Reset or Renaissance: Life, Liberty, and the Quest for Enlightenment in a Post-Covid World - Softcover

Polikoff PhD, Daniel J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938685512 ISBN 13: 9781938685514

Publisher: Portal Books, 2024

Synopsis

Lest we Forget . . .

Reset or Renaissance offers a real-time chronicle of events unfolding during the heated core of the Covid pandemic: the latter half of 2021, shortly after the rollout of the Covid vaccines. The book is no dull factual affair, but an impassioned critical engagement, distinctly literary in style, that offers a broader and deeper understanding of the scientific, sociopolitical, and spiritual dimensions of the Covid moment.

Combining documentary poetics with rigorous analysis of the flood of Covid misinformation, this volume records one American citizen's concerted attempt to make intellectual and moral sense of a tumultuous time that shook the foundations of the world.  

The historic drama surrounding Covid continues to unfold. Daniel Polikoff aims to translate knowledge of the recent past into a vision of the future guided by truth rather than illusion, perspicacity rather than prejudice, and conscience rather than calumny.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Joseph Polikoff, PhD, is a poet, translator, and independent scholar. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and his Diploma in Waldorf Education from Rudolf Steiner College. In addition to work in numerous literary journals and anthologies, he has published two collections of poetry (Dragon Ship and The Hands of Stars) as well as Parzival/Gawain: Two Plays, his edited translation of a dramatic version of the Grail legend. Dr. Polikoff has taught literature in Waldorf schools and shared his passion for Rilke in a wide variety of venues, including the Festival of Archetypal Psychology at Notre Dame (where the idea was born for his book In the Image of Orpheus); the San Francisco Jung Society; and seminars in literary circles. He has also taught at Sonoma State University, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

(excerpt)

In late summer of 2021, Covid dominated the headlines of newspapers across the globe. Fifteen months after its spectacular entrance onto the stage of world history, fear of the SARS-CoV-2 virus remained intense, palpable, and all-pervasive. The highly touted Covid-19 vaccines had only just been rolled out, and governments pushed policies of mass vaccination with religious zeal. To the political volatility already generated by lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and other elements of official Covid policy was now superadded the explosive issue (beyond controversy for some; the very essence of controversy for others) of the safety and efficacy of the new Operation Warp Speed-manufactured, EUA-sanctioned1 mRNA vaccines.

For many, distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines augured the end of the worst of times. Countless persons had lost loved ones to Covid or (whether they knew it or not) to faulty treatment protocols. Countless others who had been spared that tragic fate nonetheless suffered the consequences of economically as well as psychologically devastating restrictions. No wonder the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines, the newest and sexiest brainchild of the scientific genius that humankind had come to entrust with the holy mantle of Truth and sovereign Power, was met with all the enthusiasm displayed by crowds gathered along the road to Jerusalem to spread palms at the feet of a prophet some two thousand years ago.

Such glad emotion, however, did not characterize every person’s Covid-19 vaccine story. In the aftermath of the rollout, many other individuals were about to confront what for them were entirely unprecedented forms of social condemnation and exclusion. Others, still less fortunate, were soon to be suffering debilitating physical affliction: injury unacknowledged and indeed flatly denied by the medical establishment as well as the public at large.

For these persons, those worst of times were just beginning.

I borrow that phrase, of course, from Charles Dickens. In the first paragraph of his A Tale of Two Cities, a novel set at the onset of the French Revolution, the author employs it in provocative conjunction with its opposite:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.2

It is easy to understand why the Covid moment in history might be viewed as the worst of times. It may be more challenging to imagine a good reason why it might also be viewed as the best of times, or at least the prelude or dawn of such, “the spring of hope” in Dickens’ apt phrase. A very few rich persons, including Big Tech and Big Pharma moguls, might well regard it in that light insofar as their already unfathomable net worth multiplied fantastically as life went off-site and online and governments poured unheard-of amounts of money into vaccine development and distribution.

That, however, is not the sort of reasoning I have in mind.

I am concerned here not with the financial munificence of a few but with the common fortune of the many; assets counted not in bytes and billions but in dollars and cents and, more important, the priceless rights and freedoms that comprise the treasured inheritance of the modern human being and the spiritual estate of every man and woman. It is with regard to the struggle to preserve―and ever more solidly to secure―the fundamental liberties that constitute the dignity of persons and the foundation of democratic society, that we may look to the still unfolding Covid moment as cause for seeing great good as well as enormous evil; increasing light as well as advancing darkness; the real possibility of a new birth or renaissance―a spring of hope and wisdom in the world―even as the dark powers of winter threaten to draw a curtain of ignorance and illusion over the face of the earth, spread wide a blizzard of despair, and blind all vision of truth and grace.

I wish to be clear, from the first, as to my own allegiances as I pursue these urgent, Covid-prompted questions of good and evil, science and politics, truth and its undoing. I do not write as a Democrat or a Republican, except insofar as I do honor the original idea signified by each of those terms. I write as no attaché of any political party but as an independent, self-reliant American and world citizen, a partisan committed to the cause of Truth, Justice, and Mercy.

In consonance with that commitment, this book represents a fit mutation of one I had already begun to write in the first months of 2021, an opus on the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I thus stand and write on the platform of Emerson’s “American Scholar.”

Readers may be surprised to hear the name of Emerson featured in a volume addressing our contemporary Covid World, even if the title of the larger literary project it initiates bears the signature of the movement spearheaded by the Sage of Concord and generally known as The American Renaissance. Yet the very incongruity of the notion that a cultural movement inaugurated almost two hundred years ago might make a critical contribution to the public debate stirred by Covid controversies bequeaths the opus as a whole its title: Reset or Renaissance.

That title poses a question that doubles as a kind of challenge―one that can, like gauntlets thrown down in earlier times, lead to a fatal denouement. Nor should there be any question about the stakes involved in the larger discussion pursued in these pages. We are dealing here not only with life and death issues of public health but with questions pertaining to the constitution of our humanity and our kind’s appointed destiny. Those who know anything of Emerson will recognize that such larger-than-life matters are integral to his philosophy. Emerson, visionary that he was, strove always to fathom the big picture―to see not only the innumerable small reasons that might lead from one fact to another but the “grand and immovable”3 reasons that underlie and set the course of history.

It is the premise of this book that we find ourselves today in the midst of a conflict raging not only over the soul of the nation usually called America but over the fate of the free world. Whether conscious of the fact or not, people find themselves involved in a pitched battle between the disciples of enlightenment and those of might. By the former I mean forces conducive to the maturation of the true genius of humankind and thus progress toward wiser and more compassionate governance of the world; by the latter, I refer to those forces that deny any objective reality to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, preferring to worship at the altar of technological mastery and an all-too-human Will to Power.

Edition details

• Publisher: Portal Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1938685512
• ISBN 13: 9781938685514
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480