42. LIFE DURING LOCKE-DOWN - Do We Remain Free While Trapped Inside?

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The philosopher, John Locke, once famously asked about the freedom of a prisoner who doesn’t know that he’s a prisoner. The room he is in is locked, only the prisoner never attempts to leave the room and never knows the door is locked. The question goes - if the prisoner makes no attempt to leave the locked room, and is able to do everything they ever chose to do without hinderance, can we really say the prisoner is actually a prisoner?

The prisoner’s freedom depends on whether you think it was important that the prisoner had the possibility of leaving the room, even if at no point in their existence did they actually exercise that possibility.

Consider, for example, the idea of social mobility. In many cases young people born into social disadvantage will, statistically, remain in a position of disadvantage for their entire lives. However, because as a society we have theoretically implemented various mechanisms for social mobility to combat such stagnation we are all allowed to sleep at night. Those people whose lives mimic that of their parents, and who do not move up the social scale were not limited in their opportunities by systemic barriers to success, or so the myth goes, but by their own free choice not to engage with those opportunities. The exit - the unlocked door - was there all along in the form of access to social mobility, be it educational opportunities, access courses and training, hiring policies designed to mitigate against institutional prejudice, etc. Just because a person does not take advantage of the unlocked door, does not make them a prisoner, anymore than a locked door, never tried, does. In each case, freedom is maintained; the imprisonment is purely voluntary.

Those of us critical of the idea of social mobility are those dissatisfied with such explanations. We see Locke’s prisoner as a prisoner whether or not they tried the door, and the social inequality we live with inexcusable. Just because the door gets unlocked for some born into social disadvantage does not make the other injustices acceptable; and we are all too aware that far too many young people are not encouraged to try the door at all, not out of free choice, as the myth would have it, but out of cultural expectation and historical understanding that the door would be locked even if it isn’t.

The point of this ramble is that one’s sense of being free, or a prisoner, can depend on more than the facts of a situation: a door being locked or unlocked, an opportunity being there or not there. And as I write this I enter the third week of the UK’s lockdown, and my own self-imposed fourth week as an asthmatic trying to shield myself from Covid-19. I feel strangely trapped in my own home, and yet my life this last month looks little different to the life I lived before lockdown.

Of course that is not entirely true. One obvious difference is that I haven’t left the house in four weeks beyond a short walk to a postbox around the corner from me. In a normal month I would be going to work every weekday morning and returning every evening. It would be usual for me to go to the cinema most weekends, or go out for a coffee with my wife somewhere. If we needed supplies, we might pop out to the shops, and, if we fancied it, we might visit a local restaurant for a meal every now and again. All of that stopped with lockdown. However, personally, the going out part was never my favourite aspect of these things. The morning commute to work was a killer, requiring us both to wake up two hours earlier than we now do to teach our students online. The traffic-heavy drive home slowly killed the soul, even if it was a great excuse to listen to some podcasts. Knowing that what should be a twenty-minute journey would take twice that amount of time was always frustrating. As was the cinema. We loved to go because we love movies, and wanted to see new films as soon as we could. But more often than not the enjoyment of the movie would be marred slightly by the other people in the cinema, chatting loudly, chewing noisy sweets, opening up their brightly glowing phones, sometimes even answering them mid-movie. And those advertisements! Not the trailers, which as a fan of films, we never minded (though as frequent movie goers, we would sometimes get a bit bored of if we kept seeing the same trailers visit after visit), but the commercial advertisements before the trailers which you would be forced to sit through as captive audience. Twenty minutes of non-consensual marketing garbage before the film even started. And while I remain a sucker for an overpriced chainstore coffee, I was always all too aware that I could make better, cheaper, coffee at home. Likewise, restaurant food. It’s great - but you know it’s far less healthy than anything you could cook at home. While food supplies have been a struggle under lockdown, so far - fingers crossed - we have been lucky enough to get at least a weekly delivery online. Food choice has not been massive, but we have not starved.

So what I’m saying is, under lockdown, I haven’t left the house, but I have done all the same things I would have done outside of lockdown. I have:

  • Continued to do my teaching job, while getting a better night’s sleep.

  • Been able to watch just as many movies on DVD or streaming services, without twenty minutes of commercials and other people ruining it with their noises.

  • Continued to be able to drink a nice coffee without being ripped off by the mega-chains.

  • Continued to be able to eat well every meal.

I haven’t been able to go out for a walk, which my wife and I would often do. But I am privileged enough to have a nice garden for getting fresh air and, what’s more, actually own some exercise equipment after deciding to get healthier a few years ago. As well as being able to go for a morning “run” on my elliptical, I have been taking occasional “walks” on it too, reading a good book as I go. Some weights, a few push ups and crunches. I have more time for exercise than I ever did before and find it hard to get too stir crazy with the garden as a release valve. In fact, I am finally spending the sort of time in the garden I always wanted to but, for the eight years I have lived here previously, never quite found the right rhythm for due to the time demands of work and other places I could be.

