Interview with Daniel Feierstein

Daniel Feierstein, whose most recent book, Social and Political Representations of the COVID-19 Crisis, came out in 2022 with Routledge, directs the Center of Genocide Studies at the Universidad de Tres de Febrero and the Observatory of State Crimes at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work, pivotal in the international recognition of the Argentine military junta’s crimes as genocide, focuses on genocidal social practices. He has served as president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and as a judge on the Permanent People’s Tribunal in Sri Lanka, Mexico, Myanmar, and Colombia. He is the author of Pandemia:Un balance social y político de la crisis del COVID-19 (2021), Genocide as a Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (2014), and Memorias y representaciones: Sobre la elaboración del genocidio (2012). This interview is an excerpt of a longer conversation that took place on August 30, 2022, as an Editor’s Choice podcast for Latin American Perspectives.

AS:

Could you outline the central themes of Social and Political Representations of the COVID-19 Crisis?

DF:

The book actually came about as a concern right at the start of the pandemic, when I saw that most governments lacked an understanding of three or four issues that seemed essential. One was that a pandemic is always fundamentally a social process and that it was being regarded solely as a biological health process. And then—basically the knowledge I gained from over 30 years of work on genocidal processes in the social response to catastrophes and something that is also quite insufficiently studied—that the perception, I would say, not only of the majority of governmental leaders but also of many social science professionals is that social action is the same in everyday life as in times of crisis. What one learns from analyzing social catastrophes is that there are two types of action, two very different types of reactions in which different rationales of social action are in play and that although social action has been greatly studied in everyday situations, it has been much less studied in catastrophic situations, where perhaps the field of greatest study has been genocidal processes. The idea was, well, to draw on some of the things learned in that field to examine the very different circumstances of a pandemic, which is not genocide (a desire to carry out a systematic plan to destroy the population) but a confrontation with the possibility of death, which evokes behavior typical of catastrophic situations.

So, on the one hand, the book attempts to explore that—to try to do, let’s say, a comparative analysis, in an initial chapter, of the various international responses from different countries faced with this issue and the difficulty of understanding the social nature of the pandemic, perhaps somewhat centered on Latin America and in particular Argentina but always allowing for a dialogue with what happened elsewhere. And, on the other hand, it attempts to analyze some basic processes of human reaction in great depth. The social reaction to catastrophic processes—for example, the role of defense mechanisms, which has been studied through psychoanalysis, and what it does to the individual psyche during catastrophic events—has received very little attention. In another chapter, the book delves deeply into the logic of the way the denial mechanism operates, and the chapter that follows looks at the way the projection mechanism works. Within a set of 10–12 basic defense mechanisms, I think these two are the more common in catastrophic situations.

TC:

How do you think the economic structures of Latin American countries determined or limited the strategies for combating the pandemic? I am thinking about informal economies, high levels of overcrowding, the legacy of neoliberal policies, economic dependency.

DF:

Well, very much. I deal with this in the book. Latin America was the worst place for this pandemic. It was logical that it would be the worst place, and that’s what makes the performance of the United States with regard to the pandemic more scandalous than that of Latin America, precisely their structural differences. Why was Latin America the worst place? I would say because of two or three fundamental variables . The first is that it has the greatest social inequality on the planet. It is not the poorest region, but it is decidedly the one with the greatest inequality. This inequality has created enormous agglomerations of people, neighborhoods with millions of people all crowded together, which, in a pandemic of airborne transmission, is extremely serious. Perhaps the only place equivalent to Latin America is the Indian subcontinent, which experienced a similar situation. This creates a situation of tremendous vulnerability. And then, because of its economic history and neoliberal adjustments, the destruction of the health systems in Latin America also played a key role in its inability to handle the situation. I believe that the great majority of Latin American countries had severe impact ratios because of these not very manageable variables. What is worrisome is that none of them—perhaps we could raise the example of Cuba, but Cuba is very different from the other Latin American countries—pursued a strategy of elimination, which was the only one that the region could implement. Latin America could control entries, but what was very difficult was mitigation, precisely because of the region’s socio-demographic structure and the nature of its health systems.

