We’re used to the trope that our personal actions don’t make much of a difference. Arguably, in tackling climate change it’s not my choice to take an individual flight that makes things better or worse. In the current pandemic, however, nothing could be further from the truth. If I happen to be infectious, taking a flight these days might turn me into a superspreader, setting off a chain of infections that might harm a great amount of people. While we normally have to adapt to the world, the potential of spreading a virus like that has the uncanny effect that the (social) world, suffering infection, ‘adapts to us’, the one spreading. Of course, there are good reasons to avoid labelling individual people as superspreaders, but the fact remains that my individual behaviour might contribute to large-scale infections. The possibility of spreading the virus makes a number of very common habits doubtful and raises a number of moral questions. If I am contagious, then I should take precautions so as not to harm others. Therefore it’s not surprising that we find ourselves confronted with the recurrent advice to wash our hands and stay at home. However, even if the precautions to be taken are individual actions, they require a supportive social setting and compliance. If my employer, for instance, coerces me to work without taking precautions, the blame should be placed accordingly. Thus, new kinds of responsibilities emerge. In what follows, I’d like to consider some aspects of such responsibilities.

Being harmful. – In spreading the coronavirus, we cause harm. The idea of being alerted to the fact that one was responsible for such a spreading is enormously unpleasant, to say the least. While we might not want to attribute moral responsibility to a spreader, we will deem it epidemiologically important to track such a patient. So while such a spreading might not count as a (voluntary) action because it is not intended, it requires us to see ourselves as a cause of harm. That said, being involved in such an event might count as a case of (bad) moral luck and can hardly be dissociated from moral considerations.* Now the assumption that we are merely involuntary causes in such events no longer holds once we know that we are in a pandemic. In this case, I ought to take precautions. A failure to do so would strike me as morally blameworthy. So if I neglect hygiene measures (and end up spreading the virus), I am behaving irresponsibly and blameworthily. However, and this is the point I want to highlight, my fellow citizens and those responsible for living and working conditions in particular also have moral duties. Collectively, we might be said to have the duty to mutually enable each other to take necessary precautions. Now what does this amount to?

The moral status of spreading and spreading advice. – Advice such as “wash your hands!” and “stay at home (whenever possible)” is certainly helpful and ought to be followed in our current pandemic. Yet, it is a double-edged sword. On the one, hand it promotes risk aversion. If people comply, they might indeed prevent spreading and thus create a safe environment. On the other hand, it can be stigmatising. Given that at least staying at home comes at quite a price for some, we must bear in mind that calling out noncompliance might stigmatise and harm others, too. With the lifting of the lockdowns, we not only see people prematurely hasten ‘back to normal’, we also see a growing divide between those complying and those not complying with the restrictions. This divide is not helpful for either side. As I see it, people can only comply successfully with restrictions in a supportive environment. While it is true that individual actions can make a lot of a difference, individuals must have a chance to balance their compliance with the costs that arise. For a tenured professor like me, for instance, it’s easy to stay at home. But that is worlds apart from asking compliance of a shop assistant, who might be sacked if she fails to expose herself to hoards of potentially infectious customers, frowning at her for not wearing her mask correctly. So while everyone needs to consider themselves as a potential cause of harm to others, we need to create an environment in which we enable such considerations. Calling out others will more likely provide an incentive to shift the blame.

What is a supportive environment? – No matter what strategy (if any) your government is following, we need to comply with certain restrictions, if we want to prevent harming people through spreading the coronavirus. A supportive environment is one in which we can comply without harming ourselves. If we ignore the needs of children for a moment, one of the greatest factors that make compliance with lockdown restrictions difficult is the fact that we have to work and rely on other people’s work (to supply for our needs). Thus, we need to make sure that our working conditions allow for compliance. It is here that see a great number of difficulties. Let’s briefly highlight two issues:

