38. QUESTIONS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD - Some Concerns and Queries As COVID-19 Continues To Spread

This week’s Philosophy Unleashed will be a little different than usual. I’m not just going to pick one topic and think about it, and I probably won’t reach any conclusions, but at a shocking time in our history where every certainty we once had feels like it is being pulled out from under us and old, familiar ways of doing things are, by necessity, being radically transformed, there are a lot of disconnected questions floating around in my mind that I thought it might be worth keeping a note of. Who knows, they may form the basis of future posts in their own right?

So to begin let’s just take stock of some of the changes in the last week alone here in the UK. The last post I wrote laid out the clear case for the closure of schools here in the UK. Now, while my web analytics do tell me that some IP addresses in the WestMinister area of London visit visited the site last week, I don’t think that post played a part in the government’s decision to listen, but on Friday all schools were closed. Also closed on Friday were all bars, clubs, restaurants, cafes, gyms, leisure centres, theatres and cinemas. All week we had been told to “socially distance” and stay at home as much as possible to avoid the spread of COVID-19, but on Friday the Prime Minister’s polite request became an edict: we must stay at home unless it is essential to go out. No visiting friends and family, no large gatherings, no going outside at all unless it is for exercise, avoiding others while doing so, or shopping for essentials such as food. And to facilitate this radical change in our lives the government are giving some financial support to businesses to pay the wages of workers unable to work so that they don’t lose their jobs, tax relief to businesses so they don’t have to go under even if they are forced to close, an extension of welfare for those who do lose their jobs because of this, and the opening of “closed” schools for the children of key workers who have no other way of keeping their children home if they are to do their essential work during this crisis. Schools, therefore, have been repurposed from educational facilities following an academic curriculum to limited daycare centres; teachers, like me, are now working from home and delivering lessons online.

The world has changed.

In my own little life, I have been home since Tuesday following government guidelines about those “vulnerable” to COVID-19. I have chronic asthma and that puts me on the “at risk” list, so I was unable to continue working in a crowded school. However, my wife is a teacher too, so still ran the risk of bringing the infection home to us as partners of the “vulnerable” were not included on the list of those who had to stay home. She stopped work on Friday and will only have to work at her repurposed school for one day in the next fortnight as staffing has been shared out via a rota. Luckily for me, we have a garden and we have each other, so being stuck at home is not the total isolation it will be for some people. I have more books than I could read in a lifetime and subscriptions to pretty much all of the streaming services. I also play guitar, so can entertain myself. And write, as I am doing now, which can pass the time.

But there are many losses too. As I write this we were supposed to be away for a weekend at my in-laws, celebrating Mother’s Day. That was obviously cancelled. My sister lives in London. The brief lunch we had with her two weeks ago when she was passing through the Midlands could be the last time I see her for a while. My stepdad, and other friends and family in America, I may never see again depending on how international travel recovers from this crisis. We were supposed to be road tripping across America for three weeks this summer. Although the flights have not yet been officially cancelled, in our minds that trip is no longer happening. Likewise, tickets to the theatre, to gigs across the country, have all been cancelled or indefinitely postponed. The improv group I am a part of will not meet and cannot perform. Friends who were meant to visit over the Easter holidays and beyond will stay in their homes, as will we. Wrestlemania, the annual wrestling extravaganza that has been an annual high point of my life since the first one I saw back in 1992, and a tradition spent each year with friends will now be watched by just my wife and me; the event itself not a live spectacular in front of 60,000 screaming fans, but pre-recorded later this week in a series of empty venues. Sport, both real and fake, has been cancelled.

I don’t drink alcohol, so have never been much of a pub person, and have always favoured takeaway over restaurants, but going to the cinema at least once a week and getting coffee from overpriced coffee shops was one of my few public pleasures. I shall miss that in this brave new world despite the ability to stream films and make coffee at home. Just as I shall miss the daily face-to-face interactions with my students. While I am excited about the possibilities of online learning, none of it I’ll be equivalent to that strange, unpredictable alchemy of having 30 people in a room all buzzing off each other and being inspired by the things that each other say. Sometimes such classrooms can be frustrating too. Noisy, uncontrolled, off topic. It wasn’t until I faced the prospect of not being able to stand in one again for an indefinite future that I realised how much I would miss them.

