Food For Thought

Reflections on the Corona crisis by fellows from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study

Shelter in Place For many, the pandemic isolated us from our normal daily routines but we all experienced the lockdown differently. At the initiative of Joe Bauman, NIAS Fellow 2017/18 alumni shared their photos of what home looked like during the lockdown; of the silence found in different places.

For some not much changed, and already empty streets in sparsely populated towns remained as they were before. In a few cases this collective stay at home strenghtened bonds, as Ingrid Maier’s photograph elicits.

Yet for others, like Péter Róbert, Philip Kasinitz, and Fenneke Wekker, previously bustling city streets suddenly became quiet, enabling new ways to experience their hometowns.

Anu Realo – Elva, Estonia – 24 April 2020

Maartje Abbenhuis – Laingholm, New Zealand – 22 April 2020

Mary & Ken Gergen – Wallingford, United States of America – 24 April 2020

Andreea Badea – Frankfurt, Germany – 10 April 2020

Ingrid Maier – Uppsala, Sweden – 23 April 2020

Johannes Koll – Vienna, Austria – 30 March 2020

Fenneke Wekker – Amsterdam, the Netherlands – 27 April 2020

Péter Róbert – Budapest, Hungary – 12 April 2020

Joe Bauman – New York City, United States of America – 31 March 2020

Philip Kasinitz – New York City, United States of America – 21 April 2020

Eric Jones – Fairford, United Kingdom – 24 April 2020

Jacob Thaisen – Oslo, Norway – 21 April 2020

Reflections on the Corona crisis by fellows from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study

TA B L E O F CO N T E N T

Foreword – Jan Willem Duyvendak Introduction – Johan Schot

p. 22 p. 24

Humanity at Home Luigi Corrias

p. 28

Soundscapes and Deaf Spots Maarten Kleinhans

p. 30

The Disenchantment of Home Jan Willem Duyvendak

p. 35

Illness as a Metaphor, Pandemically Ulrike Kistner

p. 41

When is it Too Much?

Liesbeth van Vliet

p. 46

The Pandemic of the Second Century Miko Flohr

p. 50

Quarantine and its Discontents Ellen Rutten

p. 54

NIAS Lunchtime in Isolation Jean-Marc Dreyfus & Fenneke Wekker

p. 58

Resilience in an Infected Society Ton Wilthagen & Paulien Bongers

p. 64

From Participation to One-And- A-Half-Meter-Society Fenneke Wekker

p. 69

A Sublime Historical Event Matthijs Lok

p. 73

Conclusion – Ineke Sluiter

p. 78

Foreword

I hope this unusual book will find many readers. As its name suggests, its intentions are both humble and lofty at the same time; Food for Thought. It doesn’t offer opinions or advice by self-proclaimed experts on the pandemic, but it takes a step back and looks at the multiplicity of meanings which are associated with the pandemic.

The COVID-19 virus has revealed the very fabric of our society. How we experience the pandemic differs greatly by country, by region, physical and mental, and the diversity of contributions in this book reflects that. Each response shows what kind of a society we are part of; it tells us more about social and political relations than about the virus as such. And also the role of science in society as compared to politics, where the language used in discussing the virus evokes a strong battle imagery.

The articles in this publication not only look at social and political responses to the virus, but also at its social impact. In very unequal societies, where some groups have limited resources or barely access to health care, the discriminated are hit the hardest. But again, the virus is not ‘doing’ something special here, it merely magnifies what was already there. The contributors of Food for Thought show how the virus confronts us with ourselves. Sometimes the mirror does not show us a pretty picture, but the resilience of our societies or of individuals are reflected as well.

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These articles exemplify what NIAS aims to promote: science that is based on curiosity, not on judgment or political bias; ‘agnostic’ scholarship, hence not claiming that the pandemic proves that one has always been right.

Of course, the rupture in our society also gives us reason to pause, and to reflect. Should we continue as before or is there space and courage to change?

JAN WI LLEM DUYVENDAK Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences

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COVID -19 and Transformations Introduction by JOHAN SCHOT COVID-19 is a shock. It is a major disrupter of life without much precedent in the twentieth century and our just starting twenty-first century. Of course, in between this large time frame many crises happened. The last century witnessed two World Wars and a severe economic depression, and we experienced a severe financial crisis just a few years ago. Still, this one is different. The sound is different, we hear the birds again; the air gets cleaner, people in cities can breathe again; and we are immo­ bilised, we feel isolated and alienated or at peace and in our homes. These aspects and many more are discussed in Food for Thought where Fellows from the NIAS 20192020 year group, reflect on the impact of COVID-19, not only on their personal life but also on the economy and society.

A big question is whether we will go back to normal again. Many long for this, to get back to the life we had just a couple of months ago. Others argue that we should see COVID-19 as an opportunity to bring back the State to address major challenges ahead of us such the climate, biodiversity and inequality crises. Pandemics have been with us; they are part of our history and have generated havoc and change during the Han era in China and in the Roman empire. Some contributions argue that the crisis is unevenly distributed, some people and societies are hit harder than others. Of course, not taking into

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account personal losses of beloved ones, we have to agree that academics are in a privileged position, research and teaching can be done remotely and Privilege comes with remains necessary. Privilege comes responsibilities with responsibilities, perhaps not only for providing a better understanding of what is at stake in this crisis, but also to generate new perspectives, hope, and new political imagination of what is implicated in COVID-19. This is what this book aims to contri­bute to: share thoughts on how to understand the troubles of our time.

The near future will show whether COVID-19 is a temporary problem or a shock leading to a new divide in history, and, with that, the emergence of a more sustain­ able economy and society. Some argue that this crisis is small compared to what is coming due to the climate and biodiversity crises, and the continuously growing inequalities between people and countries. I think it is indeed important to put COVID-19 in a long-term perspective. It is a reminder of the wicked problems we face and have failed to deal with. These problems are expressed in the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The beauty of these goals is not that we have clear targets, and it is a historical marker that nations globally have accepted them; it represents a shared understanding that the world needs radical transformation. For this reason, the slogan of the SDGs is that they are transforming our world.

The good news is that this transformation has started. The bad news is that it goes slowly. COVID-19 is an

25

COVID-19 and Transformations

unplanned intervention in this ongoing political battle.

Some point out that we need to optimise the current development paradigm using new digital technologies.

This paradigm is based on the axioms and systems of the Industrial Revolution for the provision of energy, mobility, healthcare, water, food, education, and communication. Others point out that we need to step away from these axioms and systems since they are generating the poly-crisis we live in. They are built on the use of fossil fuels while we need a low carbon future; on principles of linear production while we need a circular economy; on a relentless drive to improve labour productivity while we need more to economise on materials and resources; and on a preference for globalised mass production and mass consumption while we have to move to more local production and consumption. This on­going battle also has deep implications for how academics work as they contribute to the wicked problems, while assuming international mobility to attend conferences or for field work. New academic practices of interdiscip­ linary and transdisciplinary research may be needed in addressing these issues, something which remains uncommon in universities despite paying lip service to it.