• The right to protect yourself from harm. – Compliance can only be demanded insofar as people can comply without harming themselves, be it economically or with regard to their health. Now from the very beginning of the corona crisis it was obvious that a number of people seem to have no effective means to protect themselves. If it is true that being indoors with other people is one of the greatest risks of infection, then care workers are exposed to an enormous danger of infection. Indeed, recent data shows that most COVID-19 deaths are occurring in this profession. If confined spaces are problematic, then what about schools, shops, public transport and the like? (While it might be ok to go shopping, it’s queite another question whether shop assistants are really well protected.) Perhaps with the exception of the medical sector, this seems to be largely in keeping with ongoing class issues. As I see it, our societies and the respective employers in particular are often not providing a safe working environment. But how can we expect compliance if we allow for such an amount of disregard within social settings, firms and institutions?
• The duty to prevent spreading. – Is there a moral duty to prevent spreading? I guess, there is if we can do it without harming ourselves. This is why many people (myself included) consider the lifting of many lockdown measures as premature, especially in that they seem to incentivise outright blameworthy behaviour of crowds gathering to protest for individual liberties or whatever. But besides such aberrations there are more subtle cases. In mid-March, for instance, a colleague returning from a high-risk area was reproached for potentially causing “panic” among students by asking them to keep a safe distance. While I think that causing panic would be bad, I also think that universities ought to prioritise providing a safe environment. Thus, it is vital that universities and indeed other institutions follow policies that enable individuals to act in compliance with preventive measures. While most universities have now moved their education online, they are partly pushing for moving back on campus asap. While eventually returning to in-person education seems sensible and desirable, such moves might also incentivise an unhealthy competition, incentivising premature steps.

So in many cases we might witness (or at least have witnessed) that people are not complying with preventive measures. However, when judging the morality of harmful behavior, we must ask whether they are acting under conditions that allow for compliance in the first place. As much as I am upset to see people behaving in ways that might harm others or themselves, when passing moral judgement of their individual actions, we must bear in mind that the responsibility for enabling preventive behaviour is a collective sort of responsibility. Although I could cause enormous harm by spreading the virus, my actions to prevent such harmful actions have to rely on collective support. In a nutshell, it’s probably more appropriate to blame certain groups, firms and institutions than individuals. Both taking precautions and easing restrictions should be implemented such that these actions allow for mutual support.

––––

* Which reminds me of an intriguing discussion of Adam Smith on the so-called piacular by Eric Schliesser.

PS. Many thanks to Justin Weinberg for suggesting an important revision in my phrasing.

Many people, part of myself included, seem to see the current crisis as a loss of normality. That makes sense, because a lot of processes just came to a halt. But what if you didn’t feel at home in the world as it used to be some months ago? What if you felt like you didn’t belong or wouldn’t get anywhere in that world? If you felt guilty, day in day out, for not getting done what you ought to get done, you now wake up in a world in which hardly anyone gets anything done. The “new normal” that lockdowns create, then, might be a rather comforting kind of normal, at least more comforting than the old competitive world that we had to leave behind for the time being. – Writing my “search for a conversation”, I focused on the current situation as a disconnection from the recent past. Since then, I had a number of conversations that made me see quite a different perspective: The uncertainties and losses we partly experience might actually make us more equal, such that at least some aspects of the current situation might create more familiarity with one another than the former status quo. In what follows, I still don’t have much to say myself, rather I’d just like to give voice to this idea – an idea that I began to see thanks to the conversations I had so far.

Before I get into details, let me be clear about one thing: There is no cynicism or disregard for the current suffering. Quite the contrary. We need to distinguish between two facts: On the one hand, there is the spread of the virus and the disease it causes. On the other hand, there are our social responses and their impact on our lives. By “social responses” I mean measures such as the stay-at-home policy, the prohibition of public gatherings and events etc. In order to appreciate the perspective I’m trying to describe, it might help to imagine that the social responses were put in place independently of any threats to our health. So when I say that the crisis might be comforting for people, I mean that the social measures themselves (and not the disease) can afford comfort.

But how, you might ask, how does being locked up (more or less) afford comfort? The social measures have a number of effects. In my last post, I suggested they disconnect me from my recent past and all the norms that guided me. Of course, this might be disorienting. But think again! What if many of these norms are not helpful or even harmful? Take the general competition within various job markets. Now we’re asked to support each other rather than compete. Is that a bad thing? Take the priorities of academia. Is it so bad that we cannot churn out paper after paper, host workshop after workshop right now? Take the effects on the environment. Isn’t it a good thing that we can swiftly adapt to acting in accordance with measures that will play into ameliorating climate change?

