My wish to write this book arose in the 2020, roughly around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a Sinologist, I cannot ignore the fact that the coronavirus first appeared in China, and thus in the cultural-linguistic area which represents the core of my personal and professional interests, and is essential for the fundamental contents of my research work.
For me, being a researcher working in the field of Chinese philosophy, epistemology and ethics, this situation, which is still ongoing as I write this, raises many questions, which are first and foremost connected to the reasons for this global crisis and the conditions that it has brought about. The fact that the cause of the start of the epidemic in Wuhan, a city with a population of several millions, was probably related to poor hygiene in a food market, one dealing with live (and partly wild) animals, triggered in many, and especially in the West, a wave of outrage over the “primitivism” and supposedly “low level of culture” of the people there. This was accompanied by an unprecedented rise in Sinophobia and new racisms, connected with unconscious prejudices and a lack of knowledge regarding the more complex factors that define all cultures and the individuals who live and function within them. Essentialist views of the “Other”, and a generalized understanding of “Others” as the bearers of certain characteristics, have once more surfaced in Western societies and manifested themselves in new forms of xenophobia, based on old racist ideas.
However, the issues of race and racism were not the only matters which, as a Sinologist, attracted me to this research, and which awoke in me reflections that eventually led to the writing of this book. As the COVID-19 infection spread around the world, becoming a pandemic, it soon became clear that it was precisely China and other regions of the Sinitic cultural-linguistic area, rather than Euro-American nations, that were more efficient at stopping its spread, and even eliminating the virus.
The research on which this book is based clearly shows that when looking for an answer as to why this was the case we have to refute the ungrounded claim that it was because of the alleged autocratic practices of Sinitic states, which act “from top to bottom”, and can impose strict measures due to the traditional “obedience” of their populations. In this book I proceed instead from the supposition that the reasons for this greater efficiency was more likely to be found in Confucian relational ethics, which do not proceed from the notion of an isolated individual, and within the framework of which the contextualized self and society are placed in a mutually complementary relation.
From the same transcultural perspective, the present book also deals with a number of other problems, linked to the political and ethical dilemmas that arose when confronting the pandemic. Here, I have to mention different culturally conditioned relations with regard to digital control and its cosmotechnological foundations. In this context, the book also deals with questions regarding the future of enlightenment values, humanism (and the humanities), as well as the fate of privacy and the public sphere. It concludes with a humble hope that we have – in spite of everything – still learned something from this COVID-19 pandemic, and with (perhaps an unrealistic) optimism that somewhere at the crossroad of our multifarious worlds there is still a possibility of a new global ethics, based upon equality, not on sameness.
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