Three deep takes on what comes out of Coronavirus - Uffe Elbæk, Byung Chul-Han, Astra Taylor
Perhaps unsurprising - with those hours of commutes and presenteeism liberated from us, temporarily, at home - that there is a veritable outbreak of lengthy Corona-commentary. Our selection mechanism is what the most admired of our peers recommend to us - so we hope that’s enough of a filter to be interesting and useful.
Note: the first two pieces were given to us in Danish and Spanish - and we’ve used what seems to be the powerful translation capacities of Microsoft’s Bing Translator for each. We will post the original language text on an open Google Docs, and if anyone can improve the translation, please mail us here and we’ll let you edit.
We've now shown we can shut down. But do we have the courage to open up to a free, green, post-capitalist Denmark? By Uffe Elbæk
The founder of Alternativet, Uffe Elbæk - with us from the start of the Alternative UK - has left his party and is now speaking as a “free green” in the Christiansborg Parliament in Denmark. His integrated vision for a more enterprising and more green Denmark is still as universally inspiring as it was in 2017, when we started A/UK - so we’re happy to print extracts here. The full English text is available here, and the original Danish text is here (if you can improve translations, mail here).
Uffe has a classic ten point plan to in order to take the opportunity presented by the Coronacrisis and shift the country to a “free, green, post-capitalist” future:
° A green, democratic tax and enterprise policy °Freeing up structural reform °A cultural renaissance °Strengthening civil society °A holistic health policy °A mobilisation of civil rights and equality° A free education policy °A new social safety net °A progressive European policy °A new vision of nature
Some highlights below:
A holistic health policy: Many of the health challenges we have today can be traced back to our opportunities (or lack thereof) to live meaningful lives.
Whether we're talking lack of self-esteem, dissatisfaction, loss of meaning, depression, loneliness, self-harm, weight problems, nicotine addiction, drug or alcohol abuse, sexual problems or lifestyle-related cancers – these diseases often point to back to the constraints we as human beings have to be able to see and manage our own lives.
Therefore, the main ambition of a holistic health policy is to strengthen the individual citizen's understanding, insight and desire to take responsibility for their own health throughout their lives. The individual must take responsibility for his own life. But the community needs to back this up with knowledge, opportunities, advice and guidance.
This vision of life and health must be the starting point for the way the primary health system meets citizens. But it also is indicative of the way our children and young people get to know themselves and their own bodies through school and education.
Therefore, bodily activity, healthy food—and the ability to put into words the emotions and signals the body sends—should be an integral part of teaching, at both kindergarten and primary school level, as well as in secondary education. Because if you can't feel yourself and interpret what your body tells you, then the chance of serious health problems increases.
Therefore, a holistic health policy must be based on prevention and support for citizens, so that they themselves can take responsibility for their own lives and health as far as possible.
Freeing up structural reform. Municipalities must be exempted from the strict rules of the Budget Act and the construction ceiling and it must again be possible for municipalities to raise the tax rate.
Similarly, it must be possible for municipalities to formulate procurement requirements that support local green business strategy, green local producers and green entrepreneurial environments. Municipal institutions must have the opportunity to become much more independent institutions; while the primary schools of the municipalities must have the same freedoms as free schools.
Municipalities and regions must be given a wide opportunity to experiment with citizen budgets, citizens' proposals, civic education and lower voting age. Finally, villages and communities must be much more directly involved in overall municipal decisions and have the possibility of gaining the status of experimental zones where normally existing legislation is put out of force and the degrees of freedom are significantly increased.
A new vision of nature. I don't think I'm going to be the only one to think that we as a society are completely out of touch with nature and all the other species we share the planet with.
At the moment when, as a civilisation, we saw humanity as something separate, different and more exalted than nature, we took the first step on the civilisational journey that has brought humanity to the climatic edge, the disaster for biodiversity, where we now stand. One more step, and we will jeopardise the preconditions for a sustainable civilisation.
That is why it is essential that we re-establish our relationship with, and respect for, nature. We must stop abusing its resources as if they were inexhaustible. The bulging overuse of natural resources over the last two hundred—and not least the last 5o—years has squeezed the planet's ecosystems not just down to, but beyond the pain threshold. We must therefore get out of the logic of growth and consumption that characterises most societies today.
It's not just the planet's life that's in acute danger of drying out, I also think it's human inner life. Because the lack of personal connection and respect for nature can in the long term lead us as human beings to lose our relationship with "place", our neighbours and ultimately to ourselves. It’s a long chain of relationship losses.
And if we cannot feel ourselves, we cannot feel the world and the pain that, as a species and civilization, have inflicted on all living life on the planet.
