Rarely has the third of these aspirations been more important.
We live at a time of great sophistication. A global economy is capable of delivering food and products from around the world to your doorstep that would have boggled the imagination of a Roman Emperor. Yet the entire economic system we depend on is capable of being brought to its knees by a simple virus.
That is no co-incidence. The vulnerability is built in to the economy and the society. It is a fundamental mistake to allow collective decisions to be primarily made by the accumulation of individual choices rather than public need. What is chosen by a few can put at risk the lives, the security and the welfare of the many. The things individuals don’t usually decide to buy, like waste disposal, are actually pretty important.
In central China a small number of people believe that they can enhance their own health and their sexual performance if they spend their cash on purchasing rare and exotic live animals. If someone particularly wishes to impress their friends or influence their business associates, they might serve up such delicacies at a dinner party. One consequence of this is that the world is being stripped of some of its most magnificent creatures as the high price of pangolin or tiger flesh drives poachers to seek out every last animal in order to earn a great deal of money at the price of extinction. Another is that previously very rare interactions between species become frequent in wild animal markets or on the edge of newly stripped forests. That becomes an ideal mechanism for new viruses to be encountered by humans or for new mutations to pass between species.
Once a new virus exists a global economy makes it quick and easy to move that strain of it around the world. People from many different countries come together on a business trip, a skiing holiday or a cruise ship and once a new mutation is out there it is inevitable that it will be taken home and spread widely.
Borders are utterly irrelevant to a self-replicating virus.
Every defence against the transmission of the infection and every treatment of it depends on the good will of people who are prepared to act in the best interest of the community regardless of their personal welfare. Yet the dominant moral lesson that our society has been preaching to us all for decades is that greed is good, individual free market choices will magically group together to produce the best possible outcomes and there is no such thing as society.
Never has the hollow emptiness of that value system been more completely exposed.
Let individual free market choice rip and people from infected areas seek to escape their personal risk by travelling away from the current centres of infection turning themselves into perfect transmission mechanisms and moving the infection to new localities. Create an economy that depends on large numbers of people working on zero hours contracts or who depend utterly on fake self-employment and they will have to go into work when they are feeling unwell. Spreading their infection. Run a health service on the basis of which individuals can command the most resources and people lie in corridors gasping for breath without access to the ventilators they need.
The response of many to the coronavirus infection has been to display staggering commitment to the needs of others. We have seen health service workers exhaust themselves taking risks with their own lives because they believe it to be the morally right thing to do. Some of them have done so with little access to the equipment that could reduce the risks they face to reasonable levels because of cutbacks to the services they work to provide. We’ve seen volunteers helping to bring food and medicines to others who are trapped at home with no thought of personal reward and every thought about the needs of their community. We’ve seen individuals and businesses behave with great consideration despite heavy costs. The vast majority of people have wanted to do what they can to help their community.
The response of a minority has been a drastic contrast. They have rushed to grab whatever resources they can for themselves, got in their cars and moved to their second homes in the country, gone to the pub or the races regardless of advice from doctors and made things worse for everyone else.
In normal times society can cope with a few selfish individuals. Indeed, it may well be that our species needs a few rule breakers in order to continue evolving. At times of crisis it becomes clear just how much we depend on the vast bulk of people working selflessly for their community and being prepared for a significant degree of self-sacrifice.
It also becomes clear how much we depend on the decisions of government, locally, nationally, and internationally. It is not possible to simply rely on the good will of everyone doing the right thing. Government has to step in and impose sanctions and incentives to encourage positive behaviour and punish dangerous choices. Government is also needed to manage changes to health provision and to organise massive and rapid changes to services which are at the point of collapse.
Without government intervention the much-vaunted free market economy responds to a major crisis by destroying itself. Stock markets tumble. Businesses go to the wall. People cannot earn their living. A vicious cycle develops in which one person’s business having to close becomes another person’s job loss which in turn results in another business closing. Millions have already lost their only source of income in a few short days and have been left worried sick and economically vulnerable at exactly the time when they are most in need of a bit of security.
In such circumstances only the collective can avoid disaster. So, we have seen governments that are philosophically wedded to a belief in the core virtues of complete free market economies and which hate state action forced into using extreme state intervention techniques to rescue the private sector economy. The needs of the community has had to take priority over individual choices and the economy has had to be driven by conscious plans and decisions not by market happenstance.
The UK government started out trying to manage this crisis on the basis of extremist ‘nudge’ theories that stem from a conviction that government should very rarely enforce decisions. Under the influence of that philosophy it refused to ban mass sporting events and allowed one in every thousand British citizens to attend the Cheltenham race meeting at a time when cross infection was rife.
Reality and necessity has eventually driven the UK government down a very different course. It has had to devote billions to financially support people at risk and it has had to gradually begin to take steps to enforce necessary behaviours rather than rely on persuasion and marketing expertise.
It remains to be seen whether that government will have the intelligence to learn the lessons. Or whether the public will come out of this crisis determined to elect politicians who think differently. For decades environmental campaigners have been saying that we must put an end to the destruction and exploitation of wild animal species. We’ve been arguing for the importance of more local food production and less international air travel. We’ve talked about the vital importance of building resilient communities and their mutual support networks. And we’ve campaigned for more resources to be devoted to public services and to our collective community health.
Has there ever been a time when those values have been more clearly illustrated to have been right? There is such a thing as society whatever the children of Margaret Thatcher believe. Our futures depend on whether we can build and strengthen our society or whether we shrug our shoulders when we come out of this crisis and go back to valuing competition and selfishness. It is anybody’s guess which will happen but let us hope that people draw the right conclusions. Because this won’t be the last crisis and it may very well not be the worst.
Unless we change our ways.