Abstract
This article examines the ideas, reception and social role of Germany’s most prominent cultural critic of lockdown politics, Gunnar Kaiser. In contrast to the majority of European intellectuals, Kaiser took an early public stand against the naive adoption of science as a social authority and the unprecedented overturning of core democratic principles. He argued that without vigorous, open debate, the worldwide state of emergency threatened to usher in a fundamentally new (bio)political era, in which liberal democracy would be replaced by an increasingly totalitarian technocracy. Yet despite his voluminous philosophical output, which included a highly creative and increasingly professionalised YouTube channel as well as two best-selling books, Kaiser found himself largely excluded from mainstream German discourse. Crew analyses the full range of Kaiser’s interventions while also situating him within the broader landscape of European dissent.
To be an outsider is the gravest guilt.
Introduction
The most prominent obituary on the life and work of Gunnar Kaiser, Germany’s leading cultural opponent of lockdown politics, can be found in the conservative broadsheet, Die Welt. According to its title, ‘He was the hero of an age’. Despite the edifying headline, the article is less than flattering: ‘Those who paid any attention to the “phenomenon Gunnar Kaiser” might have quickly concluded that, on account of Covid, the man had gone crazy’ (Lühmann, 2023). 1 Like so much of the commentary on the dissidents of that period, the text contains the full assortment of clichés that are increasingly associated with fundamental critics of prevailing cultural orthodoxy, from ‘misinformation’ and ‘conspiracy theories’ to ‘right-wing populism’ and ‘Russian state propaganda’ (Lühmann, 2023). Elsewhere in the German-language press, the disreputable impression is confirmed. An article in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) from December 2021, for example, describes Kaiser as nothing less than a ‘demagogic’ ideologue (Rhonheimer, 2021), while the left-leaning Taz speaks allusively of his activities ‘in networks of Covid deniers’ (Meisner, 2021). Across the breadth of the political spectrum, German media tended to regard Kaiser not as a legitimate, if strident critic, but rather as an errant or even nefarious actor – as a ‘subverter of military morale’ (Wehrkraftzersetzer), as Kaiser himself writes, or a ‘heretic’ (2022: 293) 2 threatening a new orthodoxy.
Such casual suggestions of extremism are weakened, however, by the fact that each of these newspapers published essays by Kaiser, in some cases during the pandemic itself. His concerns about the constriction of public debate and its implications for ‘pluralistic democracy’ (Kaiser, 2020a) expressed in Die Welt in December 2020, or his criticism of the intelligentsia and its credulous, affirmative attitude towards lockdown published in the NZZ three months prior (Kaiser, 2020b) hardly amount to fanatical positions. That the call to uphold the tenets of democracy even at times of crisis could be presented as such is a testament, on the one hand, to the scale of the upheavals that defined that period and, on the other hand, to the ‘mainstream’ treatment of dissidents generally. Both of these issues are at the heart of the following essay. Crucially, Kaiser’s reception offers a clear indication of his significance for contemporary pandemic discourse. In German-speaking Europe, no one offered a comparably productive, persistent, and philosophical critique nor gained anything like the same level of traction. As the Welt obituary concludes, with a note of grandeur: ‘Kaiser’s legacy is a footprint of the soul of the age’ (Lühmann, 2023).
Having achieved modest recognition from the success of both his YouTube channel, founded in 2016, and the publication of his novel, Beneath the Skin (Unter der Haut), Kaiser’s (2018) breakthrough as a public figure was nevertheless a product of the pandemic. By the end of 2020, his interventions on the topic had yielded more than 100,000 subscribers; at the time of writing, three months after his death, the number stands at more than 250,000. In total, his main channel – Kaiser TV 3 – has received more than 55 million views, which, for an almost exclusively German-language production, is a remarkable figure. Although video remains the medium for which he is best known, he was equally capable in print. Besides his newspaper articles, he also contributed chapters to various edited volumes and wrote two further books of his own – The Cult: On the Virality of Evil (2022) and The Ethics of Vaccinating: On the Reclamation of Autonomy (2022). Both works appeared on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list.
