Reposting "The Veil of Ignorance and Lifting the Lockdown"

It is now a notorious truism that it is a lot easier to impose “lockdown” than to end it.  You don’t need to understand how society works in order to shut it down, you just have to shut it.  But it turns out that you cannot re-open it without considering in what order in which to do that…and that the order of opening implies an understanding, even a consensus about the ordering of the things that make a society work. And now that we're on the point of re-imposing elements of lockdown (a lockdown that for some people never really started, and for others has never really ended) another fascinating mirror is being held up to our nature? 

What really matters to us?  What matters most?   Will we, like Caliban, rage at the sight of our own ugly face in a mirror?

Back in March, we made value judgements between the rate of infection and societal coherence. To give an obvious example, the hospitals were not shut down. The emergency accomodation and isolation of the sick by National Health Service underpins, it transpires, absolutely everything else.The protection of its workers, facilities and capabilities turns out to be a good to which all other goods must be sacrificed. Including some of its own functions in preventative and ongoing care...including for, for examople, chronic disease like cancer...and, of course, the ongoing care of the old in care homes.

It turned out, to our shame, that this last function didn't matter to most of us nearly so much. In order to make room for a potential “tsunami” of Covid patients, hospitals had to be emptied of patients who were not at that moment in need of critical care.  And if the consequences in our care homes were tragic, then the Darwinian pragmatics of the ordering of society and its priorities were disquietingly exposed as a consequence.

 As lockdown was eased on the deceptively consensual idea that “the economy needs to get going again,” similarly brutal realities were exposed. What we were doing in the easing of lockdown, in putting our societies back together in a specific order of re-openings is that we are making conscious, practical value driven choices about how those societies actually function, in the order of what we actually value most. (Postal workers, bus and delivery drivers are modern aristocrats by this measure.) And now that we need to cope with the much anticipated "second wave" the sociology and politics of how we do that, the value judgements we make, are even more telling and fascinating.

Shut the pubs, is the cry, for example...when it is the drink bought at Supermarkets that fuels the house parties that fuel the epidemic. The spirit of Holy Willie is not dead. We still toleate privatised and secret vices more than we do those exercised in public.

"The Veil of Ignorance" might be a useful thing to think about. The idea, associated most with American thinker John Rawls, is that, as a mental exercise and way of judging what happens in the "real world," you set about designing a social system with no foreknowledge of your own position in it. In opuir current sitution, given that "normal,"for a lot of people (as in the phrase "back to normal") was and is pretty crappy, the idea is to imagine a just economy (in terms of housing, health, cultural activity etc etc) where you and your ethnic or social group have NO guarantee of being at the top.

Most people who get to design societies, from Solon to Solomon or Jefferson to Lenin, (let alone UK and Scottish civil servants) have imagined themselves to be in charge of their dream projects...because, through violence or the inherited benefits of violence, they WERE. But we live in a consumption driven democracy, and in a democracy, we theoretically get to debate and agree how we want to live: what matters most and in what order.

As we debate lockdown again, we are getting to debate and agree on some of this stuff right now...and not purely on "clinical" or "scientific" grounds as we revealingly pretend, clinging to an illusory objectivity. As we eased lockdown, we had a limited window of choosing what we actually WANTED from the New Normal, of speaking aloud the unspoken consensus we are actually already using to make decisions.T hose same decisions are being asked of us again, with a marked decline in social cohesion, which might have as much to do with the weather being awful as it does with resentment about Dominic Cummings or those of us who can and do work quite happily from home...while being utterly dependent on having ALL of our needs met by people in other parts of the economy which really can't.

So did we blow it?  Did we have a chance to reinvent ourselves and we missed it? 

The single biggest question right now seems to be how do we spend and borrow the money to get through this when we don't know how long "this" lasts? Do we really want to leave such choices to those who have always made such decisikons? The question of "who pays" is going to get more and more pointed, as the rich insist, as they did in the post crash austerity period, that it isn't going to be them. The Trumpian universe we live in, where handing out free money to people who were already rich was the answer to all of life’s little difficulties seems a little out dated..But is it possible, really, to put an end to that past, and envisage the future as a rather different, fairer place? Or will moral exhaustion sieze us now, leaving the field cleared for the sharp elbowed and the red in tooth and claw?  Is the "fairness" we yearn for merely the empty piety of a bankrupt paradigm of progress?

What will we decide to make of ourselves, as a society, as a country in this moment of unique opportunity to lift the viel on ourselves, to see ourselves for what and who we really are? If it turns out that the "new normal" that we choose is lazily indistinguishable from the rotten, corrupt old one, well, it will turn out that that is who we are, that is who we choose to be. 

It may well be that this is already happening. Maybe we should be talking about it. Before the Veil of Our Ignorance once again falls on us all.