We
cannot afford to ignore the collective nervous breakdown which triggered the
West's lurch into lockdown
We need to go on
talking about lockdown. You might think now that both candidates for Tory
leader have begun what is likely to be a stampede of government ministers
denying they ever supported it, that the story of this unprecedented historical
event was finished.
So discredited will the policy and its sinister propaganda programme have become that sooner than you might have thought possible, records will be amended and memories erased in the great totalitarian tradition, to make it appear that this terrible thing was somehow inflicted on the nation without anybody’s official approval.
So why not let
it go? It’s over, thank God. It will never happen again. Let’s just forget it
and get on with life as we used to know it rather than wasting time on post hoc
analysis.
But we cannot -
must not - give in to this seemingly reasonable temptation. Because what
happened over the past two years, in this country and most of the developed
world was not just a mistake: not merely a failure of judgement, or a
misreading of the facts (or, more specifically, a confusion about what
constitutes fact).
It was something
far bigger and more alarming: a surrender of the fundamental principles of
liberty and individual responsibility which we had assumed were unassailable in
the West and were envied (with much consternation) in the East.
It is absolutely
imperative to remember that we believed, before this great lurch into
authoritarianism, that we had cracked it: the western democracies had found the
answer to the ancient question, “How should people live?”
Here was the
unbeatable formula: freedom under the rule of law, the primacy of personal
responsibility under elected government, the right to a private life over which
the state could not intervene except in the most carefully litigated ways.
The despotic
states which held out against this global democratic tide became more and more
desperately defensive. The principal one - the Soviet Union - simply collapsed
under the impossibility, and its upcoming rival - China - had to resort to
bribing its younger generations with shameless wealth, creating a new
bourgeoisie which would have appalled Marx.
So what really
happened here? Not only was there the introduction by fiat of the most
extraordinarily invasive legal prohibitions, exceeding anything that had been
imposed in the modern era even during wartime (children were not banned from
embracing their grandparents during the war, nor was it a crime to have a
sexual relationhsip with someone outside your household) but any public
criticism of these measures was effectively prohibited or stigmatised to an
extent that was almost unendurable.
But let’s get past
the outrage and condemnation and ask the real question: why? How did it come to
this? The explanation has to go beyond politics - at least in the ordinary
sense of the word. It has to be pathological. The world went crazy. There is no
other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of
particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.
Of course there
was a strong element of traditional political activism in play. The argument
was instantly framed by the inevitable Marxist hangers-on in terms that suited
anti-capitalist dogma.
If you were
opposed to lockdown on the grounds of the damage that it would do to the
economy, you were cast as a ruthless defender of “profits over people??. In
other words, you would prefer to sacrifice lives (notably of the elderly and
vulnerable) for the sake of mere monetary gain. Thus did “protecting the
economy” become synonymous with protecting the richest (and probably
healthiest) sectors of the population.
Presumably even
the most infantile left-winger can see now that the damage to the economy in
this horrendous period is hitting the least well off hardest. “A thriving
economy” is not a euphemism for profiteering: it is the condition that provides
prosperity, well-being and opportunity for the maximum number of people.
And prosperity
does not mean crass affluence - buying more and more unnecessary stuff. It
offers the great mass of the population the chance of self-determination, the
ability to make life choices and to fulfil their potential.
Making a
conscious decision to embrace policies that damage the economy should be
morally unacceptable except under the most horrific circumstances. Some people
in power clearly thought the pandemic was such a circumstance. Other people
simply used it as a pretext for shutting down an economic system that they had
always disliked. If we had got the argument out in the open, that second group
might have been exposed.
But there was a
more insidious difference between the pro and anti-lockdown camps which is
older than the divide between the supporters of free markets and the champions
of command economies. Perhaps it is the most basic disagreement of all because
it goes right to the heart of the human condition.
There is an
eternal struggle in every organised society between the longing for freedom and
the need for security. (Indeed, that struggle exists within every individual.)
In political systems, those two polar impulses have taken the form of liberal
democracies which prioritised freedom, and authoritarian governments which
promised (often falsely) security.
During the
second half of the last century there was a pretty clear sense of which
countries - and which political systems - represented those two options. During
the Cold War, we knew where we were: it was Communist dictatorship versus the
Free World. You chose the side you supported - which was not always the one you
were born into. Some people changed their minds and their loyalties over time.
Then, a
generation ago, all that certainty - and the debate that went with it - came to
an end. The failed Communist leviathan, it is now obvious, had a complete
nervous breakdown. Maybe, not so obviously, we did too.