If we focus on certain social, psychological and environmental effects, we can quickly see that there is a lot to be said in favour of our response to the crisis. But still, you might say, it is hard to let go of cherished conventions that guided our interactions. Isn’t it worth keeping them? The disconnection from our recent past might feel like a loss. But again, what if you didn’t feel at home in these conventions? What if you think that much of your life looks like a failure or non-normal in the light of the status quo we had to abandon? There will be way more interesting examples, but I guess that my own experience helps me in taking this perspective. Before I got a permanent job at Groningen in 2012, it became increasingly likely that I would end up with, well, not much. Remembering how it felt to live through various existential worries allows me to imagine myself in quite a different state. Unemployed, ignored, full of on-going self-doubts, would I have thought that I am losing much by the social distancing measures? Or would I perhaps have thought that everyone is now a bit more on the same page as I am?

I don’t know. But Jon, a reader of my last blog post, fleshed out pertinent thoughts about our response to the crisis in some detail. He kindly gave permission to quote his message to me:

After a short burst of anxiety I realised that for me life continues much the same. I’ve been probably unhappy and somewhat anxious for the last year and a half. Why? There was no obvious reason, but a sense of foreboding, that one was not prepared for some thing, that a house could likely never be owned, that I was too ordinary for my growing children to want to spend time with me as they got older, and that I was shaping up to be a net taker, rather than a giver. Confronted with a global event like this is in many ways is a relief, I think once a cancer patient knows what they have is terminal, what really is there to fear outside of the illness.? So, this has happened and it is what I’ve always feared, yet it is hardly that unpleasant. If one can keep ones home and have enough food, it is potentially entirely satisfying. Better still, to be free of the conflict a person can have when immersed in the guilt, the kind of guilt that tells us we should be working when we are not, we should be outside when we are in, we should be engaged in some activity that is full filling when really we can’t be bothered. I find this pandemic peaceful and an opportunity to gaze into the hearth of life, free of self criticism. I enjoy the small things I’ve not seen in people before, both good and bad, and shopping is a surprisingly pleasant experience where people are cordial and aware of you, in the supermarket itself there is space to move and a quiet, calm. On the farm where I live, the M25 that drones as if an ocean is just past the tree line, is quiet now. The ancient farmland seems to be remembering itself, walking around it in the evening it is once more in the depth of the countryside and not a faux village as it is in the modern era. I will miss this when it is over. While the pandemic itself is ruinous to a small number of people for the vast numbers of younger, healthier population, this is far safer an environment that the risks taken driving to work. It is astonishing to me the level of reaction, it is one we can not repeat, there will not be another time in which any sane government will consider suspending all economic activity for everyone on full pay – and on a global scale too! It is an extraordinary experience. I’ve been thinking the virus could be the narrative vehicle in a Pinter drama, the virus itself is relatively harmless, but the story is far more about a collection of disparate personalities confined in a small space. I tell people to savour these times, because scary or not it will be an unforgettable chapter in our lives and we will mourn it when it is over.

Jon’s account brings out aspects and possibilities that I wasn’t aware of when beginning to think about this situation. Taking them into account, I realise what an enormous privilege it is to think of the time before as something lost. Yes, I lived to some degree in accordance with the status quo, I was and still am a beneficiary of the system that is now under threat. But as I noted earlier, I see my alignment with this status quo as a then lucky accident. Things could have gone differently, quite differently. And then it would have been likely that I would have felt largely out of touch with what happened to become, to some degree, a sort of normality for me.

But whichever perspective is more in line with your biography, no matter whether you feel more at home in the abandoned status quo or the interim that we’re living in now, all of us have to face the time after, the time after “suspending all economic activity”. As Eric Schliesser points out today in a rather dark piece, we’ll likely find ourselves in “political turmoil”. As I see it, we might be facing a kind of post-war situation without having had a war. Economically speaking, things look pretty worrisome already. Socially and politically speaking, I fear we’ll be confronted with various myths that are already in the making. It remains to be seen which of these two perspectives will be a better preparation for the time to come. In any case, I find it vital to learn as much as possible about our various takes and hopes generated by the crisis, and look forward to many more exchanges.

 “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.” Hume

I’ve been trying to begin this post for a number of days now. Everything I write feels like a failure. Why is that? Everything seems out of place. I don’t have any interesting opinions to share and I’ve even lost my own conventions for writing. Before March 2020, when I began to write something, I often felt a background against which I was thinking: What I wanted to say felt “worth noting”, “exaggerated”, “inappropriate”, “dull” or whatever, because there was a normality that afforded orientation, a canvas to which I could add my scribbles. Now it feels as if the canvas were gone. With everything in motion, all eyes fixed on the graphs showing the spread of the coronavirus, there is no normality. Of course, there are people trying to maintain business as usual, but funnily enough it is them who stand out a bit awkwardly now, because most of us live in uncertainty. (Here, I’m not talking about all the admirable professionals who work ceaselessly to limit the damage, but ordinary people tucked away in their homes.) We don’t know what’s coming next, whether curves go up or down, whether our neighbours or loved ones or we will be affected more drastically, whether we can return to the normal lives that we had to put on hold. What can we say, if we want to talk and say something beyond repeating or questioning statistics or predictions? It seems as if there were currently no proper place for a conversation between ordinary people. But we need to talk. At least I do.