As I said: the world has changed. And here are the questions arising to me as it does:

1) Has social media made this more problematic than it needed to be?

I do not think the world is over-reacting right now. If anything, given reports coming out of the UK this morning about people defying the orders to stay isolated and going to the beach this weekend, or still gathering in pubs, I think some of us are not reacting enough. But we must remember that all the efforts we are going to are an attempt to “flatten the curve” of infection so that our health services are not overwhelmed with hundreds or thousands of serious cases of infection all at once. If we all get COVID-19, but get it slowly across a population spaced out across a year, then the health system can cope, but all getting it within a short period of time means more people needing simultaneous help than we have the resources to tend to. Which is why I wonder about the impact of social media. Pre-social media, if a particularly nasty virus was spreading, we might all get it and just sort of grumble to ourselves within our isolated communities. “It’s a particularly bad one this year,” we might say. Those who get really sick and need urgent care would call their doctors or ambulances as and when the help was needed, and we might find out months later, when official statistics are released, that we had a particularly big surge of hospitalisations around that time. With social media, however, we all know that there is this potentially deadly coronavirus going around, and so any signs at all of the disease - new, persistent cough or high fever - but also any other symptoms at all which we are worried about has caused mild panic. That panic means more pressure on the health service as people contact them about symptoms or self-admit themselves into hospitals.

Ultimately, we all want to be safe, and being told there is a potentially deadly virus which might feel just like a common cold or flu - which most of us have all the time - makes more people lean on the health service for guidance than they would at any other time. So a health service already worried about being over-stretched, becomes over-stretched already not by serious cases of the disease, but by hundreds of thousands of worried people trying to figure out if they have it or not.

We then have the problem of social media spreading misinformation, including misinformation about the benefits of staying at home. We hear one thing from official sources, but see random posts online which tell us something different. As our sense of truth and fact has been eroded over time by our social media use, at this time of pandemic when we need to act on hard science, many people have no compass anymore for navigating what is truth and what is fiction. So simple measures like asking us to stay at home don’t work so easily. Not just because of the coronavirus-deniers who don’t believe staying home will help, but because we also see stories and pictures of people actively defying the social distancing measures and therefore start to believe it may be okay to do the same ourselves.

Likewise with panic buying. In theory there should be no problem with the distribution of food. Currently in the UK all supermarkets are still open and delivery drivers are bringing the food to them. Farmers are still farming. Even takeaways are still delivering. I can see a slight fear that showing symptoms means you have to suddenly “self isolate” for a week, or two if you live with others, might make you worried you would not be able to go out and shop, but in theory you could live off takeaway and delivery food for a while and if we all did one fairly big shop of a week, or even two weeks, of supplies, we would be okay. Instead, people have been buying for the apocalypse, assuming there will be no more supplies beyond what is in their cupboards at home, and social media has escalated and amplified this panic buying as photos of empty supermarket shelves circulate and make people who wouldn’t have panic shopped realise that if they don’t buy some stuff now they will miss out because of others already panic buying. This cycle perpetuates: more panic buying, more shared stories of panic buying, more sense there is a need to panic buy yourself.

So social media may have allowed us to connect with others more during this tough time of self-isolation and social distancing, but it may have also been responsible for the need for such a tough global response. We are panic buying not only at the supermarket, but at our hospitals - our fear that we might die or be left out of urgent care or supplies causing us to eschew any sense of community and clog up essential services with minor needs, leaving those who actually need those services unable to access them, thereby creating more fear to stoke the panic further. Perhaps this pandemic would look very different were it not being shared second-by-second, along with every rumour, myth and half-truth, across social media?

2) Can the current political and economic structures survive COVID-19?

