Nietzsche once said that culture was only a thin apple peel over a glowing hot chaos. That is probably to say that even a small shock suffices to confront us anew with barbarism and dizzying stupidity. And now we are actually dealing with a worldwide pandemic. In effect, the thin apple peel tore at once and an abyss of the most dangerous folly has opened up. Thus one headline read in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: “Mankind takes a break—the planet exhales.” One might simply accept as childish impudence calling the lockdown, the curfew that has practically brought the entire global society to a standstill, a “break.” But the madness lies in the presumptuousness of assuming a perspective above humans and of making oneself the voice of the “tortured” earth. Giovanni di Lorenzo, an intelligent, educated man, is the editor-in-chief of that newspaper. But today he evokes Hermann Melville’s captain Benito Cereno: The barbarians have his ship in their hands—and he can do nothing about it.
Such aggressive, “green” nonsense is no longer far from the misanthropy and self-hatred that is characteristic of the fanatical environmental sect Extinction Rebellion. They articulate the actual plain text of the green substitute religion: corona is not the disease, people are—and corona is the cure. This is the current variant of a phantasm that can be found in every radical ecology movement—namely, that “ravaged” nature is now taking its revenge on human beings. What the environmental summit and climate protocol have not managed to accomplish is now being achieved by nature itself: corona is bringing nearly all the wheels to a standstill and thereby improving the CO2 balance. That even this madness has a method becomes especially clear with the euthanasia fantasies evidently nurtured by some. For some time, the old white men were marked as enemies of the multicultural “no-borders” future—today they are being decimated by corona.
Nevertheless, there is the good news that doctors and scientists are appearing as new media stars; these would be the virologists and epidemiologists. They are not only filling the competence gaps of politicians, but they are also gradually displacing the talk show–proven scientists of the hour and pseudo-philosophers who now fear that due to corona the “climate catastrophe” might be forgotten. Whoever wants to avoid perishing in the competition for attention must switch from climate to virus. The CO2 fetishists are rather poorly prepared for that. One can also put it this way: The corona crisis distorts the Greens to recognizability. Their slogans can only be understood today as an expression of intellectual neglect of prosperity. Thus, Robert Habeck, author of children’s books and head of the Green Party, suggested most recently that restaurant owners facing financial ruin should use the bankruptcy period to install new, ecologically proper heating systems, and he recommends in all seriousness “developing an alternative, precise strategy to combat the virus”—a new world record in arrogance and ignorance. To underscore his economic incompetence, he is also currently promoting corona bonds.
The extent of the corona crisis also becomes more clearly recognizable when one considers what has suddenly become unimportant. Nobody is interested anymore in the skipping children from Fridays for Future. And even hard-nosed modernists only shake their head when gender activists want to rename the Hamburg “Bürgersaal” because the designation is supposedly misogynous. Even the Earth Hour on March 28th, the official switching off of lights as a sign for environmental and climate protection, struck most citizens as embarrassing. It wasn’t mankind but infantile society that is pausing for intermission.
People are dying from the virus, and this is a good thing—only those manifest crackpots from Extinction Rebellion would state it so clearly. People are dying from the virus, but this is unavoidable—this opinion can be heard more frequently, namely, from those who consider themselves to be representatives of social rationality. They argue that a still greater catastrophe looms if we do not rapidly return to normal economic and social life. This is being discussed under the title “Exit Strategy.” The underlying credo states: Not politics but economics is our destiny. And some are even already prepared to die as human sacrifices for the economy.
Should a wonder not occur—and wonder would mean that the International of Physicians develops a vaccine or a therapy in a short time—we will soon find ourselves terrorized by the question: Who and what is of systemic importance? Consensus in this question probably only exists to the effect that doctors, nursing staff, and law enforcement agencies have to take precedence. Then come those who provide us with the necessities of life. But how about politicians, journalists, prominent figures? Will it then become evident again that some are more equal than others?
These are the questions that bring us to the limits of politics and ethics. They are traditionally conducted under the title “state of emergency”—and that is what we are dealing with today. Nothing is more instructive about the essence of the state than the state of emergency. It is, to be sure, clear to any liberal and any democrat that the most important task of the constitution is to limit the power of the state in the interest of the freedom of the individual. Precisely this becomes an issue with the severity of the situation. In a certain sense, the state of emergency takes us back to the origin of the state itself. No one has formulated this more clearly than Thomas Hobbes, who defined the relationship of the citizen to the state through the relation of “protection and obedience.” In the state of emergency, the protection of the citizen by the state is more important than the protection of the citizen from the state. The question then is only who decides the state of emergency. In the end, is it the scientists with their exponential curves that refuse to level off?
