The citizens of liberal democracies have been deprived of their freedoms overnight. As paradoxical as it sounds, the new creed of social distancing leads to a new mass society of passive people. A few counter thoughts.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Giorgio Agamben, 07.04.2020, 2.00 p.m.
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| Auf der Angst, das Leben zu verlieren, lässt sich allein eine Tyrannei errichten: der monströse Leviathan mit seinem gezückten Schwert. Titelbild von Abraham Bosse zur gleichnamigen Abhandlung von Thomas Hobbes aus dem Jahr 1651. [Grafissimo / Getty] |
How could it come to the fact that in the face of an illness, the severity of which I cannot judge, but which is certainly not a plague, an entire society felt the need to feel poisoned or contaminated, to isolate themselves in the houses and the normal living conditions to suspend, i.e. their employment relationships, their friendship and love relationships and even their religious and political beliefs? How could it happen that from one day to the next everyone looked at themselves and the others as if they were mere agents of infection who had to cover their faces with a mask and keep a safe distance of two meters ? It seems necessary to think about it.
Obviously, the disease already existed somehow, if only subconsciously. Living conditions must have become such that a sudden sign was enough to prove them what they were - that is, unbearable, just like a plague. And this is, in a way, the only positive thing that can be drawn from the current situation: It is possible that people may later start to wonder whether their way of life was the right one.
The new orthodoxy
But one should also think about the need for religion that brings the situation to light. An indication of this is a language borrowed from the eschatological vocabulary, which recurs in an almost obsessive manner in the pounding discourse of the media and which conjures up the end of the world. It is as if the religious need, which the Church is no longer able to satisfy, groped for another place to stay and found it in the religion that has long since become the true religion of our time: science.
Like any religion, this can produce superstition and fear, as is typical of religions in times of crisis, of different and contradicting opinions and regulations. They range from the position of the heretical minority (which is also occupied by well-known scientists), who deny the severity of the phenomenon, to the prevailing orthodox discourse, which claims the opposite, but whose representatives radically diverge in their views on how to combat the disease . And as always in such cases, some connoisseurs or would-be connoisseurs emerge who secure the favor of the monarch, who, as in the times of religious disputes that separated Christianity at the time, according to their own interests for one or the other party takes and enforces its measures.
And a third thing to consider is the obvious disintegration of every conviction, every common belief. You have to say that people no longer believe in anything - except in the naked biological life that has to be saved at all costs. But on the fear of losing life, tyranny alone can be established, only the monstrous Leviathan with his sword drawn.
Therefore, it will not be possible for all those who have kept a minimum of clarity to return to life before the crisis, when the end of the epidemic has been announced, when the time has come. And that may be the thing that drives us most to despair today - even if, as someone once said, we are given hope only for the hopeless.
The new euphemism
History teaches us that every social phenomenon has or can have political implications. It is therefore advisable to carefully observe the new term that has just found its way into the political encyclopedia of the West: social distancing.
Although the term was probably coined as a euphemism to avoid the cruel word "demarcation", one has to ask what a political order based on it could be. This is all the more urgent since it is not just a purely theoretical hypothesis. Every emergency - this time it is the health one - is always also a laboratory in which new political and social situations are tried out that are still waiting for humanity.
Of course, as always, there are foolish people who call for positive things to come out of this situation. Then there should be no indication that the new digital technologies have fortunately enabled remote communication for some time. However, I do not believe that a community based on social distancing would be human and politically viable. But whatever perspective you take, it seems important to me that we think about this topic.
A first consideration concerns the really unique nature of the phenomenon that the measures of social distancing have brought about. In his masterpiece "Mass and Power", Elias Canetti defines the mass on which power is based by overriding the fear of being touched.
While people are usually afraid of being touched by strangers, and all distances that people build around them ultimately result from this fear, the only situation in which this fear is reversed is by mass. «It is the mass alone in which man can be released from this fear of touch. (...) As soon as you have left yourself to the crowd, you do not fear their touch. (...) Whoever presses you is the same as yourself. Then everything suddenly happens like within a body . ( ... ) This change in fear of touch is part of the crowd. The relief that spreads through it reaches a strikingly high degree in its greatest density. »
The new collectivism
I do not know what Canetti would have thought about the new phenomenology of the mass that we are now facing. What the measures of social distancing and panic have created is certainly a mass - but a kind of wrong mass, so to speak, that is made up of individuals who keep each other at a distance. A not dense, but diluted mass, which nevertheless remains a mass if, as Canetti specifies shortly afterwards, it is defined by its compactness and passivity, in the sense that «it would not be able to move freely at all. (...) The stagnant mass is waiting. She is waiting for a head to be shown to her. »
A few chapters further, Canetti describes the mass that is being formed by means of a ban: “Together, they do n't want to do much more than what they had previously done as individuals. The ban is sudden; they impose it on themselves. (...) In any case, it strikes with the greatest force. It has the unconditional nature of an order, but what is decisive about it is its negative character. »
It is important not to miss the punch line: a community based on social distancing can never - as one might initially naively believe - have to do with an exaggerated individualism. On the contrary, it would be - or is actually, as we are just observing - a diluted mass based on a prohibition, which is precisely why it is particularly compact and passive.
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher and author. He has published a lot on the subject of the state of emergency, including the book of the same name entitled «State of Emergency» (Suhrkamp-Verlag, 2004). His most recent works are "What is Philosophy?" (Fischer-Verlag, 2018) and "The Power of Thought: Collected Essays" (Fischer-Verlag, 2013). - Translated from Italian by René Scheu.
