The heavy cultural and social legacies of the pandemic: the most worrying damage to the West
The pandemic, "now that it goes away", as Checco Zalone would say, one of the few artists still endowed with a non-ideological sense of humor, capable of making people reflect even in the most dramatic situations, leaves behind, in addition to the victims and the enormous economic damage, a whole series of negative cultural and social heritages that threaten to heavily influence the civil life of Western countries in the years to come. And in particular of ours, one of the most sensitive to the cultural changes taking place, given that the race for abstract perfection has always been typical of the Italian mentality, the one that results from ideal principles, which when they are negative, end up creating negative values. difficult to counter.
Many affirm that the values and criteria that have established themselves in managing the pandemic essentially represent a (further) application of the principles, already widely criticized previously, of the politically correct ( "pandemically correct" is the expression used by someone). The discussion is too complex to deal with in this short paper, but it is a fact that a certain type of mentality, aimed at creating the perfect world, even in this particular case, the one at "Covid zero" , and at realizing it in a "correct" way, without "Get your hands dirty", that is, without taking responsibility for making mistakes and recognizing your mistakes (which are the only ways to obtain positive results in our physically and morally imperfect world), but always boasting of doing the "best thing" or even "The only possible one", has had a considerable influence on the way of dealing with the disease, and above all has taken root, thanks to the choices of the rulers and the action of the masses and social media , in the social fabric and risks remaining there for a long time in the years to come.
Now the management of the epidemic, like the previous version of an app, is no longer in fashion, the same no longer interests the mass media , and if anyone is still affected (by us, people still without work and some fundamental rights) are almost asked not to disturb the speeches on the new emergency, that linked to the war in Ukraine, as if those who predict that we are going to a world where every dramatic event becomes an emergency and a true state of exception were right becomes normal. However, it is worthwhile, even if some may judge them to be out of time, to make some brief considerations on the cultural and social institutions affected by what has happened in the last two years.
The first (and it is natural that this is the case) was modern medicine, experimental medicine, the art that par excellence is based on its mistakes and learns from them. The Scottish historian and political scientist transplanted to America Niall Ferguson in his fundamental book on the genesis and future evolution of Western civilization ( "Civilization – The West and the rest" , translated into Italian with the title "Occidente – Rise and crisis of a civilization ” ), Among the factors that have determined the planetary success of our civilization also includes modern medicine, which has brought physical well-being and prolonged the average life of men in all continents. The experimental nature of medicine was the first to be affected from the beginning of the epidemic: the duty to face the disease also based on one's own mistakes (inevitable especially in the face of a new virus and probably the result of a laboratory error) the imperative of perfect action is replaced, as if the health professionals should never make a mistake, and the result was that since there was no perfect (that is, certainly effective) cure for Covid , then one should not intervene, but limit oneself to advising the "watchful waiting". A similar approach was followed in the way of evaluating and dealing with the symptoms of the disease: even if from the beginning it was understood that only a minority of infected people (positive for swabs) became seriously ill, the simple possibility of getting sick made every infected a sick future and instead of treating people at risk, the idea was essentially to prevent infections, because only that was the "correct" action. Thus medicine has renounced the experimental mentality (with laudable exceptions, it is fair to say that we have led their protagonists to have a hard life from a professional and civil point of view) and has turned into a dogmatic medicine with a single imperative: that of making the choice without defects, even at the cost of not having to deal with the consequences of one's decisions.
The second victim affected by this mentality was politics, the art of achieving the collective good: medicine has always played a "separate" role in Western culture (Ferguson highlights this very clearly in his book). to the values embodied by politics (unlike religious medicine which also gave its followers political power) and this has always been the strength of his successes. In dealing with Covid , on the other hand, as a consequence of the common desire to act correctly, not to make mistakes, a confusion has been created between politics and medicine which has led the rulers to essentially issue health prescriptions that have affected the individual life of citizens, and the health "experts" to dictate the political rules of collective interest. In this way, politics in turn renounced to exercise the central core of its art, that of knowing how to graduate and know how to target its measures with reference to the different concrete situations (for example to the age groups of people), preferring to adopt, boasting about it , the most restrictive decisions possible.
