Sunday 28 November 2021

The Fake Liberty of Anti-Mask Whinging

I understand Peter Hitchens's beef with the Conservative Party. His argument, reminiscent of the doctrinal disputes of the long abandoned Trotskyism from whence he came, is the Tories are no longer Tory. They have abandoned the tenets of conservatism as divined by Edmund Burke and have instead embraced liberalism. This was more than confirmed with the coronation of Dave in 2005, and Theresa May and Boris Johnson since have not departed from this point of view in the years since. Front and centre is the sovereignty of the individual and everything else - tradition, the common good - are nothing next to the crudities of gratification and self-indulgence. And as social liberalism is the de facto dogma of the early 21st century, conservatives have plenty of reasons to be miserable.

Peter should have paid more attention to his 1970s International Socialist educationals. The abandonment of conservatism for liberalism (or, more properly, neoliberalism) was part of the Tories' ideologically tooling up to take on the labour movement in the following decade. Or to put it another way, the shift to free markets, individualism, and authoritarianism under Margaret Thatcher was because the Tories were the political vehicle for the forcible reassertion of capital over labour. They are a ruling class party. But ideas, even when they're grafted onto a bourgeois political project can take on lives of their own as they stuck to the consequences of the Tories' sweeping, purposeful enterprise of social devastation. Despite her affecting Victorian morals, the dog-eat-dog governance and great property scramble Thatcher kickstarted inaugurated a new hegemony of I'm alright Jack, and nowhere does in manifest in more pathological and mind-numbingly stupid ways than among those fancying themselves as conservatives today.

Take Andrew Lilico, for example. Writing for The Spectator, he argues Boris Johnson's announcement of new mask mandates in shops and on public transport is, an "imposition on the public" and equates to "simple tyranny." There was an emergency situation at the beginning of the pandemic, and therefore a case could be made for extraordinary measures then. Now? There is no case to answer - the pandemic is virtually over. He argues infections have been flat since the summer, a claim that is demonstrably not true. He says there isn't the remotest risk of the NHS getting swamped, while ICU is still mobbed by the Covid ill and nurses and doctors driven to exhaustion by the relentless pressure of cases (we're currently at rates comparable to last March). Interestingly, he forgets to mention numbers of deaths, which were 848 this last week, and 1,029 the week before. And now we have the new variant. I'm sure these facts slipped his mind as he barrelled toward his first knock out point:
If the government had suddenly declared, in mid-2018, that it was making masks mandatory in all shops for no better reason than this might cut down on respiratory illness a bit, would you have complied? Of course not!
A textbook example of a facile comparison. 160-odd thousand excess deaths and around a million dealing with long Covid were enough for anyone to take notice. Especially someone whose day job involves shuffling numbers around. What's his excuse?

Having done the heavy lifting, he settles into the "hey, I'm a mask wearer too, I just bridle at government tyranny" shtick. He says it's simply not legitimate for the government to expect people to comply with public health strategies because there's no emergency. There has to be imminent danger. An argument as foolish as saying we shouldn't bother with seat belts because the chance of crashing our car is slim. It's very simple. The right to life is the most fundamental of liberties, and because we're not living in compounds walled off from one another, maintaining life and ensuring collective health is a responsibility for society as a whole - its institutions and, where appropriate, as per an incredibly infectious disease, with its members. Because we live in a capitalist society criss crossed by class struggle, this abstract communitarian standpoint acquires the flesh and blood of materiality when it is our class who are at the forefront of exposure, while the likes of Lilico and other right wing contrarians can pick and choose their level of risk. When the Tories fail to protect public health, they deserve condemnation not because of "incompetence" or "being wrong", but because of the interests they champion. The health of the property portfolio and the wage relation comes before that of actual human beings, and this too has been demonstrated time and again.

But with the freedom bit between Lilico's teeth, we should stand up for our liberties and refuse to comply. He might want to reflect on words he wrote early in the autumn: "When you are engaged in an illegal act you should have no protection from other citizens intervening in a proportionate way to prevent you from that illegal act, unless the police themselves are in the process of preventing it." I look forward to a maskless Lilico whining about getting fined on the tube and kicked out of shops. Assuming he has the guts of his convictions to follow through his clickbait stance.

Lilico, like most right wing commentators, is not only a latter day enthusiast for the blasted Thatcher and broadly aligns with that section of capital that wants to be free of all social bonds and obligations, he has to play the right wing commentator game where he competes with others for paid hot takes, profile, and attention. He and others like him typify the conservatism which Hitchens despises: individual self-interest and advancement dressed up as defences of liberty. On this, we can agree with our very erstwhile comrade, especially as his nonsense are the sorts of arguments Covid-19 finds congenial.

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8 comments:

Blissex said...

«the right wing commentator game where he competes with others for paid hot takes, profile, and attention»

By and large it is not limited to the right wing, anyhow this is a good description by an ex-practitioner of that game:

https://unherd.com/2020/08/given-my-time-again-i-wouldnt-choose-journalism/>
This was thrilling: I wrote for The Guardian now! Eventually, I developed a routine for picking up this kind of work. Every morning started with the Today programme, scanning Twitter, reading the headlines, especially reading the headlines in the Mail, in search of something that I could be mad enough about to write 600-800 hundred fiery words on it. Being mad was important because the economics of this kind of content required fast output (since timeliness is critical) and high engagement (since this is how editors, and writers, measure success). I write quickly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so people are more likely to share and react.
Not everything I wrote when this was my main form of journalism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dishonesty that made me feel ashamed: I was deliberately riling myself so I could rile other people in turn, and the arguments I offered had a kind of incuriosity, a clamshell quality, where the main thing to recommend them was how impervious I could make them to critique.
»

BCFG said...

