The following article was published on February 9th, in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, under the title Mehr Diktatur wagen (dare more dictatorship). It is signed by Thomas Brussig, a writer born in East Germany. Since we do not have access to the original,1 we translate from its English translation, as published on the website of the journal Telos.2 A brief commentary follows.
Dare more dictatorship
“Although infection rates are falling, the coronavirus crisis continues to be an experience that leaves us powerless to react. Despite restrictions in our daily lives and the start of vaccinations, no end seems to be in sight – although there are a few countries that have managed to curb the virus. The reason for this feeling of helplessness in the face of coronavirus is due to the fact that until now we have been called upon to deal with this crisis with the tools that democracy provides us.”
Sigmund Freud once spoke about the “three wounds suffered by humanity”: first, the Copernican worldview that displaced us from the center of the universe; second, Darwinism, according to which we do not descend from God, but from monkeys; third, psychoanalysis, which tells us that we are not self-determined beings, but that our actions are guided by hidden, unconscious and instinctive motives. Now we can speak about the three wounds against democracy, even though only three decades have passed since the time when liberalism was at its zenith. According to the popular perception of the “end of history”, market economies and democracy had achieved an undisputed victory and there was nothing to stop their spread throughout the world.
It was a belief that received a first strong shake-up prompted by the Chinese economic miracle, which proved the baselessness of the assumption that democracy and market economy go hand in hand by nature. The market economy, within the framework of a one-party state, has achieved exceptional growth rates, prosperity and outstanding technological achievements, whether in architecture, space travel or artificial intelligence. The second blow against democracy has to do with Trump and Brexit; events between 2016-2020 brought to light the vulnerable points of democracy against demagogy. The problem with Trump was not only that someone like him was able to win the elections, but also how little resistance he encountered as this disgrace trampled on the presidency without anyone throwing him out of the White House and without the famous bipartisan system of checks and balances stopping him. Even his electoral defeat was not exactly a glorious moment for democracy – it was a period of prolonged agony. On the contrary, Brexit made democracy look like a caricature: following a referendum whose result was approximately 50-50, representatives of the minority and smarter half yielded to the other, slightly larger but clearly more foolish half, baptizing their cowardice as “respect for a democratic decision.” The third blow to democracy obviously came with the coronavirus crisis, from the moment democracy has proven unable to use the tools necessary for a successful response to the pandemic.
There are certainly some democracies that have brought the pandemic under control – e.g., Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea, but these are countries that are islands (or almost islands), which does not allow for easy comparisons. And unfortunately there is the example of another country – China again – with an authoritarian regime that got rid of the coronavirus early on, quickly putting an end to the second wave.
Is this “inability of democracy” an endemic shortcoming, or can democracy use equally effectively the tools needed in the war against the pandemic? It is obvious that any attempt to deal with the pandemic must be based on the best possible research. However, a democratic response to the pandemic must be based on majorities, seek consensus, and look for compromises. All these are alien to science. In the early days when the theory of relativity emerged, when they asked Einstein his opinion about the book “One Hundred Authors Against Einstein,” it is said that he replied: “If I were wrong, one would be enough.”
Science and only science is competent to provide answers for dealing with the coronavirus. Let’s consider the following thought experiment: suppose there is a virus that is as contagious as the coronavirus, but at the same time as deadly as rabies. Infection would mean certain death. In this case, it would be sheer suicide to put scientific proposals to the judgment of majorities or to find compromise solutions and consensus. Back to reality now, where the coronavirus does not kill everyone it infects, but only about one in thirty. This gives us a degree of flexibility. However: what is that point beyond which science must take the reins? When one in two dies? Or one in ten? The answer is this: immediately once the situation becomes critical. And when we reach the point where as many people die every day as would die in an airplane accident, then the situation has indeed become critical.The weak point of our system is the lack of flexibility and the inability to adapt to necessary measures. Political opposition seems disconnected from science. What politicians keep asking is “what more can they impose on people” or “for how long can people accept it.” As if that’s the issue at stake. A virus is out of control, a virus with which you can neither negotiate nor persuade it to do anything, nor intimidate it. If we want to get rid of it, we are forced to take certain measures. Thanks to science, we know what measures are necessary; we even know the cost we will have to pay if we neglect to take them. Of course, one can wage war against them and protest about them, since various predictions can be arbitrarily overestimated or underestimated. However, there is a dominant factor behind the events, which does not care at all about all this.
