As well-worn paths of daily life disappear, it can feel like a familiar world is crumbling around us. Everything is in flux and nothing is certain.
Yet the coronavirus reveals fundamental truths about the human condition that can help us find our feet and point us towards a fairer future.
The virus makes no distinction between rich and poor, between citizen and foreigner, between man and woman. The virus takes no heed of skin colour, educational qualification or postcode.
Of course, it’s easier to self-isolate in a mansion than in an overcrowded apartment. A hefty bank balance is a better cushion against an economic shutdown than a maxed-out credit card. And the elderly are at much greater risk of dying from the virus than the young.
Yet in the end, the virus confirms our basic equality.
As Camus wrote in The Plague, we are all assured “of the inerrable equality of death”. This may not be the type of equality we want, and we may stave death off as long as possible, but we have little choice in the manner of our passing or the manner of our birth.
This should remind us that our luck — good or bad — is undeserved. Almost 30 years of continuous growth has accustomed many Australians to relative economic security.
But as the contemporary manifestation of Camus’ plague pushes our economy over a cliff, everyone is getting a taste of the precariousness that already characterises many lives.
If you’re experiencing homelessness, the pandemic spreads one more level of risk on layers of personal crisis. For a disability pensioner spending more than half her income on rent, anxiety about how to pay the power bill is a familiar state of mind. Not knowing when the next job will turn up is nothing new for a casual worker in the gig economy.
If insecurity is new and unwelcome in our lives, then we can assume that its pervasive presence was never welcome in the lives of others. It should give us pause to consider the levels of inequality and disadvantage that we allowed to build up during Australia’s long boom.
The virus has also helped us identify common needs. Food and shelter, obviously, but also love, care, companionship, cultural expression, pleasure, meaningful activity and a sense of belonging.
We cannot achieve any of these things on our own. We might think of ourselves as rugged individuals, charting our own course, and deserving what we accumulate through personal effort. But as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson notes, even a superstar like Michael Jordan can only throw baskets if someone keeps the court clean. We are all in this game together.
The government’s massive stimulus package is a collective act of mutual support intended to bridge the current crisis. Cooperation, care and solidarity are our most important aids in crossing safely. We should not abandon them when we reach the other side.
The pandemic also alerts us to our common flaws. The prime minister has declared that panic-buying is “un-Australian”. The evidence from supermarkets across the country contradicts him. The shoppers anxiously loading up their trolleys are just as Australian as Scott Morrison.
The pandemic has made us afraid — for good reason — and panic-buying is evidence of our inclination to first protect our own interests and the interests of close family and friends.
Yet this very human tendency does not mean that we lack concern for the common good.
Like human beings the world over, Australians are neither inherently selfish nor inherently selfless. A moment of introspection will reveal that each of us is capable of behaving well or poorly: of being greedy or restrained, impulsive or thoughtful, generous or mean, truthful or dissembling. The degree to which we exhibit the virtue, or the vice, depends on many factors, including what others do around us. If everyone else is clearing the shelves of pasta sauce, chances are that we will grab some too.
But selfish and panicked reactions are not inevitable. Nor are they the norm. Many individuals and organisations are responding to the crisis in reasoned and caring ways. In suburbs across the country, people are letterboxing offers of food or groceries in case neighbours are stuck at home. The major supermarkets swiftly imposed purchase limits on staples like pasta and instigated a dedicated shopping hour for the elderly and those with a disability.
This may not be a sufficient response, but it demonstrates a widely shared concern for the welfare of vulnerable members of our community.
Then of course, there are the staff in medical centres and hospitals working endless hours and putting themselves in harm’s way to tend to the sick and infectious — just as emergency workers braved the terrors of our unprecedented summer of fire to protect life and property.
The ancient philosopher Aristotle identified virtues such as courage, generosity, kindness and moderation as the exemplars of what it means to be good at being human. Virtue, for Aristotle, was synonymous with excellence.
More than two thousand years later, we continue to evaluate one another in similar language. To call someone generous is to say that she sets a norm of behaviour that is admirable and worth emulating. To call someone greedy is to condemn their actions as unacceptable.
Aristotle also argued that the things we routinely do shape our characters. We become brave by doing brave acts, we become kind by acting kindly.
