. We are the product, not the consumers. Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snapchat are free apps for us, because we are being sold. And to keep us on their social media as long as possible, they have to feed us with information we will agree with, facts we like, so that they can sell us more. They will never give us the counter-opinion of our beliefs, they can’t create frustration, they can’t afford to let us turn off our phones.

A video giving us more details on how social medias triggers political polarization.

Therefore, the fact that we are constantly being comforted in our own beliefs, the fact that we are fed with information that suits us, statistics that match our opinions ultimately leads to a polarization of the world. People don’t listen to each other anymore, we are all fighting on different levels: it is no longer a battle of political opinion, but a battle of political information. The frustration and ponderation we should be encountering on social medias, allowing us to reflect and build strong arguments, as well as empathy and retrospective is something that is done through heated discussions, but by then it is already too late. We have incorporated our statistics, the dialogue is impossible.

 

I believe it will be difficult to change the system, as we are so dependent on these social medias. We would rather have false information than none. So we need to lose our naivety and look further, dig deeper into the information we are looking for.

We need to develop our empathy to be able to discuss and curb the overarching polarization of the world, and it is only after this palingenesis that we will be able to hope for a more united world.

I believe that if humanity has lasted for so long and has grown and developed so much, it is because we have implemented human rights. Human rights are now the basis of our society, but they should not be taken for granted, and neither do the right to healthcare or adequate food.

In many ways, we (the western world) have tried to push aside Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest, we have tried to build a world in which disabilities are no longer a hindrance to living a normal life. Killing, inflicting torture and inhuman treatments, raping, stealing, enslaving: we know these things are wrong, it is deep-rooted in our society that these actions result (most times) in punishments. And we believe it is normal.

But we have to take in consideration that it has not always been that way, and that the animal world, which we used to be a part of, are living under completely different rules: they simply don’t have any.

A picture of a cat playing with a mouse: in our world, this would be considered as torture. Two thousand years ago, it could have been normal.

The human world used to be as ruthless as today’s animal world, but we have developed into an evolved, better, fairer world. But this is infinite. Rights are fluctuating all the time as we discover new things, make scientific progresses: soon, there might be a world in which abortion (arguments for that here), gay marriage, gay adoption, IVF, or even divorce, are human rights everywhere around the world. And after that, it could be cloning, being able to choose the sex of a baby or its physical appearance…all this sounds completely crazy now, but two hundred years ago, nobody would have believed that women could have the right to vote, and four hundred years ago, nobody thought slavery could ever come to an end.

The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, in its first article of the 1998 Additional Protocol on the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings states that “any intervention seeking to create a human being genetically identical to another human being, whether living or dead, is prohibited”. These prohibitions are based on “concern for human dignity and the moral status of the human embryo”. However, as a commentary on “Human Cloning and human rights” by Carmel Shalev says, these prohibitions constraint two other fundamental liberties: freedom of reproduction and freedom of science (you read this paper here).

 

 

The battle for different kinds of human rights: some believe women's rights are more fundamental than the rights of an embryo, whereas others believe an embryo is a human being and taking its life away is therefore breaking a human right.

 

Because they are not inherent to humanity, and because what makes a “good world” is something that is highly subjective according to one’s own beliefs, there is a constant battle occurring between what could be considered as human rights. Ultimately, adding rights to one lead to restricting another’s.  Human rights should not be taken for granted; some are more set in stone than others, but we, as individuals, have to choose our own battles on where we want to stand, on which rights we believe are the most fundamental in order to build the society we want to see.

I would like to discuss the differences between the movies Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme) and 120 BPM (Robin Campillo), two movies dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that struck the world in the 1980s. The virus is believed to have caused more than 32 million people throughout the world. The movies are strikingly different in the way they represent HIV and the people affected by it, and these diverging conceptions, even though they might highlight cultural differences reside in the fact that both movies were released at different periods of time in the history of HIV: Philadelphia was released about ten years after the discovery of the virus when it was still unveiled in spiraling questions, whereas 120BPM is almost thirty years older. The HIV “crisis” seen in hindsight is utterly different, especially considering the swings that occurred in the public opinion, concerning a disease that was initially believed to be a “gay cancer”.

 

I think it is quite important to underline why homosexuals were targeted more than people with heterosexual practices: indeed, if it is easier to transmit the virus through anal sex because of a higher risk of transmitting blood, we have to be reminded that at that period of time, STDs were not common, and even if they were, they were not common enough to break the taboos built around them. People were protecting themselves during sexual encounters to avoid unwanted pregnancies: the contraceptive pill was liberalized, condoms were too, but there was no reason for people who did not have that risk to be careful. Homosexuals were not as careful as heterosexuals because they did not believe unprotected sex could have consequences on their lives.

