41. TO CLAP OR TO CRY FOR CARERS? - On The Importance of Being Able To Hold Two Ideas In Our Heads At Once

One of the nice things about philosophy is that it allows us to give clarity to otherwise tangled thoughts.

Last night, like so many people across the UK, I stood outside my door clapping at eight o’clock. After weeks of isolation, it is quite magnificent to hear the all-too-quiet streets suddenly alive with noise for those few brief minutes. Children banging pots and pans. A few vocal cheers. Fireworks, even. Every week at eight, booming somewhere in the distance. And clapping, echoing from every house, bouncing around corners and criss-crossing across the streets. But I must admit, since the first day this idea was mooted - clapping to show our carers and key workers support during the Covid-19 crisis - I felt quite uncomfortable about it despite recognising it could be a potentially powerful gesture. I will admit further, that discomfort has meant I haven’t always clapped. The first week, I did not, nor did I clap last week. Frankly, I was wrestling with the morality of the clapping. By standing out there and clapping, was I participating in a fairly useless piece of empty symbolism that was not only ignoring a much more important issue, but developing a narrative which actively helps to sweep such issues under the rug?

Let me explain.

I have always found symbolic gestures to celebrate so-called “heroism” dangerous, as they perpetuate the idea that such heroism is noble, rather than, as it so often is, the unwelcome consequence of easily preventable failures by the state. For example, war. Each year on November 11th we remember the “heroes” who “sacrificed” their lives “for us”, and yet each year the world gets no further to peace. More soldiers are sent out to kill and be killed. The wars continue; more “heroes” return home in body bags. Few, if any, of the wars they fought were necessary or morally justifiable. Far from heroes, the lost soldiers are largely victims of propaganda and the self-interests of rapacious state systems. The blood on their hands is shameful rather than something to be praised; their deaths a tragedy.

The same is true of the current care-workers putting their lives on the line every day in the fight against Covid-19. Because while their actions are completely heroic, the heroism is in large part due to the failings of the state which have left healthcare services grossly underfunded, and the workers within those services lacking the necessary Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to do their jobs safely. If we had properly funded our healthcare service over the years, the system would not be so overwhelmed by the current crisis. The healthcare workers would not be at such risk each day. They are doing an amazing job…but their job shouldn’t be so heroic. The sacrifice they are making is not by choice, it is the consequence of underfunding and neglect. As is the fact that so many of us got sick in the first place - because the government put the economy first and hoped for a herd immunity to allow “business as usual” to continue despite a killer pandemic with no vaccine or cure. People continued to gather and infect. People feared losing their jobs so put themselves and others at risk long after it was clear that their going to work would spread the disease. And people died as a result. Even now, as we clap the “key workers”, many being called “essential” are not essential, but rather essential for small pockets of the economy to continue to profit from this crisis. I am grateful for my food deliveries, for companies like Amazon enabling things I need to get to me despite international lockdowns, but it is because we continue to have a competitive capitalist system that far more people than are needed to bring necessary products to our houses are putting themselves and others at risk. To explain what I mean, I shall use an example I often use in the classroom when discussing animal experimentation:

1) Let us assume that we have made a compelling ethical argument for the use of limited animal experimentation in matters of life or death medical ethics (perhaps in developing a vaccine for Covid-19). i.e. some small number of non-human animals may justifiably be sacrificed for the greater good of saving millions of lives.

2) While any successful argument for the above may well justify, in principle, the use of limited animal experimentation in such cases (let’s say 100 animals may be justifiably killed “for the greater good”). It does not justify a hundred different, competing, companies all killing one hundred animals each so that they become the company to first find, patent, and own the cure.

3) The moral argument which justifies the limited animal experimentation clashes with the economic and political reality of a system where we are not just seeking a cure, but companies are seeking to profit from that cure. The desire for private profit means data from animal experimentation will not be shared with competitors, and each company will have to run their own, confidential and proprietary, tests to ensure the intellectual property is their own, thereby duplicating the necessary experiments far beyond what is morally permissible.

4) Therefore the moral argument which justifies the limited animal experimentation requires a fundamental change in the way medical experiments are done, and the economic model at work in the pharmaceutical industry, if it is to be applicable in practice. Without the change in practices, the principle of the moral argument is undermined, thus making the conclusion that experimentation is ok invalid.

So what does all this have to do with Covid-19 and key workers?

Well - while we do need every doctor and nurse that we have working at this difficult time, do we actually need every supermarket open? Instead of having Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Waitrose, etc. all competing for their share of the market, would it not be better to just pool resources and have a centralised food delivery model to minimise the number of people who have to work and maximise the access for everyone to essential foods? And when I say essential foods I mean just that - currently in this crisis I can not only buy, say, pasta, but I can still pick my favourite brand of pasta. When toilet paper was being panic bought, what was actually being panic bought was particular brands of toilet paper. Bizarrely while Americans fought over packets of Charmin, you could still buy plenty of that particular brand here in the UK because it is not a market leader in this country (Andrex, however, was hard to find). Takeaway food has been a life-saver for some people in self-isolation and without it they might genuinely starve (or infect people leaving their house for food)…but do we need every competing delivery service in the country all vying for our money? Do I need Deliveroo workers and Uber Eats workers putting themselves and others at risk just so that one particular company can win the greatest market-share? Do I need pizza from Dominos, Papa Johns, Pizza Hut and the little local place round the corner all to be available to me at this time? Does the limited food not making its way to our empty supermarket shelves need to be wasted in the kitchens of these competing establishments so that all four of them can make a pizza when maybe only half of the food they have the supplies for will actually end up being ordered?