Mitigation was the strategy that was tried in most Latin American countries. It was obvious that it would fail; Latin America did not have the conditions for mitigation, which requires a very robust health system and a very different organization and socio-demographic structure. It’s interesting to consider the decision, greatly criticized at the time (but now on López Obrador’s desk in Mexico), to do the opposite—in other words, “If I’m not going to adopt an elimination strategy and I know that I won’t be able to be effective with a mitigation strategy, then I’ll assume the price in health but at least I’ll try not to assume a socioeconomic and sociopolitical price for the crisis.” In this regard, Mexico had huge numbers on a health level, as in all of Latin America, but the pandemic did not have such a heavy impact at the socioeconomic level because it decided to implement almost the minimum measures necessary, which was highly criticized at the time. No wonder, we say, because it had decided to let the pandemic circulate, but maybe that decision was made in the understanding that it was impossible to deploy other types of measures, given Mexico’s socio-demographic and health structure. Time will give us more tools to evaluate the various policy decisions. It’s a shame that we don’t have comparative information from some country in the region that tried an elimination strategy, but none of the countries pursued one.

AS:

What do you believe are the most immediate and long-term consequences of the pandemic? In the introduction to your book, you write: “A catastrophe sets us face to face with the possibility of imagining that social life could be different than what it is.” What do you think social life in Argentina will be like after the pandemic?

DF:

I think that at both the international level (in the Western world at least) and particularly in Latin America and Argentina, the pandemic has left behind a profound defeat in various dimensions, which is the perception—speaking strictly in terms of representation—that any attention to the population as a whole that compromises the profits of the most concentrated sectors of the economy is inviable. The outcome of the pandemic could have been very different but ended up being this: if the governments were once again given the opportunity to do something regarding the pandemic, I think they would all implement the herd immunity strategy—do nothing—because they all suffered political costs for their attempts at care, which, not being effective, turned out to be more or less useless, generating a sociopolitical cost without achieving a major health gain. This is a far-reaching sociopolitical defeat, because it is not the defeat of this or that political movement but the defeat of a political conception of care for the population and the possibility of constructing a more equitable society, with greater respect for the majorities and greater efforts to care for the population. I think that at the same time the precautionary principle has also suffered a defeat. This is a matter of great concern, because what we do not keep in mind is that, while this pandemic was dreadful, it could have been much more dreadful. When it began, we did not know what the mortality rate would be. It was not clear, because you only find out when lots of people begin to die. This pandemic had more or less a rate of 2 or 3 per 1,000, around 3 per 1,000, in those populations that let it circulate. This is an extremely high rate. There had never been an experience like this in the history of the most recent centuries. But instead of 3, or 4, or 2 per 1,000, it could have been 3 percent or 8 percent. There is nothing to prevent a future pandemic from being much worse in terms of fatality rate. The precautionary principle exists because, since we do not know what the incidence will be, we must act, in terms of public policy, in terms of the worst-case scenario so that it does not come about. Later, when there is more information—which is why this transdisciplinary effort is so important—you can change public policy decisions.

That the precautionary principle was defeated means that, faced with a future onset of an event of this nature, the response capacities of the Western world will be much worse than those that existed before COVID. When one analyzes how the situation of the systems of reality representation ended up, the sense is that the capacity for intervention will be much lower because the completely erroneous conclusion from the indicators—but one absolutely predominant in terms of representations— is that the response was exaggerated. What has remained as a social construct is that there was more intervention than necessary—not the wrong intervention or poorly implemented intervention or even too little intervention but too much. And therefore, in light of a new outbreak, what is logical from that conclusion is that intervention will be less—that we will wait to see what the incidence is. This is the defeat of the precautionary principle. By the time we realize what the incidence rate is, it is often too late.

Actually, the Western world that I am looking at in its postpandemic logic (its development in the East was different) is, I insist, a product of the way it grappled with previous pandemics that mostly affected the East. The East’s comparative success will allow it to insist on that policy in the future, but in the Western world this has been very difficult, even in countries that have been successful. It is interesting that countries such as Australia and New Zealand have not managed to make the most of their healthcare successes, calling attention to the fact that their response to the pandemic was much better than the Western average in the care of their populations. On the one hand, this is extremely serious with regard to both any future health catastrophe and any environmental catastrophe. Understanding how we react to pandemics has implications for our reaction to other catastrophic events, and for this reason the political defeat in the realm of the representations in the West is relevant to other social processes and will take enormous effort to reverse.