Here are a few pictures representing gay stigmatisation in the 1980s 

 

As James Agar underlined it in our seminar, there seem to be a misunderstanding, or something was not well-portrayed in Philadelphia, or at least not as well as in 120BPM. In 1993, public opinion still believed it was a disease only affecting gay people. Even though the movie does represent a woman who caught it through a blood transfusion, her pristine looks and healthy appearance was not striking enough to make the audience believe that she was ill. The focus is on Andrew Beckett, the gay man, whose scars we only get so see once. There is something strangely politically correct in Philadelphia, a determination in avoiding to shock the audience; they were probably afraid of the backlash it could cause on a population refusing to face reality. As James Agar seems to believe, Philadelphia was Hollywood’s good deed, a form of charity allowing them to feel good and move-on unremorsefully.

 

And indeed, it would have shocked the population: if 120BPM had been released in 1993, I doubt it would have received as good a critic as it did a few years ago. People, in times of crisis are unable to face it properly and prefer to be oblivious to it rather than face the Tantalian truth of an unchangeable dire situation. But watching 120BPM today is easier, because the situation has passed and we are not asked to react and fight against an incommensurably prominent problem.

The HIV-related stigmatisation of gay people ended progressively and seemed to retreat as scientific progresses were made.

To conclude, I believe that a common reaction to a crisis is ignorance, and this is clearly seen during the HIV/AIDS crisis: people lacked knowledge and preferred to rely on the hope they would never be infected because they couldn’t, rather than protect themselves and acknowledge the disease’s lethality. Acknowledging it meant giving way to fear and panic and in times of crisis, it is easier to try to avoid it.

We tend to believe that revolutions are solely triggered by inappropriate political ruling. From a contemporary point of view valuing democracy as the best of all political regimes, there is a shared opinion that monarchy and absolutism were banned because of deep-rooted privileges granted to a ridiculously small part of the population, a theory coming from Christianity with no system of proof of its legitimacy. However, even though the French revolution in 1789 had a pivotal importance in human rights, it is nevertheless essential to mention that its first Republic lasted no longer than 12 years, before it became an Empire under Napoléon. Napoléon’s title was not questioned in France. He was a hero. However, the Parliament the republic had installed in order to avoid repeating mistakes of the past were destitute from all power. Napoléon was not different from Louis the 16^th.  Indeed, there was a frame to his power which he had earned. Napoléon was not born emperor, but does it justify a return to a system which, even though it could not have been referred to as a monarchy, was not far from its institutions? And why did the system collapse, if it were to come back to a similar type of leadership several years later, but one that was praised?

 

 

 

Here are two paintings, the first one portraying Louis XVI, a painting by Jean-Baptise-François Carteaux. The second one represents Napoléon “Bonaparte franchissant le Grand-Saint-Bernard”, by Jacque-Louis David. 

It is undeniable that both painters have a very different look on the two leaders, Consul or monarch. 

 

 

Out of all the reasons why the “monarchie absolue” was to fail was the plague of 1720 striking in Marseille. First of all, the political reaction to the plague in order to protect the population from it had a drastic impact on the way the government was seen. If the “third state” was paying taxes in exchange from protection from the nobility, these taxes were of no use here, as the government could not protect them from a disease. The action they took consisted of reducing the people’s freedom, by organizing lockdowns. Needless to say that if national lockdowns have a dreadful impact on 21^stcentury’s household, the consequences were even more dire for 18^th century people relying solely on themselves to survive, the government providing no type of insurance in order to help those in need.

 

The government asked people to burn wood inside of their houses to purify the air, which only led to wood shortages. So many people had died, and so many were banned from practicing their jobs, trade was slowed down because of new controls imposed by the municipalities.

Ultimately, famine, cold and disease led to political uprisings. The third-state, influenced by the great ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire and many other Enlightenment writers were given the impulse to start rebelling. Thousands of citizens congregated at the Château de Versailles asking for bread, to which Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, is known to have answered (even though we are not too sure of the veracity of these lines) “If they can’t have bread, they should eat cake”, digging their social differences and privileges even deeper.

In conclusion, the monarchy had to collapse and the plague occurring several decades earlier definitely had an impact on how events unfold. Napoléon was drastically different in his ruling of the country, however, he did not bear the blame for the plague on his shoulders.

 

Bibliography: 

https://www.pourlascience.fr/sr/histoire-sciencesla-medecine-entre-epidemies-et-politique-sous-la-revolution-20221.php

https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/2020/04/15/economies-morbidite-peste-marseille/

https://journals.openedition.org/cdlm/10903

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0078-0?WT.feed_name=subjects_sustainability

https://www.herodote.net/5_octobre_1789-evenement-17891005.php

It is commonly acknowledged that the Black Death has killed between 30 to 60% of the world population. However, it is forgotten that, as well as suffering from the Black Death, some communities were also undergoing the loathing of the rest of the world.

The irrational and unexplainable origins of such a destructive disease highlighted mankind’s necessary need to find culprits – or its use of the irrational to inflict pain upon those they already hated.

