Viruses and Civilizations. The New Impact of Biocataclysms on the Evolution of Sociocultural Models and Civilization Projects

Abstract

The article considers the situation associated with the coronavirus pandemic in Russia and in the world as a whole and its possible consequences for the eco­nomy, politics, and sociocultural processes. The author analyzes the publications that have appeared recently and focused on questions about what the world ex­pects after the end of the pandemic. In the reviews of the topic “The World after the Pandemiс” some optical defects typical of technocratic positivism were re­vealed. The reduction of levels of psychohistory and psychoideology leads to an underestimation of the scale of the disaster and the breakdown of communica­tion between the regulator and the population. The “historical size” of events of this kind is set by the great plague epidemics in their influence on the way out of the Middle Ages into the Modern civilization. Such comparability confirms the appeal to images of emptiness in art and philosophy. The symbolism of “life on pause” speaks about the scale and possible irreversibility of changes, at least in local civilizations. Thus, the coronacrisis undermines the foundations of the resource society and the “civilization of oil” – the basis of the Russian politi­cal ethnonarcissism. A closed circuit with positive feedback is formed, its swing is fraught with landslide changes and risks with unacceptable damage. Tough clashes with reality strike at the regimes of simulation, political postmodernism in general. Ideas about “political eschatology” and plurality of interpretations of the concept of civilization allow us to discuss the prospects of transformation of the civilizational project in Russia.