{"id":9722,"date":"2020-11-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aspeninstitutece.softmedia.cz\/article\/2020\/liberalism-goes-viral\/"},"modified":"2024-09-30T18:52:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T16:52:17","slug":"liberalism-goes-viral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/article\/2020\/liberalism-goes-viral\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberalism Goes Viral"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World<\/strong> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek Polity Press, 136 pp, 2020<\/em><\/p>\n

Sadly, pandemics are nothing new. In his 1975 book \u201cDiscipline and Punish\u201d, the French philosopher Michel Foucault used anecdotes from seventeenth-century\u00a0French military archives in a lengthy discussion of how local governments reacted to the plague. Step one saw each town cut itself off from the outside world\u2014nobody in, nobody out. Towns were then divided into neighborhoods. Each neighborhood was placed in the charge of an intendant, and each street had a syndic\u2014a guard that made sure nobody left their home. Bread and wine were delivered to special boxes on the doorsteps.<\/p>\n

Along with enforcing the quarantine, syndics would visit every house on their street once per day to take a roll call. Each resident was required to show themselves at the window to prove they were still alive. After five or\u00a0so days of quarantine, the town authorities began decontaminating homes. People were ordered outside\u2014one house at a time. Officials sealed the doors and windows with wax, pumped the house full of \u2018perfume\u2019 and then set the gas alight to disinfect the interior. After that, people returned to their home.<\/p>\n

Daily stress comes not so much from fear of death, but from worrying about the next time they might be able to visit a restaurant or go to the beach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion, that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions,\u201d Foucault writes. \u201cThe plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, as now, success in combating a pandemic was proportional to the government\u2019s competence, it\u2019s ability to maintain social cohesion and the public\u2019s willpower. Failure signified the opposite. The French archives called the people whose job it was to deal with the sick \u2018crows\u2019. They were characterized as \u201cpeople of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead,\u00a0clean and do many vile and abject offices.\u201d In the twenty-first century, we call these same people\u2014grocery store clerks, garbage collectors, janitors and truck drivers\u2014\u2018essential workers\u2019. They have the lowest-paid jobs but continued to work while the rest of us were locked away at home. Even nurses, the most respected profession in the United States in straight years of Gallup polls and in high demand everywhere, struggle with mediocre if not meager salaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is wrong with our system that we were caught unprepared by the catastrophe despite scientists warning us about it for years?\u201d Slavoj \u017di\u017eek wonders in his latest book, \u201cPandemic!\u201d<\/p>\n

All Kinds of Social Dissonance<\/h2>\n

If it was not obvious before, it turns out, quite a lot, and the crisis has exposed all kinds of social dissonance that we were happy to ignore before. While people voluntarily submit to mobile phone surveillance from companies who want to sell them stuff, why won\u2019t they share data to benefit public health? Daily stress comes not so much from fear of death, but from worrying about the next time they might be able to visit a restaurant or go to the beach. And\u00a0what can we say about a society that prioritizes re-opening pubs over schools? I like beer as much as the next person (probably more), but am plenty willing to drink it on my couch indefinitely if it means my eight-year-old gets to visit with her friends in a classroom.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek has long argued that ideological myopia distracts society from addressing its deepest ills. Rather than attack problems at their root, this means we are satisfied with treating the symptoms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u017di\u017eek\u2019s slim volume feels a lot like a collection of newspaper columns or a book version of a Zoom call (all the sales royalties go to M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res). He riffs on current events in more or less real-time, citing Wikipedia, The Daily Mail and The Guardian in footnotes\u2014and responds to many of his philosophical friends\u2019 own contemporaneous takes on the coronavirus. In doing so he revisits many of his favored themes (ideology, hypocrisy and his derision for liberalism) and mannerisms (praising pal Julian Assange, references to film and pop culture and the odd venture into bathroom humor).<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek is not interested in the particular failings by governments in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak. \u201cThe point is to reflect on the sad fact that we need a catastrophe to be able to rethink the very basic features of the society in which we live,\u201d he writes. He sees COVID-19 as having exposed weaknesses that were already there.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know there is enough toilet paper and the rumor is false, but what if some people take this rumor seriously and, in a panic, start to buy excessive reserves of toilet paper, causing an actual shortage?\u201d, he writes in a typically \u017di\u017eekian passage. \u201cIt is not even necessary to believe that some others take the rumor seriously\u2014it is enough to presuppose that some others believe there are people who take the rumor seriously\u2014the effect is the same, namely the real lack of toilet paper in the stores.\u201d Going one step further he argues that the toilet tissue panic is an attempt to trivialize COVID-19, writing: \u201cJust think how ridiculous is the notion that having enough toilet paper would matter in the midst of a deadly epidemic\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a Crisis, We Are All Socialists<\/h2>\n

