For some, the climate crisis is not progressing fast enough. In Bernd Ulrich they have their most eloquent representative. We have a few questions.
Friday: Mr. Ulrich, let’s talk about freedom. Would you agree that the Corona crisis has fundamentally affected our freedom?
Bernd Ulrich: Without a doubt. We couldn’t do many things at once that we had done before. But the question is also: Why did we get into such a situation? Well, with our way of life we create compulsions that later reach us elsewhere. From my point of view, the side effects of the application of freedom are the big issue of the 21st century.
What does that mean in relation to Corona?
We don’t yet know exactly what caused Covid-19. But the increasing problem of viruses and pandemics is undoubtedly also due to the way in which we use our freedom. Specifically, this means: maximum mobility, maximum penetration into the refuges of animals, keyword zoonosis. We force an almost insane coexistence with millions of animals in our country, for example. All of this entails risks. And unfortunately one of these risks has now occurred.
So the loss of freedom suffered would be inevitable. On the other hand, I would like to quote the ex-President of the Constitutional Court, Hans-Jürgen Papier, who said that the reaction was sometimes contradicting, headless and excessive. Some decisions were simply not enforceable. If the law is only on paper and cannot be enforced, it is poison for a free, constitutional state. From that point of view, we inflicted this imprisonment on ourselves and not the virus.
There are of course different ways of reacting to a pandemic. The countries have also taken different paths. Roughly speaking, none of them were really successful. But there is no question that we are forming a high-risk society; responding ideally to surprising, high, fast-moving risks is a very unlikely phenomenon here.
Can you still learn something for the climate crisis from dealing with Corona? In terms of freedom?
In general, one can learn from Corona that the sum of the unintended side effects of our behavior begins to exceed the intended ones. That is, the side effects then become the main thing. We have to think about that. Because when side effects become the main thing, so many compulsions are created that freedom becomes formality. One can formally remain free, in the sense of democracy, the rule of law and so on. Only the number of alternatives to choose from is rapidly decreasing.
The Green Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann said that if we take measures early on that are very tough and may not be proportionate at this point in time, then we could bring the pandemic to its knees. I think that’s a disturbing sentence.
It is part of the logic of fighting a pandemic that one reacts maximally to relatively small phenomena and, so to speak, pulls a root. That idea didn’t work. And not just because of constitutional concerns. But I cannot see from the quote that Kretschmann wanted to undermine democracy because of this.
Bernd Ulrich, born in Essen in 1960, is deputy editor-in-chief of Die Zeit. This year he published, together with Luisa Neubauer, in Tropen Verlag: We still have a choice. A conversation about freedom, ecology and the conflict between generations
You yourself once wrote: “Freedom is difficult to assert against existential, biological crises, there is only responsible or irresponsible behavior.” I asked myself whether this is just polemical or whether you mean it seriously.
Let’s put it this way: It is obvious that a society can negotiate anything – just not the physical and biological realities. You can vote on how to respond to a virus, but you cannot vote to make it go away. That is the minimum rationality that should prevail in a society.
In your book, which you wrote with Luisa Neubauer, there is a strong sense of impatience, impatience also with regard to the length of the democratic process. Doesn’t that run the risk of becoming a bit totalitarian?
I am of the opinion that for the climate crisis, or rather, the crisis in the human-nature relationship, different rules apply and different logics prevail. And we have to come to an understanding about them now. In our heads, however, from the experiences of the 20th century, there is a fear that what happened back then could repeat itself in different variants of totalitarianism. That is why we are calibrated to recognize totalitarianism as early as possible in the bud. This range of early warning phenomena includes the fact that impatience towards democratic processes is something bad and that a step-by-step policy is always the right thing to do.