These difficult times challenge us to practice Aristotle’s virtues — along with more careful hand washing — until they become such a habit that they are part of who we are. In doing so, we lay the foundation for a stronger, more caring community after the threat from the virus recedes.
Peter Mares is lead moderator at Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and the author of books including No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s Housing Crisis and Not Quite Australian: How Temporary Migration Is Changing the Nation.
Peter wrote: The virus makes no distinction between rich and poor, between citizen and foreigner, between man and woman. The virus takes no heed of skin colour, educational qualification or postcode.
Peter, the virus kills twice as many men as women, and being highly contagious through human contact it relishes urban-dwellers and cruise-ship passengers and being also feline-transmissible, it may one day mutate to prefer the cat-owned to dog-carers.
Any notion we may have of ‘equality’ is a political and economic construct; it’s not observable in nature except in the broad indifference physics has to all biology: entropy is equally unmoved by the viability of life and the propagation of suffering, but the costs are not equally shared (for example, evolution itself has wiped out more than 99% of all species.)
This whole article is an abuse of the is-ought fallacy made worse because in its pique of rhetorical frenzy, the epidemiology and mortality weren’t even researched. (And how do you not understand that all primates compete for privilege? Before we labelled it a moral failing, it was how a smart, cooperative species evolved to do sexual competition. That’s why it’s so hard to change.)
If we want equity of agency and dignity, Peter, we have to define it, fund it and police it: sometimes against some of our most competitive instincts. Nature won’t direct us, and we can’t appeal to it for authority.
So in the moral argument, you must explain clearly what you mean by equality and why you view it as being in the long-term interests of our species, what systems preserve inequality and how, how we should amend them to better hold one another to account for acting against species interests, and why that’s more effective than simply wishing our way to a fairer world.
There’s nothing in the way you’ve sought to milk readers’ Covid-19 anxiety that progressed this.
Evolution doesn’t cause extinction events, the environment does.
Tony, the environment can certainly cause extinction, but so can predation, disease, or adaptation toward specialised environments or diets that subsequently cease to exist.
My broader point was this: evolution has resulted in the loss of more than 99% of species as a byproduct of the adaptations we have today; it’s not a smart, morally-intelligent process, yet it’s also the one that produced the species from which we are trying to build smart, morally-intelligent civilisations.
Appeals to nature should not be used to underpin appeals to morality. The moral standards we have produced tend to be a strange amalgam of biology, evolved behaviours, social organisation and economics — inevitably we have to adapt them as circumstances change, and modify them as we realise that things we’d love to be easy for our species to do, actually aren’t.
Just stick to the golden rule or ethics of reciprocity and you can’t go wrong.
Except when we have power over people whose needs we don’t understand and don’t bother to find out. (I.e. all the time.)
The Golden Rule makes every ignorant, entitled, overprivileged bombast the judge of the long-term needs of human welfare. (‘I didn’t need a public education, gender equity, public healthcare, or subsidised childcare, therefore you don’t.’)
It’s great for producing self-satisfaction among the privileged, but in no sense adequate for the kind of class- gender- and culture-blind respect and justice Peter was trying to discuss.
Just stick to the golden rule or ethics of reciprocity and you can’t go wrong.
The current crisis with the COVID-19 I believes throws some light on an age old philosophical question: are people by nature basically good (selfless) or bad (selfish)? Given the ‘assault’ on supermarkets and the large purchases of some essential items the answer would appear to lean to the latter. Australians like to delude themselves as to their caring and giving nature in times of natural crises but it appears when it comes to them being under ‘supposed’ threat it is every man or woman for themselves and to hell with the rest. It is all about ‘ME’ with little or no thought for others in worse situations or in greater need. I do not think that the ‘excuse’ put forward regarding the panic shopping as a sign of the desire to look after one’s own in the first instance cuts it as an excuse for such behaviour. But it is not too difficult to find plausible explanations for this behaviour and it is one that goes to the heart of questions of equality.
Undoubtedly some of these shopping hoarders are likely to be a particular type of Australian the same ones who live in swank suburbs – away from the commoners and riff raft and are known to invariably give less to charities than those living in less advantaged suburbs. People who by virtue of their wealth feel superior – the myth of meritocracy, and entitled to place themselves ahead of all the others who have failed to achieve due to personal failings and hence be unable to compete in the deadly serious game of life and death. A bit like survival of the fittest.