The Industrial Revolution has shown that deep changes in the economy and society are possible. A simi­ lar change is underway in the fast-growing renewable energy industry, the emergence of mobility-as-service market, the introduction of electric vehicles, and the growing market for organic and vegetarian foods. Some call it a Sustainability Revolution. I call it the Second

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By JOHAN SCHOT

Deep Transition (The Industrial Revolution being the First Deep Transition) since it entails a transformation of the axioms and systems mentioned before. Deep refers to the process of developing new behaviours, new beliefs, and norms, and thus the transformation of our value system as human beings. COVID-19 happens at a moment when the First and Second Deep Transitions are competing for attention, and resources. The impact of COVID-19 has to be judged against this background.

This crisis may contribute to a deep learning process on how we want to live in this world. It may accelerate the Second Deep Transition, or it may ignore that question and perhaps even slow down the process of transforming our systems. It is political decision-making, financial investments, but also our own critical reflections that will influence the global community’s path through this crisis and beyond.

JOHAN SCHOT Chair of the Academic Advisory Board at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and Professor of Global Comparative History and Sustainability Transitions at Utrecht University

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Humanity at Home

By LUIGI COR R IAS

The Corona crisis has confined humanity to staying at home. The Holocaust survivor Jean Améry famously held a passionate plea for the need for home. This need is twofold. One the one hand, one needs a place that is familiar: where one knows the language and is able to read the most subtle signs, the everyday language of gestures and silent expressions. Marcel Proust’s famous episode of the madeleine with tea comes to mind as a beautiful illustration of the warm reminiscences such a home can give. Most of us have our own madeleines.

Améry also points to the need to belong to a political community. The familiar home cannot exist in a vacuum.

Such smaller communities are only possible under conditions of security provided by a political community.

Unfortunately, politicians have used the argument of home and security to close off borders and keep ‘the other’ out. Trump’s message that ‘this is a foreign virus’ is emblematic in this respect.

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With the help of Améry we may point to an alternative here. Now that we are forced to work at home with our partners and children, we may rethink the oikos: reconsider the relationship between economy and ecology, our values and priorities, our place on the planet among other species. In addition, this is the moment to reim­ agine political community. For even if humanity seems to be in this together, the truth is that this crisis does not hit all of us equally hard. Some have no familiar home to return to, are far from their partners and children, fleeing the very community that was supposed to provide them security. For the lucky ones, this might be the moment to rethink politics and solidarity in smaller and larger communities, within and beyond borders.

LU IGI COR R IAS is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Law at

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During his fellowship at NIAS Luigi examined the concept of humanity in international law, which remains undefined though widely used. He constructs a concept by looking at concrete cases of dehumanisation.

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Soundscapes and Deaf Spots

By MAARTEN KLEI NHANS

The sounds have changed. The pounding of trucks and trains have dampened, the din of lovers of noise has been stamped out. In came the sounds of birds, common inland birds without the sonic force of seagulls that can overpower the screech of a braking tram. And a rare bird I had not seen for decades: the goldfinch, an explosion of colours with wings and a song like a pristine meltwater stream flowing over cobbles.

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In came the sounds of bored neighbours wasting water with their high-pressure sprayers. Apparently, such noisy toys can keep the boys busy for hours. In came the occasional acceleration of a car speeding in the narrow streets of the village. Some people release all their quarantine pains through the right big toe. All in all, civil­ ization did not come to a nasty end yet, such as described in dystopic novels. Some people have real pain and some people have lost loved ones, but it did not happen close to me, as far as I know.

Luck and luxury afford attention to minor pains. The pressure on the ears has been released in this intelligent lockdown. A minor headache dissolved so fast I nearly forgot that I had it. Minor headaches are said to be triggered by: • muscle tension in the back and neck (a common state in academics), • exhaustion (a common state in academics), • carbon monoxide (a common state only in academics with houses heated by coal), • concussion (only a common state in academics working in old buildings with low ceilings), • and permanent background noise (a common state in university buildings with poor isolation for noises from outside and in well-isolated university buildings with air conditioning).

So, we escaped the inescapable. I can’t help but enjoy this new soundscape. The blackbird on the roof behind

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Soundscapes and Deaf Spots

us sings such sophisticated compositions that it took me half an hour to discover the five different phrases sung in a row up to the Da capo. I refuse to feel bad about enjoying this.

But it is hard to hear the silenced voices. Sherlock Holmes famously solved a murder What am I not hearing case because the dog did NOT bark that I should hear? in the night (therefore the dog knew the murderer). What am I not hearing that I should hear?

My family, NIAS fellows, collaborators, and the postdocs and graduate students in my team communicate with me. This word is hilarious. ‘Communicate’ is the bare-bonest, meanest and leanest word possible for all the things we do when we interact. In the thesaurus alone I find 53 very different ‘synonyms’ for communicate, and all of them are more meaningful and more specific.

The seminars at NIAS before the lockdown were nothing but neuron-stretching, skull-expanding experiences. Our ears became amplifiers, our eyes became tele­scopes and microscopes with filters to light up parts of the world’s spectrum that I had never seen before. I noticed that the discussions were conducted with person­alities that shimmered through in overtones and overtures, and sometimes as Unlike the birds, we need soundless photon fountains to reduce our aviation on that were impossible to turn a spaceship Earth, but how to blind eye. All of it contributed replace meetings in person? to the meteor showers and the conviviality. I miss that. I wonder how many of the speakers realize that they are missing all this during their

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By MAARTEN KLEI NHANS

online seminars. Unlike the birds, we need to reduce our avi­ation on spaceship Earth, but how to replace meetings in person?

One of the fellows sent me a book. A brilliant classic

by Jevgeni Zamjatin that I had never heard of: My (Wij in the Dutch translation, We in the English), written well before Brave New World and 1984. It is about a society with numbers rather than persons, a sterile spaceship rather than nature, and communication, rather than contact. The fellow sent me the book because I was allowed by said fellow to blurt out some associative ideas about said fellow’s seminar. I greatly enjoyed our two hours of talking on yet another planet, which would be horribly tiring online, and on top of this I was given this poetic book. Me. A book present. It felt as if I got a present twice.

This was not the first time that I wondered why scholars from the humanities give so much to others. In the natural sciences, this other planet in the academia, one sees someone wonder all too often whether sharing this or that thought will earn one a co-authorship. In this era After Hirsch, co-authorships are indulgences for going to publication heaven. Apparently, humanities hardly do co-authorships. Virtue is its own reward, but I was awarded such rewards already by the fellows who were willing to listen. I hope that everyone realizes how much there is to miss.

Our most modern means of communication often have no higher quality than those in in prisons in bad American movies from the 1980s. We sit on two sides of

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Soundscapes and Deaf Spots

the closed door and look at each other through a letter box. Worse, the two-dimensional spacetime on screen often freezes and all I see for minutes is a static, distorted face. We talk to each other through long plastic tubes.

Often it sounds like Neil Armstrong et al. doing their quarantine afternoon walk on another planet. Sometimes it sounds like the tube of the vacuum cleaner (switched on). Where are my blind spots, or rather my deaf spots? What is it I don’t hear? What sensory wormhole could I open to detect the stances and overtones?

I can’t help comparing our situation with the sounds and emotional range of communication of the Daleks, but I lack Doctor Who’s powers to bring about a happy end.

MAARTEN KLEI N HANS is Professor of Biogeomorphology of Rivers and Estuaries at Utrecht University. During his fellowship at NIAS Maarten examined the philosophical pillars within Earth Sciences.

