The Post-Pandemic Future of Humanity and Christian Humanism

Bogdan Ferdek

Abstract

The Covid 19 pandemic turned out to be a great reset of humanism. The pandemic has degraded man in the name of man. To save man, he was deprived of his freedom and inviolable rights. The pandemic has spurred the emergence of different visions of the
post-pandemic world. One of these visions was presented by the Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben in his book: Where are we now? The epidemic as politics. For Agamben, a pandemic is an illustration of a state of emergency and bare life. Also, the post-pandemic world will be a state of emergency based on naked life. A different vision of the post-pandemic world was presented by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum from Davos, in his book Covid-19: The Great Reset. According to Schwab, the pandemic has reset the old normal. The world known in the first months of 2020 has gone down in history as the pre-coronavirus era. The reset of the pre-coronavirus era is the beginning of the post-coronavirus era. In both visions there is no room for Christian humanism. In the post-pandemic era described by Agamben and Schwab, there are visible attempts to replace a person with a new biometric human identity that boils down to pure biological data, such as fingerprints and digital photography. The new impersonal human identity will therefore be based on „naked” biological data. So a person will get an identity without a person. Although post-pandemic visions have no place for Christian humanism, they are theologically indebted. Instead of a creative God, they put a creative man. This creative man is no longer a Prometheus who steals secrets from God. He himself wants to be God. The theological debts of Agamben’s and Schwab’s visions are like a call for an experiment with Christian humanism.