Dr Liz Gordon: A peculiarly political pandemic
At the heart of this blog is the triangular relationship between the law, trust in government and human freedom. All three elements are important. The corpus of the law represents the current status of justice in Aotearoa (for good or bad), including challenges, Judge-made law, common law and the intentions of Parliament.
Trust in government is just another term for politics. Just as the economic system, via the share market, is driven by people’s feelings about the context (which can be notoriously neurotic), politics is driven by sets of feelings that boil down to trust. The late Jim Anderton used to talk about the hopelessness of pushing political ideas when the ‘tide is out’. How to bring in the tide is the puzzle that all politicians have to face constantly.
Human freedom is not straightforward thing either. Is it ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom to’? Freedom from the virus or freedom to go out and play. When your freedoms impinge on mine, whose prevail?
So having got the definitions out of the way, let’s have a look at the issues.
- New Zealanders ‘agreed’ to the lockdown because they had high levels of trust in the government, not because they were certain that the government’s lockdown was lawful.
There were two legal challenges to the legality of lockdown and both failed in the High Court. According to Andrew Geddis and Claudia Geiringer, both were poorly argued and doomed to fail. However, they note, this does not mean that the law was sound. There were significant questions as to the powers used, including the power which essentially put us all into quarantine. The article is very much worth reading. The point is, that there was such a strong support for a rationally argued programme of action that the legal base did not matter. Politics, not the law, reigned supreme. What is oddest about this is that Jacinda has constantly said things like “this doesn’t have to be political”, while relying exactly on the trust thing. It is politics that looks like personal responsibility.
2. New Zealand was remarkably free of the ‘freedom’ virus that has attacked other countries and jurisdictions.
This movement has been most obvious in the United States, with gun-wielding mobs protesting against continued quarantine orders, with Old Trumpie out the back yelling “liberate”. Don’t even try and understand that, by the way. It is clear that disruption is Trump’s only agenda at the moment, his last hope to hold onto the Presidency against such an appalling record of misjudgement and inaction.
As we saw in the curious case of Simon Bridges, in a situation of high trust in politics, calls against the grain are politically unacceptable. This is something to do with human nature and human psychology. We have ‘adopted’ the government’s messages as our own. Any critique of the government is a critique of us.
The freedom argument, which has popped up in one way or another in a number of countries, is both a rational outcome of neo-liberalism, which places individuals in the marketplace in premier position (i.e. it is libertarian), and an offshoot of the kind of survivalism that has flourished, again in the USA, in recent years. This is the kind of discourse that had Timothy McVeigh bomb a government building in 1993. In short, it is a profoundly political demand. The existence of semi-automatic rifles at the recent Michigan demonstration shows that some are prepared to back up that demand with force. Liberate, indeed, the rule of law!
The disinclination of people like pre-Covid Boris (I still hold out hope for the virus to have infected him with a little bit of sense), Bolsonaro (Brazil), Erdogan (Turkey), Trump (USA) and others to take measures that reduce human freedoms (remember that initially the UK was talking herd immunity and let the oldies die, as they do) is strongly reflected in the virus numbers. As others ‘flatten the curve’, the latecomers are shooting ahead of the competition to have the most cases. The UK is catching up to Spain and Italy so fast it is dizzying (having swept past France and Germany in the past week), with Brazil and Turkey converging fast. While others fall away as their mitigation policies start to work, our right wing friends are out in front.
However, Turkey is now flattening the curve a little, closing schools and workplaces, bowing to the inevitability that mitigation is the only thing that slows the virus down (except possibly everyone injecting themselves with disinfectant, which would indeed mitigate…. life). Brazil is becoming the alarming case of what happens when there are no national mitigation policies in place. In the words of President Bolsonaro this week: “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”.
All eyes should be on the United States next week, where Republican governors are under pressure to re-open business in states where the virus is just beginning to recede, loosening its grip on a socially distanced population. It will return again, of course, in force, should this happen in places such as Florida. We should not forget the highly contested Democrat states where the rightists are using every method possible, including legal as well as public demonstrations and opposition, to force a quick re-opening of business and economic activity. It is almost civil war out there.
3. In extraordinary circumstances, leadership can make a difference
While the legal case for following lockdown is not that strong in New Zealand, and while the urgency for economic re-opening is building, there is a marked, populist (how else to explain the marketisation of Ashley Bloomfield’s image) relationship, built on that strongest of human grounds, trust, that has developed and continued here. And that very factor alone, and the actions that follow from it, has seen us, the people, and our government, defeat (for the time being at least) the virus.
Dr Liz Gordon is a researcher and a barrister, with interests in destroying neo-liberalism in all its forms and moving towards a socially just society. She usually blogs on justice, social welfare and education topics.
The imagination runs wild.
