Carsten Brosda
In the corona crisis, quite a few seem to be ready to forego the freedoms that are loved and necessary. We must not silently watch the destruction of confidence through fear policies.
The extent to which we have to restrict our usual lives these days is actually inconceivable for a modern democracy. However, orders and orders are currently being accepted that we would rightly have flagged as targeted attacks on the foundations of our free society. This acceptance is due to the deep and overwhelming fear of many citizens about the dramatic consequences of the corona virus. The enlightenment of our democracy will have to prove itself in the political handling of these fears.
Fears of a future that is increasingly perceived as uncertain are not only now pressing our democratic publics with considerable force. Achille Mbembe described a few years ago how people all over the world – from the poor district to Silicon Valley – were feeling that the world could end at any time in view of the great developments of our time. According to the philosopher, the future opens to nothing and paves the way for a negative messianism that leads either to a skinny struggle for survival or to collective suicide shortly before the apocalypse. In times of the corona virus, these warnings become even more urgent.
In any case, Covid-19 challenges the basics of our way of life head-on: When it comes to survival, not a few seem to be willing to give up loved and necessary freedoms without further ado and to bow to the supposedly lack of alternatives. The shock that the invulnerability of one’s own existence is so easily shaken by a new virus is profound. The narcissistic insult of being vulnerable hurts.
This goes so far that just a few days ago, citizens in the social networks aggressively demanded the restriction of their freedoms and the call for a curfew. In a panicked generalization of their own fundamentally sensible social distancing, they called for the strong state, which should also force the supposedly unreasonable to act with a firm hand. Afflicted by such a “panic of reason”, as Sascha Lobo called it , some lose not only moderation, but also obviously the empathy for the less socially privileged, whose life cannot slow down now in the home office of a five-room apartment .
In these moments you could literally see how it was itching for some politicians to seize the opportunity for self-staging as a hard, unconditionally enforcing doer. The hope of a Helmut Schmidt moment, which, as Hamburg’s senator for the interior, commanded the Bundeswehr during the tsunami of 1962, was all too palpable. The only thing that remained unclear was whether the urge to take an even more extreme measure was solely due to their own profile or whether it was also based on the fear that they would later be confronted with the allegation that they had not acted quickly and decisively enough. However, subsequent political skipping and outbidding acts remained the exception.
The subtle difference between curfew and contact restrictions
It is a remarkable sign that German politics has largely abstained from any war rhetoric in dealing with the virus. While wild military metaphors are regularly used in Italy, France, Austria and the USA, and Hungary has even overridden large parts of its democratic constitution, local politics continues to strive to address citizens as self-reliant and reasonable people. The difference between a contact restriction and a curfew, for example, may often be a theoretical one in practice, but in the logic of the reasoning, the public space as a social sphere is less damaged. Citizens are still allowed to move freely as long as they take care
This level of precision with regard to governmental measures to contain the virus is important – and it must also guide all other relevant political issues. This applies to the debate about cell phone tracking of those who test positive as well as the control fantasies behind debates about fines for fake news. Anyone who wants to approach informational self-determination or free public discourse without careful discussion is not only changing the rules of our democracy in the short term, but is overstating the state mandate to protect the population.
After the immediate fear of health and concerns about the economic consequences of the slowdown in society, voices are justifiably rising to ask what effects the restrictions on combating the corona pandemic will have on our democracy. The debate about this can help us keep an eye on the basics of our community. Frank Biess has already been promoting “the cultivation of democratic fears” in 2019. Concern about free democracy could therefore be a resource to secure it. We should think carefully, according to the historian, “of what we want to be afraid of. Because these fears could indeed prevent the future that they imagine.”
The currently burgeoning concerns about the future of our democracy could fill our desire for a democratic debate with new meaning. Because it is not just about threat scenarios, uncompromisingly clear edges and pithy crisis rhetoric, but above all that citizens should clarify what is important for everyone in a sensible conversation with each other. It is this conversation in which we must come to the realization that it is currently sensible for our living together to keep our distance. This does not provide a technological app solution, no legal authorization from the Federal Minister of Health, and certainly no panic generalization of one’s own milieu experience across society.
This will only succeed if we acknowledge the mutual vulnerability of our existence and develop solutions based on solidarity together. When we realize that we can harm each other and therefore have to take care of each other. If we continue to live together and not give up its communicative basis. Social passion and state judgment, yes, also self-limitation, are equally in demand here.
The optimism of democratic politics – even in times like ours – lies in the fact that we, as citizens of an enlightened society, recognize that reason lies literally between us, that we have to agree together how we want to live, what we believe to be true and accept for right. This can succeed in online forums and social media networks as well as in the arenas of mass media reporting or in private communication with friends and acquaintances, colleagues. Right now we have to take care of these places and forums – analogue and currently primarily digital. We have to fill them with life under the conditions of distance.
For our debates, we have expert opinions and sources of information at a historically unknown level. And it is good and right that we use it. But we have to put up with the fact that, as the sociologist Armin Nassehi rightly points out, we keep coming across sentences that we find to be correct, but that fundamentally contradict each other. Because of course the current contact restrictions make sense. Of course, they actually have prohibitively high social, economic and cultural costs. And of course they stand in the way of our democratic order. All of these sentences are correct, but they do not match. Nor can they be coerced into state executive policies.
It is the job of a free, democratic and open society to debate how we can balance these fundamental needs. We must not silently watch the destruction of confidence through the politics of fear, but should begin to talk socially about how to deal correctly with the current challenges of our lives and their consequences. Democratic discourse does not need a state of emergency.
Carsten Brosda is Senator for Culture and Media in Hamburg and Chairman of the Cultural Forum of Social Democracy.
The article was originally published on DER SPIEGEL.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessary reflect CGS policy.
