COVID-19 remediation measures have raised the old issue of freedom vs. security. Governments around the world have imposed a variety of restrictions and requirements, curbing individual freedom to prevent the spread of the pandemic and keep their citizens safe.
This issue — how much freedom we are willing to sacrifice to be safe — popped up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Twenty years ago people in the United States and elsewhere seemed willing to surrender quite a bit of their liberty — and quite a few of their rights — in exchange for the promise by the security state to defeat the threat of militant Islam. This time, for a variety of reasons, an unusually large number of people in many countries are bridling at making this tradeoff.
Hobbes asserts that humans give up a portion of their absolute freedom to act in their own self-interest that existed in the state of nature and surrender it to the Leviathan, i.e., to the government. We agree to abide by a set of rules in order to keep other people from acting arbitrarily toward us.
What is important about this social contract is that we can’t pick and choose which portions of it we comply with and which we don’t. If one group of people decides to refuse to wear a mask that is meant to protect others from infection, or to vaccinate, creating conditions for mutations of a dangerous virus, then another group may decide to ignore stop signs and red lights while driving. And a freedom-loving governor like Florida’s Ron DeSantis may then penalize drivers who stop at stop signs.
Another issue is majority rule. When society agrees on a set of rules a minority that disagrees will need to comply. When Britons cross over to Europe they are required to drive on the right, even though their preference and vehicle design favor the left.
It is true that in the case of COVID-19 some accredited medical professionals, social and behavioral scientists and children’s advocates have dismissed the disease as a minor inconvenience or have offered alternative treatments, or have criticized the vaccines. Given the complexity of the modern world, a wide variety of opinions exist on each and every issue. However, there is such a thing as the scientific establishment, consisting of a majority of recognized professionals, and modern society has agreed to listen to their opinion — and not, say, to the ideas of a charismatic shaman. Based on expert opinion the authorities have instituted a set of measures which will keep us all safe from the disease — and it is our responsibility to comply with them. It is the cornerstone of our civilization.
How much freedom we surrender and what we get in return is a key question. Locke in particular was concerned with the limit of state power. His view that man possesses natural, inalienable rights to life liberty and property was the foundation of the American Revolution and informed the Founding Fathers’ concern with the limit of state power.
Marxists and other authoritarians saw all these discussions as bourgeois demagoguery. Building on Hegel’s ideas about the gradual merging of the individual and the state, Engels famously declared that “freedom is the recognition of necessity”. What it meant in practice, as demonstrated by the experience of the 20th-century totalitarian state, was an attempt to change human nature and to create a kind of individual for whom following the diktat of the Great Leader and the dogma of his party would be a natural choice.
Some human material was inherently not suitable — and so property owners and clergy in the Soviet Union and Jews in Germany (and later in the Soviet Union) had to be eliminated. But the rest could be revamped and modified. In the words of early Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin (written before he himself was eliminated as unsuitable material), “our task is to process human beings, to turn them into a kind of living machines who in all their actions would be driven by new principles and the new proletarian ideology.”
Or, according to Minister of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, “every human molecule stumbles in every direction, bumps against its neighbors and moves in a chaotic and disorganized manner. Our goal is to organize those molecules, give them a unified vector, endow them with a goal and instill order.”
A society like this would seem to have little trouble combatting an epidemic. The Chinese government — repressive, yes, but still pretty far from that totalitarian ideal — was able to defeat the disease relatively quickly. But repression and lack of democracy is not a necessary ingredient. Plenty of democratic nations were able to do so as well, including New Zealand (which is at number four in The Economist’s democracy rankings) and Australia (at number nine).
Aside from China or Singapore, however, democracies have done generally well in containing the Covid pandemic — certainly not worse than less democratic Brazil (number 49) or India (number 54).
As a rule, moreover, authoritarian governments will have a worse time keeping their citizens safe in an epidemic. They have a tendency to sweep their problems under the rug, their personnel selection for positions of responsibility is based on factors other than professional competence and ideas expressed by the Great Leader often trump professional opinion. Russia is a poster child of how authoritarian governments can screw up their response, but so is, unfortunately, the United States, where asinine pronouncements by the former president were given considerable play.
In general, the safety of citizens and freedom are not inversely correlated. On the contrary, wherever you look, people are safer and more secure in democracies, not in flawed democracies, hybrid regimes or authoritarian states. In other words, democracies, while not perfect, are better at keeping up the state’s end of the original covenant, whereby citizens surrender a portion of their freedom in exchange for security.
On the other hand, our response to the COVID pandemic shows that we, the citizens, are no longer keeping up our end of the bargain. We distrust our governments, especially ones we ourselves have elected. It is seen all over the world, especially in France with its yellow vest protests and in the UK, where Brexit was a rebellion against the government in Brussels. In the United States, long before the anti-masker and anti-vaxxer response to the pandemic, the epidemic of gun ownership has been a clear expression of anti-government sentiment.
While the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that gun ownership is meant for the maintenance of a militia (a common endeavor), most gun owners claim they buy firearms to protect themselves and their families.
Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau believed that humans come to rely on one another and organize in society not out of necessity but when they become more civilized. It doesn’t bode well for the future of our civilization that we now seem to be pining away for a situation where it is every man for himself.
