Severe communication disruptions
From the beginning, the corona crisis was characterized by communicative schizophrenia, which took its starting point from the perception of the relationship between security, freedom and solidarity. For example, lateral thinkers loudly complained at demos that one was no longer allowed to speak their mind in an alleged “GDR 2.0”, flanked by professors who wrote in the high-circulation leading media that they would not be heard. Politicians, on the other hand, have managed to constantly appeal to people’s responsibility for themselves and others and at the same time deny their ability and willingness to do so through sometimes absurd rules of conduct. The brief ban on sitting on a park bench was one of the most grotesque examples. Mirroring this, despite all the serious courses and deaths visible to everyone, especially among the elderly, there was an unprecedented level of stupidity and irresponsible gossip about an allegedly completely harmless virus or targeted mass murder by vaccination, which undermined trust in the Some people’s ability to take responsibility is put to the test.
therapy recommendations
This state of affairs has contributed to the widely lamented polarization of society. Now calls for a “processing” of the pandemic are booming. The many lessons learned papers from science or the various political advisory committees are obviously not meant by this, but something overarching, aimed at the overall picture and social interaction, a committee of inquiry or an inquiry commission. In this way, the impression arises, the relationship between security, freedom and solidarity should be brought back into balance in a kind of group therapy.
In April, for example, there was a call for such a commission on a website called “Pandemic processing”, with prominent names such as Gerd Antes, Klaus Stöhr, Wolfgang Streeck and Jürgen Windeler, including all sorts of more or less lateral thinking spirits such as Boris Kotchoubey, Ines Kappstein, Christoph Lütge, Günter Kampf, Martin Hirte, Markus Veit or Ulrike Guérot. In this case, that may be appropriate: if the aim is to overcome divisions, the various sides must be involved. Incidentally, Sucharit Bhakdi, Wolfgang Wodarg or Harald Walach are not (so far) among the signatories, but that would perhaps overtax the socio-therapeutic possibilities of a review commission.
The appeal states, among other things:
“An open, critical and constructive “debriefing” is an indispensable part of any professional crisis management. In addition to the objective learning process, the integrative effect of an open debate on civil society is also essential.
(…)
In the interests of social peace and in the interest of a constructive follow-up to the pandemic, we would like broad, non-partisan support for the establishment of such a commission. The follow-up to the pandemic also requires considerable, and also self-critical, commitment from the German scientific community. Last but not least, dealing with the pandemic must be understood as a task for society as a whole. The people in our country must be involved as subjects with their own voice.”
Why not. Among other things, the initiators want to talk about error culture, the organization of research, scientific policy advice or communication between politics and authorities. About everything, so to speak. Above all?
Heribert Prantl answers a little more focused in the Süddeutsche on 13./14. Mail to the question “why a review is so urgently needed”:
“Perhaps people have learned something wrong in the three years of the crisis; they may have gotten used to the fact that severe restrictions on fundamental rights are part of the strategies for coping with a crisis and that even what is disproportionate in major crises is considered proportionate. This could continue with other catastrophes, such as the climate catastrophe. Coming to terms with the Corona period therefore includes self-assurance as to what the innermost, weight-proof core of the free constitutional state is.”
Prantl also sees that freedom alone has too little integration and brings human dignity into play as a foundation:
“Human dignity is inviolable, never and under no circumstances. This dignity also includes respect for the core of private life; it must remain beyond any consideration. That is the true content of a fundamental right to security: it is the security of people in the law.”
It is true that human dignity is touched upon every day in our society, in nursing homes, in meat factories and other low-wage areas or in refugee policy. But of course that doesn’t speak against Prantl’s demand.
The whole thing and the elephant…
What is rather irritating about these all-encompassing demands is that they are conspicuously incomplete politically in one respect, or perhaps reticent. Manfred Wildner, editor of the magazine “Gesundheitswesen” and involved in the scientific assessment of the pandemic from the outset, also emphasizes that different aspects of the pandemic have to be brought together and, of course, the biomedical perspective alone with the health dimensions, important as it is, of course not enough.
He refers to the well-known story of four blind people who each feel different parts of an elephant’s body and then describe it, mistaking their perspective for the whole. The one who felt the legs takes the elephant for something tree-like, the trunk for something long and pointed, the belly for a wall, and the tail for something like a rope. There are many similar allegories, from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Lessing’s Parable of the Ring, that sometimes what one immediately perceives is not everything. The elephant does not look like its trunk, the pandemic is not just an epidemiological event of infection.
… and the gorilla
Another animal is part of the perception of the corona crisis, the gorilla in the field, which is not seen. In her book The Omnivore, the American psychologist Nancy Fraser draws attention to the extent to which the course of the corona crisis was shaped by capitalism, starting with the fact that the spread of the virus to humans was probably favored by the disruption of ecosystems and wildlife trade, from the neoliberal dismantling of welfare state infrastructures that are needed to deal with crises – the ÖGD is pars pro toto here, or the socially highly unequal consequences of the pandemic to the winners of the crisis, who were able to do dazzling business at the expense of the general public . Her conclusion (p. 259 f):
“So in general, Covid is a veritable orgy of capitalist irrationality and injustice. Exacerbating the flaws inherent in the system to the utmost, the pandemic is shedding a harsh light on the hidden places of our society. Pulling them out of the shadows into the daylight, the pandemic exposes capitalism’s structural contradictions for all to see: the inherent drive to cannibalize nature to the brink of planetary conflagration, to divert our capacities away from social reproduction, to be productive of public institutions to the point where they can no longer solve the problems the system creates; its tendency to feed on the declining wealth and health of racialized people and not only to exploit but also to dispossess the working class.
Fraser also calls for a review:
“But now comes the hard part: putting that lesson into social practice. It’s time to finally figure out how to starve the beast and put an end to cannibal capitalism once and for all.”
One can criticize Nancy Fraser’s book for a lack of analytical rigor that she argues too associatively and appellatively, but she is right that coming to terms with the pandemic includes the role of capitalism, reflection on the “economy that kills”, how as Pope Francis once put it in no uncertain terms, and the transformation of this economy.
Capitalism is the elephant in the room, but it is hardly talked about in connection with Corona, at best anonymously as “our lifestyle”. The term capitalism is practically non-existent in the Lessons Learned papers and is therefore not the subject of analytical considerations and practical objectives. The fact that virologists and epidemiologists do not keep an eye on him may come as no surprise, and perhaps liberal observers like Heribert Prantl see “freedom” so suddenly that they no longer see the horizon beyond. Interestingly enough, one hardly reads any intelligent analyzes from the left-wing milieu. Instead, some there have drifted off to conspiracy theories and are probably no longer to be won over to reasonable discussions about the future of our coexistence. For this future, however, it will take more than digitizing reporting channels in infection protection, stockpiling masks for the next pandemic or agreeing that fundamental rights must not simply be restricted by general decrees. Without further social criticism, the processing of the pandemic will remain incomplete.