#Me(too)

Arguably, the real plague behind covid has been a plague of selfishness. Individual, collective, international.

It is irredeemably selfish to not even try to participate in collective efforts to inhibit the spread of the pathogen, and a wounded political conscience makes for an especially poor excuse.

Yet it is also selfish to want government to shut down the whole of society just so that one can feel safe — particularly when one has a relatively lockdown-proof source of income.

I was surprised to hear Haruki Murakami apparently suggesting in an interview with La Vanguardia the other day that it is never right for states to restrict individual liberty in the name of a social good. I hadn't previously tagged him as a fan of The Purge franchise.

All civilised modern existence is based on some sort of explicit plus implicit compromise on the above aka the social contract first outlined explicitly for the world by our own great thinker John Locke.

For Locke, as has generally been the case in the United Kingdom, liberty exists primarily as a vehicle for the secure prosperity of all. We are famously the nation of shopkeepers not libertarian fanatics and it this form of liberalism which must now condition our attitudes to the pandemic response at the social level.

Locke's predecessor Thomas Hobbes advocated that the nanniest of states should decide everything, for everyone. Locke understood that we are actually all capable of adjusting our attitudes and behaviours to the situation without the need for constant, absolute and unbending diktats from above. Imperfect perhaps, but generally workable.

Take a look around the world. States are important and carry out valuable functions, but they are clearly not capable of solving humanity's most pressing problems, pandemic included, all by themselves. (And when they try to do it collectively, things often tend to go further downhill.)

And, a gentle reminder to the trumpeteers of personal liberty in the UK, often the same people inclined to tut tut about the 'submission' implied by Islam, have a look at your passport — you are all subjects of Her Majesty, no matter which set of liberal values you personally choose to espouse.