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The Disenchantment of Home

By JAN WI LLEM DUYVENDAK

And then we were confined to home. Finally, a chance to enjoy our homes and work from home! But the tone in the newspapers and social media quickly changed. Home is sweet – as long as we choose to be there. Normally we are in control at home. But how can we be in control when the government commands us to stay there? Sure, we can still do what we want indoors but forced domesticity is a contradictio in terminis: we appreciate home, we realise now, as long as we can leave it – otherwise it starts to feel like a prison.

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Disenchantment of Home

Rather than something festive, our stay at home becomes a disillusion – and that hurts extra because we associate it with positive emotions: ‘feeling at home’ is a warm verb, ‘home’ is all rosy. Home is predictable, reliable. It is the place where we can be ourselves, where we coincide with our environment. The emotional assignment to really feel at home gnaws at us when we don’t feel at home – as a lot of people experienced because of the lockdown: the disenchantment of home. Of course, this crisis is an extreme situation – but it is precisely from this that we can learn. It can, for example, increase our empathy towards those who are condemned to stay at home every day.

COVID-19’s sudden and profound intervention in daily life, causes some to believe that its consequences must be extraordinary too. The end of globalisation was quickly announced by the extreme left and the extreme right. To me, it seems too early to draw such megalo­ maniacal conclusions. It is clear, however, that the Corona crisis magnifies a number Home was popular for so of issues. Whereas ‘home’ was an long because it didn’t get acclaimed place until recently, our attention seriously we now discover how isolating home-life can be. Home was popular for so long because it didn’t get our attention seriously.

Academic interest in the concept of ‘home’ has long been neglected and is often negative: only when there is a lack of home and homely feeling, as is the case with many migrants and the homeless. Sociologist Paolo Boccagni, one of the few who seriously studies ‘home’, writes about the sudden interest, ‘under the current

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By JAN WI LLEM DUYVENDAK

global pandemic, the usually sceptical question What’s the point of studying home? is bound to find new answers.’

Unparalleled numbers of people are forced to stay at home. ‘Forced domesticity used to be a prerogative of vulnerable minorities in poor health conditions – disabled people, frail elderly, and the like. Now it is being experienced by the mainstream.’

And the mainstream have no idea what happened to them. Next to adult working men who are rarely at home during the day, women working outside the home see their world shrink drastically too. One of the greatest changes of the past fifty years has been the entry of women into the public sphere – and in order to achieve this, the limiting effect of ‘home’ and domestic work had to be exposed.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild put this sharply; even those women with paid work, no longer sentenced to home, remained responsible for the second shift: unpaid domestic work. Many feminists hoped that men would take responsibility at home if Men, and increasingly more their wives focused on outdoor women, feel more at home work. However, this rarely at their work than at home happened. Thus, Hochschild concludes that ‘home’ has been left orphan­ed. Nobody cares about home anymore. Men, and also increasingly women, feel more at home at their work, than at home.

Whereas Hochschild initially formulated a fundamental criticism of home, she now advocates its protection and revaluation. The world of work, of the economy, has become ubiquitous and is increasingly pervading

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Disenchantment of Home

‘home’ and vice versa: workplaces are becoming more and more homely, tempting employees to work more and more. The digital revolution plays an important role in this: tech companies increasingly turn their offices into homely places, and we continue to work at home, because we are available 24/7.

The Corona virus drives this fusion of home and work to a peak: employees try their utmost to combine work and home. This unusual situation makes ‘home’ extremely demanding. And like that, it blows up in our faces. Fusing home and work is complicated and not for everyone. For most of us, a few weeks of lockdown feels like an unbearable shrinkage of our world, no matter how passionately we video call.

Since the 1970s, people with a mental disorder have not been living together in large homes, and increasingly only ‘at home’. The Dutch government promoted that living your own home was better than living in a carehome. While seeing professionals is the most important visit for independently living elderly and disabled people, they now refrain from entering homes due to the virus. The enormous increase in loneliness that results from this policy is not only felt by people with a physical or mental disability – the same is equally true for the elderly. While the most vulnerable older people can still go to a nursing home in their very last life phase, all other elderly must continue living at their own homes.

Lonely, languishing at home is bad but not life-threatening. This is different for households in which there is domestic violence. To quote Paolo Boccagni again:

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By JAN WI LLEM DUYVENDAK

‘While #StayHome is the right thing to do, it only exposes the vulnerable members of a household to the darker side of domesticity. In fact, it is informed by the assumption that people are more protected by staying home.

This is likely the case in health terms, but not necessarily in social ones.’

Fortunately, home is a safe place for most people.

But that does not mean that we really feel at home. The experience of feeling at home is a scarce and exceptional experience. It is an exclusive emoThe experience of feeling tion: we don’t feel at home with most at home is a scarce and people and in most places. If feeling exceptional experience at home within our own homes is so hard, why do so many politicians tell us to feel at home in the neighbourhood, the city, and also in the nation?

These politicians simply haven’t thought about what feeling at home really demands of us. Only that explains why home plays such a central role in the recent discussions on Dutch citizenship.

When accused of oikophobia by right-wing populists, the left-wing parties responded by saying they do have warm feelings for the national home, rather than excluding the discussion of home from the political sphere.

In the debate about Dutch identity and citizenship: private, domestic emotions are elevated to the public norm – we should feel at home in the nation. The more citizenship is defined on an emotional level (you have to feel like a Dutchman; you have to show that you are loyal to the Netherlands: a dual nationality indicates lack of bonding, etc.), the more exclusive it becomes. This sen-

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Disenchantment of Home

timentalisation of Dutch citizenship has been captivating us for the last fifteen years. It is time to break with the misguided idea that citizenship would be primarily a matter of feeling and that the government should therefore interfere with our feeling of home.

We only selectively experience the feeling of home, and its discussion in the political arena doesn’t that into account. Besides after the Corona quarantine, home is completely disenchanted.

However, some politicians deliberately politicise a sense of home: they know that framing the debate in terms of home leads to polarisation and calls for minorities to conform or leave. The populist reproach of oikophobia resonates as long as politicians think that politics should be concerned with feeling at home. But what if they learn from the Corona crisis that feeling at home is already so difficult? Would that give them the space to no longer burden politics and citizens with a sense of home?

JAN WI LLEM DUYVEN DAK is Director of NIAS and Distinguished

Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His main research interests are belonging, ‘feeling at home’, and nativism.

This article is a shortened version of the article ‘De onttovering van thuis’, originally published in De Groene Amsterdammer (8 April 2020).

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Illness as Metaphor, Pandemically

By ULR I KE KISTNER

‘The Corona crisis’, as it is referred to short-hand, spawns a proliferation of images and metaphors surrounding the COVID-19 virus. It recalls the title of an influential text by Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, published in 1978. Sparked by the experience of treatment for cancer, Sontag’s philosophical reflection sets out to challenge the mythologizing, moralising and stigmatising effects of common metaphors of illness. In a context in which illness itself no longer holds a form of truth with respect to the subject, she contends that ‘… the most truthful way of regarding illness and the healthiest way of being ill, is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.

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Illness as Metaphor, Pandemically

Sontag’s analysis of Illness as Metaphor focuses on metaphors of cancer (commonly considered to afflict persons lacking in passion and sensuality, and prone to inhibition, repression, and depression) and tuberculosis (historically considered as disease afflicting creative minds, also as indicating lack of passion, or as sign of punishment). Ten years later, in a sequel, Sontag turned her attention to AIDS and its Metaphors (1988).