I have always argued that it is important to remember that the political and economic structures which shape our lives are arbitrary constructs of human invention, there to serve the specific teleological purpose of making life better for people. My further argument has always been that the current structures fail to do this - but I won’t argue right now about how anarchism is the only ethically legitimate system of political power (that’s for my upcoming book, Authentic Democracy, out soon on Tippermuir Books, pandemic-willing). Instead I will argue that the fiction that these systems are somehow necessary or permanent has been greatly exposed by COVID-19, and we have seen this twofold. Firstly, in the way that when government wrung their hands on how to respond, we saw citizens take action into their own hands, self-isolating before they were told to, taking their children out of school or telling colleagues to work from home. We also saw the failings of national infrastructure be solved through autonomous action, whether it was organising grocery deliveries for neighbours, using online services to raise money for those tossed out of work, or volunteering to help the NHS cope with the demand. In the UK, every single government response to COVID-19 came days, or even weeks, after many citizens themselves had already autonomously started doing what they were eventually told they had to do. If we survive this it won’t be because of government intervention, but because the people forced their government to step up and intervene. And that should never be forgotten.

The second way the fiction has been exposed is economically. For years any attempt to make a political case for greater welfare, socialism, universal basic income, etc. has been met with claims that the money simply isn’t there. Well, this week we found out that the money was there all along. It was only political will which was missing. Once the powers-that-be saw a moral imperative to provide such money to uphold businesses, jobs, mortgages and rent, they released unlimited funds and borrowed whatever they could. What this shows is that the only thing different between COVID-19 spending and the more radical systems of social welfare routinely rejected is those in power not seeing the moral imperative. However, there is a definite case to be made that the many thousands who die from poverty and poverty-related caused each year make poverty as much a pandemic as this novel coronavirus, if not more so, and as such that there ought to be the same level of moral imperative to tackle these other “viruses” too.

In fact, the UK government’s response is historically interesting precisely because they have chosen to act specifically in such a way that facilitates those losing work as a result of self-isolation and social distancing measures, but only as far as the fading economic myths are maintained. Where the government could have enacted a total pause on all rent, mortgage and utility payments and distributed a universal basic income to all, they have tied income up to employment still, and money will be loaned in many cases, not given. It was essential to them, more than it was to spare people’s lives and sense of security, to bolster up the idea that you must still earn a living, and that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Even so, once this is all said and done - if it ever is - it will be hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. We have seen that political action does not require government, and that there is always money there to protect the state and economic system even as they tell us there is no money for those with serious disabilities to eat or for the homeless to get some shelter (as I write this there is talk of empty hotels being forced to convert into shelters for the homeless; again - showing that this could have been done before too). If we remember that in the aftermath, it will be very difficult to go back to a world based on those shattered myths.

3) Were We All Working Too Much?

The other revolution we will discover is how many of our jobs we can do at home, far more flexibly than our bosses previously imagined. As a teacher I have long battled against the rationale behind my having to wear a suit and tie everyday…well, since teaching from home I seem to have been able to do the job well enough in my jeans and hoodie. Office politics, employment conventions, they will also be exposed for the myths that they were as we innovate new ways of doing things that don’t require us to be in offices and shared spaces, or follow certain norms and procedures. The time-sucking commutes, the busy-work to fill in the contracted hours - all of this will fade as we find ourselves efficiently and comfortably getting things done at our own pace from home. Lest we forget that the spread of this disease has been hastened essentially by those too scared of losing their jobs to stay home, or those feeling obliged to go to work over their own health and wellbeing and that of those around them. The decision to lock down the country could have been made on day one had government not feared the response from employers in need of employees.

At the same time, we will realise those things which we truly valued about our workplace interactions and want to do more of them once we are able. Those things we missed most can be celebrated once this is over, just as the types of work we celebrate as a society need to be radically transformed. This crisis has shown that the bankers, the hedge-fund managers, the financiers, the accountants, the celebrities, the sports stars, the salespeople, the marketers, etc. can all stay home and society will tick along quite merrily without them. But the cleaners, the refuse collectors, the supermarket workers, the delivery drivers, the teachers, the charity workers, the utility workers, and of course, the health service workers, these are the people we cannot do without. If we do continue on with the old economic myths following COVID-19, it must surely be with the financial compensation for these sectors changed to reflect their national importance? When the millionaire stockbroker gets sick because he has no cleaner, and sicker still because no delivery driver was there to bring him food, and then dies because there was no healthcare workers to attend to him, the importance of those jobs is clear. When the cleaner, the delivery driver and the NHS worker live in a world without millionaire stock brokers, the world carries on. It will be hard to forget that.

