With few exceptions, the way in which the Covid-19 response has been framed across the globe is chiefly as a moral question: the protective authority of the World Health Organisation (WHO), then the protective duty of the State, the protection of the hospital as the only source of healing, followed on the lowest tier by the personal duty of the populace to stay at home and ‘save lives’.
This response may have arisen out of a respect for the science, however nominal, but it is the moral impetus which has kept it aloft, driven by a mix of government, media and society at large. This morality and the moral stances which derive from it are misplaced.
While the proposition to ‘save lives’ makes for a neat slogan and catchy PR, logically it is patently absurd. Matters of life and death are not something which the government, let alone the average Joe on the street, has any significant control over — barring the obvious. One person’s staying at home or wearing a mask or washing and sanitising their hands obsessively (or not) is not a guarantee of either longer life or earlier death.
Compare this with the reaction to the Spanish Flu in October of 1918, where ‘save lives’ was used with active intent, by having the populace volunteer as caregivers in field hospitals.[i] Whether such an appeal, done with the same intention as in 1918, would have the same effect in today’s society is questionable.
Instead, the injunction to stay at home has caused more harm by simply prolonging the time the virus is around rather than any substantive means of managing it, and produced even more longer-term social issues, of which security of household income and psychological damage are but the beginning. Blanket lockdowns did not work for the stated purpose the first time, and there is no reason to think that they will work again, yet governments still insist that this is the ‘right’ thing to do. It is seemingly assumed that if they kick the can further along the road, some other solution will present itself — a vaccine most likely — and they can deal with the attendant issues once this has passed. An all-too-common political solution.
Intrusive measures
Moreover, in South Africa’s case particularly, this moral position has been used as a cover to introduce ever more intrusive measures of governance. First, the ridiculous command council model of rule-by-fiat was proposed at local government level, and now the Health Minister is demanding legislation giving him more powers, while the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs continues to extend the state of disaster, though there are no actual grounds for it. This is not to mention the government’s insistence on going through with disastrous NHI plans on account of the pandemic.
Other countries have experienced much the same: just look at the Australian state of Victoria, which has renewed lockdown measures, often accompanied by alarming levels of force in effecting compliance, after the re-emergence of Covid-19 cases.[ii]
Yet, many people would support the continuation of such measures. A Guardian Essential poll in August, for example, found that 72% of residents of Victoria were in favour of the harsh measures, while 60% of Australians in general were in favour of more extensive tracking surveillance.[iii] In the United Kingdom, an Ipsos MORI poll on 22 September found that 44% of respondents were in favour of a second national lockdown, while 76% were in favour of local lockdowns.[iv]
Despite reservations as to the sample sizes of these polls, there is still a clear trend towards acceptance, which seems to point to something much more deep-seated.
On the one hand, our relationship with illness, suffering, death, and medicine has changed in the last few centuries, one side-effect of which is the commodification of good health and the association of its provision with moral duty.
People in the past
Fear of death was of course something with which people in the past were concerned. For example, Lucretius’ epic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), written in the 1st century BC, consisted of six books of nearly 1 200 verses each fulminating against the fear of death. Stoic philosophers such as Seneca the Younger did likewise a century later, and similar teaching to remove the fear of death is found in all the major religions’ holy books.
However, unmediated by hospital and institutional care, death and serious disease were simply a much more present feature in people’s lives in even the relatively recent past — just another of the many cycles which are part of our existence in this world. Ivan Illich, in The Limits to Medicine, describes how the doctor’s role has changed from ‘healer’ to ‘health provider’ with the emphasis moved from ‘the ill’ to ‘the illness’, more or less around the time of the Renaissance. This time saw the emergence of the concept of ‘natural death’.[v] Especially with regard to the preventative, most aspects of our lives have now become extensively medicalised and, consequently, we seem to have outsourced all responsibility to the medical profession to keep us healthy.
Now, governments seem to think that they have the power to stop death altogether by legislating themselves to be God on the supposed authority of some figures.
Numbers are notoriously manipulable, though, and without knowing the parameters for reaching those numbers (and, more importantly, what was discarded as a parameter, along with what was simply unmeasurable), such numbers are meaningless. Indeed, writing post-1945, metaphysician Réné Guénon lamented how the modern world had been increasingly characterised by an almost entire reliance on the quantitative and consequent ignoring of the qualitative.
Instructive
Our own government’s Covid numbers are instructive, here. Besides having been kept away from public scrutiny for a long time, the figures released are presented without context and without proper explanation of criteria. We are not given information such as the severity of cases, what comorbidities there were, whether these cases were ‘asymptomatic’, or indeed how many deaths were truly from Covid-19 and not Covid-19-adjacent.
Governments across the world — and ours is no exception — have essentially focused only on this one source of potential danger to life to the exclusion of practically all others, leaving us with a skewed picture of reality.
At the risk of veering into mysticism, the bottom line is: ‘if it’s your time, it’s your time’. Besides which, what is the point of being kept ‘safe’ and alive if only to be forced to live in misery and penury?
Just as moral imperatives may have been used to justify an extended lockdown, several attendant moralising trends have arisen during this time, with much the same modus operandi in mind — selectively applied, of course.
By way of a small example, one of the most contentious issues throughout lockdown was the banning of the sale of cigarettes and alcohol, the latter on grounds of increased trauma incidents and ICU capacity.
Hysterical articles
During the time of this prohibition, hysterical articles in certain corners of the media pushed for a new temperance movement, decrying the evils of the ‘demon drink’ and characterising the country as terminally enslaved to alcohol – not once, but in an almost constant weekly stream, in editorials, expert testimony, regular columns, and even with an intervention by the health minister himself, almost in lock-step with the government line. The same courtesy was not given to multiple other things which lead to the oft-quoted co-morbidities threatening mortality from Covid-19.
So, too, the response — to remove the source in its entirety due to the actions of some — is overdone, yet also perfectly in line with the way in which most political ‘issues’ are dealt with today. Thus, anything offensive is removed from sight, as if the mere disappearance of it will remove the problem.
At other times, moral compasses went out of kilter.
Much was made about the anti-lockdown protests in various parts of the world, yet comparatively little about the Black Lives Matter protests: the one was seen as righteous and the other subversive, the latter leading to ‘spikes’ in cases, while the other supposedly did not.
Criminalised aspects of normal behaviour
So, too, governments have criminalised aspects of normal behaviour, not least of which is the ability to question received knowledge, in the form of imprisonment for spreading false information — though the equally ridiculous pronouncement of the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) castigating FlySafair for an advert purportedly ‘condoning a breach of Covid-regulations’ and ‘encouraging unsafe behaviour’ comes very close[vi] — and all this while real crime is continuing unabated.
Human nature is such that there will always be someone who wants to stick it to someone else, or otherwise exercise their will over others. But this all has the ring of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. The only real moral imperative which we have right now, then, is to stop letting the media dictate the terms, and get the country, if not the world, back on some sort of track.
[Picture: Tumisu from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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[i] As the case study given in H. Phillips (1987), ‘The local state and public health reform in South Africa: Bloemfontein and the consequences of the Spanish ’Flu epidemic of 1918’. Journal of Southern African Studies 13(2): 210-233.
[ii] See for example K. Barnett, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Victoria’ in Quillette, 2 Oct 2020, (https://quillette.com/2020/10/02/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-victoria/).
[iii] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/25/essential-poll-australians-back-strong-surveillance-and-banning-all-international-flights-to-curb-covid
[iv] https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/less-half-britons-support-second-complete-national-lockdown
[v] I. Illich (1975) The Limits of Medicine. Medical Nemesis: the expropriation of Health. New York.