From a short experience of public health communications and media reports on the current pandemic, we could add some more recently trumped up metaphors for critical scrutiny – for instance, Donald Trump’s designation (now retracted) of the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 as ‘Chinese virus’, Emmanuel Macron’s declaration (on 16 March 2020) of ‘war’ against an ‘invisible enemy’; or the seemingly more innocuous talk of ‘unsuspecting/unsuspected carriers’. Recently enunciated as these meta­ phoric attributions and declarations are, they emerge ready-made from a long history.

What the metaphorical attributions to vastly different pathogens and conditions have in common is the fact that they proliferate(d), historically and/or currently, in the absence of securely established aetiologies and effective biomedical treatments. In the cases of TB and HIV in particular, there was a time lag between the establishment of the respective aetiologies and the development of effective treatment. Moreover, in the cases of TB and HIV, the respective aetiologies could identify the causative agent by way of stipulating a necessary condition, but in the case of TB, the identification of the sufficient

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By ULR I KE KISTNER

condition on which popular opinion and expectation had fastened, remained elusive; and in the case of HIV, the lentiviral nature of the HI virus hampered the popular acceptance of the HI virus as cause of AIDS. To the extent that the control of communicable bacterial and viral infections involves public health interventions, it has to rely on public health communication and popularisation of scientific theories. At this interface, metaphorizations come into play – widely and wildly. Early bacteriology provides rich pickings in this respect. In the face of problems surrounding diagnostic causality, bacteriology tended to take recourse to metaphors resounding to the present day. To drive home the idea of specific disease causation, bacteria were imbued with an essential identity. Specific diseases were being identified with the bacteria linked Bacteria were personified as to them; and bacteria, in turn, ‘the enemy’, cast in frames were personified as ‘the enemy’, of political nationalism cast in the frames of political nationalism, in a combination of military and organicist metaphors. Thus, Robert Koch (1890) spoke of bacteria in terms of ‘the smallest but most dangerous enemies of the human race’, to be fought and defeated. Infection was rendered in terms of an ‘attack’ (of bacteria or viruses), followed by the ‘defence’ (of the organism) and a ‘counter-attack’ (by biomedical professionals, procedures, and therapies). ‘Disease’ appears as a confrontation between bacteria or viruses and doctors backed by governments.

Considering the ubiquity of metaphors of illness circulating between scientific theories grappling with the

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Illness as Metaphor, Pandemically

unknown, and the need for public health interventions in the face of the unknown, historically and currently, it is probably not surprising that Susan Sontag’s book gets entangled in a pervasive paradox: while resolutely declaring its own anti-metaphoric stance, the book devotes itself in large part to the description of metaphors of illness – to such an extent that the vision of the demystification of illness remains elusive. In that respect, it shares the fate of Robert Koch’s discoveries.

Identifying a bacterium as specific causative agent of TB, Koch had opened the way for destigmatisation of TB and other communicable infections. In the terms of the triumphant announcement of Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, no longer was illness a result of ‘an indefinite something’ (such as ‘sinfulness’, conduct, ill fortune, heredity, living conditions), but of infection with a specific identifiable bacterium that could be targeted with biomedical treatment. However, just when destigmatisation Just when destigmatisation became theo­retically possible, became theoretically possible, stigmatisation was being re-­ stigmatisation was being reinstituted through politicalinstituted through politically ly and socially consequential and socially consequential metaphoric attributions. The metaphoric attributions slippery slope of such attributions is brought home by the consideration that a popular-scientific discourse casting bacteria and viruses as enemies to be eradicated can easily be turned into an ideology that portrays its enemies as bacteria and viruses to be eradicated.

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By ULR I KE KISTNER

There is thus good reason to critically consider the meta­ phors of illness and the ways in which they circulate in current discursive practices. For some criteria, we may want to turn to Paul Ricoeur’s work on metaphor, especially his distinction between ‘dead’ substitutive metaphors, and ‘living’ metaphors which could facilitate new connections. But that is a story for another time.

U LR I KE KISTN ER is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria. Her teaching and research interests lie in political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. During her fellowship at NIAS, Ulrike investigated the psychoanalytic conceptualisations of anxiety and trauma, focusing on Freud’s essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.

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When is it Too Much?

By LI ESBETH VAN VLI ET

Within the blink of an eye, the world around us has changed, in ways many we could not have imagined. The world, which we (especially the people living in relatively stable and wealthy parts of the globe) too often interpret as a makeshift, seems uncertain and unpredictable at best, simply terrifying at worst.

And so, we try our best to understand. We count and compare infection rates, deaths, and prediction models on a daily basis. It being the first pandemic in which social media takes centre stage, there is no news outlet that does not seem to have a constant update on the latest information and developments. The world is, however, changing so rapidly that news is sometimes already outdated the moment it is aired. Still, we hunker for it, craving towards something to hold on to, to make sense of the predictable world seemingly falling apart. But is this search for information really a blessing?

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From communication research, we know that honest straightforward information is of the utmost importance when we are confronted with a sudden – traumatic – change in our future outlook. We need information to make sense of what is happening, to know what the future will bring, and to understand what we can do ourselves, especially if things turn out for the worst. So yes, open communication from public health experts, govern­ments, and clinicians about the current COVID19 statistics, the risks, and our own responsibility can be a blessing by guiding us through these tough times.

But that does not mean that information is a magic bullet. On the contrary; there is accumulating scientific research demonstrating that information can also hurt.

Especially the combination of searching for information while feeling unable to control the situation can be risky. Some people are more vulnerable to this peril than others. Moreover, in stressful situations, our attention narrows and focuses on the most threatening information, leading us to forget the more peripheral and potentially nuanced information. This can also explain why we most vividly remember anecdotal harrowing social media stories in this pandemic but forget the more positive and reassuring ones. So yes, (an overload of) information about COVID-19 statistics and risks can also be a curse by petrifying and paralyzing us.

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to how we can overcome potential pitfalls of searching for and receiving of information. The WHO advice of turning off news buzz and limiting social media is certainly helpful,

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When is it Too Much?

as it will diminish the continuous threat, we exposure ourselves to. But we might also be able to learn something from communication studies in serious illness.

In advanced illnesses, clinicians have to walk a fine line between informing patients and their loved ones and providing hope. The same seems to apply to us as soci­ ety at the moment. We need We need realistic information, realistic information, inforinformation from trusted mation from trusted health health agencies. But we also agencies. But we also need need to find hope to find hope. Hope, a multi­ dimensional and flexible con­struct; something we aim for and something we experience at the same time.

Hope can elicit from several sources; from knowing we can trust the information we receive, from kindness and compassion around us, from having meaningful relation­ships with others, and from our religion. Hope is what adds to the resilience of mankind and seeds of hope seem to grow rapidly around us.

And while we try to find hope within the uncomfortable reality we enter more deeply each day, we might also find some guidance from research surrounding our mortality. The COVID-19 pandemic makes us increasingly aware of life’s most uncomfortable truth; that we will all die. When that time has come, people are not without regrets. Regrets of having worked too hard, not having spent enough time with loved ones, and not having chosen happiness. May we use this extraordinary and frightening time in order for information to not paralyze us, but to motivate us to behave responsibly, to be

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By LI ESBETH VAN VLI ET

grateful for our healthcare staff in the frontline, to tell our loved ones how much we care and to be the hope we search for. Let us become damaged but beautiful, as described by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: ‘The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.