I would say the opposite, i would say the ruling classes are abandoning liberalism and embracing a sort of hysterical authoritarian conservatism (which is why they love woke narratives so much).

Incidentally, this lurch to authoritarian conservatism has nothing to do with Covid, where Covid is concerned the Tories are decidedly liberal, lockdowns and public health measures are the last thing they want, and more often than not they implement them because they have little choice, for example, if the rest of the world introduce certain measures, Britain must or risk being on the red list. This is why we are seeing certain actions now.

So Hitchens is just your typical right wing nothing gets in the way of business and shopping for shit we do not need type, and any public health measures are an affront to his free market dogmas, and possibly a threat to them too.

The actual material reasons for hysterical authoritarian conservatism (other than we live under bourgeois rule) are as follows:

Managing the relative decline of the West in relation to the East.

Managing the pressure on resources (soil degradation, increased demand and more expensive supply costs for primary products)

Climate damage limitation attempts

But anyway, how hard is it to wear a mask, are some brits so incapable of such a simple thing? It isn’t exactly crossing the channel in a dinghy is it! Having said that if they did a poll I am pretty sure over 80% of the public would agree with mask wearing in shops and on public transport, virtually every poll has shown strong support for lockdown measures.

Blissex said...

«There was an emergency situation at the beginning of the pandemic, and therefore a case could be made for extraordinary measures then. Now? There is no case to answer - the pandemic is virtually over.»

And here we go again to a point that apparently I am one of the very few people making: the inconvenient problem of SARS-CoV-2 is that it has a death rate (among the unvaccinated) of around 1-3% (but skewed to the oldies), in between the 0.1-0.% of the flu and the 10-30% of a real plague.

If it had a death rate of 10-30% the same people who now rant about individual freedoms would likely be the first to board up the houses of the infected and to burn them down with the infected, or at least to dump the infected into cattle cars and dump them into "lazzarettos" surrounded by layers of barbed wire fences.

But many people argue that a disease that leaves 99-97% of the (unvaccinated) population alive is simply not serious enough, just like the flu, to justify particular restrictions, and *electorally* this works alright; the 1-3% that dies can't vote any-more, and their relatives are not that many either, and often inherit their properties, at long last.

So for many in the 99-97% SARS-CoV-2 is almost like the flu, but for the impact on the NHS. Thus the electorally successful choice of "fatalistic liberalism" by many governments faithful to the "Washington Consensus" type of politics, for half-baked lockdowns followed by fast mass vaccinations (but only with products marketed by big-pharma "national champions").

«I look forward to a maskless Lilico whining about getting fined on the tube and kicked out of shops. Assuming he has the guts of his convictions»

I think this is a large misrepresentation of his argument, which to me seems that wearing masks should be an individual choice in the current situation, so wearing a mask is as compatible with his argument as not wearing it.

Blissex said...

«virtually every poll has shown strong support for lockdown measures»

Only because "hoi polloi" are mostly unaware (thanks to Starmer, Sturgeon, Davey, and of most of the mass media) that with test-trace-isolate no general long-term lockdown was needed in the countries whose governments betrayed the "Washington/Pfizer Consensus", and deaths have been 10-100 times lower and jobs, businesses and GDP have not been lost in any significant measure or have grown.

Wishingonastar said...

As Desmond Tutu put it, we need to concentrate on our commonalities and on which we can agree, which is much in your writing. However, ‘An argument as foolish as saying we shouldn't bother with seat belts because the chance of crashing our car is slim. It's very simple.’ Who is the ‘we’ in this? As a bobby back in the day, I didn’t choose to target adults who didn’t wear seat belts because the choice was theirs to make and everyone knew the foolish and potentially life changing/ending consequences of that choice. Children were a different matter, of course.

Blissex said...

«I didn’t choose to target adults who didn’t wear seat belts because the choice was theirs to make and everyone knew the foolish and potentially life changing/ending consequences of that choice»

That kind of argument is way too simplistic, and most of the discussion about vax/mask (including this blog post) is way too simplistic, even if there are a few thousand years of discussion on this matter by philosophers and lawyers.

The fundamental issue is rarely mentioned, and it "prevention" vs. "punishment":

* Infecting someone else with a sickness that can disable them for weeks or months or kill them is in most countries a crime of some sort.

* In a purely "fiat libertas, ruat caelum" logic, everybody would be free to infect other people, and then the other people would seek to punish them by suing or prosecuting those who infected them.

* The question is whether and when before-the-fact restrictions on everybody are "justified" as opposed to after-the-fact punishments of just the culprits.

BTW this applies to seatbelts too: they are mandatory for adults also because every adult is insured by the NHS, and not wearing a seatbelt usually means greater damage that is a greater cost to the NHS.

The after-the-fact alternative would be to make seatbelts optional, and then bill the cost of NHS treatment to those who have car accidents and were not using a seatbelt. Their choice, their consequences: why should taxpayers who use a seatbelt pay for the treatment of the greater damages of "scroungers" who don't use one?

No man is an island, and especially in modern states personal choices have direct but also indirect consequences on others, and often "prevention" is so much cheaper and easier than "punishment", with limitations for freedom (e.g. the freedom to own weapons or poisons or pornography or to use clothes or seatbelts or masks).

I often ask the people against the obligation to cover their breathing organs why they accept the obligation to cover their reproductive organs. Shouldn't that be a personal freedom too?

BCFG said...

"I often ask the people against the obligation to cover their breathing organs why they accept the obligation to cover their reproductive organs. Shouldn't that be a personal freedom too?"

I would be careful Blissex, often asking people those types of questions can get you into trouble, especially is these puritanical, Victorian values witch hunting days.

Anonymous said...

Whether we agree with such rules or not, we can all surely agree that the boss of Iceland saying he won't enforce government mandated Public Health rules is a rather perverse situation.