Perhaps It Is Too Late?
Maybe we need to recognize that several months of feckless leadership means the "third wave" of COVID-19 is going to hit us and there's little we can do about it?
Perhaps we need to just let COVID hit us after all?
A modest proposal, if you will.
Perhaps the emphasis on building social responsibility — wearing masks, socially distancing, washing your hands — has created a social hammock of sorts.
In short, if everyone else is doing the right thing? Then my awareness doesn’t have to be as high. Thus if the rest of the herd is behaving the right way, the rest of the water buffalo roaming the Serengeti don’t have to worry as much about the lions.
Let’s say for a moment though that the individual members can’t rely upon the herd anymore. You probably won’t want to introduce yourself to the possibility of lions on the Serengeti all that much, will you?
Voluntary distancing is a phrase we heard back in March 2020, and it was working if numbers from retailers are to be believed.
Perhaps the grand solution here isn’t to manufacture a sense of social responsibility that doesn’t exist? Perhaps — and I am just spitballing here — the grand solution is to remove the boot altogether and let the chips fall where they may.
Perhaps it is too late to stop the spread?
Either way, perhaps the best approach to restoring the individual responsibility that social distancing guidelines have removed from society is to simply remove the guidelines and let individuals sort for themselves? If the impact risk of going to the supermarket is that much higher, maybe other options — pick up or delivery — become more palatable for high-risk categories?
In short, put the lion in the herd. The herd will distance accordingly.
The one catch here with our modest proposal (apologies to Jonathan Swift) is the impact to the health care system regardless. Yet if this “third wave” is coming either way?
Are we not doing ourselves a tremendous disservice complicating this fact by signaling to our friends and neighbors that we don’t trust them to behave responsibly, ergo we require the coercion of laws to make them behave responsibly?
This might be the million COVID question.
Should the boot come off, will our neighbors and friends behave responsibly?
Will we take up individual responsibility where the social responsibility imposed by the heavy hand of government demonstrably failed us? Experts can still be experts; experts might even be right. More to the point, are we deceiving ourselves by insisting that all the masks, distancing, and hand washing is foolproof?
The basic questions to answer at this point is simple. Are we adults? Can we be trusted as adults to do the right thing? Are the lockdown mechanisms creating the illusion of safety where the opposite is true?
The economy has by and large shifted to the new reality. The problem at present is that the social distancing guidelines have created an illusion of safety — one that is arguably harming Virginians.
By lifting the veil and treating Virginians as adults? Yes, there will always be bad actors, but as Plato argues in Laws there are ultimately two types of lawmakers by means of two types of doctors — the free doctor speaks with the patient and persuades them on the path of treatment; the slave doctor simply imposes treatments and rushes off to the next slave.
Yet Plato offers a third means of lawmaking — preludes or prologues — that he describes as a third means of an admittedly avuncular approach to lawmaking:
What is my object in saying this? It is to explain that all utterances and vocal expressions have preludes and tunings-up (as one might call them), which provide a kind of artistic preparation which assists towards the further development of the subject. Indeed, we have examples before us of preludes, admirably elaborated, in those prefixed to that class of lyric ode called the “nome,” and to musical compositions of every description. But for the “nomes” (i.e. laws) which are real nomes—and which we designate “political”—no one has ever yet uttered a prelude, or composed or published one, just as though there were no such thing. But our present conversation proves, in my opinion, that there is such a thing; and it struck me just now that the laws we were then stating are something more than simply double, and consist of these two things combined—law, and prelude to law.
What we are lacking in Virginia vis a vis our reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is the prelude to lawmaking.
Namely, either citizens have no idea or confidence in the social distancing guidelines, or worse still that the guidelines themselves are giving a false sense of security and increasing the likelihood of spreading the disease.
Instead, we are given the slave form of lawmaking. Do this, because we know what is best and you won’t understand the explanation.
That might work for slaves, but it doesn’t work for free citizens.
The remedy at this point may be to remove the precautions that have allowed millions of Virginians not to take this pandemic seriously enough.
Individuals can ramp up their own personal precautionary requirements or ignore them (as they already are) at their pleasure while allowing the state government to continue to set the tone: wear masks, wash hands, voluntarily distance.
What harm is there in simply admitting that coercion was the wrong tool and that persuasion and prelude were better remedies? What harm is there in increasing rather than decreasing individual responsibility over social responsibility?
After all, if we can’t trust our friends and neighbors to do the right thing? No amount of lawmaking is going to make a vicious and selfish people virtuous overnight. Trust and responsibility will.
The options here are not the false choices of seriousness and unseriousness, but rather to start trusting our friends and neighbors to be responsible citizens and do what is best for them and their families — or be prepared to enact some of the most draconian laws and impositions ever considered.
Collectivizing trust hasn’t worked so far. Time to spread it around a bit.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.