COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, and the “Spanish Flu”: Historical Moments and Social Transformations

Abstract

The author of this article maintains that it is not certain that COVID-19 will reach a magnitude that would justify the social significance that it has in fact been attributed to it by published opinion and government reactions in many countries. It is the lockdown, and not the virus or the infection itself, which is forcing us to imagine that there is a difference between the world before and the world after. This is what changed with the lockdown: “another world,” perhaps only temporarily, became not only possible but immediately real. The nature of the world after lockdown is the main question in the conflict between interpretations of COVID-19’s social significance. The current government discourse about a “new normal” in our future is part of that struggle. After comparing the COVID-19 pandemic with the spread of HIV/AIDS, Wagner concludes that the world is on the verge of a historical moment of the kind that opens up the possibility of large-scale social transformations comparable to the “great transformation” in the first decades of the 20th century. The virus and infection by themselves cannot reach that kind of significance. But perhaps they arrived at a moment when their emergence in combination with the lockdown as the political reaction to them will prompt a re-evaluation of our situation. The experience of lockdown has broadened social imagination and has increased the potential for positive social transformation. But we are clearly still far from any decisive collective action for solving urgent problems through free expression and democratic deliberation.