Conscious of his role as a public intellectual, 4 Kaiser was also the initiator of several high-profile campaigns. Inspired by a combination of the ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, signed by 153 largely Anglophone intellectuals and published in Harper’s Magazine in July 2020, and the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, chiefly associated with North American academics including Jordan Peterson and Bret and Eric Weinstein, Kaiser published his own ‘Appeal for Free Debate’ in autumn 2020. Calling for an end to the ‘deliberate defamation of intellectuals, artists, authors, and anyone else who deviates from prevailing public opinion’ (Kaiser and Matuschek, 2020), the letter was signed by around 200 public figures, including the philosopher Rüdiger Safranski, author Ilija Trojanow, historian Götz Aly, and microbiologist Sucharit Bhakdi. 5 Similarly, in spring 2021, with lockdown restrictions entering their second year, Kaiser initiated a campaign of non-compliance under the slogan, ‘I’ll have no part in it’ (ich mache da nicht mit). Prompted by the forced, mass testing of school children, which made in-person education conditional on a negative test result, the accompanying 17-minute video (Kaiser, 2021a) remains his fifth-most watched (with nearly half a million views) and provides a glimpse into the principled defiance that made him a beacon for so many disaffected Germans. Repeated six times throughout the text, later published on Substack, he declares: ‘I’ll have no part in it. / I refuse. / I say no’ (Kaiser, 2021b). 6
Nevertheless, not all his interventions were so squarely confrontational. A hallmark of his work is its creative diversity, ranging from the dramatic (Kaiser, 2020c), the cinematic (Kaiser, 2021c) and the polemical (Kaiser, 2020d) to the personal (Kaiser, 2023), the literary (Kaiser, 2020e), and the satirical (Kaiser, 2021d). Indeed, a note of irony seems to underlie almost everything he produced. Equally central to his channel are his countless long-form interviews with guests from the full spectrum of cultural, intellectual, and scientific society. His first conversation with the physician and erstwhile SPD politician, Wolfgang Wodarg, for example, remains his most-watched video (Kaiser, 2020f). Besides an undying desire to come to terms with the political schism of 2020 – what Kaiser dubs the ‘Great Inversion’ (49) – nothing else seemed to guide his choice of interview partner. There is no obvious, unifying political or ideological position, only a common concern about the wisdom of upending the cornerstones of Western civilisation: about the ‘creeping development towards a totalitarian, biopolitical command state [Verordnungsstaat]’ (28).
In what follows, I analyse examples from the full range of Kaiser’s pandemic-era interventions, paying particular attention to The Cult. I begin by reframing the ‘pandemic’ not as a crisis of health, but as a crisis of politics – a conceptual shift also suggested by the subheading of Giorgio Agamben’s (2021 [2020]) book, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics. The main two sections of the essay consider the implications of those politics – that is, the meaning of the historical rupture identified by the epithet, the New Normal. This includes, first, the violation of long-held philosophical principles and political traditions and, second, the development of what Kaiser calls ‘biopolitical technocracy’ (230): a kind of supranational managerialism that threatens to overhaul the relationship between – and the conception of – the state and the citizen. A central concern throughout the article is the way in which the axioms implicit in lockdown radically reimagine the idea of citizenship, stripping it of its classical connotations. The final part of the essay considers Kaiser’s tentative solutions, before situating him within the broader picture of pandemic-era dissent, especially as it pertains to Germany.
Conceptual clarifications: The pandemic as politics
Setting the tone for the book, Kaiser opens The Cult with a flood of questions. The first three read: ‘Why is no one rebelling? Why are people allowing all this to be done to them? Even more: why are so many positively in love with their brave new shackles?’ (13). Later, concerning the restrictions, he asks:
Are we taking unnecessary and extreme collateral damage for granted? Will the measures, in the face of these sacrifices, even bring that which they promise to bring? Where would we end up if we took the political action of the last years as a general guiding principle? (117).
The questions, preempted by his videos from spring 2020, 7 betray a sense of consternation widely shared by those unconvinced by the premises that sustained the measures – that the virus represented an extraordinary societal threat, that the near-abolition of public life was the most reasonable way to combat it, and that mass vaccination represented what Germany’s Health Minister, Karl Lauterbach (2022), called ‘the only reliable way out of the pandemic’. 8 The fact that these premises were so readily accepted was, as we will see, one of Kaiser’s most enduring concerns.
Before the threat of the virus or the wisdom of lockdown is even discussed, however, Kaiser’s questions remind us that the measures reflected a political choice, and that they therefore demanded critical examination. They were not, as was often implied, an act of nature or a scientific necessity. Speaking on NDR’s ‘Coronavirus Update’ podcast in October 2020, for example, German virologist Christian Drosten claimed: ‘At a certain number of cases, this virus simply compels a lockdown’ (quoted in Kaiser, 2022: 53). Drosten’s comments absurdly ascribe agency to the virus and, in the process, deny the political nature of the crisis. They are representative of the kind of technocratic obfuscation or, more plainly, political manipulation that was widespread during that time.
The habitual reference to ‘the pandemic’ must itself be seen as part of this obfuscation, whether willing or otherwise. A representative headline in The Economist from September 2020, for example, reads: ‘The pandemic is plunging millions back into extreme poverty’ (Anonymous, 2020). Here, as in so many cases, the term functions as a placeholder – or euphemism – for lockdown, which, through its unprecedented interference in the global economy, was clearly responsible for increasing levels of deprivation. The virus may have made people sick, but it did not lay them off work any more than it arrested them for visiting the gym or imposed nightly curfews.
