Coronavirus has exposed our fear of risk
A crisis, and especially a health crisis, has a way of putting people and states under severe strain. In Britain, we have not yet seen the national quarantine procedures implemented in Italy. We are yet to experience the type of social distancing measures now introduced in Ireland and Belgium, or the state of national emergency which President Donald Trump has declared in the United States. And we wonder whether the authorities are making the right calls…
Some of the arguments being made are measured and informed. Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary, wrote for the London Evening Standard yesterday, urging the government to speed up social distancing. His article serves to illustrate the range of opinions which exist among global health experts. This range includes those drawing on evidence showing that strict, swift, and targeted social distancing measures can help drastically slow the spread of COVID-19 throughout a population. Although, such measures also come with heavy social and economic consequences.
There have also been some unhelpful responses from those who are ill-informed and who are, to put it plainly, panicking.
Other than basic human craving for security and information there is also something bigger at play, beyond all the calls from amateur virologists and social media prophets for the government to take dramatic action.
In Britain and the West, we live in societies where we are accustomed to being insulated from risk. Citizens now take it for granted that everyday life operates according to regular laws which control our interactions – whether that is in the form of protections in the workplace or the standards which regulate our consumer goods.
The venerable Lord Sumption, in his Reith Lectures last year, noted that one of the features of our society’s “growing appetite for legal rules” is “the constant quest for greater security and reduced risk in our daily lives.”
“This is particularly important in the areas of public order” and “health and safety”, Sumption said. “People sometimes speak as if the elimination of risk to life, health, wealth, and wellbeing was an absolute value.”
The trouble is that life is risky, no matter how much economic, scientific, and political development has helped to eradicate many of the challenges which were faced by human beings for centuries.
Our current aversion to confronting the reality of these challenges is rather exceptional in human history. Four hundred years ago, disease and periodic plagues were simply part of the human experience. It was understood that war, pestilence, and sheer bad luck could strike you down in the prime of life. For women, pregnancy carried with it serious risks of perishing in childbirth.
Pre-modern people were used to living with death. The most vivid illustration of this is perhaps Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s vast painting, The Triumph of Death (c.1562), which depicts death’s armies overwhelming the living.
Writing about death was a preoccupation of great poets and philosophers. The Renaissance man of letters, Michel de Montaigne, devoted an essay to the subject of whether “To philosophise is to learn how to die”. The great 16th-17th century poet, John Donne, writing of the experience of mortality, warned humanity “send not to know, For Whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee”.
And in a memorable and often-quoted phrase in Leviathan (1650), the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote of a theoretical state of nature in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. This condition was theoretical for Hobbes, but perhaps not so for 17th century Europeans whose lives were ravaged by religious conflicts and unfortunate climate catastrophes.
Lucky Hobbes passed away at the ripe old age of 91. Donne survived typhus, but died, possibly of stomach cancer, at 59. Countless others who lived before and after them were not so fortunate. Poor Bruegel was just 39 when death came knocking at his door.
What we are re-discovering is that no law or government – no matter how competent and efficient they may be – can protect citizens from all of the risks of human existence. This is true not only in the case of health crises but in our personal and political choices too.
A great many people, including stressed journalists and alarmed pundits, are struggling to come to terms with the uncertainty that this disease represents. The truth is that we will not know what the best way of tackling this disease will be until we start doing it. And to draw on the words of the Prime Minister at the post-COBRA press conference this week, we do not know how many of us will “lose loved ones before their time”.
The great difficulty when considering which response to the coronavirus outbreak the British government should take is that aggressive state action creates risks of other kinds.
The kind of comprehensive lockdown which has taken place in China comes with deep social, economic, and political costs. You can’t have China-style containment measures without a China-style surveillance state. People in Wuhan have been force-tested and coerced into a quarantine since 23 January.
Then there is the problem of what happens economically when such measures are put in place. In Hubei Province, the economy has come to a standstill and workers have lost their jobs. In Italy, the economy is now expected to fall into recession.
Societal disruption, popular anger, the re-spread of disease among populations lacking immunity after quarantine measures are lifted. These, too, are very real risks.