“Dare more dictatorship!” This should be the slogan. The fact that it is the coronavirus deniers who speak of a “coronavirus dictatorship” is reason enough for us to pursue something like this. Deniers are unable to grasp the extent of the danger, but they have an idea of how we could deal with it. If the virus disappears (how quickly this can happen has been shown to us by South Korea and Singapore), we can return to normality. We must literally understand that the virus has brought us into a state of exception (note: in the original German Ausnahmezustand). Democracy remains our normal state, with its freedoms and fundamental rights.
For the “fathers of the Basic Law” (note: Grundgesetz in the original, the German Constitution of 1949), it was absolutely expected that they would want to set up a protective wall against the possibility of repeating a Nazi dictatorship; however, they forgot that the exercise of fundamental rights during a pandemic can endanger the entire population. Of course, the protection of life must be the highest priority – what else? The proportionality of measures depends on their effectiveness: ineffective measures should not be implemented. Such an observation seems trivial and indeed it is – but a look at reality shows that such ineffective measures (such as the ban on fireworks or the ban on exercising at a distance greater than 15 kilometers from home at the same time that other activities are allowed) have been implemented, while the very useful Corona App is no longer discussed at all. While the mandatory use of this application is being debated or even urgently requested by both scientists and society in general, no elected representative wants to touch the sensitive issue of privacy. Even Karl Lauterbach (note: German epidemiologist, member of the Social Democratic Party), otherwise a champion of the harshest measures, prefers fireworks bans over an application that would not be subject to the restrictions of data protection laws.
The coronavirus itself is dramatic enough to dominate the news for months now – however, not so dramatic as to make us not take the necessary measures. If we could do such a thing, we would have already said goodbye to the coronavirus. The recipe is known.
For the sake of its own credibility, democracy should not take its own tedious rituals too seriously. Nothing would be more harmful to it than the suspicion that it is more concerned with itself and less with finding solutions to current problems better than other forms of government do. The coronavirus has electrified spirits everywhere. It has set in motion a learning process, putting us in a position to reconsider some of our certainties. It would be fatal if we were ultimately left with just the third blow to democracy: that democracies cannot make it.»
The title of the article is a clear reference to a statement by Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt from a speech he gave shortly after his election in 1969, where he called for strengthening democratic institutions (Wir wollen mehr Demokratie wagen. Wir wollen eine Gesellschaft, die mehr Freiheit bietet und mehr Mitverantwortung fordert.: We want to dare more democracy. We want a society that offers more freedom and demands more responsibility.). In his own article, Brussig retains the structure of this call, but completely reverses its content. It is not democracy itself that is threatened, as once before, but our very existence. Democracy is not under threat—it is a threat.
The entire argumentative line of the article is neither distinguished by its depth—it operates within the familiar logic of “safety/health first, then freedom”—nor by its high level of substantiation. It abounds in crude factual errors—for instance, the infection fatality rate of the virus ranges between 0.1% and 0.5%, not 3.3% as stated in the article—as well as evaluatively shortsighted judgments—the fact that over 3,000 people die daily from tuberculosis (almost as many as 20 aviation accidents combined) does not, according to the author, constitute a critical situation. Moreover, it reveals that (well- or ill-intended) naiveté often characteristic of many high-profile “experts” when addressing public issues.
Blind trust in modern science, without even the slightest inquiry into the motives of those involved, is itself a prime example of shallow thinking. At the same time, the author’s reasoning about the value of science is so circular that one stumbles upon contradictions no matter where one starts. According to the article, science is the only competent authority to address a fundamentally social issue, yet the reason for this suitability lies precisely in the claim that science is simultaneously untainted by social influences! According to Brussig, the instrumental rationality of science can thus guide (somehow mysteriously) the social rationality of purposes. But beyond the author’s contradictory views on the relationship between science and society, his understanding of science’s internal functioning is equally simplistic. The supposed irrefutability of scientific theories is (at least theoretically) only possible to the extent that there is room for compromise and consensus. If, as anthropology teaches us, the logical categories people employ are at least partly a reflection of their social categories,3 then the scientific way of thinking also reflects exactly the strong tendencies toward individualization that operate in modern societies. The absence of any form of science in more traditional societies is largely due to the “conservative” nature of their social organization—conservative both in the positive sense of greater social cohesion and in the negative sense of greater authoritarianism and rigid perceptions. The grounding of politics at the human level also implies a broader dethroning of truths “revealed” as such, which were once supposedly the proclaimed goal of science. Thus, an authoritarian science, freed from the bothersome requirement for compromise and consensus, as Brussig would desire, is a chimerical monster that cannot exist and is therefore an ideological construct. If it could exist, it would merely take the form of a dead metaphysics (as is already, in fact, the case).
