The pandemic religion: the rights and guarantees of liberal democracy overwhelmed in the name of “science”
The lockdown has become a ghostly, insistent, pervasive presence in our lives, agitated and brandished in a repeated mantra by "experts" and scientists, some of whom have been awarded institutional positions, others instead free hitters in the circus of information: an authentic cruel fair, an "exhibition of atrocities", just to mention the livid narrative paradigm of James Graham Ballard who, not surprisingly, in his novel reserved a primary role precisely to that science that in the attempt to become art had instead turned into a nightmare.
Close everything, in the name of science. Without other explanations, without sharing of information or data.
A colossal and dogmatic ipse dixit that for an abundant year has been knocking down like an iron mallet on families, students, businesses, self-employed workers, eradicating the social fabric of cities and redesigning the economic, social and certainly also psychic geography of our country.
At the opening of his masterpiece, "Man is antiquated" , Gunther Anders, pessimistically, reflected on the need to interpret and act on change, without suffering it passively and without leaving the world adrift, the exact opposite of what happened in this last one. a year of pandemic obscurity, in which we returned to the role of spectators and subjects, unable to ask questions and, above all, to obtain answers to the essential questions of any institutional system.
Who decides?
What is the legitimacy of those who decide?
On what basis and with what data does it decide?
How do you decide?
On the contrary, we have witnessed a reflux of the entire system into a technical web that has genetically changed, for the worse, most of the guarantees provided by a mature liberal democracy.
The system of the sources of law laid out on the Procrustean bed of emergency, in a dangerous twist that has undermined the guaranteed result of the hierarchy of sources, inextricable and laocoontic sequences of decrees of the President of the Council of Ministers, ordinances of ministers and commissioners, decrees- he reads upstream of the chain but often evanescent and empty in their paradigms, and above all, the restless and long shadow of the statements, opinions, and considerations of scientists.
A new pagan altar on which to sacrifice freedom, economy, sociality, affections, and often also logic: the measures, all highly impacting on our lives, and on the lives of our children, have been attracted in the all-encompassing perspective of a misunderstood right to health, elevated to a totem engulfing all freedoms and constitutionally protected rights.
From a fundamental right, the right to health has become a fundamentalist right.
But in a parliamentary democracy, decisions should be based not only on information flows, and here they remain in a blanket of darkness, but also on a transparent process that makes public discourse, of criticism or analysis or evaluation possible. On the contrary, none of us still today have the faintest idea of what is the proven scientific nature of lockdown measures through which, as in a medieval ordeal, we have already gone through for months, with the only sensible result of coming out of it with nerves and economics. pieces and a pandemic situation, according to experts, at the starting point.
Nor has anyone ever explained the scientific meaning of the curfew or of keeping a restaurant open for lunch but not for dinner, as if the infection followed its own time zone. Or why you get infected in a restaurant or theater but not in the swarming carnage of a subway car.
Yet the clerics of the new pandemic religion occupy manu military newspapers, television programs, transformed almost into eschatological pop icons: they promise hecatombs, black plagues, and we see them dancing macabre dances like in Herzog's Nosferatu, and you never understand if they are worried or if, on the contrary, they betray a thrill of forbidden pleasure in announcing the next end, with that ambiguity worthy of “collective behavior in times of plague” about which Jean Delumeau wrote in his volume “Fear in the West” .
Not to mention those bodies, such as the omnipresent and omnipotent Technical Scientific Committee (CTS), hastily encysted in our institutional circuit, again without any form of transparency and without their adherence to the political decision-making circuit being really clear: because if a government is accountable to Parliament and is accountable to both its majority and the opposition, the CTS on the contrary does not have these obligations, splitting itself from the representative system and ending up simply responding to those who nominated it.
The perplexities about the organism, and the salient differences with similar institutions adopted in other countries such as France, have been underlined several times by the constitutional doctrine but it seems as if the problem has remained confined to academic dialogue alone.
Worse still goes with the “personal” ministerial consultants, appointed in trust by the ministers and whose decisions you really have no idea how and to what extent they become concrete policy elements. A nebula constellation that fragments the decision-making process, constituting a return to the world of the arcana imperii and to a logic that is no longer political but only technical.
And how dangerous is the logic of science left wild and ungoverned, without entangled liberal or simply democratic guarantees, we are reminded of by the vivid pages of history reported by Giorgio Agamben in "Homo sacer" , in outlining the carnicine scenario of the trial of doctors in the second Nuremberg.
Or again, that “tyranny of values” analyzed by Carl Schmitt and which constitutes the non-neutral point of attack of the stickiness of languages with their own inner world and which consider nothing outside their limited horizon.
This is certainly one of the biggest challenges for the Draghi government. The democratization of a science turned into an arena of all against all.
In this sense, if on the one hand the use of the decree-law in place of the Dpcm can be welcomed as an act of return, at least partial, to the bed of the legal system, on the other hand the essentiality of a political but also political responsibility is evident. legal, the decisions taken by the technical and consultancy bodies
Bruno Latour asked for the democratization of the scientific discourse in his theory of the "Parliament of things": it is clear that we must demand transparency on data, on decision-making processes, currently obtained only through the courtrooms, as in the case of the meritorious initiatives of Einaudi Foundation to see the minutes of the CTS itself displayed.
And then there is an imperative, truly of a moral nature: the return to expressive continence, loudly requested by Draghi for his ministers but which must be extended to consultants and technicians of all levels.
This cacophonous and stunning background noise, based on contagions, despair and apocalyptic scenarios, is not good for anyone, if not in a certain ambiguous way of understanding "science", called in panic to consolidate only itself and the income of position of one's power.
The post The pandemic religion: in the name of "science" the rights and guarantees of liberal democracy overwhelmed appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-religione-pandemista-nel-nome-della-scienza-travolti-diritti-e-garanzie-della-democrazia-liberale/ on Thu, 18 Mar 2021 05:01:00 +0000.