Monthly Muse: 3/2026

Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the March 2026 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation

• Weekly Grounding #129

• Weekly Grounding #130

• Weekly Grounding #131

• Our Wars, Their Crises

• Weekly Grounding #132

Contemplation

I published two Special Edition Weekly Groundings this month: one on health politics and another on Iran. I also wrote an article, “Our Wars, Their Crises,” which discussed the effects of the Iran War on the ground in India. Since these items were published, the link among the three has come clearly into view.

On March 23rd, Indian Prime Minister Nadrenda Modi warned the nation that “We have to be prepared just like the times of Covid,” and proclaimed that the “effects of the war will be felt for a long time.” An Indian Express editorial, entitled “As West Asia War Continues, the Zone of Uncertainty Expands,” states:

That Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to invoke the Covid crisis and the need for national unity in his address to the Lok Sabha Monday shows the scale of the formidable challenges ahead: From the severe dislocation in energy supplies to the unprecedented volatility in financial markets, the shadow of missiles over a one-crore diaspora to the over-heated rhetoric by each of the three sides in the conflict that keeps ratcheting up both temperature and pressure…As the zone of uncertainty expands each day, internal adjustments will be needed.

Despite the myriad global upheavals of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, I still believe that covid is the most significant among them. This is not just because of the covid crisis itself, which, taken alone, had massive impacts. It is also because, as Modi’s speech illustrates, covid has become a model for other crises. This is why Handful of Earth continues to feature content on covid and health politics many years after the “end” of the pandemic.

As I suggested two years ago in my essay, “The Era When Nothing Ever Ends,” covid inaugurated the polycrisis regime of the 2020s:

The major crises of the 2020s—including but not limited the covid pandemic, Ukraine War, and conflict in the Middle East—have not occurred as separate, sequential events, but, rather, have converged and compounded upon one another to produce a state of “polycrisis.” This polycrisis throws the stability of the status quo into question due to both the scale and interlocking nature of the increasingly proximate shocks to the system.

By what if polycrisis were the new status quo? While it is too facile to attribute a grand conspiratorial motive to the converging crises of the present, the global ruling class has, at minimum, recognized the pragmatic benefits of sustaining a state of perpetual polycrisis. By keeping the public in an incessant condition of uncertainty about the nature of reality, the ruling class is, paradoxically, able to retain its grip on power over the very global system ostensibly under existential threat from polycrisis.

The Iran War is but the latest addition to this new status quo. It is no surprise that the “the times of covid”—defined in policy terms by lockdowns and mandates—are invoked to prepare the people for an ever-expanding “zone of uncertainty.”

Provocation

“Because we would all prefer to forget the Covid crisis and move on, the following may have already faded from our collective memory. Only a few years ago Australia rounded up citizens exposed to Covid, including asymptomatic people, and shipped them involuntarily to detention facilities against their will. Videos of Australian quarantine centers made their way onto social media before tech censors, at the behest of governments, dutifully scrubbed them from the internet. Many provincial governors in Australia abused their emergency powers: while not every Australian state chose full-throated authoritarianism, several of them did. Canada likewise built detention facilities for infected persons, and the state of New York fought an ongoing legal battle to do so.”

—Aaron Kheriaty, MD, “Follow the Scientism”

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