It’s not that I am a prophet of doom or a skeptic, but I do believe that there is much work to be done to dispute the representations of the pandemic. I feel that, although my presentations were widely heard in Argentine society at the time (which greatly surprised me)—there was a kind of explosion in the social media, in systems that, as a scholar, I was unaware of, ones with millions of readers—the duration of this was very limited. Looking at it now in the medium term, you see that the social construct of those representations has been much more negative—the defeat of the precautionary principle has tended to prevail, the perception of exaggeration, the prevalence of rationales of denial, and, one could even say, projecting into the future, the adoption of very systematic and worrisome mechanisms of projection, which was how this whole process created a great deal of suffering. And since there are no strategies for processing that social suffering, what begins to emerge is a search for responsible parties upon whom to unleash violence. This is the greatest risk with a catastrophe that has not been processed. The processing of the catastrophe would be through projection—through the expression of that violence, that discomfort, against some social group, some social subject that is construed as being responsible for that suffering.

TC:

Do you think that Argentine society has been able, as you write in the book, to assess what challenges of a sociopolitical and ethical or moral nature the pandemic has left? Has the pandemic made us more or less solidarity-minded?

DF:

When I was writing the book this was more dubious. I believe, as I was just telling you, that it seems to be clearly moving toward a place that is quite sinister—that might even be a final resolution. I would emphasize, in the case of both Argentine society and much of the West, with all its nuances (because I believe that each society has had its own way of grappling with this), that it has a lot to do with the type of government it had in dealing with this situation. In the case of Argentine society I think it was terrible, since there was no opportunity for social processing. This is what is so troubling—that neither the national government, the provincial governments, the social organizations, or the political parties created any opportunity to work on and process the suffering endured. I don’t know how much there was in other societies—perhaps very little—but in the Argentine case there was nothing, no room for it.

We have embarked on a research project now in working-class neighborhoods to see how the pandemic experience affected social bonds. What we have begun to see is that the strongest feeling, in both the working-class neighborhoods and Argentina as a whole, is a very deep process of denial—acting as if this had never existed. Like the extreme denial of the repression, it is just not a topic of conversation. The issue has rapidly disappeared from the public scene, and there has not been any opportunity to process that suffering. In this context, if we ask ourselves today where Argentine society has ended up, it has clearly ended up with much less capacity to form bonds of solidarity and establish critical constructs about what was experienced, since there was no opportunity to do so. And since our entire defense mechanism discourages us from doing so, what has ultimately prevailed has been an individual resolution—one’s corporate self-interest—and the search for a culprit upon whom to blame this discomfort.

At the time when I was writing the book, in early 2021, when it was still not clear how it would turn out, opinion polls showed that, as opposed to what the communications media were saying, the majority of the population was asking for greater care measures. That situation has definitely changed, and I think that what was devastating in Argentina—and I don’t know if it was like this in other countries—was the information that came out in mid-2021 about the gatherings that had been held in the residence of the president [Alberto Fernández] during the time of the strictest health care measures. We could say that this was the crushing blow to the argument about the representations, because it made those who were still prioritizing a policy of care feel completely stupid in that, while they were suffering to guarantee well-being for all, the one who had ordered those measures was enjoying gatherings that they could not have. There is a very interesting psychologist, a psycho-analyst, Luciano Lutereau, who, at one of the events we had, raised something that I found very enlightening. He suggested that the image of the birthday party for the president’s partner (Fabiola Yañez) activated all the paranoic fantasies that are so common in this historical moment. Luigi Zoja deals with this extensively—how paranoia and the projection that goes hand in hand with it are among the basic strategies of the objectification of this late-twentieth-century and beginning-of-the-twenty-first-century neoliberal moment. The situation was ideal for mobilizing that rationale, because this conspiratorial paranoic fantasy posits that the authorities have a good time while they make us suffer.

We also see this in the United States—these modes that clearly represent the Trumpism of the average man with regard to politics, which circulate around antipolitics. That image—which we could say in this case also affects Boris Johnson, in a similar situation—of the political leader having parties at a time when no one in the entire population could get together with anyone is, according to Lutereau, like the paranoic husband who comes home, opens the door, and finds his wife with her lover. It is the ratification of paranoia, and the effect on social representations is devastating. An incident that ratifies one’s paranoia is devastating to one’s psychic structure. In the Argentine case, this was the harshest blow in a process that was still being disputed at that point, and it was clearly seen in terms of an individualistic stance, critical of any care measure and, we could say, contemptuous and skeptical of any form of solidarity. This is what must be reversed in Argentine society, but it will be a titanic task.