For several reasons, it appeared that Jewish communities did not suffer as much from the Black Plague as the rest of the population: one of them is that they did not use the water from common wells of towns and cities. Jews were isolated in ghettos, reducing infection rates, and as their religion promoted cleanliness more than any other, such as hand-washing and bathing, the disease did not attain them as much as other communities. Resentment against the Jewish community was very strong in a time of religious uncertainty; people believed God’s anger had inflicted such torment, and in their minds, God could only be mad at the Jewish community who negated Jesus’ existence.

Thousands of Jews were killed or committed suicide by fear of dying in atrocious circumstances. Most were burned alive, it is therefore impossible to know the precise numbers of the Black death’s consequences on the Jewish communities.

From a 21^st century’s point of view, these mass murders sound barbaric and senseless. Whether the killers truly believed the Jews were responsible, or only used the Black death as a reason to perform what they had always wanted to, we tend to believe that with our contemporary scientific knowledge and moral acuity, such horrendous acts could not happen again. But it can.

The Asian population, whether from China or any other Asian country, has been suffering a huge amount of racism and xenophobia in the past year, to a proportion that Wikipedia now has a page listing all xenophobic and racist consequences of the pandemic.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_xenophobia_and_racism_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic)

The difference between today’s pandemic and the one happening seven centuries ago is that we belong to countries not allowing us to perform such terrible actions. Even though most of the population has been educated on moral grounds, we have seen that some of us still tend to use the pandemic to excuse forms of violence.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/coronavirus-attack-london-racism-jonathan-mok-b1782233.html

The coronavirus outbreak and our reaction to it show that we have not changed much since the 14th century. We are lucky enough to have built several boundaries, to have received an education, and most importantly to have institutions banning this kind of behaviour. But we have to be careful. It seems like mankind needs to find culprits for something that does not, or in today’s case does, have a scientific explanation. We keep repeating the errors of the past, in a milder way, but we are. We have to keep increasing our awareness, and others’ so that each time, mankind’s consequences on mankind in the middle of a world cataclysm are diminished, lessened, until they cease to exist.

Bibliography

https://indianexpress.com/article/research/coronavirus-black-death-how-jews-were-blamed-for-the-plague-and-massacred-6406282/

Diane Zahler (2009). The Black Death. Twenty-First Century Books. pp. 64

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the_Black_Death#cite_note-:0-4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

 

The word crisis is overused and misunderstood. Its etymological root coming from the Greek word “krino” meant “separate”, “choose”, “judge” or “decide” (McIoughlin). It leads us to believe that the word crisis depicts a state in which the human being, able to reflect on what is happening around him, has the possibility to deliver a critical analysis of his surroundings. The very word crisis is inherently linked to the existence of a living soul with cognitive capacities.

Political crisis, economic crisis, sanitary crisis, psychological crisis, and especially existential crisis show us how the term is multifaceted. So multifaceted that, pushed to its paroxysm, it has lost all meaning. The term “crisis” only highlights that there is something wrong and undefinable that our lack of vocabulary pushes us to use the term “crisis”, a term to which everyone in the room will nod to, because they might not really know what we are referring to, but they know that there are many things they would like to change.

The term crisis was the victim of an abuse of language. In Chinese, it embraces a broader definition: crisis,  “危机” is the addition of the words danger and engine. And danger is the possibility that something bad or undesirable will happen. Desire is personal and entirely subjective. Therefore, a crisis, whether it is felt by numerous people, or only by one individual, cannot be depicted in a universal way.

However, a general situation, emphasized on with anxiety inducing forms of communication, can lead to a general crisis, in which everybody seems to be drowning in the same fear of one particular danger. Or so does Jim Callaghan said in his interview in 1979, during the Winter of Discontent which put England in the worst recession it had ever known. To him, there was no crisis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX06xqN6710). The unnecessary tumult was coming from the media. But to the rest of the UK, there definitely was one.

As far as crisis is individual, the anxiety it creates can be transmitted to others, and especially with the rising influence of medias, as Carlo Caduff suggested in What went wrong: Corona and the World after the Full stop” (2020): “today’s fear is fueled by mathematical disease modeling…nervous media reporting”. There can be a general sense of crisis, a consensus on how people feel about a situation. However, it is possible to live in the denial of a crisis, just like Jim Callaghan was hoping to live in denial of the winter of discontent.

But the word crisis does not seem to match the current situation that has caused drastic changes to our lives. The crisis in itself does not imply that there is a change in our lifestyle, but denotes, at most, a sense of uncertainty, anxiety and questioning. Its subjectivity suggests that it is limited in the proportions it can take.

Coronavirus has metamorphosed our lives irreversibly. Calling it a crisis undermines the effects it had on us. Its unstoppable spread has caused a lot of destruction and violent changes. Cataclysm is the word matching these terms. I believe that we are undergoing a global cataclysm. Not a crisis, a cataclysm. In a crisis, many of us could have acted just as this man on Supertramp’s music album released in 1979. But we can’t.