Worse than the concrete fear of some life-threatening reality, such as in the past the Spanish flu or today COVID-19, is the anxiety nourished by the imagination of terror. This is the business of the modern prophets of the apocalypse, who usually show up in the guise of science. They lend support to the great religion-substitute of an infinite environmentalist worry, with which the Party of Prohibitions exploits the guilty conscience of an affluent society. Instead of “What can I hope for?”—a question for which one used to expect an answer from Christianity—they ask: “What must I fear?” This accords to the presumed wisdom of children who want to carry out a world tribunal to save the earth.
To avoid losing out in the competition for attention, one has to shift gears from climate to virus. Thus, for example, the headline in the weekly Die Zeit: “Humanity takes a break and the planet takes a deep breath.” To call the “lockdown” and the curfews, which practically froze the world economy, a simple matter of “taking a break” might be written off as childish shamelessness. But the real insanity is inherent in the claim to be able to adopt a superhuman perspective and become the voice of the “tortured” earth. Corona is not the disease, so it is suggested, but rather humanity—and corona is the cure. Such is the current variation of a fantasy found in all radical environmentalist movements, i.e., that a “violated” nature is now taking its revenge on mankind. Where the environmental summit and the climate treaty fell short, nature itself is making up the difference. Corona stops nearly everything and therefore improves the CO2 balance.
In one sense, the corona pandemic is less a disruption than a continuation. We are living through an age of anxiety. After the golden years in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Islamist terror followed, and then the new mass migrations, the ominous “climate catastrophe,” and now the virus. Regardless of whether the war against terror has been won or not; whether the waves of migration really mean the “decline of the West” or not; whether the “climate catastrophe” is only the fantasy of an apocalyptic sect or a real threat—no fear is greater than the fear of infection, the fear of an attack by the invisible enemy.
It is ultimately a matter of the price we have to pay for the processes of globalization and networks. The slogan “no borders,” which sounds so humanistic and utopian, is showing its dark side. Not only humans, their products, and their technologies are no longer constrained by borders; so is evil. After decades of affluence in Europe, humanity experiences itself for the first time again as the vulnerable and endangered species that we are. Gradually the Germans especially are waking up out of the Rousseauian idyll of a natural existence, that the Greens conjured up for them, and they are recognizing that nature is not particularly generous. The virus confronts us uncompromisingly with the limiting value of “survival.”
Translated by Russell A. Berman
