One of the words that have spread virally thanks to Covid-19 is “vulnerable”.
Above all, the elderly and the chronically ill are classified as particularly at risk of pandemics.
However, not all seniors agree with the blanket labeling, some “Golden Agers” feel downright discriminated against.
This reaction reflects the ambiguity of the term, which stands for a care that can also be perceived as paternalism. The medical meaning in which the word is used in the Corona context is close to the Latin root "vulnerare / wound". Until well into the twentieth century, "vulnerable" as a term for the vulnerability of organs was limited to such a physical meaning. The word made its way from medical terminology to the educational language of a wider public only slowly. While Wahrig's German dictionary recorded “vulnerable” at least at the end of the sixties of the last century, the word will still be searched in vain in the 2017 spelling dictionary.
The writer Jean Améry was one of the few who used “vulnerable” early on in a figurative sense: in 1971 he judged Karl Popper and Herbert Marcuse, “the two great old men”, as argumentatively “extremely vulnerable. But the metaphorical naming of discursive weaknesses did not set a precedent. Another expansion of meaning, however: "Vulnerability" now also includes in public parlance not only susceptibility to organic, but also to mental illnesses. The ethical overtones that resonate in the term nowadays also had their starting point in medicine: in 2001 the EU laid down guidelines for “good clinical practice”. According to them, people who are incapable of giving consent or who are in a dependent relationship shouldcan only be included in clinical studies in exceptional cases. The German document did not speak of “vulnerable” but rather of “in need of protection”, but subsequently “vulnerable” as the Germanization of the internationally used “vulnerable subject” became widespread.
Thanks to this psychological, moral and social enrichment in meaning, the career of “vulnerable” began twenty years before the corona pandemic, with a frequency curve that has risen steeply since then. It has become a multifunctional word that can mean vulnerable, endangered, risky, vulnerable, unstable, sensitive, needy or disadvantaged. “Vulnerable” smooths out these semantic differences and gives everyone so designated the overarching status of the potential victim. Not only migrants, women, children, young people and the elderly are declared vulnerable people across the board. There is also a “vulnerability” to stress, to sweets or “to radical groups”. And the appropriately so-called consumer advocates have long since discovered the "vulnerable consumers".The concept of vulnerability not only harmonizes with the current victim pathos of identity-political currents, it also fits with the tendency of large parts of society to hold the state, the economy or fellow human beings responsible for the consequences of their own actions - from over-indebtedness to obesity.
But maybe there is a real core to it. Because aren't we all vulnerable? After all, as we have known since Arnold Gehlen, the human being is deficient, so vulnerability is his most prominent generic characteristic. To compensate for the lack of claws, the lack of fur and the slow two-leggedness, people have set up welfare states, railways and power plants. But now it is becoming clear how deceptive the security of this artificial substitute nature is: Power grids, cell phones, even entire states and even the world market are now considered "vulnerable". The only thing that helps is what the zeitgeist calls out to us with a different catchphrase: "Resilience!"