As unpleasant as the coronavirus is overall, one has to be downright grateful to it for one thing: it has relentlessly revealed a real structural weakness in this country and its inhabitants, which is urgently waiting to be repaired, even if Corona will have long been overcome at some point: a particularly pronounced one Skepticism not only about the Covid vaccination, but to a certain extent also about science and technology as a whole. What a Eurobarometer survey already showed in 2014 seems to be solidifying: “According to the survey,” the APA reported at the time, “the Alpine republic was one of those countries whose citizens were least likely to have a positive effect of science and innovation in a European comparison look at various social issues. “
This is now falling on our head, for example in the form of a rather manageable Covid-
Vaccination rate and massive, irrational resistance across all strata of the population to the scientifically required and well-founded methods of fighting pandemics, from masks to tests to vaccination.
Where did we actually take the wrong turn? Part of the explanation may lie in the country’s history. Because after 1938 Austria drove out or destroyed a considerable part of the – often Jewish – educated bourgeoisie that generally forms the social basis of enlightened, rational thought. After the war, this intellectual void could not be filled, and Austria has not recovered from it until today, the economist Ulrich Berger from the Vienna University of Economics and Business recently analyzed in “Standard”.
They were increasingly filled with unscientific and irrational methods and supposed therapies such as homeopathy, anthroposophic medicine, stone healing, iris diagnostics, kinesiology, Ayurveda or the use of Bach flowers, Schüßler salts and Grander water – to name just a few. (A good overview of the traditional oath scene is offered by the recently published book “Business with nothing – false medicine risk” by Theodor Much and Edmund Berndt.)
It is probably due to an Austrian variant of “Live and let live” that is sympathetic in itself that the advocates of reason and enlightenment paid too little attention to this intellectual tumor for too long. The fact that countless pharmacies sell globules today and that the medical association is not free from representatives of the Quack faction unfortunately fits into this picture – and gives the counter-enlightenment an aura of legitimacy.
The political struggle of the Greens against technologies such as genetic engineering represented a booster for the unreasonable in this context; It is hardly surprising that the new mRNA vaccines in particular are met with skepticism in the green-affine countries of Germany and Austria. The fact that right-wing corona skeptics in particular can reap the fruits of this counter-enlightenment today is a subtle point of the story. If it does not succeed in making the education more heard and weighted again, Corona will not be the last crisis on which we largely fail.
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