Courtesy Editorial Island

A decision by the British government to make it mandatory for everyone to wear facemasks in shops has sparked protests in London. Some protesters staged a march at Hyde Park, the other day, condemning the government move, which they called a severe blow to their human rights. These anti-mask campaigners are not alone in opposing the mandatory use of face coverings. There are many others of their ilk across the pond, and they include US President Donald Trump, himself, who, however, seems to be buckling under pressure. These dyed-in-the-wool liberals insist that governments have no right to tell them what to do with their faces. They are also against vaccination, physical distancing and contact tracing, we are told.

There is no gainsaying the validity of the argument that the state is duty bound to protect and preserve people’s rights and freedoms. But there occur certain situations where the curtailment of these rights and freedoms becomes necessary for sustaining the greater good, and such restrictions are consistent with deontological ethics as well. Otherwise, it becomes well-nigh impossible to ensure public safety in emergency situations. What if persons afflicted with Covid-19 were allowed to move about freely in crowded places without covering their faces?

Liberalism, underpinning liberal democracy, which is widely believed to be an antidote to ethnonational autocracies, is universally cherished, but, if taken to an extreme, it can make governance impossible in any country.

The biggest challenge for liberal democracy is to reconcile conflicting imperatives, e. g. striking a fine balance between safeguarding individual freedoms and ensuring public safety. Crimes, especially terrorism, contagions, social problems arising from economic inequalities and the like have caused liberal democracy to be redefined. The US democracy has undergone a sea change since the 9/11 attacks, which necessitated stringent security measures at the expense of some of the rights and freedoms of American citizens. Covid-19 has posed a new challenge to democracy; in battling the pandemic, democratic nations, even in the Global North, have had to adopt some drastic measures that are in conflict with the liberal values they claim to uphold, and act somewhat like their bete noire, China, which has brought Covid-19 under control.

It is believed that the modern state has emerged from an unwritten social contract, which delimited the authority of rulers and defined the rights and freedom of the ruled on the grounds of self-interest and rational consent. Even political philosophers (including John Locke), who cherished life, liberty and property, which they said could not be taken away, held that people had to abide by the law. Hence the need for rational consent to obey quarantine and disease prevention laws!

Unless the world succeeds in beating coronavirus decisively, Covid-19 will lead to far more serious problems than what we are experiencing at present. Health systems will be overwhelmed, the world over, and we might witness a situation similar to that in Europe, in the mid-1300s, when the Black Death carried off about one third of the Continent’s population; cartloads of corpses were removed several times a day from houses and streets and buried in mass graves, according to historians. We recently saw some chilling pictures of refrigerated trucks deployed in New York to help store bodies as hospital morgues and funeral homes could not cope with the load. The UN has warned that at the present rate of job cuts, about one half of the global workforce will be at risk unless the pandemic is effectively tackled and conditions are created for the ailing economies to recover fast. Job losses entail a steep rise in the poverty level and are likely to give rise to uprisings that threaten democratic governance. People do not behave rationally when their survival is threatened. During lockdowns we saw people jostling to secure essentials even in the developed world, where there were fights over toilet paper. How ugly the situation would get if there happened to be a global food shortage owing to the pandemic is not difficult to imagine. In such an eventuality, liberal values would fall by the wayside and humans would find themselves in a ‘state of nature’, again, where according to Thomas Hobbes, life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

Those who resist the health guidelines in place to battle Covid-19 are the true friends of coronavirus. One can only hope that the anti-mask protesters in London will not inspire people in other countries, especially here, to follow suit.