It feels important to speak, not because I have anything to say, but simply because I think I need a continued conversation, I need to connect. I’m writing in the first person deliberately now. Firstly, because I’m not sure I can speak for anyone else. Secondly, because I begin to feel sick of the third-person perspective. The talk about our lives seems largely determined by graphs and pandemic plans, by talk about symptoms, spreaders, medical, social and economic challenges. Don’t get me wrong: I think this is vitally important. But beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of ordinary exchange that acknowledges the current situation. The lack of normality makes most of what drove our interactions before March 2020 seem rather pointless. In a manner of speaking, I’m inclined to say that I no longer take it for granted that the sun will rise tomorrow. It’s custom and convention that made me expect so, but much of that custom and convention is shattered for the time being. Currently, my friends and colleagues are not friends and colleagues but potential spreaders. So am I. Thank God, then, we have these virtual tools now, but they do have limits that I need to get used to. What’s perhaps more, we neeed a mode of speaking that neither relies on the past status quo nor merely echoes the current medicalisation of our lives.

So how can we connect? How can we have such a conversation? I’m asking because there is so much exchange and advice on how to get through. This is good. But it concerns an uncertain future. I want to talk about the present. I want to understand, not just cope with, what is happening now. No, not in numbers. I want to understand the kind of life we’re living now. We keep acknowledging that these are “strange times”. But they are our times now. We are disconnected from our recent past and from the predictions that guided us then, up till February or March 2020. The catch is: I cannot understand anything on my own. Understanding is a joint project. It works through mutual acknowledgement, occasional disagreement, and refinement, creating a shared familiarity, fostering hopes and hangovers. – But while I have not much to say myself, I have found some really good pieces that helped me shaping my thoughts. (While there are many other good pieces, I’d like to focus on those acknowledging the situation and addressing to some degree concerns of our ordinary lives.) So why not simply list them (in order of appearance):

• The first is “Academics, lead by example” by Boudewijn de Bruin. Amidst numerous (laudable) attempts to maintain business as usual, this piece felt as if someone had opened a window and let in some fresh air. A crucial idea is the acknowledgement that this is not a normal situation and that we need different resources to respond to challenges: “This is not the time to be competitive. This is not the time to tell everyone how productive you are, working 24/7. … So should we give up? Not at all. But we shouldn’t pretend that it’s just business as usual, only online. Seize the opportunity and lead by example and share your wisdom and humanity with your students and colleagues.”
  What I particularly liked about Boudewijn’s account is that he has a clear sense of how he arrived at this acknowledgement. It came through listening to others. Accordingly, he writes: “Listening to people with different views is more important now than ever. Think about all your students and colleagues of different nationalities, from different cultures, different religions. They will bring their own ways of dealing with uncertainty. They have their own views about life and death. They may have widely different expectations about the responsibilities of the state – or they may trust the state much less than you do, or more. Imagine what you would want to do if you were in Italy or Iran right now. You would want to go home. Many of our non-Dutch students and colleagues are in that situation. But many borders are closed. They need our care more than ever.”
• The second is “Covid-19 and online teaching: mind the slope” by Andrea Sangiacomo. He stresses that, while it’s fine to try and remain functional, we must do so by respecting the context in which we function: “If the whole university system happens to run quite smoothly online, if in the end we end up enjoying this (and this might even happen, who knows?), another risk is forgetting why everything is moving online. Reminder: we’re amidst a world pandemic that so far killed almost 15.000 people worldwide (as for today, Monday 23rd March 2020). This is the context within which our online teaching is happening. Remembering this context is important in order not to loose perspective on the meaning of the events, including online teaching. Yes, education needs to keep going, not everything can now become explicitly about the pandemic. And yet, this pandemic is now the broader context within which people are teaching and learning about any subject. We’re teaching online because students (and everybody else) must remain home, trying to limit as much as possible social contacts, practicing social distancing and trying to slow down the spreading of the virus.
  There are pragmatic and existential downsides in forgetting about this context. From a pragmatic point of view, if one looses this context one might forget why staying home and avoid socializing is so vital for everybody at this time. Online teaching becomes just another way of getting distracted, trying to find something in which one can become absorbed, in order not to think to what is happening (about the absorption syndrome see here). But in situations of emergency like this (which will likely endure for some time), trying not to think is precisely the worse one could do. We need all our thinking capacity at this point in order to face whatever will happen.”
• The last one I want to list for now is “It’s all just beginning” by Justin E.H. Smith. It’s a very rich and multifaceted piece. What struck me most is that it gave voice to a feeling that I struggled to express myself earlier to no avail: the strange disconnection to our own and shared pasts: “In spite of it all, we are free now. Any fashion, sensibility, ideology, set of priorities, worldview or hobby that you acquired prior to March 2020, and that may have by then started to seem to you cumbersome, dull, inauthentic, a drag: you are no longer beholden to it. You can cast it off entirely and no one will care; likely, no one will notice. Were you doing something out of mere habit, conceiving your life in a way that seemed false to you? You can stop doing that now. We have little idea what the world is going to look like when we get through to the other side of this, but it is already perfectly clear that the “discourses” of our society, such as they had developed up to about March 8 or 9, 2020, in all their frivolity and distractiousness, have been decisively curtailed, like the CO2 emissions from the closed factories and the vacated highways. …
  We created a small phenomenal world for ourselves, with our memes and streams and conference calls. And now—the unfathomable irony—that phenomenal world is turning out to be the last desperate repair of the human, within a vastly greater and truer natural world that the human had nearly, but not quite, succeeded in screening out.”

