Has Modernity returned to our lives? Or rather, are we the ones who came back to it? The backbone of the socio-historical process that we understand by ‘modern’, or at least its more liberal version, has been present all these years. We are the ones who have denied the centrality of this ‘liberal script’ to describe and prescribe the forms of organization of society and individual self-determination. We have been too easily manipulated by the optical illusions of ethical relativism, institutional anarchy, individualist fundamentalism, populist verbiage, and alternative truths. We thought we were gradually entering a post-material, post-modern world. The pandemic reversed this trend.

 

Towards the (beginning of the) end of the COVID-19 crisis, embodied in the growing and steady supply of vaccines to contain the virus, we have enough analytical perspective to explore the experiences we have gone through and learn the lessons that can allow us to build a better future. These lessons are here to stay, but it is our responsibility to interpret them socially and translate them politically. This brief article summarizes the five constituent components of the liberal script of modernity to be implemented into the post-COVID era:

 

1)    Science: The most evident shift between the pre- and post-COVID-19 era lies in the resurgence of scientific knowledge at the center of the public sphere. We have recovered the positivist aspiration to know the ‘truth’ through open access to science. To have a reason, we use Reason. Certainly, politics always intrudes when we ‘follow the science’, yet the very reincorporation of science-based communications in everyday political discourse produces a new social reality. When life is at stake, it is hard to believe in ‘alternative truths’. Fake news are limited once we testify that our knowledge gap hurts real people and conspiracy beliefs are avoided when we witness that vaccines work as those ‘distrustful’ experts predict. Once again, the true heroes are those who strive to question, learn, innovate, test and produce in order to provide concrete answers to concrete challenges. The investment of the most powerful countries powers in research and development can lead to great results. Knowledge, after all, embodies a form of power.

 

2)    Institutions: As we learn to differentiate between truth and falsehood, we once again recognize the value of social institutions with epistemic authority, helping to familiarize ourselves with their organizational processes. How many of us knew about the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before the pandemic? What did we know about the three-stage testing process vaccines go through for approval? Who was interested in the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in preventing global epidemics before the current global health crisis? During times of chaos, threats and uncertainty, we find security in institutions. The names of laboratories, universities and professors who collaborate in the ‘fight’ against COVID-19 fill the headlines. The directors of the ministries of health and the chiefs of police who implement quarantine measures are our new ‘commanders’. Regardless of whether we congratulate or criticize them, we legitimize their authority by analyzing their policies and results. In the post-COVID liberal script, social institutions are back at the center of the political debate.

 

3)    Community: Infection risks and prevention measures have led to our conscious or unconscious redefinition of the core group with whom we share common bonds, values, and goals: our social identity. With whom do we ‘come together’ if that increases our risk? The patterns of social (inter)connectedness during the pandemic also made us reconsider the norms of collective behavior of the community to which we aspire to belong. We realized that the reaffirmation of our self-determination and individual self-reliance is not detached from a multiplicity of overlapping identities that affect our everyday lives. The virus originated in a market on the other side of the world affects us all. Tourists who come to our countries with mutations of the virus and cities that do not enforce lockdowns affect us. Neighbors who do not put on their masks and our relatives who gather in masse affect us. Collective solidarities become intrinsically overlapped: we are guarantors of each other’s destiny. Reciprocal trust is the key to effective repertoires of collective action based on voluntary compliance at different levels. Communitarianism and cosmopolitanism, which were increasingly perceived as contradicting each other, again go hand in hand in the post-COVID era.

 

4)    State: Among the social institutions reconsolidated during COVID-19, the nation-state stands out as the principal unit of the international system. State borders redefined who enters the national territory and under what measures, occasionally suspending international regulations and inter-governmental cooperation. In this context, the citizen, wherever he is, again became an object of concern and a beneficiary of preferential rights. This seemingly threatening citizen patriotism, a priori, facilitates the populist strategic construction of a Manichean antagonism between ‘the People’ and ‘the elites’, yet it can actually undermine it. The COVID crisis brought governance abilities back to politics: which government offers its citizens better policies? Showing that citizens are ‘first’ requires credentials. It is no wonder that many of the populist regimes have failed to manage the crisis: the virus feels particularly ‘at home’ within them, in the words of Professors Michael Zürn and Armin Schäfer. Failure often tends to delegitimize the populist leadership and eventually overthrow it. The post-COVID era restores policy-based competition between political actors at the national and international levels.

 

5)    Humanism: In the liberal script of Modernity, human beings are again at the center of the socio-political order and, with it, the ethics and hierarchies of humanity. States, communities, institutions, all faced the dilemma of how to stop the virus without sacrificing individual freedoms – how to overcome the pandemic without being overcome by it? In totalitarian regimes this dilemma is largely irrelevant, but not in democracies. The rights to health and personal safety clash with rights to work, property, leisure, protest, pray, study, among others, creating multiple challenges and inequalities. The rights of young and old people, affected differently in case of infection, similarly collide. When these dilemmas are discussed, whatever the decision is, the rights and obligations of human beings become the epicenter of the discussion. The conviction in the progressive course of history in relation to the rule of law, democracy, and human rights might deepen towards the post-COVID era.

 

These are the five constituent components of Modernity’s liberal script that we learned in 2020, which can bring transformative change by laying the foundations for the post-COVID era. Certainly, learning can also be temporary: the return to routine can lead us to forget the trauma we experienced, perceiving it as part of an externally imposed phenomenon and not the product of a conscious choice. Besides, who said these standards and practices are appropriate? The seeds of social elitism, nationalist chauvinism and global inequality might also be hidden in them. Finally, we must remember that the liberal ‘script’ is constantly challenged by alternative ‘scripts’ (totalitarian, authoritarian, populist, fundamentalist) and there is no guarantee that we will be immune to pernicious contagion from these contestations. Even more so if we take into account that the pandemic has also fueled some of these alternatives, mainly the hybrid ‘script’ of the Chinese Communist Party, which was perceived as successful in managing the crisis through its dependence on data digitization and privacy intrusions (although other historical, cultural and political factors could have affected as well). Still, for now, this injection of modern-liberal energy is already in our hands.

 

 

Dr. Daniel Wajner is a postdoctoral fellow in the research cluster “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (SCRIPTS), Berlin International College, Freie Universität Berlin. Comments are welcome at daniel.wajner@fu-berlin.de