On a macro- scale or societal scale I would contend that the shop hoarding is a clear reflection of the economic values capitalism has instilled in the personal value systems of those who live under such a system. It is all about dog eats dog, competition and individualism. These are the values that promote and also seek to justify inequality on a whole range of levels. Capitalism represents a moral vacuum that now permeates though out personal values. After all it was Thatcher who remarked that there was no such thing as society – really, how convenient for the neo-liberals. This disposes of messy concepts such as social justice.
Wilkinson and Pickett argue a strong case in their book ‘The Spirit Level’ of how all sections of society will be better off in a more equal society. This is the lesson we need to take out of this current crisis. What we need is a change of emphasis to a more caring and equal society where the intrinsic economic, social and cultural well-being of every individual is recognized and fostered. How to achieve such must come from within individuals who hold such values as important for a cohesive society.
Perhaps a starting point may be a question: Why is it that the Nordic nations consistently top the list of countries as the happiest in the world? Is there anything we may be able to learn from them? Rest assured that the privileged will fight desperately to restore their privileged position. I can hardly wait for their predictably pathetic cry of ‘politics of envy’ or the more rousing call to arms of ‘class warfare’ .
Lionheart, our species cooperates to gain food, produce shelter, raise children and defend communities, but competes to eat food, get the best shelters, gain favour with and influence over one another, have sex and privilege our children.
(And in this respect we don’t seem different from many other hominins and a large number of other herd mammals.)
So our cooperative behaviours have a situational component, as our competitive behaviours also do. Just as weeds are plants in the wrong place, a great deal of what a community calls immoral are competitive behaviours in places where the community thinks that shouldn’t occur. (Yet similar behaviours in a different situation can be extolled as virtues.)
Yet morality isn’t arbitrary, but adaptive and emergent, in the sense that the better we understand consequence and the more surpluses we have to choose, the more options we have to lift our moral sensibilities and commitments. (For example, when there are no lasting food surpluses, we don’t have the luxury of prisons. Hence every criminal penalty involves confiscations, humilation, torture, mutilation, exile or death — things we don’t always like to exercise today. Likewise, every war produces slavery or ethnic cleansing, which were commonplace in the ancient world, yet modern societies deplore: add food surpluses, and suddenly we have the option for other behaviours which we may then declare normative and eternal.)
So the question isn’t whether we are good or bad because that presupposes some absolute, context-free moral standard.
A better question is how morally intelligent we are, and how that translates to actionable, contestable and above all constructive systems of ethics that nourish individuals while also benefiting the species.
And that moral intelligence has very little to do with instinct or conscience, but a great deal to do with understanding all the consequences of our actions and neglect (including unintended risks), and whatever common short- medium- and long-term interests unite our species.
Peter could have gone there with this article because it’s true that nobody likes their cherished elderly to get sick, but he started from the wrong place: presented a clothes-line as a Christmas tree then over-adorned it with rhetorical baubles.
I haven’t read his work enough to tell whether his writing is always so weak, or whether his books are better, and he was just self-promoting with some cheap, off-the cuff piece of vacuous attention-seeking– and to be honest, I’m not sure which I want to be true.
But there’s a lot better that could be written about this situation, and I hope Peter finds enough auctorial self-improvement and readership respect to grow up and actually write some of it.
The internet is currently groaning under the weight of ‘rhetorical baubles’ of various colours, supposedly as information, entertainment, opinion. Mares’ piece is no different….. why point him out so vehemently.?
But you are right about ‘moral intelligence’. Its lacking in general and painfully now in late capitalist chaos. As for our future, the anthropocene has probably had its day. Thrashing on about right/wrong, good/bad thinking and behaviour is not going to alter our inevitable destination. Our progress there can be mitigated of course. Acceptance and humility help.
Xicetta asked: The internet is currently groaning under the weight of ‘rhetorical baubles’ of various colours, supposedly as information, entertainment, opinion. Mares’ piece is no different….. why point him out so vehemently.?
Oh, that’s easy.
