China and South Korea’s most unique methods are not only unthinkable but meaningless outside new conditions. Socialists wanted universal health care and conservatives wanted closed borders anyway. Puritans and shut-ins, consciously or unconsciously, might imaginably have wanted the same of social distancing. But nobody was asking to spray the sidewalks with trucks. Wearing masks and checking temperatures constantly, in non-epidemic conditions, is diagnosed — correctly — as hypochondria or OCD. Most modern medicines are combinations of chemicals that do not occur in nature and would make no sense to combine if one were not sick. Entire pseudoscientific industries such as naturopathy exist to resolve this cognitive dissonance. This must be carefully distinguished from the notion of a permanent state of emergency, which is of course fascism. Embracing the specificity of cure to crisis means there can no longer be such an “emergency”. It means embracing the terrifying contingency of nature — embracing contingency and nature as one — an equation that renders equally impossible the “domination of” and “return to” nature, the tension between which the Western “environmental” movement is founded on. If climate crisis is now locked in, as most scientists agree, our choices are now between “permanent emergency” and this.

Photo by Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash

Such a conception of nature might be more conventional in Asia than it is here. Chance, which is opposed to physis (natural regularity) and thus techne in Greek thought, is considered part of the organic unity of zi ran (the coherence of Tao) in Chinese thought. Yuk Hui grounds Chinese technological thought in the Taoist philosophy of nature, in which Tao is present in everything without separation between natural and anthropogenic elements, and all forms are subordinate to a primary unifying flow. Hui explains the failure of ancient China to develop modern science, despite its superior advancement in several technical disciplines, partly as the result of a failure to think of nature as governed by fixed laws rather than a holistic principle.

Photo by Nenad Spasojevic on Unsplash

While the conception of fixed laws was necessary to build up the conditions of industrial society, its opposite may be more applicable to a rapidly changing “natural” world upset by industrial society itself. This rapid change is especially evident in China’s recent history, with almost a century’s worth of modernization taking place within the past thirty years. Hui sees these two historical factors as conflicting: the new “technological time-axis characterized by speed, innovation and military competition” is “totally separated from any [moral] cosmology”. But the resounding success of China’s pandemic response — even more so in the less authoritarian Asian polities — as ecological policy points to a “harmony” emerging between them.

Photo by Pang Yuhao on Unsplash

While Landian accelerationists and increasingly mainstream voices have touted China’s authoritarianism, or wider Asian norms of “collectivism and compliance”, as the secret to their success in dealing with the coronavirus, the “cosmotechnic” integration of science, politics, and nature may have more to do with it. While the politicization of science in China (in a form specific to authoritarian politics) first appeared as a dangerous delay to its response, it has more than made up for it by accelerating a politically seamless rollout of scientific measures. In the West, particularly America, on the other hand, completely separate scientific and political agencies get in each other’s way at every turn. Bureaucratic dysfunction and political procedure halts the production of nearly every necessary technology; meanwhile, scientific bodies “objectively” prescribe authoritarian political measures and economically disruptive social ones as if they did not occur in a social context at all. “Locking down” select aspects of civilization by itself does not guarantee a “return” to “nature” will follow. COVID19 challenges the West to learn this before climate change makes it even more obvious.