My point here is not to demean the hard work of any of these people, but to question where the notion of “key worker” comes into tension with the very moral argument which permits them to work at a time of international crisis.

The argument is based on two key ideas:

1) That we need some essential services to continue during this time

and

2) That it may be worth risking the lives of certain people to bring us those services.

But, these two ideas entail the following:

3) The lives should only be put at risk where there is no other choice, and anyone putting their lives at risk must be doing so with as much risk mitigated as possible (so given PPE as a bare minimum with which to do their job).

The reality of the political and economic climate we live in has meant that point (3) has been compromised to the point that it might undermine any possible justifications given supporting points (1) or (2). For example - I am grateful that my local pharmacy is still open and able to deliver me much needed asthma medication…but I am troubled that the Amazon delivery driver who bought me my completely unnecessary Stephen King book two days ago, pre-ordered long before this crisis and forgotten about, was out risking his life to bring me something so trivial, and that he had on a better protective mask than my pharmacist when he did so. And both deliverers had arguably better PPE than some of the people working at the emergency Nightingale Hospital hurriedly built down the road.

Which brings me back to clapping for carers.

My reticence at clapping came because I know my neighbours. I know their voting habits. I know that many of the same people on my street clapping for the healthcare workers are people who have voted election after election for political parties who have cut funding to the NHS, who have argued for restrictive immigration laws that have lost us many of the very workers we so desperately rely on right now, and who have voted for any number of the mini underpinnings of welfare in this country that have all added to the current crisis. I know that their clapping is nothing more than the empty gesture that I fear, something utterly disconnected from the very real consequences of their actions and a stunning act of cognitive dissonance. I know that they will genuinely think these people are heroes, working against the odds under impossible conditions, and pay little heed to their own culpability in creating those very conditions. Just as I know many of them will, themselves, be working as key workers across the community and not even realise, amidst the patriotic myth of their own perceived heroism, that the essential work they believe they are doing is not as essential as they think. In many cases it is just a means to keep the engine of an uncaring and unfit for purpose economic system running long past the time of what should have been its natural death. They are putting their lives, and the lives of others, at risk because if they don’t they will lose their jobs. Because we live - by choice, not necessity - in a world which does not give us the basic essentials for life and health for free and therefore they have no other choice. Because even at a time of pandemic our government’s solution to the problem of getting food and essential resources to its citizens is through competitive private companies seeking to make profit in a limited, albeit captive, market rather than through shared communal ownership and mutual cooperation.

So my trouble was that, by clapping, was I supporting the myth, the propaganda, and the lies which have put so many unnecessarily in harm’s way during this crisis? From the unprotected nurse to their dying patient, infected because they couldn’t stay home for fear of losing their job - each a victim not of Covid-19, but of our political system?

But then I heard from friends who worked in the NHS, and the family members of those who work there. I heard how, despite them all wishing they had PPE more than they had claps, they were still so appreciative of the outpouring of support. How it is a momentary weekly bright spot in an otherwise nightmarish few months. A simple recognition of the hard work they or their loved ones are doing. A national pat on the back. And I realised something important: as long as there is no logical contradiction in doing so, you can hold two distinct yet inter-related ideas in your head at once.

1) That the current political and economic system is largely to blame for the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rate of infection, the number of people dead, and the appalling conditions our key-workers have to work in, many of them unnecessarily.

and

2) That given (1), it is still nice to applaud the impossible and harrowing work these amazing people are doing under such reprehensible conditions. Not to mythologise them as heroes and turn any of their tragic and preventable deaths or suffering into future jingoistic martyrdom, but to recognise that what they are doing in these difficult times is appreciated and show that appreciation through a simple, communal act of clapping.

To hold belief (1) and not clap is potentially as problematic as those who clap without holding that belief. It is to add a further level of degradation to an already exploited workforce. Just as I may reject the propaganda of Remembrance Day while still showing recognition for the tragedy of all those killed in unnecessary wars through wearing a white poppy instead of the red one, I can show my appreciation for the country’s beleaguered and exploited key workers by clapping for them on a Thursday night whilst never forgetting that each clap carries a caveat: that every infection passed on unnecessarily during this crisis, and every death before its time, is blood on the hands of the political and economic system which created the conditions which facilitated such preventable suffering.

As long as that is never forgotten, and until we have the sort of world where (1) is not the case, to clap for our carers for a few minutes each week is literally the very least that we can do.

Author: D.McKee