As a subscriber, I pay Crikey to publish stuff that I hope will be accurate, relevant, actionable and in the public interest. That means:
1. I care personally how relevant, researched, constructive, well-conceived and well-presented it is;
2. I happen to like and respect many members of the Crikey community along with the broad aims of the Crikey brand, and object to them being flim-flammed and the brand being devalued; and meanwhile
3. Contributors who seek to exploit Crikey’s pages to rabble-rouse or self-promote need to realise that when you do that with a long-term subscriber base, you’re dealing with a different beast to when you splash sensationalist feelpinion onto casually-purchased newsstand tabloids.
So why aren’t you demanding more from sub-par contributors?
So you want the Saint without the faith and the religious truths that form it?
I think you mean religious myths, Michael. Most saintly tales have been soundly debunked by historians and the revered testimonies underpinning sacred doctrines deauthorised.
So I’d suggest that we don’t have saints, except as inspirational stories. (And we know that inspirational stories alone don’t work because we don’t have saints. :p)
Hence we need smarter compassion and more compassionate smarts.
So, the oldest institution, that still exists as a worldwide influencer and carrier of the good for over 2000 years, holds no content of truth, only myth?
How can that be? We humans pull apart and no amount of learning changes that; the savage – rips apart, the clever – a short dagger between the ribs, the elite – dig their own grave with spades of delusion and dissolution.
Michael, it looks like you’re trying to switch topic from morality and ethics (which is a collective human concern, regardless of culture) to a specific religion, which is purely a subcultural or individual concern.
Sorry, but while I’m happy to debate religions or a religion it’s not appropriate to do so under this article.
However as a short answer to your question: all religions have history and I think it’s both fascinating and worth comparative study, but religious doctrine isn’t necessarily it.
Michael, ethic of reciprocity and democracy predates the 2000 years that you seem to imagine was the beginning of morals. The doctrine you’re referring to is the least moral or democratic cult in existence. How can a book that demands human sacrifice be moral.
Tony, I did not talk of content or beginnings. I talked of presence, the long long now, worldwide; and active in the lives of people who make a choice. A presence that is emboldened in its proclaimation, well grounded in its worship and enlivened in its care and support for all peoples. Not without its failings, and shame. Yet it still stands in service, much to the chagrin of its many haters.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Where is my comment?
When the coronavirus crisis is over, what lessons will we have learned?
We will learn that the virus does not discriminate in who it infects, but the outcome depends greatly on individual characteristics. The necessary lessons are not only about the health of citizens but the health of our institutions.
The NSW Premier who initially pointed the finger elsewhere, is now saying “It is up to the criminal investigation to determine blame” (No, it is up to the courts. In three years or so… And that will be her next delaying tactic. )
The political assassin, Peter Dutton, has his own private army and navy called Border Farce. Border Force is a para-military, armed and dangerous, undertrained Dad’s Army of the Immigration Minister, designed originally to enforce visa conditions then repurposed to control people smuggling and organised crime. Its incompetence has been proven since 2015 and it has been allowed to continue only under strict supervision of the Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, an ex-cop who took Border Force with him to his new portfolio of Home Affairs.
https://www.directory.gov.au/portfolios/home-affairs/department-home-affairs/australian-border-force-0
“the government established the Australian Border Force (Border Force) as a ‘single frontline operational border agency to enforce our customs and immigration laws and protect our border’.1, 2”
“Both the Customs Act 1901 (Customs Act) and Migration Act 1958 (Migration Act) contain a wide range of powers. While many of these are essentially administrative in nature, there are a wide range of coercive powers—such as powers to question, search, detain or arrest people, or enter and search vehicles or premises—which departmental officers, such as Border Force officers, can now exercise. Other Acts (such as the Maritime Powers Act 2013) also confer powers on officers. In total, officers can exercise coercive powers under 35 Acts and more than 500 empowering provisions.”
The Dept’s response to the ANAO audit emphasised:
“enhanced integrity measures” and
“an intelligence-led, risk-based approach to border security.5”
“While these amendments did not materially change the range of statutory powers available to officers7, they extended to all approximately 15,000 employees within the new department the powers previously exercised by officers of Customs and Immigration under the Customs and Migration Acts and other legislation.”
“The (long) list of Acts that confer coercive powers on Australian Border Force officers (15,000 employees) includes:
Migration Act 1958
National Health Act 1953
Passenger Movement Charge Collection Act 1978
Customs Act 1901
Biosecurity Act 2015”
Tell us again, Minister Dutton. When border controls fail, disastrously, fatally, calanatously, who is responsible?