And then there’s the fact that, pre-lockdown, my hobbies and past-times were those already done in isolation at home:

  • Spending time with my wife and cat

  • Writing

  • Reading

  • Playing my bass guitar

  • Listening to music

  • Watching films

  • Watching TV

  • Getting angry about the news

All of which I have been able to do quite happily under lockdown.

While I was never much of a social person due to the time-demands of my job and love of solitary pursuits, under lockdown I have found time to email and text many friends and family members I never normally have time to communicate with, and have seen other people’s desire for human contact extend to me far more than we would ever have contacted each other before coronavirus. Regular Zoom meetings and WhatsApp chats with colleagues I wouldn’t normally speak to once the final bell rang each day; daily FaceTime chats with my sister and her partner. Even my weekly phone-call with my best friend has now become a video chat. We’ve seen more of each other during lockdown than we have in the last year.

So, socially, I am fulfilled. Creatively. Physically. Mentally. And, of course, I am going through this whole thing with my wife, who is the person I love spending most of my time with anyway. Lockdown life, so far, has basically replicated regular life in all the same ways, just without the annoying driving and spending all that money on petrol. So maybe lockdown life is even better than regular life?

And yet…

Despite the generally rosy picture, and the added bonus that doing all this is helping to save lives, giving it a positive moral dimension, the fact that I know the door is locked; that I am not doing all this by choice but because I have to; that the cinemas, coffee shops and restaurants are closed; that I am not able to go to work, not simply choosing to stay home; that I am exercising at home because it is too dangerous to exercise outside and go on a proper walk; that if that weekly online delivery didn’t come it would put my health, and the health of others, at risk to go out and buy food; all of that somehow makes this lockdown life, a life which, pre-lockdown, is basically the sort of life an anti-social misanthrope like me dreamed of, feel like a prison.

When I walked to the postbox yesterday, those few hundred yards there and back felt like freedom. Yet even that felt tinged with the oppression of this virus. A woman walking her dog coming the other way, having to cross the road to avoid her; a lone jogger in the distance, calculating if I could mail my envelope and get back to the other side before our paths would cross. The sense of zombie apocalypse was hard to shake, even on a beautiful sunny day just a few feet beyond the safety of my home. And, of course, the knowledge that if I went beyond that postbox, carried on walking the streets of my neighbourhood, continued onwards to the town centre or nearby parks, at some point there was the possibility of a confrontation with a police officer; having to explain myself, make the case for my walk, justify why I had left my prison cell. All of that made me know that the appearance of liberation was mere illusion. Although briefly out of the house, I was still trapped inside.

So I sit now in my garden, enjoying the gentle breeze, listening to music on my headphones, writing and thinking as I would on any other day…but I cannot wait for the sound of a key in the lock. To be able to make that awful early morning commute once again and stand feeling safe in a noisy classroom of thirty coughing students as I have every working week of the last decade. Sitting close to my colleagues in the staffroom at lunch time and not worrying about how much distance there is between us. How I would love to go to the cinema after work - making that slow rush hour commute back home, celebrating every extra car clogging up the road - and sit in a chair so many others have sat in before me without feeling freaked out about it; drink a coffee poured by a barista I don’t have to worry about being infected by a virus which could kill me. I yearn for being able to drive out to the countryside (where, actually, I was due to be today - staying a few nights in the Cotswolds) and go for a walk in the world, greeting passing strangers with a friendly hello instead of crossing the road in their presence.

I miss normality, and all its awfulness and wonder. I miss that freedom. Because even though the last four weeks have felt, frankly, like four weeks of any summer holiday, and my day-to-day life has been no different than it might be during any July or August at home, the knowledge that that door outside is locked to me - even if I have no reason to try it - is enough to make my dream existence of isolated living feel like a nightmare of restriction.

And returning to the issue of social mobility, it is worth noting that I am feeling this way despite all my advantages of living: a nice house, a garden, exercise equipment, access to food and entertainment, a job which has continued to exist even as the economy collapses, etc. I can only imagine what this lockdown has been like for those living in smaller dwellings, without all the creature comforts I have. Crowded families worrying about where their next meal is coming from and how not to kill each other. Those with jobs made obsolete by this virus, staring at ever-closing but never-changing walls. For many, the lockdown has exposed the inequalities and injustice at the heart of our social system in a way they have never seen them before. They are Locke’s prisoner on the day pandemic makes him want to flee his room only to discover he is trapped there.

We are all prisoners in different ways. Our locked doors at varied distances from our cells. But there all the same. Keeping us trapped in place. Until we find the keys.

Author: D. McKee