For the most part, what we call the pandemic refers not to the outbreak and spread of disease, but to the associated political measures. The two-year period between spring 2020 and spring 2022 will live long in the memory because of the unprecedented levels of state intervention in public and private life. It is precisely for this reason that Kaiser frequently refers not to the pandemic, but rather ‘the situation’ (87). 9 The term helps to dislodge or disassociate the event from its usual scientific and medical parameters, which form part of a wider Verblendungszusammenhang or ‘context of blindness’ (37). 10 At the same time, his term creates the necessary space for reflection. How we describe, classify, and otherwise make sense of that period – the search for ‘epoch-defining terms’ (36) – is the task with which we are now faced. As Kaiser reminds us, the ‘work of the philosopher [. . . ] consists in asking the right questions’ (75).
At the heart of his ‘meta-analysis’ (37) is the attempt to understand why the sudden and dramatic transformation of society was so widely accepted, and what the transformation itself reveals about contemporary society and its likely future development. His interventions were motivated not by any callous indifference towards the suffering wrought by the disease, but by an awareness of a severe latent danger. The measures, he suggests, are a test. ‘It is the immunity of societies to totalitarian aspirations that is being tested’ (74):
If a society allows itself to be so quickly panicked, frightened, and unnerved, if it gives up so noiselessly such fundamental rights, if it is naïve and credulous and compliant and hurriedly obedient, if it doesn’t even think to defend either human dignity in the face of the imperative of bare survival or freedom in the face of purported security and health – if it, on the contrary, excludes precisely those who take a stand for civil liberties, and defames them – then that society is highly susceptible for all kinds of totalitarian temptation (74–75).
If public intellectuals can be understood as the ‘conscience of the nation’ (117), as part of the ‘immunity of our society’ (47), then Kaiser regards it as his duty ‘to take note and speak out whenever liberties are restricted and undermined, humanistic values are thrown overboard, and the demand for compliance and obedience to authority become the dominant themes’ (25). Writing for a largely like-minded readership, he sees it as ‘our task to carefully document each and every hazardous step in the alphabet of totalitarianism, and to warn against them’ (141). Regardless of where one stood on the measures and how one estimates their implications, that they represented an unthinkable departure from Western political tradition and, in the process, transgressed countless philosophical taboos, can hardly be doubted. 11 The following section examines this departure in the light of Kaiser’s work.
The great inversion
The conspicuous lack of resistance to the politics of lockdown, the widespread acquiescence to the most draconian demands, was, at least in part, Kaiser argues, a consequence of their overwhelming scale:
the peculiar thing about the Great Inversion of our epoch is not just that it took place in such a short period of time and with such great acceleration [. . . ], but also that it affects every aspect of life. It is a total paradigm shift, which concerns all areas of society and, in some cases, shatters their foundations (36).
The ‘totality of the revolution’ experienced almost overnight in March 2020, both in Germany and throughout the West, exceeded the limits of the ‘imagination’ and defied any attempt at a ‘general overview’ (Gesamtschau) of the situation (36). Without a proper grasp of the new reality, it is difficult to judge it – to adopt a moral position on it, one way or another.
In his attempt to distil the ‘essence of the Great Inversion’ (37), Kaiser identifies its most pronounced theoretical features. These are fourfold, concerning the domains of knowing, judging, decision-making, and acting. First, on the level of knowing, he contends that ‘we are experiencing an inversion from the normality of uncertainty to that of certainty’ (50). Even when the official position changes, or contradicts itself, the facts and interventions are routinely presented as undisputed or ‘settled’: the potency of the virus, the benefits of face masks, or the efficacy of lockdown (50).
12
The counterpart to this culture of certainty is an increasingly intolerant society:
Nothing is allowed to be challenged anymore. Those with doubts, those who express any concern or even merely wonder about the proportionality of the measures are cast as deniers – even as science deniers. [. . . ] Questioning has come to be morally objectionable, dangerous, and irresponsible (50).
13
A prime indication of this culture can be found in the inverted conception of the ‘burden of proof’ (50). The obligation no longer falls on the radical position, on those pursuing a wholly unprecedented course of action, but, instead, on those cautious in the face of sweeping change. This was reflected by the very framing of the debate, in which those against the measures were frequently portrayed as reckless. 14 Even dissenting experts, Kaiser adds, are decried as ‘troublemakers, busybodies, and scatterbrains’ (50). 15 The ethos of ‘absolute certainty’ (50), what Kaiser elsewhere calls the ‘abolition of doubt in the state of emergency’, has led to a ‘narrowing of the intellectual horizon, of acceptable speech, and public debate’ (Kaiser, 2020a). Ignoring the inherent complexity of the world, it also leaves society blind to unintended consequences and the potential abuse of power.
