Liberalism & The Covid ApocalypseBy Rod Dreher
May 23, 2022
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Here is a fantastic essay by the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford, about Covid and liberalism.
The pandemic brought liberalism’s deeper contradictions into plain view. On the one hand, it accelerated what had previously been a slow-motion desertion of liberal principles of government. On the other hand, Covid culture has brought to the surface the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological: to remake man. That project can come to fruition, it seems, only with a highly illiberal form of government, paradoxically enough. If we can understand this, it might explain why our embrace of illiberal politics has met with so little resistance. It seems the anthropological project is a more powerful commitment for us than allegiance to the forms and procedures of liberal government.
Our regime is founded on two rival pictures of the human subject. The Lockean one regards us as rational, self-governing creatures. It locates reason in a common human endowment — common sense, more or less — and underwrites a basically democratic or majoritarian form of politics. There are no secrets to governing. The second, rival picture insists we are irrationally proud, and in need of being governed. This Hobbesian picture is more hortatory than the first; it needs us to think of ourselves as vulnerable, so the state can play the role of saving us. It underwrites a technocratic, progressive form of politics.
The Lockean assumption has been quietly put to bed over the last 30 years, and we have fully embraced the Hobbesian alternative.
Crawford says that in Covidtide, “a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government.” More:
In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.
If all of this strikes you as illiberal, it should. Yet in another sense, the central role of fear in politics has an impeccable liberal pedigree in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. This brings us to the deeper, anthropological project of liberalism.
Crawford contends that we live in a condition in which the claim that we are living in an emergency is used to justify the state assuming and exercising extraordinary powers. The Patriot Act in the immediate post-9/11 period is one example. And think of all the “wars on ____” we have had over the years, from both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Covid response began under a Republican administration, and continues under a Democratic one. Crawford points out that “the politics of emergency is intimately tied to victimology.” He means that any measures are justified by reference to What Must Be Done to protect or succor the Sacred Victim.
He also points out the the social distancing of the Covid period exacerbates the modern condition of mass atomization that Hannah Arendt taught was a precursor to totalitarianism. Crawford writes:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/matthew-b-crawford-liberalism-covid-apocalypse/