It worked quite well …
Yes, but now a new situation has arisen. Well, stepping in the right direction at the wrong pace can be a wrong step. If you do too little in the face of the climate crisis, then the constraints increase exponentially. Then we have to do a lot more in the next round, and that is what the Federal Constitutional Court recently recorded when it declared parts of the Climate Protection Act to be unconstitutional because they were insufficient to reduce emissions. And yes, the famous impatience of youth. I would like to take up your patriarchal dodging briefly. No, this is not about immature impatience, but about processes that have a certain pace and have consequences, and the point is to preserve the freedom for those who live a little longer than you and me.
Okay, but if that’s the case, you could also let Mr. Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Climate Institute and the Virologist Drosten do the politics. Democratic procedures such as elections are then no longer necessary.
It’s a strange idea. Science can only describe a very broad corridor, in which politics then again have all the freedom or: the agony of choice. You just have to see what situation we are in. We have an existentially threatening, fast-moving crisis in the human-nature relationship. This crisis is telegenic, it is sensual, it is not abstract, it is not elsewhere, it is here, it is not later, it has started. And we have all the means to resolve this crisis. If we started seriously now, the pain of change and the restrictions on freedom would be relatively minor. Still, it doesn’t happen. And that’s why the biggest puzzle for me is: How do we actually manage to get into such an existential crisis and suppress it, even while we’re talking about it?
In September the Swiss rejected a stricter climate policy in a referendum – and Switzerland is one of the countries that has been severely and noticeably affected by the consequences of the climate catastrophe. Even if you look at the German election result, you can’t see a hundred percent “power it up” for the climate-neutral restructuring of the Federal Republic.
I find the Bundestag election result highly ambivalent because all of the parties, with the exception of the AfD, have said that they want to take a 1.5-degree path. At the same time, not a single party has proposed specific measures to ensure that this 1.5-degree path can also be adhered to.
Because they are afraid to talk about unreasonable demands.
I believe that the skepticism towards the electorate is particularly pronounced in Germany. That’s my experience when I talk to politicians. They believe that if the Germans are expected to do something, they will become unreasonable again. That is why the really important questions have not been put to the vote in elections for decades. That was also the case in 2002, for example. It was perfectly clear that something had to be done with the unemployed, and what was the campaign theme? Flood and Iraq war, also important issues, and then came Hartz IV. Today we know that you have to take a 1.5-degree path, but only mumbles this to people so that they cannot hear it clearly. But we will experience a climate policy that the people who previously believed in the murmur will pass hearing and seeing.
Many people suspect that. How do you judge it that the right are trying to hijack the concept of freedom? The AfD operates quite successfully in its circles with the fact that it is the last defender of freedom.
The AfD is a right-wing party, it is a men’s party. From this perspective it is understandable that she says: “If you are persuaded that your way of life is no longer possible, then this is nonsense, this is all just propaganda, we will help you.” so thinks maybe ten percent of the population. The change in which we find ourselves is so great, sustainable and unfortunately also so fast that there has to be considerable resistance.
Interestingly, the climate issue is not becoming as much an identity-political issue for us as the AfD would like to make it. Your neck steak is my end of the world. Or this AfD slogan, which I – sorry, cynical – think is one of the best electoral slogans: “Your car would vote us.” It cannot be summed up more briefly.
Since there are 40 million cars, one wonders why they don’t have the majority. But I do think that there is a lot of discussion about identity politics here too. For two reasons I think. On the one hand – to come back to the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries – we are used to translating all material phenomena into something ideological, aesthetic or moral. Unfortunately, objects, matter, do not disappear as a result. On the other hand, the population knows that ecology presents us with really big problems. Politicians are not addressing these problems nearly as large as they should. People feel that. That is why they begin to either suppress the problem or privatize it, individualize it. And then there is the fight “I have a cargo bike and you don’t have one.” Something that would have to be decided by politics is then carried into society, the individuals then wage a moral civil war, so to speak, instead of being part of a sensible policy to find again.
Will it be different with the new government?
My sentence of hope, if I may put it that way, in relation to the past government and the coming government: “Madness piles up against the walls of inactivity.”
“Madness builds up against the walls of inactivity.” Where did you get that from?
Invented myself.
I just ask, is nice.
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