Whether corona or climate: the individual should solve the crisis. But nobody can do it alone
In 1728 the Swiss naturalist Albrecht von Haller made a trip to the Alps. His poem of the same name praises their beauty after the previous war crises, but also sharpens the eye for the “useful pleasure”, which initially only consisted of eye-pleasing exploitation. For von Haller, “moderate nature” is reflected in the Alps, which can be mastered with reason and without “thirst for vain profit”. In his key text on bourgeois emancipation, the early Enlightenment poet still imagines the relationship to nature, high on the mountain, with a far-reaching emphatic gesture.
Almost three centuries later, experts spread gigantic sheets on the Swiss Alpine peaks to stop the glaciers from melting. The largest mountain cover is in the Rhône Alps, the plastic tarpaulin is 50,000 square meters – 0.02 percent of the total glacier area.
The foundation on which the bourgeois subject began its triumphal march is melting or crumbling under its feet through an unimaginable overexploitation. Not only is the beauty of the Alps threatened, but the people who live there must also fear falling rocks and rocks in the exposed mountains. No picture could more impressively demonstrate the futility of individual measures when it comes to major man-made risks.
And yet at the end of 2021 we are all called upon once again as individuals to fight the climatic meltdown, which is euphemistically called climate change, the deforestation of the forests, the exploitation of the people of the Global South or the pandemic. Consumption decisions, we are suggested, are a piece of power that everyone can use against those who are actually powerful. Sometimes this also works, as one or the other consumption boycott of large textile chains or delivery services has shown. However, only when there was a dispute with those involved, be it textile workers in Bangladesh or drivers in Greece.
But what about when we stand at the supermarket checkout as a small cog in the system and, with a clear conscience, slide three packets of tofu, organically grown vegetables and a possibly surviving shopping bag over the conveyor belt? Then instead of getting in the car on the bike to go home to our organically certified furnished apartment, where we plan the next vacation with the lowest possible climate-damaging footprint, because we don’t use a plane, but the train, the suitcase full of fair-trade clothes? And of course only if we are vaccinated against Covid-19, because who wants to infect themselves or their fellow human beings?
What we have experienced in the past thirty years and more can be recorded under the heading of “shifting responsibility”. It’s not just about the state stealing from its responsibility for services of general interest for decades and leaving it to the market and the private sector to provide people with water, housing, energy and welfare of all kinds. The neoliberal figures of thought have also seized the individuals who “empower” themselves on their own initiative.
Ortega, questionable autocrat
And because as a rule we do not decide how a product is produced and whether it will be launched on the market; because although we can buy the more expensive ecological electricity, we have nothing from the companies’ profits and no influence on their decisions; because we suffer with the animals and we still want the Alps to our children in iron white – because all of this is so, it always remains with the limited consumer decisions that also include the supervision of our body and our health.
We are therefore responsible for the choice of consumption, which in the best case scenario is based on an estimate of the consequences. Whether it has the desired effects is a completely different matter. To recall a forgotten example: in the 1980s, coffee was bought from Nicaragua to support the Sandinista revolution; that Ortega would one day become a questionable autocrat was not considered. But such effects can also be quantified: The proportion of organic products in food consumption has risen to over ten percent with Corona; According to the Federal Environment Agency, carbon dioxide emissions from food rose in 2020 at the same time above the 2015 level.
We have been experiencing a special kind of privatization of responsibility since the outbreak of the pandemic, through which the individual body was put into service for the community body in a previously unimagined way. Distance and hygiene rules were and are behavioral prompts for the individual, also for the benefit of the community. After the vaccines were finally on the market, it was left to most of us to find a vaccination appointment in fierce competition, and doctors: in turn, it was often the decision of who was given preference. In the meantime, the camps in the western hemisphere are overflowing with vaccines and there is hardly any acceptance of them.
That is why those who refuse to consume are now in the pillory. With the number of infections rising again rapidly, the discourse of responsibility has changed; we are talking about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” who are identified as the drivers of the disease. “We have too many people who do not get vaccinated”, complains Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) on behalf of many of his counterparts, the newly installed Hendrik Wüst (CDU) from North Rhine-Westphalia declares that the unvaccinated are responsible for that “We do not achieve herd immunity in Germany”. World Medical President Frank Ulrich Montgomery, a man of never random announcements, even speaks of the “tyranny of the unvaccinated who rule over the vaccinated”. Quotes from a Sunday evening that determined the media sound the next day.
This is politically devastating in a situation in which the executive federal government has disappeared and the future government absolutely wants to distance itself from the course of the previous one, and is therefore in competition with it to proclaim “Freedom Day”.
The vacuum of responsibility is palpable in the draft of the coalition members, who postpone future decisions to the federal states and municipalities as well as to the hospitals and nursing homes, who use the situation to draw attention to their fundamentally disastrous situation.
The agony of rational choice
The sociologist Ulrich Beck described this state of affairs with the term “organized irresponsibility”, which is currently evident from the fact that in most federal states, after a relaxing summer, not even the third vaccination was prepared for the most vulnerable groups.
The paradox is that those who refuse to vaccinate or those who are still insecure have taken the neoliberal demand for voluntary elections seriously and are now rubbing their eyes at what is happening to them. The fact that their claim to physical integrity – to assume the most understandable – now collides with the necessity for biopolitical action, i.e. the sensible submission to community health action, must be strange in view of the fact that the good health has long been fed into the private sector cycle: be it hospitals or be it individual health services.
Mind you: These statements do not aim to invalidate the meaning of corona vaccinations. It is about a discourse of responsibility in which, for decades, an empowered consumer who is able to rewrite the agenda of power has been imagined. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa writes about the social theory he wrote together with Andreas Reckwitz Late modernity in crisisthat the idea of actors capable of “rational choice” is a fallacy of neoliberal theory. This also and especially applies to health decisions.
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