MORALITY OF LOCKDOWN
In my first article in the series I highlighted narratives relating to the origin of COVID-19 and analyzed the efficacy of Lockdown in the second. As to the efficacy of Lockdown I submitted that the object is to limit and spread infections over an extended period to avoid overwhelming medical treatment capacity and NOTHING ELSE. I also suggested that we should differentiate between potential and chance when considering an original approach to dealing with the disease.
In this article I shall refer back to these concepts when considering the morality of Lockdown.
Limitation of Freedom
For the purposes of illustration in this article, please permit me to compare Lockdown to free range chickens being cooped.
Regardless of level, Lockdown is extremely intrusive on community and individual rights to freedom. As such its morality is immediately questionable, even in the lightest of forms, and Lockdown should always only be a last resort based strictly on logic and reason.
If we differentiate between potential and chance we see that the chance of contracting the virus is highly subjective and reliant on our adherence to and application of preventative protocols within a personal sanitization regimen. In hindsight we also see that potential for spread tends to be geographically defined which means that a blanket Lockdown is ultimately irrational and defies logic. If the Lockdown is porous, in any case, its application is superfluous.
If testing and data is accurate and structured, government should know exactly which areas present an unacceptably high spread potential and which not, isolating the former by way of Lockdown and not the latter. With reliable data available a Lockdown is essential for the safety of people in affected areas and useful in preventing transferal to other areas they might frequent, but indefensible for those areas with a negligible potential.
If this basic reality, tried and tested in South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan is applied, you don’t have to implode your whole economy but can keep those areas less affected functioning, isolating only those posing and faced with a real threat. Such a Lockdown would obviously be both morally defensible and economically sensible.
A further advantage would be that you could focus resources where they are needed to make a difference. Medical and enforcement resources could be focused instead of spreading these far and wide resulting in limited efficiency.
Thus, in my opinion, focused Lockdown can be both morally and legally justified. In the South African context and in all honesty I must concede that, at the launch of the Lockdown and in the absence of reckless election and preference, any objective person would have been factually uncertain whether to Lockdown or not, due to contradicting reports and international approaches. Locally there was insufficient data available to ascertain geographical focus areas for combating potential.
But that data should be available now, which makes a gradual blanket lifting morally and legally questionable. A differentiated approach to different areas is required on the basis of their spread potential and even a provincial or metro approach is far too wide, as areas within provinces and metros seem to differ vastly as is shown by the latest statistics from the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg.
But again logic and reason must prevail. What spread is unacceptable should not be prescribed by numbers in one area compared to numbers in another, but be ascertained on the basis of relation to the applicable population or portion thereof. Although Cape Town appears to have a high spread potential at first glance, testing is very wide and the amount of infections and deaths in relation to actual population is negligible, especially when compared to causes other than COVID-19 and this is a real and hard fact!
On the basis of fairness I must censor myself again, in that data value depends on how far and wide testing has actually been done and how COVID-19 deaths are ascertained. Differences in the approach to the collection and interpretation of data has been shown to be problematic worldwide in that data might suggest astronomical differences, when compared to other countries, but differences might ultimately be cosmetic due to varying approaches to gathering and analysis.
Morality of Application
If our free range chickens see a visible threat, let’s say a jackal, they will probably seek refuge in the coop voluntarily. If the threat is something invisible to them, like impending bad weather, they will need to be herded into the coup.
The same is applicable to COVID-19. Some people realized a potential threat and the possible advantage of a Lockdown and entered into it willingly. Others rejected the potential of the threat or any advantage to Lockdown but still entered into Lockdown albeit unwillingly, whilst others completely ignored the potential, regardless whether due to blatant rejection or ignorance, and resisted being cooped. This might explain the variation in spread potential between different areas to some extent but not completely, as testing variances and a porous application of Lockdown tend to blur the statistical picture.
Fact is Lockdown does infringe on personal and community rights to freedom and therefor it is essential that its method of application be morally defensible and justified. In order to comply with this requirement it must answer to the dictates of logic and reason.
The first requirement is that of satisfying the object: limiting the spread of the disease over a period and NOTHING ELSE.
