Social Distancing
“Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. To know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.” —Michel de Montaigne
Since history teaches us that every social phenomenon has or may have political implications, it’s worth carefully taking note of the new concept that has today entered the Western political lexicon: “social distancing.” Although the term was probably manufactured as a euphemism in respect to the crudeness of the term “confinement” used up to now, one ought to ask oneself what a political order based on this might look like. Thus it’s much more urgent, given that we’re dealing with a not purely theoretical hypothesis, if it’s true, as we’ve begun hearing from many sides, that the actual health emergency may be considered as a laboratory in which we prepare the new political and social structures that await humanity.
Even though there are, as always happens, the foolish who suggest that such a situation may be certainly considered positive and that the new digital technologies have for some time freely permitted communicating from a distance, I don’t believe that a community founded upon “social distancing” may be…
