Weekend Column: From Double Standards to Compromise | free press

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There is a lot of excitement about the football World Cup in Qatar, and debates about the footballers’ political statements continue. But we shouldn’t make it so easy for ourselves to criticize a lack of consistency.

How to live is political. If we want to or not. What we care about, engage in, what we ignore, what we protest against, who we vote or don’t vote for is political. It’s the same with everyone, regardless of whether and where they work or not, in what social, cultural or other circumstances they live. This is also the case with professional footballers and athletes in general – and even those who want to separate sport and politics are acting politically.

One could well have expected that the European soccer millionaires would wear the – basically completely harmless – armband with the inscription “One Love” in Qatar without harm, regardless of all the threatened sanctions. The criticism that they didn’t is justified. A commentator from Bayerischer Rundfunk even went so far as to say: “It’s better to be kicked out in the preliminary round with a One Love armband than to become world champion without it.”

When criticism is cheap

However, this criticism is also cheap – especially for people whose professional life will never culminate in a world championship or the Olympic Games, which you may only take part in once. This criticism is also cheap for people who never have to make such decisions or simply don’t make them. And that is certainly the vast majority of the population. This criticism is also cheap, because in other areas we accept the double standards of politics – and our own – or even take part in them. Companies in western democracies have been doing business with authoritarian states for a hundred years, with companies in poor countries that hardly pay wages, where people work under inhumane and life-threatening conditions. Most of us have gratefully accepted the resulting low prices for many decades. Cheap oil and gas from Russia were also welcome, and now energy sources from Qatar are to help.

And that is also part of the logic of the capitalism system. That rewards the strong and not the good. If it was worth it, we’d be good.

The question of compromise

Usually, however, there are more than two options to act (or not to act). Then compromises are required. The compromise has unjustly fallen into disrepute – which, according to the philosopher Andreas Weber in 2020 on Deutschlandfunk, is due to the fact that many compromises that politicians make are not compromises at all: “It is the case that we have to see that our current politics makes a fundamentally rotten compromise. As we have already heard, a rotten compromise is actually not one… but a harmful pseudo-compromise.” And Weber continues: “Today people grumble about concessions. They believe that we are making far too many – but in reality there are too few. Because the lousy deals, in which global Internet companies hardly pay any taxes, but low earners are fleeced, have nothing to do with compromises. We live in a time far from compromise – and it does not do us well. Social injustice, racism, extinction of species and climate change, i.e. the rejection of reciprocity towards human and non-human players in life, are all expressions of a refusal to to recognize the life goals of others.” That is, there are limits to compromise, there is a limit after which compromise becomes a selfish double standard.

The “acting together”

According to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the need for compromises is based on “acting together”, as she called it, which gives everyone involved, all life, including that of nature, opportunities to develop and does not remain stuck in one’s own point of view. In times of global crises, this “acting together” is more necessary than ever. It is often not the simple solutions that make this cooperation possible. Andreas Weber once again: “If we don’t rediscover the joint action that is based on compromise, we will be in a bad way, as a society and as individuals. That may seem paradoxical and uncomfortable at first glance. But a successful compromise is not a shame, on the contrary, it is an expression of the art of conducting relationships in such a way that everyone has a bit of life in them.The word compromise comes from the Latin ‘cum-promissum’ and means a mutual promise.Ultimately, one promises one another in it to preserve the humanity of the other.”

That’s a relatively simple yardstick against which to measure good compromises. And one that is definitely suitable for everyday life, which is political – and even uncompromising.

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