The second inversion, on the level of judging, concerns the individual’s health status in the age of lockdown – that is, the way that we relate to ourselves and each other. The idea is that ‘we no longer regard ourselves as healthy, but as at least potentially infectious or even sick’ (50). The absence of symptoms makes no difference: ‘Always the possibility exists that we are in fact already ill’ (51). Kaiser again quotes Drosten to illustrate the point: ‘It would be best if we all behaved as though we were infected and wanted to protect others from contagion’ (52). Defined by one German journalist as the ‘pandemic imperative’ (52), for Kaiser this condition amounts to the ‘tragicomic, secular return of original sin’ (51).
Besides reframing infection from an unfortunate act of fate to a kind of assault or battery, this inversion presupposes a fundamental reconceptualisation of man. In the first instance, human beings are conceived as nothing but ‘carriers of viruses, transmitters of disease, sources of infection, potential super-spreaders – a danger’ (51). Homo sapiens is reduced to ‘Homo contaminans’ or ‘Homo hygienicus’ (51). 16 With radically revised philosophical footings, humanity is no longer defined by such traditional values as autonomy, dignity, or even intimacy. This, in turn, clears the path for the measures: ‘Control and regulation [Steuerung] contradict the spirit of the humanistic, “Enlightened” democracies. The disembodied and space-less nature of social life violates the bodily existence of man and his dependence on closeness and touch’ (52). As we will see, Kaiser regards this reconceptualisation as the basis of a novel kind of ethics – bioethics – that lie at the centre of a new, unfolding world.
The third inversion concerns the question of decision-making, or agency.
‘It is no longer man, society, the people, or the polity that decide on the issues in this democracy, but rather an anonymous virus, an illness, an epidemic – or, in the spirit of technocracy, that which technology makes possible or demands’ (53).
Drosten’s earlier claim that it is the virus that ‘compels’ the restrictions is indicative of the first part of Kaiser’s argument. An equally striking example is offered by America’s former chief medical officer, Anthony Fauci. Defending his contradictory policy advice in June 2021, he declared: ‘People who criticise me, quite frankly, are actually criticising science’ (as quoted by Kilander, 2021). Fauci cannot be held personally responsible for his recommendations, it seems, because he is merely a vessel for the findings of science. Manipulative though Drosten and Fauci’s statements might be, they epitomise the apparently impersonal nature of the technocratic governance that emerged during the pandemic.
The second part of Kaiser’s claim, however, is both more subtle and of increasing relevance to his broader argument. Quoting from Helmut Schelsky’s 1961 lecture, Man in Scientific Civilisation, Kaiser writes: ‘No one at all is governing here any more, rather an apparatus is in operation that wants to be correctly managed’ (as quoted by Kaiser, 2022: 53). Politicians and experts, Kaiser explains, are ‘only the servants of this apparatus’, the very existence of which legitimates their actions and, indeed, dictates them. From this perspective, the introduction of PCR testing or vaccination passports, for instance, was a consequence of their availability – of the very fact that such technologies existed in the first place. This dynamic points towards what we might call technological determinism: as previously dominant modes of thinking fall out of favour, whether Christian concepts or Enlightenment principles, political action and social thinking increasingly conform to the logic of the technology that saturates society. 17 The pandemic experience shows that this dynamic runs counter to the ideals of a free and open society, for the logic of the machine contradicts that of the human, classically conceived. The problems with such naïve relations to technology – more precisely, to scientific or positivist thinking – are examined in greater detail in the next section.
The fourth and final inversion concerns the realm of acting – that is, the relationship between the state and the citizen. Traditionally, Kaiser reminds us, this relationship is premised on the defence of the former from incursions by the latter – on the constraint of the ‘Leviathan’ (54) through parliaments, basic rights, and the separation of powers. He explains: ‘The private sphere [. . . ] was supposed to be as large as possible, the power of the ruler, by contrast, no larger than necessary’ (54). At least according to modern political theory, any exceptions to this basis were to be explicitly defined as such and clearly justified. Moreover, in such cases the state would adopt a certain deference, asking – even begging – for public support. The citizenry, meanwhile, would ‘weigh up, be sceptical’ and ‘play hard to get’ (54): hard-fought freedoms would be yielded only reluctantly.
As the lockdown era demonstrates, however, these relations have now been thoroughly inverted: ‘The state no longer asks, it acts. [. . . ] It imposes. [. . . ] It determines and demands, we ask and beg’ (54), whether for a bit more freedom, better communication, or the return of our rights (54). The new dynamic renders the population passive: ‘The overbearing power [Übermacht] of the state presents itself on our side as suffocating impotence [Ohnmacht]’ (54). The inversion is so complete that it is barely perceived as a transgression – state incursion is positively welcomed: ‘Some of us readily participate, consent without criticism, take part proudly and with an unbecoming obedience’ (54–55). There thus emerges a credulity towards authority and a flippancy towards privacy and liberty that point towards deep-lying cultural tendencies. As with each of these inversions, they are not merely the result of political machinations, but reflect what Kaiser describes as a ‘societal climate change’ (71).