Politically, the state of emergency speaks rather for maintaining the status quo. This is why those who have been recently speculating on Merkel’s twilight and a change of government will be bitterly disappointed. Since the state of emergency justifies the state in the most radical manner, one can assume that the corona crisis will strengthen the governments in office. Incidentally, this is also supported by the latest demoscopic surveys—in America and England just as in Germany.
In one respect, the coronavirus does not stand for disruption but rather for continuity. We are living in an age of fear. The golden years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were followed by Islamist terror, new mass migration, the threatening “climate catastrophe,” and now the virus. Regardless of whether or not the war against terror has been won; whether or not worldwide mass migration spells the “decline of the West”; whether or not “climate catastrophe” is the phantasm of an apocalyptic sect or a real threat—no fear is greater than that of infection, the fear of attack by an invisible enemy.
All the cited phenomena of our age of fear have one common denominator: they are the price we have to pay for the processes of globalization and networking. The wonderfully humanistic and utopian-sounding set phrase “no borders” is now revealing its sinister reverse side. It is not only people, their goods, and their techniques that no longer know boundaries, but the vile and the evil as well. Following decades of prosperity in Europe, humans are coming to know themselves for the first time again as the exposed and vulnerable beings that they are. Germans, too, are gradually awakening from the Rousseauian idyll of a natural existence that the Greens have conjured up for them, and are recognizing that nature is not merciful to us. The corona crisis confronts us mercilessly with the limit value “survival.” And this threshold of survival is marked by triage, the decision by a doctor, transgressing all ethical criteria, as to which patient he should treat at all in view of all too scarce medical resources (respirators!).
In the face of the pandemic, what can be expected of politics, religion, and science? The European Union’s contribution to solving the corona crisis is summarized by a video that shows the EU President, Ursula von der Leyen, instructing us in proper handwashing. At the same time, she attempts to maneuver us inconspicuously into the debt union by selling Eurobonds, heretofore strictly rejected by the Merkel government, as corona bonds. This fits in with the German tendencies toward state capitalism, which, to be sure, are being thematized only in social media, while public broadcasters have switched to the most extreme form of court reporting. The so-called crisis communication is limited to an incompetent word politics, consisting essentially of expressions of admiration and gratitude for the German chancellor. Conversely, whoever, like CSU leader Söder, acts decisively and is more oriented toward Kurz than Merkel then appears as a dangerous outsider.
Regarding religion, which intrinsically should be responsible for the hope for salvation, one can be succinct: the resounding silence of the churches ascends to the heavens. To allay fears, one does indeed really need rituals. But in a culture of neo-pagan substitute religions, the Christian ones are in bad condition. If only one could still pray! Thus the image of the Pope, who gives his blessing Urbi et Orbi untimely and lonely in St. Peter’s Square, acquires a tremendous symbolic power.
Finally, there remains science. It coined the term “black swan” for the absolutely unforeseeable. And although the chief theoretician of the unexpected, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has expressly refuted the notion that the coronavirus has to do with a black swan, we can nevertheless maintain that we are dealing with an occurrence that is not covered by our awareness of contingency. Contingency means, of course, that everything that is could also be different—albeit not arbitrarily different. Educated people have this awareness. But what if things transpire differently than expected and planned? There were plans for a pandemic in the drawers—but the unexpected came differently than thought. The experts are really only able to tell us then that we must learn how to deal with not knowing. And the core of this ignorance lies in the unknown unknown, for which there are no experts.
Never have we known less about the future than today. The only thing that is somewhat predictable relates to the technical aspect of our existence. We can expect a tremendous acceleration of digitization, not only at the level of innovations in media technology but at the level of consumption and the organization of everyday life. There are, to be sure, not only losers in the corona crisis. E-commerce is booming. Everyone whose business model is based on new media is a winner of the hour. And this is how the great utopias of the internet pioneers become forced reality: working in the home office, learning in home schooling. The universities will also start next semester as virtual reality. At present, care robots are already being seen with different eyes—maybe as the beginning of that “sociality with objects,” of which the brilliant sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina spoke decades ago and for which the Japanese are today providing us with living examples. And the longer the crisis lasts, the more clearly the world will present itself as chaos and simulation.
Perhaps we will indeed once more survive with a bad fright. Yet we will not be able to begin the year 2020 all over again. Alexander Kluge’s film Abschied von Gestern (literally translated as Farewell to Yesterday but released as Yesterday Girl) from 1965–66 begins with the fade-in message: “Separating us from yesterday is not an abyss but the changed situation.” It is trivial, but no one today can really say what will be tomorrow. Only the farewell to yesterday is certain.
Translated by Daniel Steven Fisher, www.dsftranslations.com.