From our previous article we saw that spread is reliant on potential and chance and that by managing chance we can theoretically manage potential. We also saw that potential probably increases the moment we leave our home (unless it’s infected of course) and that visiting a shop for essential items tends to increase potential even further. But what we buy in that shop or how long we are there hardly has any real impact on the existing potential. True, the tomato sauce may be contaminated but not the blankets, kettles or wine containers or vice versa. Fact is the potential is basically constant in that shop and we don’t know which items might be contaminated or not and, in the absence of testing each item, nobody does! Our mere presence in the shop exposes us to a potential unique to the applicable shop and the people and objects inside of it, period.
Given this fact shops in Europe, permitted to be open due to stocking items deemed essential, were permitted to sell anything and everything on their shelves. Stocking essential items is the requirement for obtaining permission to trade, which makes obvious sense, but refusing a customer access to non-essential items whilst buying essentials does not. The exposure to potential is contained in the person’s mere presence in the shop, not their purchase! This should be rather obvious to anyone of sound reason and logic?
Thus prohibiting the sale of non-essential items in a shop that is legally open for business is obviously not aimed at limiting spread but SOMETHING ELSE. This should be just as obvious? What that something else is, could be as simple as proving an unfortunate oversight or misconception, through taking the opportunity of Lockdown to address addictions to plain and simple arbitrary authoritarianism or wanting to impose a collective disciplining on the population as a whole – a sort of vindictive paternalism! Given the necessitated, inherent immorality of Lockdown as such, the addition of any or all of these additional motives is clearly, completely indefensible. Yet big industry in both liquor and tobacco sectors have caved noticeably to government dictates!
But what is truly deplorable are anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol activists and their supporters applauding such infringements on rights, whilst they drink sugar in their beverages, leisurely downing sugared sodas or sanctimoniously munching on sweets and chocolates, feeding these to their children as well!
Yes COVID-19 does seem to primarily attack the lungs but if one isn’t an Identity Cultist and you actually look wider than your belief, you will know that France is researching the possibility that nicotine might contribute to prevention in contracting the virus and that this observation is confirmed by Chinese data too! Put that in your pipe and smoke it?
You would also know that elevated blood sugar levels are a common denominator in COVID-19 patients and that diabetes and obesity apparently increase your chances of needing specialized medical attention and dying of COVID-19? So, whilst celebrating a ban on tobacco and alcohol, have you banned consumption of all sugars in your home and started shedding those kilo’s for COVID’s sake, with summer still far off?
But let’s return to our cooped free range chickens and the imminent bad weather. Inside the coop food and water is in limited supply but there is a hole in the coop and a few heaps of various feeds and a water trough outside. So the farmer sits on a stool in front of the hole and every time a chicken attempts to leave the coop through the hole, he slaps it on the head! Now if that rightly gets my animal activist readers going, might I ask if they feel the same retort for their cooped human neighbours being wacked?
Slowly the sun appears and it seems that the storm actually passed by, but with nothing else to do and in order to have an excuse to avoid helping his wife in the house, the farmer stays put on his stool slapping every chicken on the head that dares to venture out through the hole.
This analogy provides a very simple example of how the morality issue of Lockdown can increasingly deteriorate with regard to prohibitions and enforcement, despite an initially noble and valid reason for its imposition?
Thus the morally defensible approach to Lockdown would be its imposition with inclusion of logic and rationality, causing as little as possible collateral inconvenience and with a focus on negating real discomfort. In this approach there obviously isn’t room for SOMETHING ELSE. Inclusion of SOMETHING ELSE immediately neutralizes these requirements!
Original Limitations
In the previous article I presented an isolated small-town example where zero limitations on internal social or economic activities were required. But in a city or larger town a different approach will obviously be required.
Remember, the object is to limit spread potential and isolating areas with unacceptable potential from those with low potential is essential to this end. Maybe no local shops in a high potential area sell wine, whilst in other areas some do. Like the chickens wanting to leave the coop for what is outside, this fact could motivate people to cross area boundaries from a high potential to a low potential area and increase spread potential elsewhere to procure wine (alcohol), for example. Where no such possibility exists, prohibition of wine sales would not be morally defensible?