In essence, in the post-COVID-19 world, we could all work less, at fewer jobs, from the comfort of our homes, and the world would arguably carry on. To return to the old ways of doing things afterwards would not only feel like a missed opportunity, but something which is hard to morally justify.

4) Is Britain Demonstrably A Selfish Nation?

This one is controversial, but hear me out. In the wake of Brexit an argument was made that the 52% who voted to Leave the EU were too self-centred and insular. That they were not outward looking to a wider, interconnected world, but rather thinking of themselves and what “freedom” from Europe would allow them to do. This argument was rejected by Brexiteers, who said they were not selfish, but just seeking sovereignty for their nation; sovereignty for all. And maybe they were right? Maybe. But then in December, after nearly a decade of damaging austerity, the British public were given a choice over a radical social care plan from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, or more Tory politics from Boris Johnson. Overwhelmingly, in Labour’s worst election defeat in living memory, the country voted Tory. And lefties like me said that this was a pretty selfish action - voting for personal gain and not for the many thousands of citizens struggling or abandoned by austerity politics. But Tory voters said they weren’t selfish monsters at all. They said they were doing it to “get Brexit done” because that was the only democratically right thing to do. They were doing it for the good of the country and not themselves. And maybe they were right? Maybe?

Except…if the above two majority votes were, in fact, votes which exposed a majority of the British public who are selfish in their motivations and not outward looking citizens thinking of the most vulnerable in their society it would explain why we as a country have been so bad at following the official medical advice on self-isolating and social distancing, and the government advice on panic buying. Time and again we have been told to stay inside, not gather together, and to buy only what we need. Yet the supermarket shelves remain bare, and beaches, parks, and even some coffee shops and pubs remain crowded.

COVID-19 is interesting because the advice we have all been given is not to help ourselves, but to help others: the most vulnerable in our society. The true selfishness of a human being is shown when they reason I’m ok and I will survive this so I will go out and put other, more vulnerable people, at risk and this is exactly what is happening.

Brexit and the Conservative victory suggest that the British public are currently selfish in the majority, and therefore such acts are unsurprising. Or, based on arguments around Russian and other interference, that social media can have an impact on choices which might make them ultimately selfish and self-sabotaging, which brings us back to my first argument above about social media’s influence on this crisis. Either way, as a nation we need to have a long-hard look in the mirror at ourselves when and if this is all over because this is one we can’t blame on government or the economy alone. We have to look at our own choices and why we made them.

5) Who’s Crazy Now?

In 2014, following the death of my mother from cancer, and four years after the death of my father from heart failure, I was in a pretty bad state with what is called “Health Anxiety Disorder”. Simply put: I kept on worrying about my health. I could convince myself that I was about to have a heart attack, or that there was some undiagnosed cancer inside of me that was killing me undetected, and I would obsess and check for symptoms daily. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t enjoying myself. And so I got some therapy.

The therapist told me that it was unhealthy to worry so much about my health. That I needed to stop being “intolerant of uncertainty” and “catastrophizing” every minor medical blip. He said I had to avoid checking for symptoms every day, and that I should avoid the instinct to cocoon away and avoid public places for fear of picking up a disease. He said I should wash my hands less and take more risks. So I might get sick. So what? I needed to see that being ill wasn’t the end of the world.

I visited the therapist for several months. He turned me onto mindful meditation and some CBT techniques to deal with my intrusive thoughts about my health. And for a long time I thought I was doing ok with it.

This last month has been a very hard time for people, like me, with Health Anxiety Disorders. Suddenly everything we were told not to do by mental health professionals is being instructed by medical health professionals. Check for those two symptoms - new persistent cough and high temperature; self-isolate and social distance; catastrophize: the NHS may not take the strain of this and people, including you, may die as a result; and yes, the fact that you don’t feel any symptoms doesn’t mean you don’t already have the virus. All of the things we were told were mentally problematic have become official government policy and all of the things we have been encouraged to do to combat such thinking has now been forbidden.

Philosophically it makes me ask the question: were we always doing the right thing? Were our actions and thoughts really so crazy, or was it just that society had lost sight of the true potential dangers for disease? Or, more worrying still, is the current global response unwarranted? Are we all now suffering from Health Anxiety Disorder? Are we all catastrophizing and over-reacting being as we are literally showing, as a global population, the two key symptoms of health anxiety: checking for symptoms and avoidance measures?

