The Pandemic: During and After

Abstract

The article examines the coronavirus pandemic from the standpoint of the social construction of reality. In the first part, the author discusses the similarity of the socio-cultural aspects of the modern pandemic and its manifestations in the past, referring to the characteristics of the epidemics that occurred earlier in the his­tory, described by the Russian-American sociologist P. Sorokin. The article shows how the universal and specific features of social disasters, in particular epidemics, and the pandemics in our time, form the policy of rescue. The second part of the article is devoted to forecasting the post-pandemic future. The author highlights different types of forecasting the future in discussions about the post-pandemic life and in social practices. The article provides forecasts of the future put forward by well-known experts at the beginning of the pandemic. The main idea of the forecasts is that the world will never be the same again, which the
author considers a characteristic of the type of constructing the future through a rather radical break with the past. The author believes that the modus of fore­casting according to the “break with the past” model rather characterizes not the future itself, but the peculiarity of the pandemic discourse, the essential feature of which is the desire to establish the border of the pandemic through symbolic separation from the crisis situation of the present. Another less common option for constructing the future is the “back to the past” format, where the pre-pan­demic past is the norm. The author believes that the most likely scenario for the future after a pandemic will be the coexistence and layering of elements of the old and the new in multiple forms of their interaction and hybridization.