Consequently I can find some justification for prohibiting the sale of wine in shops open for business, but for goods usually available in every single area and more especially those available from local shops, spaza shops and street vendors, like cigarettes or cooked food, I find absolutely none! Their prohibition is blatant stupidity shrouded in vindictiveness. Would someone travel far and wide for a cigarette or a cooked chicken if it were available close by? These prohibitions clearly fall within the SOMETHING ELSE category.
In drafting exclusions, originality is required with the object of limiting potential spread as the sole defining boundary as to what goods are allowed and any prohibition. I believe that this would simplify the list with very few items excluded but require excellent knowledge of the area to which they are meant to apply? Whilst the list would be simple the path to its compilation might not be, in the absence of truly proficient grassroots level public officials. This lack of proficiency might be an excuse but provides no justification – why are officials, known to be lacking proficiency, employed in the first place and is the denial of morally acceptable treatment defensible when it is due to a lack of governmental proficiency created and maintained by government in the first place? Surely such culpability attracts legal liability and international sanctioning in a sane world?
In other words a lack of morality is indefensible and any citizen supporting the denial of morality toward others on the basis of certain pet hates might just find their pet vices and rights infringed upon subsequently! In that event they really would not be justified in complaining as they supported the initiation of this process of eroding rights, when applied against others! What is good for the goose is good for the gander?
Feel free to criticize others of whining or whatever, just don’t complain when you are subsequently bitten - in other words, please don’t be a hypocrite now or later albeit in different respects, like walking your dog or exercising in public?
Enforcement
This has been an extremely contentious issue – enforcement of Lockdown regulations.
Although armchair critics have been willing to fire salvos in any and all directions, experience teaches that crime scene management is often trying, crowd control challenging and population control nigh impossible in the absence of popular discipline.
In a national Lockdown situation enforcers are met with the unenviable task of enforcing unpopular restrictions with personnel outnumbered by a few hundred to one! This is obviously a daunting task which only a fool would deny.
In contingency planning one would consider the percentage and location of the population who would probably comply voluntarily, those who would comply partially and those who would mostly refuse to comply and deploy personnel accordingly. This being said this process requires projections, guessing, and there is no hard and fast rule. This reality is exacerbated in a country like South Africa where sentiments are split and differ along many lines from race, through religion and politics to differing socio-economic and literacy levels, and even further, by the presence of migrants!
Those complying voluntarily obviously bring down the ratio of population to personnel, increasing the chances of successful enforcement. If the compliance factor relates to specific areas, personnel deployment in these can be minimized with increased deployment in others. Consequently an objective, in any rational contingency plan, would be to maximize voluntary compliance and cooperation by ensuring that the Lockdown will be as convenient and comfortable as possible?
This is where silly prohibitions become important: despite huge odds against your enforcers you intentionally opt to aggravate, even the compliant members of your population, enticing them to withdraw their acceptance and oppose! Not very clever and consequently one would be justified in concluding that this approach suggests that the government is begging for a fight with its own citizens?
It appears that the only other explanation is an inability on the part of government and its CEO, the President, to pull all the loose strings together: get those drafting prohibitions to draft them with due regard for reason, logic and morality, in such a way that they support enforcers instead of effectually undermining them?
For all those applauding the President I must differ. An awesome speaker indeed, but on a managerial level he and his board are all over the place, from logic and rationality to morality, has been since the beginning of COVID-19 and even before on general issues. Unfortunately, as CEO, that unambiguously reflects unfavorably on his managerial capabilities in my book.
Even with the compliant population removed from the equation, the odds stacked against enforcers remain high. In a motivated, collective and widespread confrontation they essentially don’t stand a chance of containing the situation without a tremendous loss of life, making our historical enforcement massacres look rather subdued, despite their factual horror!
Experience teaches that respect and more especially fear are excellent tools at avoiding confrontation. Like two school boys threatening each other prior to a fight, the bigger, more boisterous of the two might persuade the other not to take a chance at challenging him for fear of getting a memorable hiding.
From public pronouncements and actions by Mr. Cele and enforcers, they were obviously employing this tactic in an attempt to hypothetically improve their odds in the event of opposition and confrontation.
But in the absence of fulfilment a threat becomes a challenge, requiring it to be tested.
