Lockdown and the common good

Here is a conundrum: if my last article was right, and westerners increasingly operate in an autonomian conception of things, then how do we explain widespread compliance with the authoritarian measures taken by governments in response to the pandemic? The rhetoric, at least in the early months of it all, was of pulling together, of coming alongside one another to defeat a common enemy. In Britain the prime minister seemed to enjoy his Churchillian moment, mustering a degree of composure in those early press conferences; this, combined with ‘clap for carers’, and strangely enthusiastic zoom quizzes (not to mention family ‘get-togethers’) seemed emblematic of a national unity that is, to say the least, rather rare. Much of that has fractured now, as the virus approaches its third year, and one is struck with a curious sense of déjà vu upon perusing the latest headlines. But still the impassioned pleas of the vaccine evangelists make recourse not so much to individual freedom as to that same old virtue of the greater good: protecting the vulnerable, looking out for the many, not the few – that sort of thing.

My critics would deny that there is a conundrum, after all. I am simply wrong, or at best overstated, in this idea of ‘autonomophilia’. We are robustly capable of good, of moral virtue, and that includes the common good – hence compliance to covid measures, vaccine take-up, that sort of thing. But I do not think it is as simple as that.

The conundrum is a product of the idea that the big state – and the compliance it necessitates – is the enemy of the individual. At one level this idea makes a lot of sense. It is true that an overextended state will intrude upon me as an individual. That’s what we’re seeing with the expansion of the idea of ‘public health’ and the rather unfortunate conclusion from such an idea that my health (and thus my body) belongs less to me than to the state: hence a vaccine mandate soon to begin in Austria, and the distressing use of covid quarantine camps in a once-free Australia. Against such encroachments, appeal must be made to the language of rights, and the God-given freedoms of the individual – language which, though these days spanning the political spectrum, is best associated with those right-leaning, free-market, capitalistic political philosophies that have so much in common with the autonomian stance. So I begin to look rather like the very western, solipsistic individual I have criticised, when I couch my opposition to the political response to covid in terms of the sanctity of my own rights to freedom, and all that that entails.

Am I a hypocrite, then? I will let my readers be the judge of that. But I want to suggest in what follows that there is rather more going on here than meets the eye. The big state may often be the enemy of the individual, but it is the friend of the individualism that is so rampant today.

To illustrate this, it would be best to start with a brief sketch of my own political philosophy, however embryonic. It is an approach that could, broadly speaking, be labelled communitarian. Society functions best, I believe, when people operate within different levels of community: the family, the kinship group, the local community, the nation. These levels of community are formed in response to the simple exigencies and problems we humans face: the family in response to the need for love, companionship, the satisfaction of sexual desire, the practice of oikonomia, and the creation of home; the broader kinship group as a heritage of this; the community in response to the limitations of the family to provide for the whole gamut of material and spiritual need; the nation as a further horizon of this last dynamic. These are, by and large, organic formations, bottom-up solutions to particular problems. But since it is impossible that all the structures of this society be such bottom-up, community-based productions, the state too plays an important role, enforcing a unified conception of justice, arbitrating between competing interest groups, and establishing the rule of law. Law, in this approach, serves (amongst other things) both to protect family and community interests from the domination of a single individual or group, and to facilitate the creation of these different levels of community, encouraging, for instance, a commitment to marriage and family life.

Of course there is a whiff of the utopian to this, largely because modern technology, and the globalisation it has precipitated, undermine the incentives that give rise to such a society. In wealthy, developed nations, communities that operate on these terms have become opt-in frameworks, even luxury goods, a function of the very autonomy that denudes them of their power. But let us entertain it for the time being. The key point to grasp here is that, in such a conception of things, there are various claims acting upon me. There is my own volition, of course, but this amounts only to a slice of the authority that dictates what I can and must do with myself: the rest is divvied out between my family, kinship group, local community, and the state.

In the big state view, however, that slicing up is totally reconfigured. Gone are the portions occupied by family, kin, and community. They were a sizeable chunk in the communitarian vision, but now they are replaced. Speciously, of course, by the individual: that, after all, is the aim of modern ‘liberty’, as I have written before. But the exigencies that gave rise to family and to the community cannot all be met by the individual. In throwing off such shackles, we each must have, ironically enough, a helping hand. At this point, two groupings come to the rescue. One is corporate entities, on whom we so rely for the comforts and conveniences that facilitate our ‘autonomy’: big tech, and all the plethora of smaller software companies, app builders, and gadget producers, not to mention energy suppliers, who have such a grip over modern life. One cost of our ‘freedom’, then, has been the production of a new class of technocratic elites, the likes of Sergei Brin and Jeff Bezos, who have amassed unparalleled wealth in the name of improving the common lot of mankind.

But the other is, of course, the state. Having destroyed, or at best undermined, the older sources of our mutual flourishing, we find ourselves having to lean upon central government to take up the slack. Care of the elderly was once a familial and communal duty; now it must be provided by the state, and young people are correspondingly ‘liberated’ (though they must pay for it nonetheless). So too, everything from the health of local countryside to the cleanliness of urban areas, and our own health. Earlier today I passed some litter strewn across the grass by our local cathedral. Not one person, myself included, would pick it up. Why should we, when this is so clearly the prerogative of local government, and has nothing to do with me as an individual?

There is a hierarchy of being in a communitarian society, and in the older, broadly agrarian modes of life that existed before the dawn of mass society. Between the individual and the state were bonds and obligations created by the different levels of community I have outlined here; and the state itself lay between the individual and God. In the modern, autonomian political philosophy, these sources of obligation have been transferred – some to the individual, but many to the state. The result is, cursorily at least, greater individualism (I had no obligation to pick up that litter; the choice was mine). But it is also the augmentation of the power and prerogative of the state.

And that is why we in the west are in a dangerous position indeed. The destruction of community and family ties can only lead to the expansion of the state, an expansion that will in time come back to bite the individual. That, I believe, is what we are beginning to witness today.

The picture that heads this page is of a communist-era block of flats in Katowice, Poland. I have chosen it because it illustrates my point nicely. Communism is so named because it is meant to bring people together: to create one community of the nation, in which all are material equals and each pulls their weight in support of the common good. To achieve this, of course, the state must be relied upon to structure society in just this way. The result, however, was a curious individualism, a strange kind of loneliness, even. The extension of the state was paved by the destruction of those very modes of community and family life which not only bound but created individual flourishing. So in the mass society that was formed, all the conditions of true community were absent. The individual became an isolated unit, receiving obligations not from the knowable and the known but the distant and cold authority of the state, bound not by the relational but the official. Such a mode of life is epitomised by Polish bloki and the endlessly grey skyscapes of eastern European cities, monuments to the loneliness of the crowd.

Let me tie up what I have been saying here. The conundrum can be expressed in two questions: (1) are lockdowns followed because of a belief in the common good? and, (2) by the same token, are lockdown sceptics advocates of a destructive individualism? The answer to both must be emphatic: no. The big-state response to covid is not the product of any robust conception of the common good; it is instead the natural response of a hyper-individualistic political philosophy. A good that truly is common cannot be divorced from the life of the community. In the wielding of big-state power, however, obligation and duty exist only in that lonely relationship between the individual and the state. And in the name of just that individualism, such a state can only grow.

The Fourth Discourseman