In sum, it’s the call to listen to others, to respect our context of emergency, and the insight into the disconnection to many habits and values that began to help me localising my own thoughts. What I begin to see is that my habits and my past don’t provide orientation in the current context. But it’s the current context I live in and need to understand. In order to live, we need customs and habits. If past habits don’t help us, we need to stabilise habits by building and sharing them with one another. Medical and other expert advice is crucial, but only goes so far. That’s why I want to search for voices speaking to the ordinary experience we likely share. For now, we need to establish something from scratch. – So I’d be grateful for any hints at attempts to make sense of the present situation.

On 7 March 2020, a group of 900 students returned to Groningen from a mass skiing vacation in Piedmont, a place declared as a high-risk area for the coronavirus. Unsurprisingly, citizens were concerned, only to be met with reassuring phrases. Although China had documented cases of the coronavirus spread by asymptomatic patients some weeks earlier, a missive by the Groningen branch of the Dutch health authorities (GGD) still explicitly declared that people without symptoms cannot spread the virus. The document is unchanged to this day. Moreover, it seems to be part of a larger pattern. This kind of conduct strikes me as disturbing in two respects: On the one hand, it downplays potential threats and creates a false sense of safety. On the other hand, coming from a health authority such (false) statements help framing concerns and critical questions as overreactions. Questioning institutions and individuals who align their conduct with official guidance will make you stand out as “unduly critical” and “panicky”. No matter how many papers and news articles you’ve critically engaged with, frowned upon by adherents of what governmental institutions declare to be the status quo and quaestionis you might soon wonder whether you should question your own sanity. Beginning to wonder exactly that, I was reminded of the phenomenon called gaslighting, which is defined as psychological manipulation to the effect that people begin to question their sanity, memory, judgment etc. While this phenomenon is often recognised in abusive relationships, there are obviously variants of political gaslighting. In what follows, I’d like to suggest that gaslighting might be an important feature of crisis communication. This is not only important to recognise for restoring one’s sanity, but also in order to prepare for coping in the aftermath of the crisis.

The claim that there is no or little reason to be concerned is of course a trope in crisis communication, especially in the beginning. I vividly remember such claims around the time of Chernobyl. We are used to such claims, and perhaps most of us see them for what they are. There are good reasons to avoid overreactions or panic. However, things are different when more information becomes available. A claim, made unwaveringly against a background of contrary information, does not calm me down; rather it provides additional reasons for worrying. Why would authorities try to reassure me in the light of credible sources raising doubts? At this point, I normally begin to wonder whether the sources I consult might be limited in problematic ways. Am I overlooking something? Is there a serious debate? Of course, newly established facts will be questioned. What gave me pause in this incident was not the claim as such, but the fact that it was declared with such certainty, permitting no room for doubt. Given the large amount of uncertainties, it was the confidence itself that made the claim seem questionable and indeed as politically motivated, in the sense that the intention came across not as informing but downplaying. This assumption was confirmed by observations Naomi O’Leary and others shared on twitter, suggesting that there might have been a series of attempts to downplay the whole issue by health authorities and news outlets.