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The viral emergency and the world tomorrow. By Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han is a South-Korean-born, but German speaking philosopher who has gained acclaim and respect for his searing analysis of contemporary societies, particularly the impact of information technologies. Here he takes on the post-Corona virus challenges, in the pages of El Pais newspaper. The full Bing translated text is on this Google Doc, and the El Pais Spanish text at this link. Offers of a better translation gratefully received!
We've actually been living for a long time without enemies. The cold war ended a long time ago. Lately even Islamic terrorism seems to have moved to distant areas. Exactly ten years ago, I held in my essay The Society of Tiredness [Published in English as The Burnout Society] the thesis that we live in a time when the immunity paradigm, which is based on the negativity of the enemy, has lost its validity.
During the Cold War, socially-organised immunology was characterized by lives surrounded by borders and fences, which prevent the accelerated movement of goods and capital. Globalization suppresses all these immune thresholds, giving free rein to capital. Even widespread promiscuity and permissiveness, which today spreads across all vital fields, eliminate the negativity of the unknown or the enemy.
The dangers are lurking not today from the negativity of the enemy, but from the excess of positivity—expressed as excess performance, over-productivity and over-communication. The negativity of the enemy has no place in our unlimitedly permissive society. Repression by others gives way to depression; exploitation by others, replaced to voluntary self-exploitation and self-optimization. In the society of performance, one fights mostly against oneself.
Well, in the midst of this society so immune-weakened by global capitalism, the virus suddenly bursts. Full of panic, we re-erect immune thresholds and close borders. The enemy is back. We no longer fight against ourselves, but against the invisible enemy coming from outside. Excessive panic in view of the virus is a social, and even global, immune reaction to the new enemy. The immune reaction is so violent because we have lived for a long time in a society without enemies, in a society of positivity, and now the virus is perceived as a permanent terror.
But there's another reason for the tremendous panic. Again it has to do with digitization. Digitization eliminates reality. Reality is experienced thanks to the resistance it offers, which can also be painful. Digitization, the whole "like" culture, suppresses the negativity of resistance. And in the post-factual era of fake news and deepfakes, an apathy towards reality arises. So, here is a real virus, and not a computer virus, which causes a commotion. Reality, resistance, is once again noticed, in the form of an enemy virus. The violent and exaggerated panic reaction to the virus is explained, by way of this commotion over reality.
…The virus will not defeat capitalism. The viral revolution will not happen: no virus is capable of making revolution. The virus isolates and individualizes us. It does not generate any strong collective feelings. Somehow, everyone cares only about their own survival. Solidarity in keeping mutual distances is not a solidarity that allows us to dream of a different, more peaceful, more just society.
We can't leave the revolution in the hands of the virus. Let us hope that after the virus comes a human revolution. It is US, PEOPLE endowed with REASON, who have to radically rethink and restrict destructive capitalism, and also rethink our boundless and destructive mobility - in order to save us, the climate and our beautiful planet.
If more trust is what we need after this virus, maybe a period of unschooling our kids will help. By Astra Taylor
Astra Taylor (@astradisastra) is author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019). This piece for The Cut draws some wider lessons from Taylor’s own homeschooling, and the opportunity for parents right now to change their kids understanding of society:
I asked my mother what it was like to suddenly be unschooling her grandchildren. “Right now, it’s more like I’m deschooling them,” she clarified, a term unschoolers often use to describe the period of transition from the structures and expectations of school to something more relaxed and self-directed. The kids love their small elementary school in New Mexico and are accustomed to being in a regimented situation, so my mother suspects they will all need some time to find a rhythm, figure out how they like to spend their time, and establish new guidelines and boundaries. “How much television and how much computer and what is okay in terms of letting them do it, and see if they just get bored or whether we’ll need to switch gears,” she said.
Everyone is learning right now, no matter our age. None of us have lived through a crisis of this magnitude. Even before the coronavirus hit, young people were becoming more engaged with global events, striking to fight climate change and gun violence. Our economy is in meltdown, our so-called leaders are incompetent and corrupt, and the true cost of social inequality is becoming clear. Things are falling apart, so why not take these weeks or months to let your children — and yourselves — think and learn outside the academic box.
Since I’m an idealist, I can’t help but hope this crisis offers an opportunity to learn a deeper lesson, too. Unschooling, fundamentally, is about trust — trusting yourselves and your kids. As a child, I was granted a sense of autonomy and responsibility that most conventional schools do not grant to young people. Looking back at my childhood, the trust my parents had in their offspring astounds me — though as a child, I felt both entitled to and worthy of it.
Like hospital masks and hand sanitizer, trust is a resource in short supply these days. When word of the virus first got out, some believed the media was overhyping the outbreak; others, fearing government incompetence, panic-shopped. One way to understand democracy is as a system built on trust: trust in elected officials, in social institutions, and, most crucial, in one another. Perhaps if we begin extending trust to children now, when they’re the adults, they won’t repeat our mistakes.