Beautiful people do not just happen.’ (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1928-2004).

LI ESB ETH VAN VLI ET is Assistant Professor at the Department of Health, Medicine and Neuropsychology at Leiden University and is the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Fellow at NIAS. Her research looks at the role of communication in advanced illnesses, and how communication can heal and hurt when patients and loved ones are confronted with a serious illness.

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The Pandemic of the Second Century

By M I KO FLOH R

It was in 162 CE that the plague struck Chinese army camps in two western provinces of the Han Empire. The disease was bad: sources report that three or four out of ten soldiers died from the illness, and the amount of detail available suggests this was, at least in the perception of the Chinese, one of the more lethal epidemic attacks of the Han era. More worryingly, it did not stand on its own.

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Late antique sources report the outbreak of 162 had been preceded by an outbreak in 161 and was followed by outbreaks in 171, 173, 179, 182, and 185. We lack specific information about the geographWe lack specific information ical spread and lethality of these about the geographical outbreaks, but their chronologspread and lethality of ical clustering is peculiar: seven these outbreaks, but their of the eleven known episodes of chronological clustering epidemics dating to the second is peculiar century CE were dated between 161 and 185. In China, there is no 25-year period with a higher number of known outbreaks in the entire first millennium CE – though the historical record seems pretty consistent in its quality.

It was only a couple of years later that, right on the other end of the Silk Road, Roman soldiers started to become sick and die. As they were defeating the Parthians, and (re)conquering parts of Mesopotamia, the legions, led by co-emperor Lucius Verus, were struck by an unknown, lethal disease that turned out extremely contagious. In 165, it broke loose in Nisibis, which is now in southeast Turkey, and in Sardis, in Asia Minor. In 166, it reached the Roman metropolis, and decimated the popu­ lation – exact figures are not knowable, but there is no doubt that the city suffered a direct and harsh hit.

From Rome, the disease swiftly spread over the rest of the empire. In 168, it killed Lucius Verus in Northern Italy, leaving Marcus Aurelius as the sole emperor. As in China, the disease was not done after the first wave: throughout the late 160s and 170s, and into the 180s,

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The Pandemic of the Second Century

outbreaks are recorded in various places in the Roman empire. There was an outbreak in Soknopaiou Nesos in the Fayum in Egypt, in 179, reducing the number of taxpayers by as much as one third in barely two months. In 182, there was an outbreak in Noricum, in what is now Austria. In 189, the plague flared up again, in Rome.

Accor­ding to sources, the disease claimed two thousand lives a day in this late episode.

The Antonine Plague, as it has become known, marks a watershed in Roman History. Its impact has been heavily debated. Some have seen it as the big external shock that brought down the Roman economy, and it is certain­ly true that, in certain parts of the empire, things would never be the same again afterwards. Others have champion­ed a more mildly devastating narrative. Yet, was this the same disease that also wreaked havoc Han China? The idea is certainly appealing, though we do not know enough details of what happened in China to be sure it was the same disease that occurred in Rome. The timing is suspicious, and the recurrence of outbreaks, in both the Far East, and in the Far West, over several decades surely suggests something similar is going on.

Perhaps, what is commonly known as the ‘Silk Road’ in the 160s CE functioned more as a kind of Pandemic Highway.

This does not mean that the ‘Antonine Plague’ origin­ ated in China – after all, both in China and in the Roman world, the disease occurred, early on, in regions closer to the end of the Silk Road. This may suggest that the pandemic – if it is the same disease – actually originated

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By M I KO FLOH R

in Central Asia. Moreover: some caution is needed, as there are no direct parallels in antiquity. For instance, there are no indications that the Cyprianic plague of the 240s and 250s made it to China, and the same is true for the Justinianic plague of the 540s. The epidemics of the 630s and 640s in China have no parallel in the Mediterranean. It may all be a coincidence. In a way, however, that does not matter: the story of the Antonine plague and its parallels in China makes clear that at least in thinking about what was going on, a global perspective is required.

M I KO FLOH R is Lecturer of Ancient History at Leiden University.

At NIAS, he explored the social history of inequality in the Roman world, and how increasing wealth and inequality transformed cities and communities in the Roman Empire in the last centuries before the common era.

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Quarantine and its Discontents

By ELLEN RUTTEN

Now that self-isolation is the new real across multiple world regions, journalists, bloggers, and scholars avidly ponder the nexus between quarantine and intellectual potency. Some claim that quarantine boosts creativity or praise breakthroughs that isolation spawned in Newton and Shakespeare. Others paint less blithe pictures.

Psychologists point to harmful quarantine effects and writers’ critique isolated-genius myths. Some, in fact, think that ‘the lockdown generates rather mediocre writing,’ and others say: stories of intellectual brilliance in isolation are all nice and well, but they ooze privilege.

The online version of this article on NIAS’ website https://nias.knaw.nl/ whats-going-on/food-for-thought/ contains a rich resource of hyperlinks, further illustrating Ellen’s argument.

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The debate on productivity and isolation from daily-life commitments – the retreat ideal that once inspired the creation of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and other advanced-study institutions – revives an old question. Does quarantine boost or rather stifle inspiration? In pondering this question, it helps to revisit Russian cultural history, which brims with stories of self-isolated intellectuals – some of whom were more fortunate than others.

‘I have grown a beard; as the proverb goes: a moustache and a beard are praise to a young man,’ Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin wrote in a letter in September 1830, when a cholera epidemic struck Russia. Pushkin self-isolated in his family estate at Boldino village in North-West Russia. The quarantine was not his first.

In 1825, Russian authorities had condemned Pushkin to a prolonged house arrest at Mikhailovskoe, another family estate, together with his childhood nanny. He loathed the confinement then – ‘let us drink from grief,’ he famously implored the nanny in verse – but at Boldino, he was less somber. To To those of us combatting those of us combatting producproductivity issues at tivity issues at improvised home improvised home offices, offices, Pushkin’s daily schedule Pushkin’s daily schedule sounds soothingly lazy. ‘I drink sounds soothingly lazy coffee and lie till three o’clock,’ the same letter says, ‘I go riding, at five I take a bath and then dine on potatoes and buckwheat porridge.’ Appearances deceive, however: the quarantine months rank as top peak in Pushkin’s writing career. ‘Boldino Autumn’

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Quarantine and its Discontents

is, in Russian, today a shorthand for productive times spent in isolation.

At first glance, Iosif Brodsky also saw perks in quarantine. As soon as lockdowns became a corona-life fact, the dissident’s 1970 poem ‘Don’t Leave Your Room’ went viral. ‘Don’t leave your room, don’t commit that fateful mistake,’ so this seeming celebration of life-­betweenwalls starts, ‘Just settle back at home and smoke.’

Brodsky was another seasoned self-isolator: his mother took him to Northern Russia during the Leningrad Siege, and as nonconformist he later spent five years in exile at a secluded village. In hindsight Brodsky called this a ‘very productive time’: ‘I wrote a lot. Including some lines that I remember as a kind of poetic breakthrough.’ He defied idealisation though: the exile years were neither ‘that interesting’ nor worth ‘overdramatis[ing].’ ‘Don’t Leave Your Room’ is no ode to quarantines either. The verses are, in fact, hardboiled satire. As writer Thomas de Waal explains, they mock ‘those members of the stay-at-home intelligentsia … who despised Soviet reality but did nothing to oppose it, merely remaining in their rooms and complaining.’