Thus once you embark on this strategy you have to fulfil your promises: if you said you would donner and bliksem in the event of non-compliance, you have to or else you are openly inviting rejection, opposition and confrontation. This explains the complaints of brutality against enforcers?
In a normal protest environment enforcers would mostly apply incremental tactics to persuade protestors to cooperate and respond to any possible refusal or escalation. In the protest situation however, the threat is completely evident, measurable, localized and usually open to containment, regardless of the odds presented by overwhelming numbers.
In the Lockdown situation this is not the case. The potential threat is extremely obscure, essentially immeasurable and a collective, simultaneous and widespread uprising would be nigh impossible to contain – a no-nonsense, shock approach would probably be required and using it at the outset, prior to such a threat arising, is designed to discourage any future challenge or to proverbially nip it in the bud!
This approach is not uncommon to enforcement practices worldwide. While the populace regards the threat from inconvenience and discomfort as less than that posed by non-compliance it will work, but if it becomes less threatening than compliance, the strategy will fail in the face of an all-out, widespread revolt.
If all of the chickens storm the hole at once the farmer might be able to slap many against the head but some will slip through and on him leaving the hole to chase after these, the rest will follow suit. This is pure logic and even applicable to chickens!
One can rightly argue the acceptability of this approach but with a blanket Lockdown, the absence of popular respect and support for enforcers and a lack of popular discipline and social responsibility, enforcers do have an extremely strong initial argument for their approach albeit self-created! Be that as it may, once you have embarked on this strategy, you cannot soften or turn back and unnecessarily increasing inconvenience and discomfort unambiguously amounts to begging for or, at least, inviting circumvention and flat out confrontation!
This being said, actually shooting unarmed people posing no threat to the lives of enforcers or several enforcers beating and kicking a single person lying on the ground, might make for a good show in strengthening the above mentioned strategy, but it is both morally and legally reprehensible and indefensible. This specific application screams of extreme lacking professionalism but more disappointingly, it exhibits a complete disconnection between the community and law enforcement officials placed there to serve and protect the community!
With a different approach to the Lockdown, including prohibitions, sensible social responsibility and popular discipline (not political) programs in general education, better police-community relations, including trust and respect brought about by professionalism, as well as improved governmental acceptance and legitimacy, a different strategy would definitely have been possible, like those applied in Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but unfortunately our government idolizes authoritarian China and Cuba!
It would seem that our unique national conditions convinced, if not compelled, Mr. Cele to embark on this approach in the belief that no other practical option to enforcement was or is available! If this is the conviction of government towards its populace in a crisis situation, it is an unambiguous, tacit acknowledgement of failed broad spectrum governance and should be most disturbing for any sane, pragmatic individual not enslaved by Identity Cultism.
Conclusion
With the easing of Lockdown here we are probably all somewhat expectant that things might improve. Morality demands that lifting not be applied one level at a time, by way of a blanket approach, but that differentiation be made between areas requiring stringent measures and those merely required to maintain preventative protocols as applied by South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Unfortunately we know that this will not be the case. By insisting on following rigid protocols, completely ignoring morality as represented by reason and logic, government has essentially used its trump card in the opening stages of the game. With a lot more people impoverished, the poor trampled down further by this Lockdown, sufficient international information becoming available on the disease and alternative ways of dealing with it, enforcement of a subsequent Lockdown might be less successful and much more confrontational.
Moral justification for Lockdown, on current indications, is limited to isolating areas with a high spread potential from others and not insisting on isolating everyone and everything from everyone else and everything else, which is both logically and rationally impossible in any case. The South African approach to COVID-19 and the application of Lockdown has only served to magnify the societal cracks any seeing citizen already saw and confirms that others must see the cracks, but will always seek to ignore and even deny them on the basis of Identity Cultism.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – Edmund Burke.
In our current situation we could revise this quote as follows: The only things necessary for the triumph of immorality, a demise in reason and logic, is for good people to either support it or to do nothing.
It is not about Lockdown or not, nor about what is essential or what is not. It is only always about what is logical and rational or not, and whoever denies this fact might be a good person at heart, but is obviously toying at permitting immorality and ultimately evil to triumph?
-The Influentcer