In the old days, when you met another knight in the woods, it was like, Sir, let us jost. After all, as a noble you had to know how to behave. And that meant jousting. Often neither you nor your opponent felt like it, we read in TH White’s classic Arthurian novel The Once and Future King (1958). It was too hot. Or you wanted to go to Guinevere quickly. But you were a knight or not. So you had to fight – that determined your code.
In our time, living according to a code is no longer automatic, let alone that it is romantic as an idea as when Arthur was alive. The wry thing is that the zeitgeist calls for a code, for rules of conduct that protect us and the people around us against acolytes of another code. And they know no better than to follow their code.
Yes, corona also has a code. The virus knows no better than to multiply. That is his only rule of conduct. We can only counter this deadly code with our own code. With our behavior. And this is where the shoe pinches. Not only are we not nearly as ruthless as a virus when it comes to living by your code, we also seem less and less dictated by a codex, as the Romans called a set of laws. In fact, even the archetype of the code – the book, also a codex in Antiquity – is no longer warm to the majority of people.
We seem to live without code, you could almost say: uncoded. We have become that simple. That virus doesn’t even have to crack us. That slips right in, you know that: but of course they don’t wash their hands and of course they don’t stay at home if they are sick. No one is forcing them, and they won’t do it. Because they have no code.
Not quite. Scientists have cracked the code of the enemy invaders, giving us vaccines. That alone is coded life, that is, living with a code in our body. Thanks to vaccines, our immune system learns to recognize the code of a virus infection and then reacts with an immune response. This is dire necessity. You can’t say, well, I do strive to be healthy. A code is a code and as proof you have that quick response code.
It is comforting that the knights also had difficulty living according to a code, seven virtues, including wisdom, justice, temperance and charity. Take Lancelot, the best knight on earth who was really a failed knight. white: Lancelot was ‘badly made’. Lancelot certainly didn’t have a QR code. And like him, we too, with our faded awareness of code, no longer see the wood for the trees. It has already come so far in Limburg, where hospitals can no longer handle the influx of corona patients. ‘Code black’, we say in secret language, but everyone immediately knows that this refers to an emergency, and even then we are unable to do anything about it, for example by structurally scaling up the capacity in the intensive care unit. Arthurian times these are. From God. Kingdom to the buttons. arthur: “When a moral sense starts to rot it is worse than when you had none.”
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