I sure hope so. It would be really nice to look back on this a year from now (as one of my old CBT exercises encouraged us to do) and wonder what all the fuss was about. To laugh at how silly we had all been overreacting to this, even if it made us feel safe at the time. To recognise that getting ill isn’t the worst thing in the world and also, as my therapist also made clear, that sometimes we will die from these things and that that’s ok - there was nothing we could do? People die and we have to accept that, even us.

6) Is This The End of Exams?

As a teacher one of the big news stories coming out of this week of change was that all the Year 11 and Year 13 students I teach, who have been working hard towards terminal examinations this summer, have had those exams cancelled. As alternative approaches to assessment are concocted based on previous work, teacher judgement, and historic exam data, I think it will be interesting to see another myth crumble: the importance of terminal exams. Since 2010, when Michael Gove decided to “reform” British education, the goal has been more reliance on a single, terminal exam, and a less holistic approach with less professional judgment from teachers. I have always found exams to be absolutely unfit for the purpose of anything other than arbitrarily separating pupils into capricious numerical order based on a single day’s work in unrealistic conditions. In my subject, Philosophy, or at GCSE, RE, there is no professional philosopher or theologian who would spend two years learning something only to then intentionally cut themselves from all their resources and colleagues, set a completely arbitrary time-limit on their work, and then work only from memory to answer questions. Yet this is the method by which all of our secondary school students are judged. Worse - in a day and age where I can’t remember the last time I handwrote something for more that a few minutes these students are forced to take two to three hour exam papers which must be entirely handwritten.

That the exams are demonstration of anything other than a student’s ability to sit an exam has always been a problem. I wonder if as we explore the alternatives to examination in the weeks to come, it might make exam boards re-think assessment. The words of Noam Chomsky often ring true to me here:

“Consider, for example, the competitiveness fostered in the university, in fact, in the school system as a whole. It is difficult to convince oneself that this serves an educational purpose. Certainly, it does not prepare the student for the life of a scholar or scientist…In later life, collective effort with sharing of discovery and mutual assistance is the ideal; if it is not the norm, we rightly interpret this as a inadequacy of those who cannot rise above personal aggrandisement and in this measure are incompetent as scholars, scientists, and teachers…The student is obliged to set himself a limited goal, and to avoid adventuresome, speculative investigation that may challenge the conventional framework of scholarship and, correspondingly, runs a high risk of failure…In general, there is very little if any educational function to the requirement that the university be concerned with certification as well as with education and research. On the contrary, this requirement interferes with its proper function. it is a demand imposed by a society that ensures, in many ways, the preservation of certain forms of privilege.” (Chomsky, N, For Reasons of State, 2003, pp.300-301)

7) Are We Epistemologically Broken?

As I have already said, there is a worry that the post-truth world created through social media and politicians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson has made it near impossible to follow the facts and use reason to reach justifiable conclusions. In this post alone I have made multiple completely conflicting claims - that we are overreacting; that we are under-reacting; that we are showing great autonomous drive to do what is right in the face of government inaction; that we are acting selfishly and ignoring government advice; that the world can never be the same again politically or economically; that we’ll look back at this in twelve months time and laugh; that there is a possibility this has become the new normal and will never end…

Did you even notice?

I hope so. Obviously each claim was presented as a question, not a prediction or a statement; things currently fluttering about in my head. But did you read that nuance into it within a long blog post like this? Or did you just skip to the exciting parts? The TL;DR version? Are we even capable anymore of sorting fact from fiction and knowing what is going on, whether that be in the midst of a crisis, or simply any other day of the week?

Time will tell. And hopefully we will have some answers to these questions sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, keep thinking. And for those of you in years 11 and 13 who won’t be sitting terminal examinations anymore this summer - brilliant. This is a great opportunity for you to take your philosophy beyond the limited confines of an exam curriculum and write about something you care about. I’d love to publish your thoughts during this difficult time so get in touch either in the comments sections of articles, or as a contributor if you have something to say!

Author: D. McKee