Sitting in my own tower of ivory privilege, I am so far untouched by COVID-19.
Don’t know anyone who has caught it, let alone been killed by it. I read the horror stories of abject lonely deaths in their thousands in the hospitals of London, New York and Milan, and I’m touched in the most abstract way.
Nevertheless, despite the pretty good odds I now have (being in Australia) of getting through this pandemic personally unscathed, I don’t find myself feeling an increasingly insistent demand that my old life be returned to me at the incidental cost of a few hundred or thousand deaths, slightly brought forward.
But that demand is what I keep seeing, persistently published in our mainstream media via op-eds from people we are accustomed to calling “conservative” although they are definitely not that.
Ostensibly, the rationale is just some classic neoliberal rationality in action: the cost of economic shutdown is too high and not justified by the medical risk. Sooner or later we have to accept that some people must get sick and die as the affordable price of bringing the economy back to life, and sooner is way better than later.
Also, “herd immunity”.
First, herd immunity is language that nobody should be allowed to use unless they have a PhD in epidemiology and some idea of what they’re talking about. That’s not me, but I do know that it isn’t even a thing unless the risk of reinfection is off the table.
Which, so far, it isn’t. As for pontificating blowhards chucking it around with the abandon of Donald Trump spruiking malaria drugs, by all means plaster your pseudoscience on your Facebook page, but why are News and Nine publishing it?
Well, we know why, once we replace “conservative” with “reactionary” and remind ourselves of the endless ideology war which was only suspended for that moment when it looked like we may be completely cooked and there was nothing to argue over except the toilet paper.
It isn’t about the economy. It’s about the dislocation presently being felt by those who have become so used to being unchallenged in their perception of how the world really works.
Imagine the discomfort: you’ve spent your entire life being told and telling others about the cast-iron law of the market, lifters and leaners, debt and deficit, and the inherent evil of socialist thought.
Then, for the first time in the memories of everyone under 80, shit actually happens and what does every conservative government do? It saves the day by stretching the social safety net it has always denigrated, to prevent the fall.
Or, as socialists like to say: socialism.
This must not stand. But, the ruling class being above all pragmatists, not ideologues, their minds turn automatically to plain common sense. The fastest route to the return of all things to the way they used to be and naturally will, is most clearly not through waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine, nor the middle-ground cautious approach our chief medical officers are urging and the Morrison government is currently pursuing.
To be able to assert that, instead, the bandaid should be ripped off entirely, one must engage some cognitive dissonance.
Specifically, that what is happening in London and New York will not happen here. Not really a challenge for a seasoned opinion maker; you just ignore what doesn’t fit your thesis.
So we are blessed with the elegantly simple theory of herd immunity, buttressed by the assertion that COVID-19 only kills old people and barely troubles the more robust youth. Even more elegant, because it’s the same youth who will be carrying the intergenerational debt burden of keeping old people alive a bit longer than they would otherwise linger.
It’s only fair, in that context, that a sacrifice be made. Teetering perilously close to an argument that has the whiff of eugenics about it, our heroes argue that there’s no inhumanity in choosing a better future for the strong, when the alternative is decades of misery for everyone.
As long as we keep ourselves at the level of abstraction, which does not require us to contemplate what it means to suffocate to death isolated from every person you know, it’s got a logic to it.
Get the economy moving, return everyone to work, let the virus spread a bit and smooth a few dying pillows for people we’ve given the dignity of being allowed to hug their grandkids once more. If they die, well, we all die eventually.
It’s true, of course, that the saving of life is not an absolute. COVID-19 will force a more difficult moral choice on governments than the usual balances of cost and benefit that they confront when budgeting for health care. We’ll have to bear a cost, one way or the other, and part of it will be counted in lives lost.
But this is not a thought experiment.
It’s an appalling tragedy, happening right now before our eyes. The rush to give the privileged back what they feel has been temporarily removed from their grasp is unseemly. They’re able to express such mercenary awfulness because they don’t believe that they’ll, personally, ever be poor, sick or dead.
We are in a war, but some of us only want to know when our favourite restaurant will be reopening.
Good article. I’m not sure about the socialism bit, but you’ve nailed the nihilist reactionaries pretty well.
I would like to think that the current situation would cause a rethink. Both in the way the world populace acts and economic thinking.
BUT I’ve got a $100 to RSPCA if in one year from now the whole mess has not gone back to pre-plague “normality”.
( Assuming my survival, I’m prime plague bait at my age and with my ailments).
Well said, Michael Bradley, except that we are not in a war; we are in a medical crisis of plague proportions. That is a very different serious state of affairs.
“Teetering perilously close to an argument that has the whiff of eugenics about it,”
Since you raised this, the current state we find ourselves in also has whiff of Fascism about it.
I don’t agree. That (a whiff of fascism) would imply political motivation. Whereas, the current situation is, largely, a rational response to a health emergency informed by science. The political aspect is the decision on whether or not, how closely to follow the advice.
I really don’t need to have some elitist twerp from a trendy law firm lecture me.
This article is probably the worst one I’ve read today denigrating a sensible cost benefit approach to healthcare and wellbeing.
Based on his rhetorical flourishes that replace rational thought, I could just as easily say Michael Bradley is murdering teenage girls in their hundreds due to his denying them social interaction and increasing their already high rates of anxiety and depression to the point where they become suicidal.
I suggest he run for parliament where he will lose and thereby demonstrate for himself just how out of touch he is with the feelings of the majority of the electorate who have always understood that every benefit has a cost and someone ends up paying (and it is never the rich or the privileged or the powerful).
If the majority of the electorate “understood that every benefit has a cost and someone ends up paying (and it is never the rich or the privileged or the powerful).” the LNP would be permanently in opposition.
Spot on. Mac Tez
What a tedious trope, reactionaries and restaurants. I’m a paid up member of my union, have been for 29 years, member of the Labor Party, bleeding hearts lefty. I’ve got a favourite restaurant and I’m worried when it will reopen. For my palate and the employment of my friends. Michael you’re not as dumb as you’re trying to be.
I don’t expect any government, of any political stripe, to survive their first post-lockdown election… Right now the resistance is coming from the right (sadly), but that will change, is changing…
A wonderfully cliched and agnostic response GGADS. Agnostic in the sense of not knowing, anything.
Still twice as much as you know …