Kaiser’s fourth inversion points clearly towards a crucial feature of pandemic politics: the establishment of authoritarian or paternalistic state-citizen relations. In the midst of acute social anxiety, what Agamben (2021 [2020]: 8) calls a ‘sanitation terror’, 18 the state emerges in the guise of ‘custodian’ or ‘guardian’ (183; Vormund). This dichotomy between terror and salvation Kaiser characterises using the theological terms ‘mysterium tremendum’ and ‘mysterium fascinosum’ (150), whereby the former relates to an experience of fear-inducing awe and the latter to the promise of health and security. That this relationship is fraught with danger is suggested, not least, by its prevalence in dystopian fiction. In Yevgeni Zamyatin’s (1993 [1921]), We, for example, the secret police are referred to as the ‘Guardians’, while the dictator himself is known as the ‘Benefactor’. As Kaiser later concludes: ‘a society prepared to take any risk on the assumption that it increases its safety is fundamentally paradoxical: rampant aversion to risk harbours [. . . ] countless further risks that this aversion was supposed to avoid’ (179).
In addition to the beneficent, paternalistic state, however, the public itself plays a crucial role in these new relations. Characterised by passivity and obedience, citizens are reduced to the level of children. Society is marked by widespread infantilisation. This can be seen, Kaiser suggests, by the messaging and marketing endemic to everyday life (142–143). One might think, for example, of the apparently harmless admonitions of weather forecasters to dress warmly in the cold or to remember an umbrella in case of rain. In pandemic-era Germany, this practice peaked in the series of government-commissioned propaganda films, ‘Special Heroes’. Released in November 2020, the first one shows an old man reminiscing on his time as a youngster during lockdown: ‘The fate of this country suddenly lay in our hands. So, we mustered all our courage and did what was expected of us, the only right thing. / We did. . . nothing. Absolutely nothing. We were lazy as raccoons’. 19 Each of the films follows this pattern, celebrating various young people lying slouched, bored, and half-dressed on the sofa, eating takeaway food or playing video games. ‘Become a hero, too’, the videos conclude, ‘and stay home’.
The films, like the phenomenon of infantilisation generally, are premised on yet another inversion: that heroism or virtue can be found in the abandonment of responsibility, in an attitude of ‘blind trust towards the authorities’ (64) and a general ‘mentality of dependence’ (67). In reality, however, regression into such a child-like state is but the crowning achievement of the inversion of society at the heart of Kaiser’s analysis. As Matthias Burchardt (2022) writes in the foreword to The Cult, infantilisation presents a
welcome opportunity [. . . ] to cast off the burden of autonomy [Mündigkeit] and once again use one’s understanding under the guidance of another, to finally give in to laziness and cowardice and to savour, in good faith, the joys of denunciation and the exclusion of the critically minded [Gesinnungsdissidenten] and the vaccine averse [Impfabweichler] (2022: 10).
Perhaps more than any other feature of the crisis, this willing regression exposes the rupture from Enlightenment thinking that the age of lockdown ultimately represents. It draws a line under what the British journalist Brendan O’Neill (2022) calls the ‘culture of freedom’ that once sustained and, at least since 1945, defined the Western world. For this reason, as Burchardt suggests, the pandemic era presents a ‘political transformation, a cultural caesura, a civilisation fissure’ (2022: 9). As the notion of a ‘new’ normal itself implies, the age of lockdown represents a historical watershed. The meaning of this new reality, to the extent that it can already be gleaned, is the subject of the next section.
Beyond the divide: Biopolitical technocracy
Perhaps the most common propaganda refrain of the entire lockdown era was ‘Follow the Science’ – or, in German-speaking Europe, ‘Trust Science’ (115). These slogans were also the most revealing: they indicated the elevation or even ‘glorification of science’ (113) that was ubiquitous during the state of emergency. As one headline in the American magazine Foreign Policy put it, encapsulating the general ethos: ‘The Pandemic Proves Only Technocrats Can Save Us’ (Khanna, 2021a). 20 On the one hand, such sentiment shows the importance of appeals to science in providing intellectual integrity to the politics of lockdown. ‘Acting in the name of science’, Kaiser writes, serves as a ‘legitimation of power’ (113–114). This explains, among other things, the predominance of public health officials in both contemporary discourse and government communications. As Kaiser outlined in his third inversion, the impersonal and apparently impartial domain of science was routinely presented as the central guiding force.
On the other hand, such sentiment revealed something deeper than the cynical manoeuvrings of the governing class. It reveals something about the ideological structure of modernity as such. As Kaiser suggests, it is hard to think of any other idea or institution that could command similar levels of respect:
Today, one can no longer choke off a debate by claiming that it is unchristian, atheistic, or heretical; but you certainly can do so by claiming that one’s own position is scientific, while that of one’s opponent is unscientific, that is, untenable or irrational. Objective rationality [Wissenschaftlichkeit] is a highly compelling argument in our culture (271).
