When Human Bonding is Splintered
Jawhar
Sircar
New Indian Express, 8th January, 2021
After the unending months of 2020, we now feel a bit relieved as
we assume, with or without basis, that the worst may be over. As we click the
‘pause button’ of Covid 19, it may be appropriate to attempt an interim
appraisal of the effects and the devastation caused by a microscopic
mass-murdering virus.
Day after
day, we had noted with palpitation as casualties mounted, but now we discover
that the toll in India of around 1.5 lakh is the same that we lose to accidents
or respiratory diseases or stroke each year. In fact, it is actually less than
one fourth the number killed annually by heart disease or by deadly cancer.
But, then, this Chitragupta-style of reporting to Yamraj about the relative
strike rate of his gruesome weapons is not quite a pleasant task. And, the fact
that the world’s most advanced nation fared much worse than us is certainly not
a valid reason for even muted schadenfreude.
Those who take a more magisterial view of life have noted with alarm how
precariously ‘sociability’, the very pillar that holds up the human race, was attacked mercilessly by the virus. Its
long-term impact may be worse than just death-tolls. The crux of this
apprehension is that if ‘social distancing’ and ‘work from home’ are here to
stay, our human engineering may need complete re-wiring. History tells
us that the desperate need to survive against all odds, especially in the face
of much more powerful carnivores, led our hominid ancestral cousins, Homo
Erectus, to form hunters’ groups — some 18 lakh years ago.
Since then, there was no turning
back — as the human family evolved from ‘being the hunted into the hunter’.
This induced our forefathers to aggregate in ever-increasing numbers, to band
together for hunting and sharing the life-saving meat of jointly killed
animals. As Louis Liebenberg
has demonstrated in his seminal essay in the ‘Journal of Human Evolution (2008)’ on The Relevance of
Persistence Hunting to Human Evolution, it was this community
bonding that ensured that humanoids survived. Of the latter, our species,
the Homo Sapiens, proved most adaptable and innovative and hence we advanced,
while all other analogous lines became extinct. Many feel that the subsequent
adoption of vegetarianism is really an evolutionary improvement. What everyone
agrees is that ‘pure vegetation food’ is surely India’s invaluable gift to the
world, like yoga and the zero.
For
these 18 lakh years, inter-human communication and team-cooperation have been
our primary binders and it is this ‘community core’ where the virus hit the
most. Though segregation of the infected has been practiced earlier, in
epidemics like the more deadly plague, never before have so many countries of
the world been infected simultaneously and ‘locked-down’ together. Scourges
come and go, but this Covid-driven atomisation of human society is viewed as
more devastating than the calamities that rocked us in the twentieth century.
We lost 30 crore people to Smallpox; nearly 8 crore died during the Spanish flu
of 1918-20 and a similar shocking number perished in the Second World War.
During and after these devastations, hands joined together to mend the world
and life bounced back. But this time, both ‘hands’ and ‘together’ are viewed as
dark messengers of death and every person is suspect.
We
may, however, need to ponder further before declaring that Covid marks the end
of the world we were born into. This world had already started ‘ending’ a
decade ago, when faster internet connectivity and the smartphone took over. One
noted with concern, long before Covid had arrived, that physical proximity was
surely being trampled upon by virtual communication. The character of social
bonding was altered beyond redemption. In every social gathering, we noticed
how after a few moments of culture-induced bonhomie, even the best of friends
or the closest of family members simply looked away from each other. They were
totally engrossed elsewhere — with their mobiles. Lockdowns actually restored,
to some extent, closeness within the much-neglected family or immediate groups,
as everyone pooled in with basic chores and living rooms became livelier. Since
work became site-agnostic and menial help was blocked out, many young and
terribly busy persons went back to their parents, who double-doted on them
because they had hardly ever got them so close for so long.
Bruce Daisley, author of The Joy of Work, has discussed ‘personal
satisfaction’ in the context of jobs and challenges, while anthropologist James
Suzman looks differently. In his Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, Suzman
emphasises that keeping ourselves occupied is more essential for
retaining sanity than labour-saving, productivity-obsessed technologies.
Basically, we now have certain critical issues to ponder, in the context of
Covid-imposed and digitally-driven fragmentation of human society. Can the
scattered ‘new
normal’ substitute
the warmth of the primal ‘hunting group’ and its worthy successors? Will the virtual
world and its task/accomplishment fixation be able to satisfy the basic craving
of humans for company and relaxation? Would these dispersed humans be able to
avoid the disastrous effects of anomie and depression that afflict those who
de-link from emotionally essential ‘social
solidarity’ groups. Only time will tell us how adroitly this distanced
digitally-united universe tackles these concerns — by re-inventing itself.
(Please Click Here to Read the article on New
Indian Express Website)
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