The Kremlin practice of imposing self-isolation on public intellectuals persists today. After what many consider a fabricated case, theatre and film director Kirill Serebrennikov faced prolonged home detention in 2019.

Serebrennikov, who produced several new works during the house arrest, recently offered quarantine newcomers a ‘How-To-Stay-Home’ power talk. His proposed homestay diet – read, learn languages, write memoirs –

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By ELLEN RUTTEN

are inspiriting, but it also revokes sadder stories of social separation. That of poet Marina Tsvetaeva, for instance.

When World War Two broke Quarantine worked well for out in Russia, Tsvetaeva and her men who had the time and teenage son were evacuated to a means to think alone; but it remote provincial town. Deprescan have disastrous impact sion and a lack of means to support on the less well-off herself and her son thickened the exile stress – and within weeks, Tsvetaeva committed suicide. Her story cannot be reduced to a social-isolation trauma – but it is not unrelated to a point that feminists make today: quarantine worked well for men who had the time and means to think alone; but it can have disastrous impact on the less well-off, on men and (more often) women with care responsibilities. Puskin’s idle bath was, put plainly, no option for the ‘old woman trying to feed her adolescent son by obtaining a dishwasher’s job’ that Tsvetaeva did in 1941.

Together, these stories of quarantined intellectuals offer no easy answer to questions about the relation between isolation and inspiration. But they do teach us that this relation is all but straightforward. Social isol­ ation can be downright lethal; lazy but inspiring; an easy escape; and it can, simultaneously, be a deeply uninteresting and highly productive experience.

ELLEN RUTTEN is Professor of Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Her research project at NIAS examined social practices where imperfection is praised as hallmark for authenticity, humanness, or wellbeing as a response to drastic social and technological changes, and how we can use present day desire for the imperfect and non-polished to address social concerns.

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N I AS LU N C H T I M E I N I SO LAT I O N

By J EAN-MARC DR EYFUS & FENNEKE WEKKER

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FW:

Jean-Marc, may I invite you to have an imaginary lunch with me? I know a real NIAS lunch is not possible right now, with you being in lockdown in Paris and I in my apartment in Amsterdam. But I do hope we can pretend, if only for a little while, we are back in the NIAS lunchroom, eating together with the other fellows. Let’s imagine we – coincidently and unexpectedly – took a seat next to each other and became engaged in an interesting, perhaps somewhat personal talk over a meal. Would you join me?

J M D: Dear Fenneke, thank you for your kind invitation. I am glad to be seated next to you: as a French guy, I am intrigued by Dutch food and the chef is adamant to serve us traditional dishes. So I pretend I taste this green-looking stew: it is a stamppot, isn’t it? It looks good, like a solid, nourishing peasant dish. But of course, this dish (strange to my palate) probably does not taste the same when eaten in Paris or in Amsterdam.

FW: To be honest, I don’t think I will eat it… It’s not a dish to have with this warm weather. After a hard day of work, of being outside in the cold, stamppot is a perfect dish. I’ll have some of the salad instead.

So, tell me Jean-Marc, how is pandemic life for you in Paris?

J M D: The pandemic is really bad, has hit France very badly. Many of my friends got sick. I know many people who have lost someone close to them. The pandemic is also hitting our national ego hard: how come that France does so poorly in fighting the virus? Especially compared

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NIAS Lunchtime in Isolation

to Germany? The discrepancies in death figures have become an obsession for me, and I spend my time trying to find an explanation. Why are some of the oldest developed countries – Western Europe and the United States – the worst affected by the C-evil? How is it in the Netherlands? How is the Dutch self-image?

FW: I hardly know what to say. I am so sorry for you and the people around you. The everyday experience here in the Netherlands is very different. Our bubble, the convenient bubble the Dutch live in… I think that is actually what shocks me most, I have only heard about three persons I vaguely know who have become mildly sick. The virus is out there, but it is as if we all have to be reminded of it. Of course, social quarantine has changed my everyday whereabouts, but it is not like anyone of the people close to me actually fear for their lives. I didn’t realise you were going through such a hard time. I am very sorry to hear this.

I think the differences in our experiences also explain some of the differences in the self-images of the Dutch and the French at this moment. I think the Dutch believe – and our government does not hesitate to emphasise it every week – how well we are fighting the virus, how intelligent our measures are, how social and affective we are towards our elderly and vulnerable peers and… well, how Dutch we are. The self-flattering image of the Dutch is something that has bothered me over the last couple of months, but is not new. It is the national identity constantly being promoted: we are a small, but intelligent and social country. We know how to take care of

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By J EAN-MARC DR EYFUS & FENNEKE WEKKER

ourselves and others, and we can serve as a guiding light for all other countries in the West.

How is your imaginary stamppot?

J M D: I like it. It’s quite heavy, though. How’s your salad?

FW: I try to taste it as if it’s real. And it’s getting better with every bite.

J M D: According to the figures, the most serious ones, the most repeated and collated ones (and of course these are fragile), France and the Netherlands went through the same kind of crisis: rates of infection and death are not so dissimilar in the Netherlands and in France.

FW: In the Netherlands, we see those figures as a con­ firmation that we are simply doing great. While France is in ordinary lockdown, we are in an ‘intelligent lockdown’. We, the Dutch, have found incredible ways to remain comfortably locked up in our own bubble of self-idealisation. Even now, with anti-racism protests all over the world, Dutch politicians still downplay racism as mostly an ‘American problem’, ignoring the fact that racism is also at the basis of our Dutch institutions. It sometimes seems to me that the world is on fire, while we are busy tapping our own shoulders.

But I do believe – this might be a prejudice on my side – the French have a similar self-flattering image of being the best people in the world, at least in Europe. Do you think that after COVID-19 struck France, this self-image has changed? Or do you think the French pride has already vanished during the last decades – or has perhaps never existed?

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NIAS Lunchtime in Isolation J M D: France’s

self-image and self-love are very fragile, France has been suffering from a narcissistic wound for years and years (I wrote about that, of course, in the domain of Holocaust memory and representation).

And I realized during this crisis that, being part of the national body, I disliked the fact that my country did not do so well in fighting the virus. Why were these four times less dead in Germany? And of course, being an academic, I tried to rationalise and find rational explanations.

Explanations scientists do not (fully) provide. Not yet.

FW: I am sorry I am laughing out loud. But I can totally imagine you, as a proper Frenchman, being outraged by the idea of the Germans being better in ‘doing corona-prevention’. Isn’t it funny, that the Dutch, re­presented by me in this case, always feel like they are the laughing third? While actually, the numbers as you mentioned do not differ so much between France and the Netherlands. It’s all in between the ears of our trans­ national European head.

J M D: That’s funny indeed.

FW: I have sincerely missed this, to just sit, eat and share thoughts with NIAS-fellows on what’s going on in the world.

J M D: Thank you for this. I needed this too.

FW: Take care, and don’t forget to taste the dessert.

We’ll need it to overcome these sour times.

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Resilience in an Infected Society

By TON WI LTHAGEN & PAULI EN BONGERS

Resilience is the ability to anticipate, recover, and return to normal. But, we are also capable of eventually becoming stronger and better as a society, even as a result of an exceptional crisis caused by the Corona outbreak.