The contrast between God and science is instructive: for Kaiser, the latter has assumed the role of arbiter in the secular age. In the twenty-first century, it forms ‘one of the few [remaining] authorities’ (288), analogous to the role of ‘the people’ for the democracies of the Cold War or God in pre-modernity (114). Science, Kaiser suggests, might be seen as the ‘latest world religion’ (271) – a power ‘that has the final say in all things politics and lifestyle’ (106). As the American slogan had it during the pandemic: ‘In Fauci We Trust’. 21
The religious connotations of ‘science’ can be widely discerned. The insistence on the idea of a ‘scientific consensus’, for example, is nothing other than a new orthodoxy: ‘the indisputability of a dogma’ (92). Anyone who doubts, dismisses or otherwise challenges this orthodoxy is denounced as a ‘science denier’, which is another way of saying: ‘a denier of God and authority, a heretic, [someone] who is questioning our worldview in an unpermitted way’ (92). The fact that the insistence on ‘settled science’ violates the scientific method, which has its very basis in sceptical discourse and open inquiry, is yet a further indication of its perverted role in contemporary society. Delegitimising dissent and resting on the authority of individual scientists, in a manner reminiscent of the Milgram experiments, the ubiquitous appeals to science are of a clearly ‘pseudo-scientific nature’ (Kaiser, 2022: 273).
The question, then, is what role science can be expected to play in wider society: whether it is at all suited to, or even capable of, acting as a political or social authority. 22 The answer, as Kaiser explains, is no: ‘Science as method cannot in and of itself be dictatorial, since science does not govern. It is of a purely descriptive character and [necessarily] refrains from any kind of normativity’ (272–273). No amount of data, in other words, can tell us what to do. Quoting Jürgen Habermas, Kaiser continues: ‘Scientific theories give rise to technologically exploitable knowledge, but not to normative or action-orienting knowledge’ (106). Discovering the nature and potency of a virus, for example, might tell us something about the risk groups in a society, it might even help us develop treatments; but it does not tell us to forbid those groups from visiting their families or attending the bedside of their dying relatives. The value of the latter, which science can never calculate, may well override the threat of disease. 23
The point is that the natural sciences investigate objective reality. They are concerned with facts – with that which can be measured and quantified. They do not, however, determine the values that guide individual or social behaviour: freedom, dignity and companionship, for example, are all qualitative or indeed philosophical notions that lie firmly beyond the purview of science. This distinction is perhaps best expressed by Edmund Husserl (1970 [1936]), in his aptly titled Crisis of the European Sciences. In a passage uncannily applicable to our times, he writes:
In our vital need – so we are told – this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human experience (Husserl, 1970 [1936]: 6).
Attempting to apply the positivist logic of science to society at large therefore risks creating social conditions utterly insensitive to normative questions – a society blind to values as central as beauty, love or meaning. This is the very subject of Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002 [1947]) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Given the preponderance of this logic today, they write, ‘anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002 [1947]: 4). This is why Husserl claims that ‘(p)ositivism, in a manner of speaking, decapitates philosophy’ (1970 (1936): 9). Its religious-like preeminence in society negates all reflection on what it means to lead a good life.
The misanthropic implications of positivism, when applied in technocratic fashion to human life as a whole, are most obvious in relation to the human individual. Conceived in positivist terms, human beings are defined by their metrics: by their age, weight, viral load, blood pressure, resting heart rate, and so on. We are regarded exclusively as biological entities – as mere bodies or, as Kaiser puts it, as ‘objects of “zoology”’ (245). This positivist reduction of man to nothing but ‘bare life’, to use Agamben’s (2021 [2020]: 17) term, denies our existence in a broader sense: not just as physical animals but also as social beings – as citizens embedded in a polis subject to civil rights and political agency. It asserts the primacy of the private, bodily realm (which Agamben designates using the Greek term zoe) over the public, social sphere (or bios). 24 This latter sphere constitutes the domain of humanity as a concept or principle: it is, as Kaiser notes, the ‘genuine object of philosophical and ethical inquiry’ (245).