Across 11 chapters, plus an introduction and appendix, \u017di\u017eek reframes familiar social criticisms in the context of the coronavirus. As ever, his primary target is an ideology\u2014the systems of ideas that many of us tend to accept as fact,\u00a0or what Antonio Gramsci called the \u201cfolklore of philosophy.\u201d Among \u017di\u017eek\u2019s targets is what he calls \u201ccapitalist animism\u201d\u2014the idea that financial markets are some kind of natural phenomenon, even living, breathing entities. \u201cIf one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we should really worry about are not the thousands who have already died and the many more who will, but the fact that \u2018markets are panicking,\u2019\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek points to the absurdity of Donald Trump, a cartoonish incarnation of a capitalist, spending trillions of government dollars \u201cviolating all conventional market rules,\u201d offering stimulus checks to every American taxpayer in a scheme that comes close to resembling a universal basic income. In July, well after \u017di\u017eek wrote his book, the conservative UK government announced a \u00a32 billion state-funded jobs scheme targeting people under age 25\u2014not exactly the foundation of traditional Tory policies. \u201cAs the saying goes: in a crisis we are all Socialists,\u201d \u017di\u017eek writes.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek has long argued that ideological myopia distracts society from addressing its deepest ills. Rather than attack problems at their root, this means we are satisfied with treating the symptoms. \u201cThe problem is the same as the journalism dealing with the environmental crisis: the media overemphasize our personal responsibility for the problem, demanding that we pay more attention to recycling and other behavioural issues,\u201d he writes. \u201cSuch a focus on individual responsibility, necessary as it is to some degree, functions as an ideology the moment it serves to obfuscate the bigger questions of how to change our entire economic and social system.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Tension Between Individual Freedom and Objective Mechanisms<\/h2>\n

As a remedy he insists society move toward what he calls\u2014for shock value \u2018communism\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only should the state assume a much more active role, organizing the production of urgently needed things like masks, test kits and respirators, sequestering hotels and other resorts, guaranteeing the minimum of\u00a0survival of all new unemployed, and so all, doing all of this by abandoning market mechanisms,\u201d he writes. \u201cTwo other things are clear. The institutional health system will have to rely on the help of local communities for taking care of the weak and old. And, at the opposite end of the scale, some kind of effective international cooperation will have to be organized to produce and share resources.\u201d He does not advocate a return to Soviet-style governance, but insists communism is a \u201cname for what is already going on,\u201d and that the only alternative to this is a \u201cnew barbarism\u201d.<\/p>\n

In general, \u017di\u017eek revels in attacking liberal elites and their disproportionate emphasis on individual agency, but he avoids what seems like an obvious line of attack in this book. \u201cThere is in liberalism, from its very inception, a tension between individual freedom and objective mechanisms which regulate the behavior of a crowd,\u201d he has written elsewhere.<\/p>\n

On this \u017di\u017eek is right. Discussion over this tenuous balance between individual and collective rights goes back many centuries, preoccupying Plato, Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, among others. One of the twentieth century\u2019s leading liberal thinkers, Isaiah Berlin, famously differentiated between negative and positive liberty. Others refer to the two concepts as \u2018freedom from\u2019 and \u2018freedom to\u2019.<\/p>\n

In short, individual freedom ends where it starts to impede on other people\u2019s freedom. Speed limits on the road restrict my freedom to drive as fast as I want, but we view that as a reasonable trade-off that allows others the freedom to cross the street without being hit by a car. While acknowledging that society must strike a balance between positive and negative liberty when the two collide a liberal like Berlin prioritizes positive liberty\u2014the freedom to do what you want.<\/p>\n

In short, individual freedom ends where it starts to impede on other people\u2019s freedom. Speed limits on the road restrict my freedom to drive as fast as I want, but we view that as a reasonable trade.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Authoritarianism Itself is no Coronavirus Cure<\/h2>\n

The only problem is that positive liberty has come to be synonymous with all liberty. Perhaps an understandable overreaction to the horrors of twentieth-century\u00a0totalitarianism, this strips freedom of meaning. Worse than Gramsci\u2019s folklore, it caricatures liberalism and provides political cover to extreme selfishness. Physical attacks on store clerks who have requested customers wear masks or Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro\u2019s defiant trip to a hot dog stand exemplify such perversions. So did the gun-wielding nut cases who stormed the capitol in my native state of Michigan insisting they had\u00a0a God-given right to water ski in 8\u00b0C weather while the apocalypse was underway. Extreme as these examples are, they are indicative of a social breakdown that predated the coronavirus crisis. As Foucault wrote \u201cthe image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder\u201d.<\/p>\n

China stopped the spread of COVID-19 using draconian methods, but Russia\u2019s inept response proves that authoritarianism is itself no coronavirus cure. Less liberal democracies, like South Korea, succeeded in beating back the pandemic, but so did Denmark and the Czech Republic. At minimum, it is possible to say that the countries that were most successful in coping with COVID-19 saw people collectively sacrifice\u2014either voluntarily or through compulsion\u2014for the common good. In other words, they embraced negative liberty and thus rejected classical liberalism. It is hard to imagine we will not need more of this in the months ahead.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot to shake hands and isolate IS today\u2019s form of solidarity,\u201d \u017di\u017eek writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World Slavoj \u017di\u017eek Polity Press, 136 pp, 2020 Sadly, pandemics are nothing new. In his 1975 book \u201cDiscipline and Punish\u201d, the French philosopher Michel Foucault used anecdotes from seventeenth-century\u00a0French military archives in a lengthy discussion of how local governments reacted to the plague. Step one saw each town cut itself off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":8201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,186],"class_list":["post-9722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-culture","tag-liberalism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9722"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10699,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9722\/revisions\/10699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}