After postponing the deadline to November 15, the Legault government finally withdrew its ultimatum issued to health workers, urging them to be vaccinated no later than that date to continue working in the health network. and Social Services.
This decline was good news, first from an obviously pragmatic point of view, as several analysts have pointed out. The already precarious health system could not do without the care provided by the 8,000 people targeted by the ultimatum. But it is also good news from a democratic point of view, and this, whatever said most political analysts of all tendencies, who blamed the government for having given in to “anti-vaccines”. As if the ultimatum had been a good thing, if at least the government had had the means of its claims, and been able to do without too much damage from the personnel who would not have complied with it! No downside to the uncompromising nature of the measure, the abusive nature of which is however demonstrated by the ease we had to break the deadlock by imposing frequent rapid screening tests on the recalcitrant, an alternative solution which, if it had been proposed earlier, could have saved us these government reversals that looked like vaudeville.
There is no doubt that this strong approach is in accordance with François Legault’s vision of politics, who likes to represent his role as that of a good father or a good entrepreneur – two distant figures, even poles apart from a democratic conception of politics. But that it has not been the subject of any criticism, except of those of course who paid the price, is surprising and worrying.
Ambient scientism
It is true that the health crisis and the understandable fear of being infected with COVID-19 dull critical thinking. We tend to line up behind government measures, out of esprit de corps. But in my opinion, there is more. Something allowed us to act in an authoritarian way: it was that the people targeted were labeled from the outset as being opposed to science. This perception is wonderfully illustrated by a remark by François Legault himself, commenting with regret, from Glasgow, of the failure of the ultimatum, saying something like this: “I can only conceive of people who have studied science. do not get vaccinated, it is an aberration ”, as if adherence to science automatically commanded, in any context, unambiguous action vis-à-vis oneself, which does not require questioning that mobilizes affects, doubt, beliefs, stories.
Legault’s remark is all the more revealing as it takes up a cliché conveyed in the media concerning “anti-vaccines”, taken as a block. Far from being trivial, it reflects a belief that is increasingly embedded in the population – the influence of multinational technoscience companies is foreign to it. It is about scientism. According to him, science and reason would be able to make the real transparent and malleable at will, and would offer the only adequate criteria to define what we must do to live well. Exit questions of meaning, yet at the heart of human existence, which, if they mobilize reason, do the same with affects, beliefs and common sense. Whatever scientism may say, reason does not exhaust our reasons for living, and the complexity of reality is not totally soluble in science.
It is moreover from having ignored this that we sacrificed, unwittingly, at the start of the pandemic, the elderly on the altar of strict containment measures, forgetting that the isolation and abandonment of nourishing contact, rewarding gestures and seemingly harmless activities, but meaningful to these people, could lead to their death as surely as lack of food and care. And that’s what we do when we turn our backs on the terrible suffering that comes from being disconnected from the vital, carnal, bodily, emotional, symbolic links that constitute us.
The health crisis and the urgent political effort to curb it by medical means have the perverse effect of unfortunately giving rise to this scientism. We must be aware of this, to guard against this “poison” which impoverishes existence and flattens life by confining it to the only rational dimension, making us lose sight of the symbolic, cultural and political dimensions of existence, inseparable from its material dimension, are constitutive of our humanity. They call for a mode of existence where shared speech, interaction and the confrontation of points of view remain central. It is from these that the political is nourished and the common world is constructed.
The ultimatum is behind us, yes, but not the vision that supported it. The ecological crisis, and the anguish it generates, promises it, I fear, a bright future.