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2020-11-29 d
THE COVID-CON IV
"If the Government really is to assume the extraordinary authority which it appears to be taking over what were until very recently regarded as the most personal aspects of life – what distance must be maintained between friends, how many members of a family may be in proximity with one another, whether you can hug your grandmother – complete with surveillance measures to ensure that such judgements are enforced, then it is not just the details that need to be debated. "

Covid-19 has plunged us into an existential crisis over the role of the state

When did democratic citizens sign up to this power grab to control personal and family life?

Who would have thought that a random biological event – not a military conflict, or global competition for economic dominance or indeed, any other kind of phenomenon that arises from the intentions of sentient beings – could have produced this? Here we are with a crisis of confidence in our political system that goes way beyond the immediate consequences for resources, finances, and healthcare: an existential dilemma that questions the most fundamental assumptions about our relationship to the state.

Never, in living memory, has this country seen the like of it. It certainly surpasses in its profundity, anything encountered in wartime when national conviction and self-belief were on a high. And it exceeds whatever doubt and reckoning was raised by the ideological debates of the Cold War. The questions that are being asked now occupy an entirely different space from those ethical dilemmas with which political philosophy has been accustomed to deal over the past century.

Never mind wealth redistribution, social equality, free markets vs command economies: those are the easy ones. Or at least they are easy to talk about. You know what vocabulary to use, what the parameters are, and where the arguments go after you have set out the logical rules. But, God help us, what are the cosmic choices we are confronting now? Here are a few of the more pressing ones. Who is morally responsible for decisions about one’s own life or death? The state? The family? The individual? The community? If not the individual or the family, what institutions should we entrust with that responsibility and what sort of qualifications (scientific? spiritual? judicial?) are appropriate for it? Following on from that, do people have the right to risk their lives? (read more)

2020-11-29 c
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