In his already historic television speech on 16 March 2020, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte outlined the far-reaching expectations and consequences of the Corona virus. By now, it is clear that this virus not only infects our own health but also the basic structures of society.

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In our part of the world, Western Europe, we sometimes seem immune to the disastrous events that occur more often elsewhere. This does not appear to be the case at present. The resilience of individuals and of society as a whole will be put to the test in the coming months, and possibly years. But that same resilience will eventually lead to innovation in issues we have been stuck with for a very long time – and thus to progress.

Three aspects of resilience Resilience is not an abstract concept. It has three aspects.

Firstly, the ability of humans and society to anticipate a ‘shock’ or wide-ranging developments. So, knowing and estimating what is coming and adjusting to it. Certain developments take place gradually. Consider the ageing of society, which leads to higher spending on care – obliging us to work a little longer to safeguard our prosperity.

Predicting high-impact events is obviously less easy.

Think of the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, and similar attacks in Europe a number of years later. Nor did we expect the major economic crisis from 2008 to 2014. In many areas, however, we are making progress with data science enabling us to give early warnings (early warning systems) in case of storms and hurricanes that occur all over the world. So, resilience in this aspect is mainly a question of more and better knowledge. This also applies to individuals. If you know in time that your job or profession is disappearing or changing, you can retrain for another job to avoid unemployment.

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Resilience in an Infected Society

Secondly, resilience entails that we need to recover from a shock or major event and return to normal. This now applies to many people who are ill and suffer from a high fever. Returning to normal body temperature is then the goal. For society, we can draw a parallel. Many companies, organisations, and people who are no longer able to do their normal work now hope that it will be possible to resume their work within the foreseeable future. This also requires resilience: financially, socially, and mentally.

Our economic growth is likely to slow down significantly in the coming period, and the goal is to return to normal growth at some point. To cushion this economic and social shock, a large number of measures are currently being taken by the government, provinces, various labour market agencies. This also applies to the social aspect, which was also pointed out by Prime Minister Rutte. We have to look out for each other and take care of each other. Individual people do not always have sufficient resilience. In the Netherlands and similar countries, we are privileged to have a lot of resources at our disposal, and that also means that we have to contribute to the recovery in other countries where that is not the case, both in Europe and worldwide.

The third component of resilience, renewing, is seen less often. Resilience is certainResilience is certainly not ly not just a return to the old just a return to the old state state. On the contrary, renewing enables humans and society to become stronger and better. That is perhaps the greatest challenge. In these

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By TON WI LTHAGEN & PAULI EN BONGERS

enormously difficult and uncertain times, this is nevertheless the most appealing perspective. At the moment, we appear to be able to step over At the moment, we appear to all kinds of hick-ups in no time be able to step over all kinds of at all, for example in discushick-ups in no time at all sions in which we constantly got stuck. Observe how we now also support flexible workers and the self-employed to stay at work or not be reduced to poverty. In the Netherlands, we have been arguing for twenty years about the contrast between flexible work and permanent contracts, and about the question of what to do with the self-employed. Now we are taking action.

Next to that, we are making major leaps in digitalisation, something that was also difficult in the Netherlands. Necessity makes us to learn quickly, how to teach students online, as well as continuing working together, productively and efficiently outside the fixed workplace.

In this way, our knowledge becomes much broader, more accessible, and less dependent on time and place.

Strong government and public sectors This crisis also offers us individual, social, and economic reflection – back to basics. We are now going to realise once again that the market is a very effective way of organising matters in a society, but that we cannot do without a strong government and public sector. We put the contradictions of society into perspective and, hopefully, we will hold on to that resilience.

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Resilience in an Infected Society

Developing more resilience is a matter of more know­ ledge and more cooperation amongst people, com­ panies, organisations, education, and governments at all levels. Together we can draw up, implement, research, and maintain the agenda of a resilient and meaningful society. This crisis, in which both health and the economy are affected, is unprecedented, but above all let’s use the opportunities we have to emerge from it better and stronger.

This essay is a collaborative effort between TON WI LTHAGEN , NIAS-NSVP Fellow and Professor Labour Market at Tilburg University and PAU LI EN BONGERS , Director of Science of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, component ‘Healthy Living’. Wilthagen and Bongers are driving forces behind the theme ‘Resilient Society’ within both Tilburg University and the National Science Agenda. This article was originally published in Brabants Dagblad during the first week of the ‘intelligent-lockdown’ (19 March 2020).

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From Participation to a One-Anda-Half-Meter Society

By FENNEKE WEKKER

We were just getting started. During the King’s speech in 2013, he outlined a new normal: the Participatory Society, and Dutch citizens were preparing for it. No longer would citizens call on the government for care and support; Rather, from now on, they would take care of each other. The King dreamed aloud, we would ‘build a strong land of self-conscious people’.

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From Participation to a One-And-a-Half-Meter Society

Subsequently, the social support Act (Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning, Wmo, 2015) was introduced and people in need who were previously admitted to institutions and nursing homes were now forced to stay at home for as long as possible and set up their own care network.

Our participatory country of self-conscious people quickly turned out to be a place where ‘confused residents’ disturbed the peace of decent people, where the single elderly were socially Many vulnerable residents isolated and where taking the were not included in the step to participate in society beautifully sketched image was simply too great for many of a Netherlands in which – held back by social fear, disevery citizen lives ‘under trust or a lack of cognitive and own direction’ social skills. Many vulnerable residents were not included in the beautifully sketched image of a Netherlands in which every citizen lives ‘under own direction’. Social initiatives, such as the Neighbours Groups, Neighbourhood Circles and Neighbourhood Restaurants, were established to help vulnerable, hard-to-reach residents to come out of their homes and participate in society.

Over the past few years, I have followed many of these ‘confused’ people during my research; persons who are alone at home with intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems or major traumas and do not receive profes­ sional help. Many of them refused to participate in the multitude of neighbourhood initiatives that were organised especially for them. Often they wanted to, but didn’t dare. Sometimes they could, but they didn’t

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By FENNEKE WEKKER

want to. Social and physical proximity requires (self) confidence, a sense of security and control. When that’s missing, your own home is the only place where you are captain of your ship. ‘This is how I take control of my life,’ the severely depressed Martin said, echoing the King’s message. ‘I don’t need anyone, I’m my own boss, I don’t interfere with anyone. And no one has to interfere with me.’ The message sounded similar from most of my respondents: make sure you’re not dependent on anyone, don’t expect anything from others, human beings simply can’t be trusted.

I think a lot about my respondents now that the ‘one-and-a-half-meter society’ should become the ‘new normal’. I imagine how most of them must thrive now that no one expects them to go outThe prescribed social and side, to have a chat with the neighphysical distance in the bour, to sit at a table with strangers public space must be a in a neighbourhood restaurant. The godsend for many of my prescribed social and physical disrespondents tance in the public space must be a godsend for many of my respondents. Perhaps some of them will finally go out of their houses fearlessly to take a walk in the almost empty streets.

I also realise how much we can learn from Martin and others who are struggling with social fear; they have learned long ago how to survive without people around them, without physical intimacy, without social visits, parties and going to the movies. They enjoy themselves without others, they suffer alone, they live completely inward-looking. Now that the one-and-a-half-meter

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From Participation to a One-And-a-Half-Meter Society

society will return with some regularity, we can look up to the self-consciousness, strength and self-control of ‘vulnerable’ residents. Like them, we will have to learn to survive without the proximity of others.

