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2020-

2020-08-30 b
THE COVID-CON - I

The West's response to Covid shows we have succumbed to a Medieval mass neurosis

Throughout 2020, we have become a society enraptured by medieval superstitions

Can this really be happening? The British are famously – and proudly – the most difficult people in the world to terrorise or bully. The population that stood with tireless phlegm and humour against relentless bombardment, that made its historical mark with an unflinching rationality which never permits hysteria to sweep the public discourse – must now be chivied into leaving the confines of their own homes or the safe harbours of their immediate neighbourhoods.

Where did this come from? Well, on the one hand, it is perfectly clear: with an official government campaign deliberately designed not only to inculcate fear but to suggest that protection against the great threat was simple and clear-cut. And furthermore, obeying the “stay home” edict would not just protect you and your immediate family but the rest of society as well. So locking yourself away was a moral obligation as well as an insurance against personal danger. The combination of anxiety and appeal to conscience was unbeatable – even when it involved deprivations of liberty which would once have been unconscionable.

So where are we now? Trapped in a state of what appears to be a spiral of fear so profound that it has become a permanent condition.
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In moments of despair it had occurred to me that there was something of a medieval Dark Age about the current mood: Extinction Rebellion with its child saints and the self-flagellating Woke culture. Being given an apparently sound reason to disable the most notable manifestations of that historical tradition which we are now being encouraged to denounce: what could be better suited to the weird, vaguely hysterical, fashion of the times? Fear may be the most dangerous contagion but I am coming around to the view that this is not simple fear. It is a mass neurosis of which irrational and prolonged anxiety is a symptom: a corrosive loss of confidence and understanding of one’s role and identity which will, if it prevails, ultimately undermine the quality of modern life more irrevocably than any virus.

It is not only our official cultural institutions that are at risk here. One of the most fundamental principles of post-war liberal democracy is on trial – or, at least, coming up for examination.

The pandemic has been a moral predicament at least as much as a health crisis. When this whole bizarre chapter is finally over, the questions that needed to be put, but for which there was no time, will be luminously clear. How much should we have asked the general populace to sacrifice in order to protect what we knew, almost from the start, would be a quite small, vulnerable minority? Is personal liberty – normally of unquestionable value in a democracy during peacetime – expendable when healthcare systems are under sufficient strain? Where exactly do we draw the line on the right of governments to dictate the terms of personal relations? (read more)

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