For Kaiser, this reductionist conception of man, which we have previously associated with Homo hygienicus, forms the foundation of a new form of ethics or ‘bioethics’ (245). It is precisely this moral outlook, in turn, that undergirds and facilitates contemporary politics. As Agamben writes: ‘Modern politics is, from top to bottom, biopolitics: what is at stake is, ultimately, biological life as such’ (2021 (2020): 29). The problem is thus more than merely philosophical. By making the body the primary object of politics, the difference between public and private life is erased: there is what Kaiser calls a ‘blurring [. . . ] of the dichotomy between zoe and bios’ (246). Consequently, there is no conceivable aspect of human life that lies beyond the remit of the state: ‘neither the interior of the church nor the privacy of the home remain for the individual as a secure refuge [Refugium]’ (248). As the Austrian bioethics commission asserted in October 2021: ‘A pandemic is not a private affair’ (as quoted by Kaiser, 2022: 247). In the name of regulating the health or bodies of the population, everything is a public matter – or indeed a public space. 25
The bioethical conception of man is thus of a distinctly menacing character. It naturally implies what Horkheimer and Adorno term the ‘total society’ (2002 (1947): 29), in which the individual is afforded no space to exist independently – to live beyond or retreat from the reach of the regulating and mediated world. Politically speaking, Kaiser argues, bioethics leads to
the totalitarian collectivisation [Vergesellschaftung] of human life, which is completely absorbed into the dominion and influence of the state. Everything, even the smallest ‘private’ decision becomes political; man becomes bare life and his body a mere object of regulation [Verwaltung] (249).
Fully formed, biopolitical societies thus resemble what Jeremy Bentham famously described as a panopticon (Kaiser, 2022: 252). They represent an ‘open-air prison’ (Kaiser, 2022: 255), in which everything can be monitored and managed, and deviants can be effectively contained. Jarring though his language might be, it is therefore little wonder that Agamben regards the concentration camp as the implicit model of contemporary politics: ‘Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ (1998: 181). 26
By this point, it is clear that, regardless of the moral motivation or stated political objectives, the biopolitical reduction of man to an object is not just totalitarian, but also dehumanising and degrading. In such circumstances, individuals become little more than ‘cogs in a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic, totalitarian governmental machinery’ (Kaiser, 2022: 165). They are not so much human beings as ‘human capital’ (Kaiser, 2022: 167) who, without the protections of traditional ethics and civil liberties, are but the passive targets of increasingly invasive social and biological engineering. Indeed, for the technocrats who manage such societies, this reduction is a necessary step towards the ideal state, which, in typically positivist fashion, is conceived as a giant ‘machine’ or ‘clockwork’ (Kaiser, 2022: 274). For them, the image of the variously independent, creative, and obstinate human – the image, that is, of the free man – is but an impediment to utopia. As Zamyatin writes, providing a maxim for the biopolitical age: ‘You are perfect, you are the equal of the machine’ (1993 (1921): 173). 27
Conclusion
Given the bleakness of the prognosis that Kaiser offers, the question naturally arises: what, if anything, can be done? Assuming that the rupture from the ‘old’ normal cannot be reversed, if only due to the precedent that has been set, 28 how can the totalitarian and dehumanising tendencies of our biopolitical age be challenged and even overcome? Resisting the temptations of fatalism and refusing the role of passive victim, Kaiser offers various tentative ways forward.
The first of these concerns a spirit of conservatism that, although largely implicit, is nevertheless clearly discernible. It is an attitude that emerges from his rejection of the radicalism inherent in Europe’s new-found culture of certainty. Rebuking the hubris of the contemporary technocrats, Kaiser offers a programmatic statement: ‘Every instrumental [zielgerichtet] and centrally managed action is, given the complexity of human life, almost inevitably destructive. It is this very central planning that is the cause of our greatest problems’ (2022: 171). In place of the utopian zeal that can be heard in the notions of ‘Zero Covid’ or indeed ‘Net Zero’, Kaiser suggests a humbler approach. Not ‘Forwards!’ but rather ‘Hesitate!’, as Roger Scruton once suggested, ought to act as our guiding refrain. 29 Sweeping attempts to fix the world are likely to cause more harm than good. This is what Nietzsche implies when he writes: ‘The last thing I would promise would be to “improve” humanity’ (2009: 3; emphasis in original).
Related to this moment of hesitation is the very act of philosophising, as a reflection on the world in critical distance to both power and society. It is precisely the task of such ‘meditative thinking’, as Martin Heidegger (1966 [1955]: 46) called it, 30 to sound out and establish the limits to technological progress and political intervention (Kaiser, 2022: 246–247), and to protect metaphysical concepts such as freedom and dignity from the blind march of positivism. Only a culture of deep-rooted appreciation for such ideas ensures ‘that the threshold between humanity and barbarism’ is not crossed (Agamben, 2021 [2020]: 34). This is why philosophy was once considered ‘queen of the sciences’, as Husserl (1970 [1936]: 9) writes, and why public discourse requires input from the breadth of intellectual society – not just from (a select group of) technical experts.
Standing in the way of such meditation, however, is the culture of fear that dominates contemporary discourse. Whether on issues of virology, ecology, or populist politics, the tenor of public debate is frequently one of imminent collapse. It is characterised by what we might call apocalypticism or, in psychological terms, catastrophism. As well as inflaming today’s paternalistic state-citizen relations, this oppressive cultural atmosphere also dims the imagination that, for Kaiser, is so crucial if people are ‘to recognise the severity of their respective situations’ (57). It is no wonder that Heidegger’s conception of meditative thinking was originally published under the German title Gelassenheit, or ‘serenity’. Given the reach and availability of public debate, corporate advertising, and government messaging in the digital era, this atmosphere is unshakable. In the total society, one finds neither the psychological nor the physical space for the cultivation of a considered, non-mediated relationship with the world.
