State of the Faculty Address 2020

23 mechanisms. Between sovereign governments, there have been pleas for cooperation to produce and share anti-pandemic resources, from face masks and ventilators to drugs and vaccines. These phenomena represent what Žižek has called “communism”. He believes that only this new form of governance will save the world from the barbarism of unmitigated capitalism as we have known it. The French philosopher Michel Foucault would likely have shuddered at imagining where Žižek’s proposed “communist” shield against global barbarism brought on by COVID-19 might lead. From as early as the 1970s, Foucault had worried about the growing drift towards a “disciplinary society”. In particular, his nightmare had centred around Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” as an expression of how utilitarianism could be tightly weaved into everyday life. In fact, Bentham saw his panopticon as being applicable to, amongst other settings, lazarettos which are places of quarantine for those afflicted with the plague. Apropos COVID-19, Bentham’s utilitarian ideal meets Foucault’s worst fear in what have become common surveillance practices for pandemic control: QR health codes informed by social media footprints, “immunity passports” by routine pervasive testing, location-enabled bracelets to enforce quarantine, contact tracing apps, and so on. Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled the opening chapter of his new book, The Virus in the Age of Madness , “Come Back Michel Foucault – We Need You!”. He deplored the “sealing of an incestuous union of the political and medical powers” that had been made plain by this pandemic, questioning the deification of medical technocrats and exhorting the public to think clearly about the appropriate loci of authority and power in a free society. With that, we medics have been put in our place! Au contraire, many of us believe that a pandemic is precisely when doctors should rise to the challenge of providing science- based, sapiential leadership for sound policy making. To this end, I remember well Rudolf Virchow’s proclamation: “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale” or Sun Yat-sen’s “Medical affairs and hygiene are truly the roots of the affairs of men”. As far back as almost three millennia ago 《國語.晉語》〈醫和視平公疾〉 already recorded that 「上 醫醫國,其次疾人,固醫官也。」

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