The aff’s obsession with weighing the plan for “fairness” misunderstands the fact that the way they use numbers fails to be objective. Counting dead people will never capture the humanity of humanity---that dooms their analysis because it will constantly justify reactive measures that favor biopolitical technocracy.

How could humanity be better attuned with the powers of naturing nature, in a posture of co-creation rather than of a reactive technocratic war? Importantly, this is a matter of philosophical health and the answer cannot be primarily logistical – the healing-growth future of humanity does not rely on distributive numbers of vaccine doses. What follows is an exercise of critical speculation concerning the meta-pandemic future of humanity – rather than post-pandemic since pandemics are not likely to disappear and are metaphorically proteiform. We advocate here the possibility of an ontological “regenerative politics” (Haraway 1991), a generative philosophy or “thought in the act” (Manning and Massumi 2014), via the renewal of a shared cosmology based on natural creativity (Whitehead 1929), a life-affirming creative Real that is termed “Creal” (de Miranda 2017b).

Risking the future

Many political decisions during the pandemic were based on the analysis of numeric thresholds and statistics. Such behaviour is an example of Sartrian bad faith in which the past and future are reified to justify a lack of action and vision in favour of reactive measures. It is also a contradiction or logical fallacy since a decision can never be deterministic (otherwise it is not a decision) nor the result of a causal mechanism. To understand this more clearly, we need to examine the problem of the probabilistic knowledge applied in dominant modes of analytic governmentality.

Predictive, data-based, digital, statistic: these terms are today synonym of subjugation. Predictive analytics is defined as “forecasting the statistical likelihood of future trends or patterns [...] on the basis of inferred relationships between variables in recorded data” (Chandler and Munday 2020). Data analytics is “the identification of meaningful patterns within large bodies of data through the use of computers, and the prediction of future patterns, in order to gain insights that improve organisational decision-making” (Ibid). These digital forms of analysis are only possible within a framework of discretisable and decomposable material as primary component; it literally counts dead matter and in pandemic times dead people. Statistical analytics is the dominant approach to organisation and intelligence in our engineer-driven corporations or institutions because it is more easily mathematised as a set of operations compatible with so-called objective decision-making. Decisions justified by what is presented as numeric evidence appear inherently more reasonable to those subjugated, technically-minded individuals who confuse the neutrality of numbers with objectivity in demonstrations and fairness or coherence in interpretation. However, we should not be predicting, but thinking the future of humanity.

If humanity were a verb, how would one conjugate it in the future tense? A first answer springs from the Latin etymology of conjugate: to join together. To conjugate, to unite meaningfully might precisely be what humanity is about. There is a fundamental ambivalence in this root, for the instrument that joins can also be a yoke, a domination device, perhaps even a form of enslavement. On the other hand, a link that joins can also be harmonious, operating as the actualisation of a healthy assembling, figured as a composition, a compatible mesh of possibilities or, in the terminology proposed by Leibniz, a compossibility (Brown and Chiek 2016).

When we conjugate an English verb in the future tense, an auxiliary verb needs to be added, often will and sometimes shall. These two modal signifiers may seem to point towards a middle ground between desire and necessity. I shall because I must: it is my duty. I will because I long for: it is my intention. What do we long for in the longer term? The future of humanity cannot merely rely on a list of objective goals, goals that are quantitively measurable; indeed, such goals leave us not with a future but with a deterministic projection of the past. The human future, as illustrated by the 2020 pandemic, is never certain or standardisable into an algorithmic routine. Each human perspective and generative horizon is singular, partly subjective, possible with various degrees of likelihood, anticipated through processes of imagination, faith, hope, fear, risk or other forms of performativity.

Do we think about the future as a creative horizon, a possibilisation, or do we merely consider it by means of the negation of the past or present? This is a question that engages us, and conjugates our being in the present tense: we care (Heidegger 1962). To think about the meta-pandemic future of humanity is not a measurable abstraction since we are subjectively concerned with the thought: it is a matter of philosophical consideration. In this care for the future of humanity, there might be a touch of worry, a zest of love, elements of desire, perhaps an epic energy, the struggle of duty, a joyful hunger, or a dormant nihilism. Nihilistic and life-affirming energies are not fully incompatible: the most enthusiastic utopian narrative might articulate its vision by contrasting it with a negative path, a tragic alternative in which we could speak, as is often the case in climate change discourse, of a future-off humanity, a humanity without a future, or a humanity living as if the future did not exist, as if we were taking a day-off from the future.