FEN N EKE WEKKER is Political Sociologist and Head of Academic Affairs at NIAS. Her research focuses on the practice of policy interventions in deprived neighbourhoods, professional initiatives for local community building, and institutional mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. This article was originally published in Dutch on the website of cultural-academic centre SPUI25.

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A Sublime Historical Event

By MATTH IJS LOK

Despite their different interpretations of the Corona crisis, commentators and analysts in media all over the world seem to agree that this crisis marks a fundamental and unprecedented rupture in time. Some scientists, politicians, activists and journalists are hopeful that the Corona crisis will destroy traditional structures, enabling a fully regenerated and more sociable local, national and international society. Others present a more dystopian perspective of long-term unemployment, loneliness, ill-health, and a slow collapse of modern society. Some even regard the crisis in (secular) providential terms of punishment and purification.

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A Sublime Historical Event

The common perception is that this pandemic is unique in history and creates a break in time. In a short moment global society and the lives of those who take part in it have been reconfigured: expectations of the future, memories of the past and our idea of the present have radically altered. In the words of the German historian Reinhard Koselleck, the Corona crisis has suddenly and dramatically created a new ‘horizon of expectations’ of our past, present and future. As well as being a health, an economic and political crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is also a crisis in our perception of time.

Perceptions of threats and opportunities have radically changed in the space of a few weeks, in some instances even days and hours. Whereas until medio March 2020 the main economic threat, at least in the Netherlands, seemed to come from an overheated economy resulting in unaffordable houses, shortages of qualified workers, pollution and mass tourism, now we are presented with the spectre of a fast-shrinking economy and mass unemployment. Overnight the inevitable tourists who ‘swamped’ Amsterdam have disappeared, and the streets of Europe’s historical city centres have become silent.

Suddenly few people seem to worry about old demons such as climate warming, levels of nitrogen, and the rise of populism. News about a terror attack in France in February hardly made a mark, at least in the Dutch media. The nightmare of COVID-19 has unexpectantly paled other spectres once deemed a mortal threat.

This radical reconfiguration of expectations of the future, present and past, simultaneously took place on

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By MATTH IJS LOK

the level of society and on the individual level. Speaking from my personal experience, which is probably similar to that of many others, my horizon of expectations radically changed on Thursday 12 March at 17.02.

Before this instant, I was looking forward to an uneventful and pleasant year to complete a book project in the serene surrounding of the NIAS. At 17:02 I was informed by my neighbour at the NIAS seminar that the Dutch govern­ment had just announced radical measures to curb the Corona crisis, when the ministerial tone earlier had been one of reassurance. All of a sudden, the orderly and congenial NIAS atmosphere had become one of confusion and excitement. In an hour my main urge was to leave Amsterdam to be with my family in Groningen.

The calm future had in few minutes The calm future had been replaced by uncertainty and in few minutes been liminality, fear, and, approximatereplaced by uncertainty ly two weeks later, resignation and and liminality acceptance of a new situation with more constraints and fewer possibilities. I had to invent new narratives to situate myself in radically altered spatial and temporal surroundings, despite little outwardly change on the streets, at least in Groningen, or a visible health threat to me or my direct surroundings.

This sense of living through a unique moment in history that presents a rupture with all the familiar before the crisis, is, as any historian will tell you, nothing new.

During the Nineteenth century, for instance, similar feelings were voiced during the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in the Spring of 1814, the murder of the French

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A Sublime Historical Event

prince the Duc de Berry in February 1820, the revolutions of 1848, and the cholera epidemic of 1829-1837. It is a pattern in history that people It is a pattern in history experience major events in that people experience major their own life as unpreceevents in their own life as dented and marking an abso­ unprecedented and marking an lute rupture with the past. absolute rupture with the past Perhaps this Corona crisis could be termed a ‘sublime historical event’. According to the Groningen historian Frank Ankersmit, during sublime historical events the past was radically repudiated, and a former identity was discarded ruthlessly. He argues that ‘the intense historicisation and narrativization taking place at the occasion of a sublime historical event may completely dissolve the historical identity of a previous period and replace it with a new one.…’

At some point in the future, possibly in one or two years, this Corona crisis will lose its temporal immediacy, probably without us being immediately conscious of it. The media will start reporting less on casualties, health policies will appear on page 3 or become the third or fourth news item. Many of the old problems will re­ appear, some of them in a new guise. New and unforeseen emergencies will appear, and the Corona crisis will recede in our memory, firstly becoming a personal memory to be retold to those younger persons who did not personally experience it. It will become a topic for BA theses, documentaries and novels. The unity in the perception of time will be restored and history will return to its ‘normal’ course again. In the end, it will fall

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By MATTH IJS LOK

into the hands of specialised historians working at institutes for advanced studies who will insert the Corona moment in longer historical narratives, ending the sublime historical moment.

MATTH I JS LOK is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam. His main research interest lies in topics on the intersection of history, philosophy, politics and memory.

During his fellowship at NIAS Matthijs explored the conceptual and historical connection between conservatism and trans- and internationalism in the period 1770-1830.

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Food for thought and time to think Conclusion by I NEKE SLUITER At NIAS, researchers are promised precious time to think in a vibrant intellectual community. One might feel that for thinking, of all activities, Corona should not have made much of a difference. This, obviously, was not borne out by experience. Whereas the term ‘lockdown’ may suggest the kind of isolation conducive to sustained thought, in fact time to think was impacted by home situations that were isolated in one sense, but crowded in another. At the same time, researchers worldwide must have missed the pushback and debate from a different crowd, that of their peers, which makes us sharpen our arguments and improve our theories. Thinking all by oneself is hard. Thinking all by oneself in lockdown runs the risk of being intellectually and socially impoverished.

If this had just been a thought experiment, it would have confirmed the soundness of the normal organisation of NIAS: bring people together, allow them to work and think in peace, but provide ample opportunity for interaction. I am not sure the thought experiment would also have come up with the answer that academics at NIAS and elsewhere discovered: use the crisis situation itself as food for thought, and exploit alternative forms of interaction and communication to rub minds together and see if sparks fly.

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The publication Food for Thought challenged the NIAS researchers from the domain of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to use their formidable collective knowledge and insights to produce perspectives on the Corona crisis, for example by having sociologists reflect on how our sense of home was impacted by the pandemic. Interestingly, the arrow can also point the other way, as when a historian realises that the development of the current health crisis may make us reassess the extent to which a global perspective can help us understand even a pandemic from the second century of our era. Literature and photography have their own specific insights to offer in thinking about our society under pressure. And under­lying it all is the quest for resilience. Where does it reside, how can it be promoted?

I commend the NIAS scholars of the ‘Corona team’ of 2020 for the intellectual energy they have brought to the situation, and the intellectual creativity they have derived from it. If anything, it shows the importance of bringing the perspectives of all domains of science and scholarship to the table, if one wants a dinner rich in food for thought.

I NEKE SLUITER President Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)

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Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences Visiting Address

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The essays in this book are only a selection. For the complete collection of contributions from fellows year group 2019/2020 please visit our website nias.knaw.nl/whats-going-on/ food-for-thought Š Text by authors, June 2020 Design: Bregt Balk Printing: Tuijtel

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