The display of such blatant naivety is indeed impressive. Yet it is precisely this naivety and this “irresponsibility” (to a degree) that artists often possess, which allows Brussig to say outright—without restraint—what more official voices merely imply. That “democracy” is not a vehicle for all seasons, but a conciliatory concession to the masses that can be revoked at any moment. No matter how much Brussig may have denied (in subsequent discussions prompted by this article) that his use of the term “state of exception” does not refer to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the article is thoroughly Schmittian in spirit. Just as Schmitt once openly wrote what liberal “opponents” dared not explicitly admit, Brussig now strips away the last fig leaves still covering liberal “democracies.” The difference is that the otherwise astute Schmitt acted consciously, whereas Brussig more closely resembles the canary in the coal mine.
Thus, the danger appears existential, and in the face of such dangers, there is little room for democracy. If words related to the coronavirus were replaced with words related to Islamic terrorism, this text would seem as though it had been written twenty years ago. Twenty years of fear-mongering. Only dictatorship can save democracy from terrorists and viruses. The only salvation for democracy lies in its suicide. It is almost terrifying how this particular article, even if unconsciously, confirms after nearly seventy years Horkheimer’s well-known statement that “whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should also keep silent about fascism.”
Instead of further commentary, we will close with a text by Debor written forty years ago, but so timely that here not a single word needs to be changed.4 Dedicated exceptionally to all the wretchedness of revolutionary circles: to communist lapdogs loyal to the party line that wants them as stooges of modern mini-dictators, to para-establishment (according to para-state) journalists with left-wing sensitivities, and to imaginary anti-authoritarians with serious intellectual deficiencies who have become yet another arm of state propaganda (in the Wonderland called Greece, this exotic and paradoxical fruit now also thrives).
«[The cinema audience, which was never very urban and is hardly popular anymore, is henceforth recruited almost exclusively from a single social stratum, which has in any case become broad:] that of specialized female employees in the various posts of the «services» that the current productive system has such an urgent need for: management, control, maintenance, research, education, propaganda, entertainment, and pseudo-criticism. All these are sufficient to describe them. Among this audience that still goes to the cinema, we must also definitely include those of the same ilk who, being younger, are still in the stage of acquiring these various staffing duties through brief training.
In the realism and achievements of this infamous system, we can already recognize the personal abilities of the executive organs it has trained. And indeed, these people wander everywhere and can do nothing but stumble among lies. They are hired paupers who pass themselves off as owners, for fairy-tale ignoramuses who pass themselves off as educated, for dead people who think they are voting.
How harshly the mode of production treated them! From evolution to promotion, they have lost even the little they had and gained what no one wanted. They concentrate all the misfortunes and humiliations of all the exploitative systems of the past, and the only thing they ignore among these is uprising. They resemble slaves very much, because they are massed together in wretched, unhealthy, and depressing buildings; they are poorly fed, with contaminated and tasteless food; they are treated under miserable conditions when afflicted by illnesses that constantly recur, they are under continuous and humiliating surveillance, and they are kept within modern illiteracy and theatrical superstitions that correspond to the interests of their masters. They have been uprooted, found far from their provinces or neighborhoods, in a new and hostile landscape, according to the centralizing tendencies of modern industry. They are nothing but numbers in graphic representations designed by fools.
They die in droves in the streets, in every flu epidemic, in every heat wave, in every mistake by those who adulterate their food, in every technical innovation that is profitable for the numerous contractors of a scenario of which they are the first victims. The testimonial conditions of their existence lead to their physical, intellectual and mental degeneration. They are always spoken to like obedient children, to whom it suffices to say “you must” and they immediately submit. Mostly, however, they are treated like stupid children, in front of whom dozens of paternalistic specializations stammer and rave, which were improvised the previous day, making them accept anything, saying it as if it were so, and, moreover, the next day the exact opposite.
Separated from each other because of the general loss of any language that would correspond to events, a loss that forbids them even the slightest dialogue, separated because of their incessant and ever-intensifying competition within the ostentatious consumption of emptiness and, therefore, separated because of a desire, which is the most uncertain and unable to find any satisfaction; separated even from their own children, the only, until recently, possession of those who have nothing.
Separatrix
- https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/corona-diktatur-thomas-brussig-1.5199495 ↩︎
- http://www.telospress.com/risk-more-dictatorship/ ↩︎
- See the book by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification. A Contribution to the Study of Collective Representations, trans. A. Georgoulas, Gutenberg Publishing. ↩︎
- In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, μτφρ. Dimitris – Panagiotis Tsachageas, ed. Eleftheros Typos. ↩︎