Covid-19: Beyond Caution and Normality

Revolution in the Time of Disease

We have stumbled into a unique moment. Brand new social norms have sprung up and a fight for their dominance has begun. Is going to a restaurant normal or selfish? Is washing your hands repeatedly illogical, or is it sensible? Should you keep calm and carry on… or, start wearing a mask and gloves everywhere?

How best to proceed in light of the spread of coronavirus isn’t just an isolated philosophical belief, but a signal of membership to one of two new social camps coalescing. Let’s call them the Cautionary and the Normality camps.

The Cautionary Camp is fixed on the idea of safety, for oneself and safety for those you come in contact with. They have found the new evidence of the disease a compelling reason to change their whole life habits. Updates on best cleanliness practice are sought after and they take steps to share these new norms. For them, Covid-19 is an existential threat, to them or to loved ones, and society-wide change of behavior is needed to stop it.

The Normality Camp is resistant to this. The deaths are widespread mostly among the elderly or already sick, these people would have died anyway. They see the economic disruption of habits as being more costly. And, perhaps most of all, they don’t want to change their lifestyle and so will seek out information and arguments that allow them to continue not thinking about it all.

(If this all sounds like the climate change debate, then this should be no surprise as it’s the same essential process involved, just with different people at risk.)

These camps might loosely correlate with age, location, class, but they transcend all of these, and are distributed in a patchwork across the globe. The camps are formed of social relationships bound by shared norms:

Within each of these groups, you can gain and lose social capital by adhering or not adhering to the norms of the group. Wearing gloves or a mask is not so much a reasoned position on the efficacy of these devices, so much as a desire not to be seen as a member of the other group. And vice versa: resistance to wearing a mask (say, among tourists in Thailand) is more about social belonging and adherence to one set of norms than it is a strongly reasoned position.

There are virtuous impulses within each camp. Wanting to keep people safe is admirable. Attempting to remain proportional in a time of panic is admirable. There are also, at the far edge of each of these new social groupings, negative tendencies. Among the Cautionary, there is a risk of the embrace of security theatre. Within the Normality, there are those who are blithe and willfully ignorant. The succumbing to panic buying, however, is present regardless of social group.

Panic buying is a kind of social contagion more infectious than Covid-19. If you believe that there will soon not be food and other essential supplies then it’s logical to shop early and stockpile, which collectively creates the very shortage that was feared.

Security theatre is that which is done for the appearance of safety that doesn’t actually make anything safer. Compulsively washing door handles when the virus is very unlikely to survive in that environment is security theatre. Where this becomes a problem is that those who recognize security theatre for what it is are forced into an awkward situation: they can embrace these new practices or they can risk losing intangible social capital within the group.

If security theatre can be characterized by an intentional false belief, willful ignorance is the opposite problem: intentional disbelief. If you can deny that there is a problem, then you can maintain the status quo. Willful ignorance is, for many people, the base psychological state they live in. In order to bear existing and hold the values they do, it is impossible to dwell on that which contradicts them.

Willful ignorance is a social phenomenon too. It’s easier to avoid taking an action or thinking a thought, if there are other people like you who can reassure you in your stance. This mutual soothing creates and reinforces a social identity.

During the last two decades, debates over security and liberty have been hotly contested. Violations of individual liberty, through detention, internal surveillance, borders and identity checks have all been justified on grounds of increased security. The specter of the terrorist has been used as a form of social control. It may be tempting to see Covid-19 in the same light as the terrorist, that figure who manages to kill less people than bath-tubs and is still called an existential threat by politicians. But there are crucial differences that need to be attended to.

In order to successfully maintain quarantine for longer than a week or two, people’s livelihoods must be seen to. They cannot keep paying rent, paying utilities, buying food, if they aren’t allowed to go to work. So deep redistributive and anti-landlord measures will be required or else there will be either mass violation of quarantine or a revolt against rent-seekers. Even those deep in the Cautionary camp, those most desirous of following the new norms, need to eat and live somewhere.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

These are measures that those on the left have long fought for. The end of landlordism and the public provision of the necessities of life are freedom enhancing measures. The means of living is the prerequisite for freedom of action. So even despite the strong constraints on movement and physical meetings, it may yet be that the virus brings about greater individual freedom by removing many of the reasons we slave away in order to live.

Already in the last week, different states have begun different, competing measures. Their aim is to maintain the status quo, but with the virus likely here to stay for many months, or possibly years, there can be no maintaining Normality. In Britain, rent and mortgage payments may be deferred, and employers can apply for grants to pay their staff at 80% of their normal salary. Tax payments have been suspended or put back. In New York evictions have been put on hold. In France billions of Euros are being put to financing short term working schemes and covering social security payments. The most short-sighted of these proposals merely guarantee income to those that already had it before, and leave those in precarious or self-employed work in a desperate position.

These measures are a stopgap and many of them will need to be shored up as quarantine continues. Deferment periods will be extended, debt repayment holidays will become jubilees. How could they not? People must live and they must eat. If their material needs are threatened, and if too many people reach desperation then the virus won’t be the only specter haunting the world.

And in those places which do not accede to social demands, or are slow or haphazard in their implementation, the people will be forced to rely on one another. Already thousands of mutual aid networks are springing up. Who could have guessed a month ago that Kropotkin’s term of art would become mainstream almost overnight?

Those that take the crisis seriously, the Cautious, are the core of the new mutual aid groups. The people offering to deliver medicine to their neighbors or share some food they’d stored. Social media has given us an unprecedented ability to communicate with our local communities and meet each other’s needs together. But still, if we aren’t careful there will be countless people left out of these new groupings. The homeless and lonely elderly may be caught between a retreat of the state and cut-off from web-based support networks.

‘Blitz spirit’ and volunteer networks can only do so much. There are better demands beyond a sickly attempt at maintaining the status quo. Full automation? Worker ownership? Homes for all? Universal income? The details must be fought for and will be different in different places. And what means of fighting we now have at our disposal! With so many people already out of work, a general strike for demands is a risk that governments will face.

The act of being in quarantine is in itself radicalizing. But we cannot be complacent and accept increased deprivation. The response should not be a demand to return to Normality, or a retreat into the misplaced Caution of security theatre. Beyond Caution and Normality, we have the opportunity to seize a better world out of this crisis.