Lamb’s Head on a Plate, by Viggo Johansen
An early Government slogan summarising their strategy for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was ‘herd immunity’. Whether this is a useful phrase for epidemiologists or not, the decision to use it by politicians is political.
It is an inappropriate metaphor which assumes a reductive, essentialist view of human behaviour rather than the aspiration for a healthy society which integrates the environmental, biological, psychological, and social.
It is a metaphor that undermines what is best in our society and our hope for a more civilised country.
The political decision to provide free health care on the basis of need in the UK has enjoyed popularity ever since the creation of the NHS in 1947. Its foundation by a Labour Government was an outcome of the collective planning during the 1939-45 world war, and was motivated by the searing experience of the economic depression of the 1930’s.
Since 1947, we as citizens have continued to support a public service that protects the sick and vulnerable. Though the austerity of the last 10 years has ravaged our social fabric and the cuts to health and other public services has made economic and social inequality starker, we still hold to this ideal.
In this pandemic, wealth and health inequalities and prejudice have resulted in a doubling of the death rate from the Coronavirus in poorer areas of our country and in working class occupations. Older people, those with disabilities, and those from black and minority ethnic communities have suffered most.
The disproportionate deaths of those who are old, those who are disabled, those who are poorer or marginalised, and those with “underlying health conditions” is a blow to us all. To leave part of our ‘herd’ behind to suffer and die calls into question our belief that we live in a civilised society.
By using the phrase ‘herd immunity’, the Government and its advisors revealed their debt to social Darwinism. This is not a debt to the ground breaking theories of Charles Darwin that opened up our understanding of the beauty and complexity of the natural world, but rather to the closed thinking of Herbert Spencer.
Spencer and those who followed him championed the biological process of ‘survival of the fittest’ as a social ideal. They used this to promote selfish individualism, rather than the values of co-operation and altruism, which motivate us as human beings. This assertion has a history of being put to various political uses.
It is not a surprise to find such thinking at the heart of the Government of a country which has spent over four decades wedded to the neo-liberal economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society.
Instead of social bonds based on common humanity, Hayek believed only in the ‘natural’ values of the competitive free market. He believed that democratic accountability of the running of our economy, including state intervention, was ethically wrong.
It was on the basis of his thinking that Margaret Thatcher declared ‘there is no such thing as society’. Values belong to us as individuals and should not be the motivation for an overarching vision. Promoting economic change on the basis of a humanist ethic was, he thought, illegitimate. As another of Hayek’s followers Milton Friedman controversially declared ‘economics is a value free science’.
But we as human beings can re-moralise our economy by collective political decisions. We can support democratic structures that encourage us to do good works and participate in a good society. There is an alternative to the individualistic ideology underlying economic neo-liberalism that justifies letting the poor, the vulnerable and the weak to go to the wall.
As St John XXIII saw in Pacem in Terris that there is a moral imperative for public authority and power to realise our common humanity. There are positive opportunities in the global interconnectedness evidenced during this current pandemic. But we can only take these opportunities if we acknowledge our mutual interdependence and make a commitment to a universal common good.
Dr Maria Exall is PDRA in Catholic Social Thought and Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University.