As in a domino effect, after politics it was the right, the art of establishing and applying the rules of civil coexistence that was affected. The powers available to the state (Article 32 of the Constitution) to impose compulsory health treatment, including collective, presuppose that the rulers (the government and parliament) assume the responsibility of evaluating the pros and cons of choices which, affecting the availability of one's own body, heavily undermine individual rights, and presuppose an equally necessary clarity on the part of the state in linking the effects of the measures and the purposes of the same, in the sense that there must be a reasonable link between the former and the latter; otherwise there is what is technically called "excess of power", that is, a power exercised for purposes other than those envisaged. When the only public aim devoid of defects has become that of avoiding contagions in general (even of healthy people) and not that of protecting the likely sick (the categories at risk), every restriction has become practically possible, even the most irrational and also those that not only have not been useful from a health point of view, but have deprived and deprive citizens of fundamental rights such as the right to work and freedom of movement and assembly, and all this in the name of the mentality that made the “correct” (error-free) approach to the epidemic the only one possible.
Perhaps the most serious consequence of all this has been the fact that social relationships themselves, sometimes even personal and family ones, have been affected and modified by the pandemic. Here too the mentality of correct action, amplified and widespread by the mass media, has created in many people a fear not related to their empirical possibility of getting sick (which should be gradable according to their individual conditions), but to the abstract concept of an unknown danger (and disinformation was another plague determined by the mentality we are talking about), which can be faced only if we act in the only correct way possible, the one indicated from above. According to this mentality, many, mistakenly equating the abstract possibility of contagion and real disease, have called for increasingly harsh measures against "criminals" who do not get vaccinated, or have uncritically approved the government's measures, stating that "people must be educated ”, And (seriously) even many children have refused to play with the children of unvaccinated people.
Finally, the cause and effect of this transformation of social relations was the activity of the media, another victim of this perfectionist mentality, which when it does not admit the possibility of making mistakes does not even admit confrontation with contrary positions, even if only moderately and partially opposed, such as those of those who believe vaccines useful, but only for certain age groups and for certain situations, even professional, people all demonized as no-vax . The sad thing in the debates and opinions of the mass media (apart from a few laudable exceptions) was not so much the divergence between the different points of view (which is physiological not only in the political field, but also in the scientific one), as the dogmatic character of those who speak by slogans and with slogans respond to critical reasoning, even the most reasoned and moderate ones.
The British Catholic writer Gilbert K. Chesterton, creator of the character of the priest-detective Father Brown, is generally credited with a significant sentence: "The big risk of no longer believing in God is not not believing in anything, but believing to everything " . The pandemic has highlighted that a basic lack of values (moral relativism) and criteria of truth (scientific relativism), however based on "transcendent" principles with respect to material reality, even if not necessarily linked to religious faith, brings too much human beings often believe blindly, dogmatically (every relativism is always dogmatic) in the opinions that claim to be the only correct ones and that thanks also to the role of the mass media , also conditioned by this lack of objective values and criteria, they impose themselves as such in the "official" (or mainstream , as they say) sphere of science, law and politics.
The consequences of all this are those which have been mentioned above, and which, in any case, readers probably know better than the writer. A new emergency is already underway and others will probably come, but perhaps the awareness of the dramatic consequences of this cultural surrender to the dogmas of flawless action, of correct "zero risk" action, which then translates into what is traditionally he would call a sin of pride, it can help to face them in a different, more reasonable and more (allow me the term) "human" way. This is an important cultural challenge in which many countries (especially, despite the many mistakes also committed in those parts, the Anglo-Saxon countries) that have overcome the pandemic emergency while maintaining their traditional values, are benefited, but that also ours that for it has been at the forefront in the opposite sense it can and must face: the risk is that of an irreversible loss of Western values, and for Italy the risk is the prospect of a slow transformation into an authoritarian and arbitrary state, inefficient and repressive, strong and weak at the same time, and run by a few elites of (presumed) experts, a South American type state.
The post The heavy cultural and social legacies of the pandemic: the most worrying damage to the West appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/le-pesanti-eredita-culturali-e-sociali-della-pandemia-i-danni-piu-preoccupanti-per-loccidente/ on Mon, 14 Mar 2022 03:48:00 +0000.