One of these things is not like the other
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One of these things is not like the other
In which yours truly breaks cover on covid lockdowns after a long period of silence
I’ve steered clear of ‘the covid debate’ for many months; I wanted time to think my thoughts through to the end.
My latest piece, for The Freethinker Magazine (the oldest publication — founded in 1881 — of the UK’s historic secular movement), represents my attempt to grapple honestly with both the popularity of authoritarian policies and the extent to which we let civil liberties be undermined.
I’m not very pleased where we’ve landed, and not just economically (it seems the money governments blew on covid across the developed world finally and irrevocably let the inflation genie out of the bottle).
I think we’ve done serious damage to the social fabric.
A few people have asked me about the final (brief) paragraph. I had originally wanted to end in a state of aporia, as it were, because I found the debates around covid productive of far more heat than light.
The magazine, however, wanted me to make a more specific comment on what might have been. Unfortunately for them, I’m a forecasting skeptic (and think it’s often used as a vehicle for people to present their opinions as facts). Sometimes, I can almost hear my mother saying, ‘if “ifs” and “ands” were pots and pans, there’d be no need for ironmongers’.
So I simply gave my opinion.
Like many lawyers, I also became alarmed at attacks on civil liberties and began to criticise what the government was doing. For reasons obscure to me, the single worst encroachment acquired a dreadful name. ‘Lockdown’ is a term borrowed from prison management and came to describe a situation where states were effectively incarcerating their populations. Worse, of all the politicians to issue a stay-at-home order, it had to be the least serious man the UK’s political system has produced in recent decades. Every time Boris opened his mouth, I half expected to hear a ba-dum-tss at the end of each sentence. It was like being conscripted by Groucho Marx.
However, my view that civil liberties are as important as scientific truth — and that civil liberties and scientific truth are incommensurable with each other — only crystallised when those same publishers started asking me to analyse various restrictions on a scientific, not a legal, basis. This I refused to do, partly due to lack of expertise, but mainly because I thought my civil liberties arguments stood on their merits. They did not need to be set off against science or weighed in some sort of balance with science on the other side.
Coronavirus exposed how human beings argue about incommensurable values. By this, I mean values that are not comparable on some common scale — values that are intrinsically different. Those on one side, who thought managing coronavirus turned on following the science and heeding scientists like Chris Whitty and Neil Ferguson (who perhaps enjoyed the power), and those on the other side, who thought people had a right to object to having their lives micromanaged by the state, gave every appearance of coming from different planets. The two groups were appealing to values so unalike in kind that they could only ever talk past each other.
Read the rest here.
One of these things is not like the other
I've come to the same conclusion; liberal society cannot justify "lockdowns." Liberty must win.
Thank you -- this is the anti-lockdown argument I've always waited for someone to make. Far too many have focused on opposing the interventions based on utilitarian calculus as opposed to on fundamental values. As far as the lockdowns were concerned, there are good utilitarian arguments against (Maxim Lott has done the maths and it didn't come out great https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor ), but they aren't worth swallowing the implicit assumption that freedom of movement is to be bought and sold for some number of micromorts, some difference in life expectancy, or any other value that came out of someone's calculator. On the topic of vaccine mandates, however, the purely scientific arguments failed almost entirely (the risk-reward calculus still comes out pretty good for vaccines if you don't do stupid things like boosting 10-year-olds), and the only real question was whether we're a state that does things like this or one that doesn't. This is a meaning-of-life question, and most of our media and internet philosophers didn't even notice it's there, let alone tried to answer it.
The saddest thing is that I feel many people have *wanted* to make these fundamental-value points, but for some reason shied away from them in public and chose to fight on the utilitarian battlefield instead. And as the topic changed from lockdowns to vaccines, the fight turned into a rout, while also causing serious collateral damage as far as vaccine intake was concerned. Needless to say, both sides are responsible for the latter (without heavy-handed lockdowns, anti-vax sentiment would probably have stayed much more marginal), but I have rarely seen so much destruction wrought by the unwillingness of people to communicate clearly where they stand and what they want.