Abstract
Abstract In 2020, two crises emerged into prominence in the United States and other parts of the world: (1) the flourishing of the COVID-19 virus, in which the polarization and relativization of knowledge have hobbled efforts to prevent pandemic spread, and (2) the killing of George Floyd which has stirred worldwide protests against centuries of racial oppression and unbared an underlying racist ideology about the seemingly lesser value of Black people. It might seem that both these crises are unrelated, but this article argues that both crises are rooted in a common phenomenon, the surge of the pursuit of everyday pragmatic mastery beyond its legitimate boundary. This pursuit of mastery has instrumentalized structures of discourse, thereby undermining Alfred Schutz’s paradigm of the well-informed citizen seeking to understand dispassionately imposed relevances and the non-pragmatic provinces of meaning that might have restrained the pursuit of such mastery, such as the provinces of theoretical science and religious experience. As regards racism, the pursuance of such mastery results in transgressing and eliminating through violence the ethical boundaries the Levinasian other prescribes. These twin crises are not disparate happenings occurring now to remedy the tedium of the pandemic, but are bound together at the hip.
Highlights
In 2020, two crises emerged into prominence in the United States and other parts of the world: (1) the flourishing of the COVID-19 virus, in which the polarization and relativization of knowledge have hobbled efforts to prevent pandemic spread, and (2) the killing of George Floyd which has stirred worldwide protests against centuries of racial oppression and unbared an underlying racist ideology about the seemingly lesser value of Black people
In 2020, two crises have emerged into prominence in the United States and in other parts of the world: (1) the flourishing of the COVID-19 virus in which the polarization and relativization of knowledge have hobbled efforts to prevent pandemic spread, and (2) the killing of George Floyd which has evoked repeated and worldwide protests against centuries of racial oppression and unbared an underlying racist ideology about the seeming lesser value of Black people
The article began by demonstrating how in the current pandemic, those intent on protecting themselves against any expert-recommended interference with their everyday pragmatic relevances and fortified by the pseudo-theories propagated by social media and cable television could undermine Schutz’s ideal of the well-informed citizen
Summary
Alfred Schutz’s “The Well-Informed Citizen” presents a framework for understanding the current Covid-19 crisis. The man-in-the-street takes such imposed relevances as elements of the situation to be defined or conditions for his course of action, without seeking to understand their origin and structure This is so because he is governed by sentiment rather than information and prefers “the comic pages of newspapers to the foreign news, the radio quizzes to news commentators.”[2]. The Twin Crisis of Covid-19 and Racism 71 those whose relevances converge with our own, Schutz acknowledges that knowledge that is “socially approved” by one’s in-group is more readily embraced and held As a result, he bemoans how methods of public opinion polling often end up conferring social approval upon the views of the uninformed man-inthe street, who usually represents majority opinion, at the expense of informed opinion, thereby imposing such views “upon the better-informed members of the community.”[4] Favoring such uninformed, majoritarian opinions reflects a mistaken understanding of what concepts like “democracy” and “majority rule” mean
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