While nursing his gravely ill godson in the spring of 1876, Lewis Carroll wrote the 141-stanza absurdist poem "The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in 8 Fits". In the plot, a crew of ten sets out on a sea voyage chasing an elusive creature, a Snark – an allegory for the search of happiness. The venture does not pan out well – the Snark eventually turns out to be a highly dangerous Boojum who has the power to make things "softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again."
We watch, spellbound, as our elderly, our jobs, and our lifesavings softly and suddenly vanish in the spreading contamination. As we do so, we might ask: is this more than your typical natural disaster? Might this be the end of the way we live, of the way we produce, consume, and navigate our existence? In brief, can capitalism – a society that venerates private initiative and the pursuit of profit, a society that believes prosperity and happiness rest on “on buying everything in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest” (as the historian Eric Hobsbawm famously put it) – can such a society survive the coronavirus?
Can a society that believes prosperity and happiness rest on “on buying everything in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest” survive the coronavirus?
Here are two possible scenarios.