It is with this problem in mind that, in 2021, Kaiser set about founding such a space – what he termed ‘The Refuge’ (Das Refugium). Outlined on a theoretical level in the last section of The Cult (346–349), the practical shape of this ‘island of freedom’ is detailed in an eponymous video from May 2021 (Kaiser, 2021h). 31 From the site of a prospective location in Umbria, Italy, he explains that, in the first instance, the idea is to gain distance from contemporary conditions – that is, ‘not to prevail, but to endure’ (346). At the same time, the project was an attempt to escape the impotence associated with seemingly futile and largely reactive resistance, and to take the initiative. Conceived as a retreat for the like-minded, the refuge was more than a mere rejection of society. Quoting Michel Foucault, Kaiser stresses: ‘We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers’ (348). 32 It was typical of Kaiser that, despite his strident critique, he always sought ‘to remain in conversation’ (329) with his ideological opponents, constantly lamenting the division of society. More than anything else, the refuge project betrays a conviction in the importance of human relationships – of human intimacy – in countering the ossified, miserable, and indeed ‘dead world’ (343) of totalitarian control.
From a post-emergency perspective, it would be easy to scoff at the necessity of such endeavours. Setting aside the litany of causes that, in the name of science, seem ready to return us to the conditions of 2020–2022, the post-pandemic world appears almost uncannily similar to the pre-pandemic world. Yet, the fate of numerous critics and dissidents paints a different picture, especially in Germany. To take just a few prominent examples: in May 2023, one of the country’s most outspoken scientific voices against lockdown and the associated vaccines, Sucharit Bhakdi, was taken to court for incitement to hatred, where he was acquitted; in August 2023, the Weimar district judge Christiaan Dettmar was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for his 2021 ruling on the illegitimacy of school mask mandates; and from June 2022, the leader of Germany’s most high-profile anti-lockdown group Querdenken, Michael Ballweg, was held in police custody for nearly ten months without charge. The charges that have since been brought against him have been significantly scaled back, in what the Taz calls a ‘slap in the face’ for the prosecution (Stieber, 2023). Such is the pattern these cases present that one journalist asks whether Germany is ‘persecuting lockdown sceptics’ (Beppler-Spahl, 2023). 33
A particularly brazen example of this pattern of persecution concerns the Berlin-based American satirist C. J. Hopkins. A searing critic of lockdown and twice a guest on Kaiser’s (2021k, 2021l) podcast, in August 2023 Hopkins was convicted of violating article 86a of the German penal code, which, as The Atlantic notes, prohibits the dissemination of ‘propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organisation’ (Kirchick, 2024). That the charges were politically motivated is hard to refute: himself a man of the Left, Hopkins’ provocative references to Nazi Germany, the ostensible source of his crimes,
34
are clearly intended to warn against a return of totalitarianism, not to help bring it about. Having successfully overturned the conviction in court in January 2024,
35
he offered the following in his closing remarks:
Not every form of totalitarianism is the same, but they share common hallmarks. Forcing people to display symbols of conformity to official ideology is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Declaring a ‘state of emergency’ and revoking constitutional rights for no justifiable reason is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Banning protests against government decrees is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Inundating the public with lies and propaganda designed to terrify people into mindless obedience is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Segregating societies is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Censoring dissent is a hallmark of totalitarianism. Stripping people of their jobs because they refuse to conform to official ideology is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Fomenting mass hatred of a ‘scapegoat’ class of people is a hallmark of totalitarianism. Demonizing critics of the official ideology is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Instrumentalizing the law to punish dissidents and make examples of critics of the authorities is a hallmark of totalitarianism (Hopkins, 2024).
Like the judge presiding over the trial, one might be tempted to dismiss Hopkins’ impassioned defence as ‘ideological drivel’ (ideologisches Geschwurbel; as quoted by Velázquez, 2024). But it is precisely our task, as the state of exception fades into history, to remember how far we in Europe went, and to recognise the rupture from a once proud political tradition that the ‘pandemic’ represents. However one relates to it, there is clearly a very legitimate alternative story to be told about that period: one that foregrounds not disease, hospitals, and medicine, but politics, philosophy, and society. It is a story that concerns not the alleged protection of bodies, but the obvious degradation of citizens. Given the extent to which this story remains out of favour in both intellectual and official circles, in which the wisdom of lockdown has long become an article of faith, this story has a certain urgency. Let us hope that the interventions by the likes of Hopkins and Kaiser can bring about a much-needed reckoning with lockdown and, by extension, with the underlying cultural shifts that both predate that period and continue on, unabated, in its aftermath.