Finding confirmation (or contrary information) is an important part of assessing your own position. So finding papers and news articles that confirmed my perspective was important in many ways, especially as this crisis is still emerging. (As a side note: I’m immensely grateful for the fact that we have social media such as facebook and twitter. For all the wrongs they are known for, social media seem crucial now for sharing information, raising doubts, and not least for social bonding in times of physical distancing.) But however reassuring it was, it didn’t explain why the health authorities issued false claims. Surely, they must have known that the public wouldn’t be (completely) reassured by false claims whose refutation might just be a click away. Since I can’t read the minds of those issuing false claims, it might be better to focus on the effects of such gaslighting. Two effects strike me as particularly relevant. First, as we know from Trump’s and other famous cases, gaslighters might wish to divert attention from other facts. In the Dutch context, it might be construed as a means to divert attention from the idea of creating “herd immunity”, although, lo and behold, this is now explicitly denied. However, I’m not sure that this diversion was the underlying reason in the present case. So at this stage it might be more useful to focus on a second aspect: Arguably, a general effect of political gaslighting is to nudge people into adherence to a status quo. Panic is certainly recognised as a social problem. To cut a long story short, it will generally be seen as socially desirable to maintain calm (rather than panic). If you manage to portray critics as creating panic, you effectively depict them as having undesirable traits. If this is correct, people might be expected to silence their critical tendencies in order to appear socially desirable. That’s (political) coolness, in a nutshell.

Apart from the fact that making false claims is morally dubious and might incentivise counterproductive forms of conduct, the effects of such governmental gaslighting strike me immensely problematic for two further reasons. First, they generally polarise and thus might even reinforce nationalist tendencies, at least when the supposed status quo is construed as the achievement of a particular country. In the Netherlands, some crisis experts even went as far as claiming that Italy’s strategy of a lockdown was “incredibly stupid”, since it would damage the econony, while the Dutch way was the “only right one”. While I hope that this assessment remains an outlier, there is a second reason that, in my view, renders such gaslighting particularly pernicious: the creation of political myths that serve to polarise after the crisis. Let me explain.

In the last few days, I was often reminded of stories about the time after WW II, after the revolutions of 1989 and after the financial crisis of 2008. Of course, the corona crisis is vastly different in many respects. But what crises of such scale have in common is that they allow for fundamentally different ideas about how to go on afterwards. The fact that large parts of our social and economical customs break down is both devastating and ground for reconsiderations. Do you remember Occupy Wall Street, to pick just one example? It’s no exaggeration to say that this movement has been portrayed by and large as a failure. Whatever the merits or downsides of the movement, such portrayal has been prepared long before. Not intentionally, of course. But by depicting criticism of neoliberalism as a failure, a meme that is still with us, the grounds were prepared to portray countermovents as countering a supposedly desirable status quo.  – I am reminded of this and other stories whenever I listen to all these wonderful ideas about how the corona crisis might also inspire new forms of interaction, forms that are more in line with general political goals such as reacting to the climate crisis. Be they about new forms of online teaching, or larger ideas about environmental or economical questions. My worry is that downplaying the impact of the corona crisis today will serve as a force to retain a status quo from which to counter and suppress important movements after the crisis.

What does this mean for crisis communication? Of course, not every attempt to avoid panic is a form of gaslighting. But I generally think that governmental institutions might underestimate their audience. Here is a positive counter-example: The virologist Christian Drosten currently runs a regular podcast for the public (in German). In one episode, he openly explained how reading one single paper (by a historian on the Spanish Flu) made him change his mind about recommending the closure of schools. What impressed me was the general public response. In a moment of crisis, an expert calmly communicates the fragility and uncertainty in establishing scientific facts and policies. Of course, I’m relying largely on anecdata, but my impression was that this attitude was received as rather reassuring. This in stark contrast to the archetypical assertion that everything is under control, which often prompts worry or cynicism.

I stop here. These are just a few confused thoughts and associations that struck me while trying to come to terms with the new situation that is now affecting us in a number of very different ways. Let me end by saying that I wish you all the best.