Imagine if we’d had the biggest experiment in history. All those who were prepared to be in the lockdown approach, exactly as it is happening and has happened put on one of the islands, North or South. Those wanting a no lockdown approach, every single thing carries on as normal, on the other island.
One island having flights overseas in and out just like up to the end of January. No forced quarantines, people allowed total freedom to decide. No schools closed, no shops closed just business as normal.
Which island would you choose?
Peter: “Which island would you choose?”
I’ve read the Geddis and Geiringer article. The island with no lockdown. No house arrest, in other words.
Is ‘trust’ the sole explanation?
Quote
There is a name for the pursuit of unanimity that is so overpowering that it supersedes any realistic assessment of alternative courses of action: “Groupthink”. The term comes from the psychology of the 1970s – and like a gigantic field experiment, we are currently filling it with life.
There are a few exceptions: The writer Juli Zeh has reminded us of our constitution, according to which the mildest possible means must always be chosen for encroachments on fundamental rights – but no necessary debate has taken place. The journalist Heribert Prantl wrote that “one must not only fight resolutely against the virus, but also against a mood that regards basic and civil rights as a burden, a burden or a luxury in times of crisis”.
But there are few voices only and they don’t make themselves heard. And the opposition is missing in the parliament.
Democracy was eaten by the fear of illness. Although we don’t know very much about the disease – or maybe because of it.
The medical statistician Gerd Antes, professor in Freiburg and a world-renowned expert in his field, says: “There are two enormous problems with the numbers: we do not know how many people have been infected with the new corona virus and how many have infected are added every day. It is also unclear how many people die directly from the infection as cause.”
If this sentence is true, it should actually sweep away all of the government’s corona policy. Instead, it just fades away.
People plunge into an act of solidarity with the weakest, although most of them are threatened much more by the measures against the disease than by the disease itself. Altruism, where previously only self-interests were thought?
Or is the intoxication of the emergency due to the fact that people still overestimate the real physical danger of the disease?
We are all prisoners of the pictures from the Italian city of Bergamo: we saw the convoy of military vices who have come to fetch the coffins of the dead.
The suffering caused by the lock-down is more difficult to depict. The speechlessness of the lonely, the pain of the victims of domestic violence, the needs of the unemployed, the fear of the small self-employed and entrepreneurs.
The social medicine specialists could report about it. Because at the moment it’s only the epidemiologists’ hour.
The corona experience will be included in our history books because it is the first disease that is also transmitted via the Internet.
All mechanisms of modern media hysteria take effect here! And instead of moderating, certain politics and the media act as fire accelerators.
Yes, we lack immunity to this virus in every respect: health and social. This illness is serious. But we made it a disaster.
Unquote
(Google translation of a text by Rudolf Augstein in “Der Freitag, 15/05/20”, referring to the lock-down measures under the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Manfred Staab: Augstein could have been commenting about what’s happened here in NZ, huh? The same issues. But has anybody in this country written – and had published – an opinion similarly sceptical? If so, I haven’t seen it.
““Groupthink”.”
Indeed. I first came across that term in the 1980s, as a descriptor of those who planned the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
That story was in a management textbook, as a warning to people not to fall into the same trap.
We’d be justified in concluding that pretty much all post-war US foreign policy has been similarly afflicted.
And it seems that the Washington Establishment has learned nothing from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe. See this:
https://www.rt.com/news/487970-maduro-venezuela-us-mercenary-incursion/
I’ve seen on Twitter a characterisation of this Venezuela pratfall as “Bay of Fat Pigs”. Heh!
Those responsible for formulating US foreign policy still can’t grasp the fact that they should stay OUT of other polities’ political arrangements, no matter how much they deplore said arrangements.
Back to the coronavirus schemozzle here: Today, I had an appointment with a health service provider. Said provider’s view was the same as mine. We’d have much preferred Sweden’s approach. There is always risk, whatever course of action we follow: our government ought to have treated us like adults and allowed us to choose for ourselves what – and how much – risk to take.
I’m in the so-called “at risk” age group. I was not asked for my opinion. I was told what to do – and not to do – as if I were six years old again and had no agency over my life and actions.
From the beginning, I’ve taken a very dim view of that. I’m horrified at how willingly so many younger people have just accepted without complaint the crimping of their liberties. And I’m equally horrified at the damage done to our economy, with the inevitable malign effects on the jobs and lives of our children and grandchildren.
We know nobody at all who’s had this virus. Nor do we know of anybody here. We’ve heard of a couple of overseas cases; however, one turned out to have nothing to do with coronavirus, and I would not be at all surprised if the other illnesses were caused by something different.
On the other hand, there have been cases reported from before last Christmas, in both France and the US. And at that time, a member of this household had an illness with almost identical symptoms. I’ve read online comments suggesting that other NZers had late last year also had something similarly nasty. No way of knowing now if that virus was circulating here then, until antibody tests become available.