I’d like to reference two of my favourite pop culture icons in a discussion of the rise of what I like to call the ‘anti-Socrates.’
First, The Simpsons episode Little Girl in the Big Ten…
“Laziness is counter-revolutionary. Questions are decadent. Fast hands mean less whipping.” See here.
My second reference comes from the second Adrian Mole book The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole. Adrian is contemplating suicide and makes two lists…
“Reasons for living: Things might get better
“Reasons for not living: You die anyway; Life is nothing but anguish; There is too much cruelty in the world; ‘O’ Levels in June; My parents hate me; I’ve lost Pandora; Nobody leaves Barry Kent’s gang alive.”
I’ve always liked Adrian Mole and have read the books since I was a secondary school in the 1980s. He is two years older than me in the books but because of the lapse in publishing time, we were a similar age when they were published. Sue Townsend’s death at the relatively young age of 68 meant that Adrian’s story was never finished. I like to think that he finally got together with his childhood sweetheart Pandora at the end of the last book – compare the endings of Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years and Adrian Mole: The Prostate Years.
Anyway, I digress. The point I’m making is twofold; firstly that making a list of pros and cons for any action is a good idea. And secondly, that asking questions is always the right thing to do and only an authoritarian would disagree. Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with this.
Anyone who has ever had to complete a risk assessment at work will know that you always have to acknowledge the problems inherent in any activity before looking at ways to mitigate those issues. I vividly recall the only time I had to give an activity with a group of 15-17 year olds the highest possible risk assessment – ‘catastrophic’ ie: there was a risk of death in the activity. Fortunately, wearing the safety equipment provided during the activity reduced that risk to ‘minimal.’ This is how I feel about a some of the current responses to Covid19.
As I write these words, we are approaching the 10-month anniversary of the first ‘three week’ lockdown. In the UK, the original justification was to take pressure off the NHS; now the talk is about suppressing or even eliminating the virus entirely. Even with the vaccines now available, this seems improbable. The bottom line is that we are going to have to learn to live with this virus for some time to come.
Now is the time to say of course I think the virus is serious, that we need to protect the vulnerable, blah, blah, blah. No-one would argue against taking this novel virus seriously. But is the defeat of Covid19 really the number one priority in the world today? And, even if it is, are the measures being taken to combat the virus in danger of creating other problems that are worse than the effects of the virus? You could use a baseball bat to kill a wasp in your living room but by the time you had killed it your house would have suffered an awful lot of damage.
In economics, there is a procedure called cost-benefit analysis where long-term decisions are assessed by comparing the present value of costs with the present value of benefits of any given action. Generally, an action should only be taken if the present value of the benefits outweighs the present value of the costs. In other words, actions in the present have implications for the future. I am not for one moment suggesting a monetary analysis of the actions in regard to Covid19 but merely suggest that it is necessary to at least look at the negative aspects of the actions taken to control the disease.
Saving lives and developing vaccines are undoubtedly positives of the current strategy; to my knowledge, no-one has argued otherwise. But I do worry about the economic impacts of this crisis, the psychological damage to young people denied access to education or not being allowed to meet their friends and the loneliness and isolation being imposed on older people. Above all, I am concerned that the authorities appear to be enjoying the enormous powers they have granted themselves and some police officers and clipboard warriors are getting off on pushing people around. We have reached a situation where actions are illegal unless made legal by the government, the exact opposite of what life should be like in a democratic society. The longer this state of affairs goes on, the harder it may be to regain our right to freedom and privacy. And once this crisis ends, I foresee a tidal wave of legal claims by people whose relatives died after being denied healthcare or those whose businesses collapsed due to Covid19 restrictions.
Who should be asking questions about the draconian powers our rulers have granted themselves? The media. But much of the media – both mainstream and online – appear to have taken the view that anyone questioning anything about the policies being adopted is a Covid ‘denier.’ This is a transparently obvious attempt to associate any opposition to current policies with the fringe nutters (or not so fringe in certain parts of the world) who continue to deny the Holocaust. This is the similar to the media’s attempts to label anyone who so much as raises an eyebrow at the mad outbursts by the weekend hippies of Stinky Conformism as ‘climate change deniers.’ Or labelling anyone who objects to the anti-Semitic ravings of a self-proclaimed Islamic ‘scholar’ whose only achievement in life appears to have been to grow a beard as an ‘Islamophobe.’
This is what I mean when I refer to the rise of the ‘anti-Socrates.’ Socrates was an Ancient Greek philosopher whose most famous aphorism is probably ‘the only thing I know is that that I know nothing.’ He worked by asking questions and trying to get people to explain why they believed what they believed. Many (most?) people were (are?) not capable of explaining the reasons for their opinions and some of them became angry with Socrates for daring to question even their most profound religious convictions (sound familiar?). It is no surprise that Socrates was eventually put to death for the ridiculously vague crime of ‘corrupting youth.’
Whilst Socrates was intellectually curious and humble in his claims, the current anti-Socrates types in charge of the media, the internet and politics are the exact opposite. Like religious delusionists, the anti-Socrates of the media does not just know but knows everything. And that is why there is such a growth of conformity of opinion in our age.
Still it could be worse. These days you only get booted off social media for heresy. You can see what they did to unbelievers a couple of thousand years ago in Video of the Day #19.
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