The 1957-58 Asian Flu vs Covid: A Tale of Two Responses

Sunday, March 9th, was our state-endorsed, curated, and tailored ‘Covid Reflection Day’. A day late (lest I indulge in something rather distasteful and Orwellian), here’s a piece I originally wrote, under a pseudonym, while still an academic at a UK institution. That I had to conceal my identity to protect a job that would soon be swept away by the imperatives of a consumer-driven, EDI-fixated, neoliberal higher education sector tells you everything about the climate of that period, our period.

Published in The Daily Sceptic almost exactly five years ago, it examines how Britain’s response to crises has shifted from the measured stoicism of past generations to the febrile hysteria that defined the Covid ‘lockdown(s)’. Government messaging, media amplification, and a cultural drift towards safetyism supplanted individual judgment with an unquestioning deference to technocratic authority.

Far from an aberration, Covid merely exposed a deeper societal trend: the long erosion of resilience, autonomy, and reasoned risk assessment in favour of infantilised dependence on the state.

📖 Read the full article here.

Below is the article’s conclusion — now all together, everyone: “Thank you, NHS!”

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Conclusions: From Stoicism to Hysteria?

In 1957 the UK responded to a global pandemic with cool, calm stoicism. The pandemic was “just” a pandemic, not a social catastrophe. Citizens could cope. Death was the exception not the rule. Society (and the economy that paid for it) would struggle on. People would continue to go about their everyday lives. Fast forward to the UK of 2020, and we encounter a society that’s responding to a similarly infectious, similarly dangerous pandemic with what amounts to shrill, hyperventilating hysteria. The pandemic will destroy everything we know and hold dear about life. Individuals can’t cope. Death lurks around every corner. Society (and the economy that pays for it) must be suspended. People must be protected from the myriad risks posed by everyday life. Whereas the stoic proclaims, “I’ll manage, let me be!” the hysteric wails, “I can’t cope, help me!”

Flitting back and forth between these two pandemic responses is like tracing the contours of a profound cultural shift that’s taken place across Western societies over the past 60 years. There was a time when people, individuals, citizens (whatever you want to call them) were seen, conceptualised and treated as resilient, capable and autonomous beings. The stoicism of the UK’s response to H2N2 was the natural corollary to this way of understanding what it meant to be a person in society – after all, if someone was resilient, capable and autonomous, then the onus was on them to take something like a global pandemic in their stride without too much external intervention. In recent years, however, there’s been a slight but nonetheless significant change to the way we conceptualise “personhood”. It’s not necessarily that we hear less about resilience and autonomy; it’s that the significance of problems like vulnerability and fragility has increased. The hysteria of the UK’s response to COVID-19 is the natural corollary to this new, rapidly emerging vision of personhood: if you’re vulnerable and fragile then the onus is on you to allow others to look after you during a global pandemic.

But so what? Is this even a problem? Deep down aren’t we’re all fragile? Don’t we all sometimes feel vulnerable? Of course. But we aren’t talking about “literal” vulnerability or “actual” fragility. We’re talking about vulnerability and fragility as concepts, as terms that feature within debates taking place at governmental, policy and regulatory levels regarding people’s potentialities in society: What are people capable of? What should they be capable of? What can we trust them to be capable of? The relatively recent emergence in the West of phenomena like health and safety, safeguarding and risk assessments perhaps hints at the types of answers these questions have been receiving. The ideal person whom policy makers have in their heads as they design these initiatives is not an autonomous, resilient being. He’s vulnerable. He needs protecting from his own autonomy. Want to use an angle grinder? Fill out a health and safety sheet. Using bleach to clean a toilet? Complete a risk assessment. Successive governments have, in these ways, slowly been redrawing the boundaries of personhood. Unpredictable and unruly autonomy and resilience? Out. Predictable and malleable vulnerability and fragility? Very much in.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the UK Government’s response to COVID-19 is that in the space of two short months it has achieved what three decades of health and safety regulation couldn’t – it’s encouraged large swathes of people to appreciate the benefits of being considered vulnerable by authority. Do this, don’t do that; touch this, don’t touch that; walk here, don’t walk there. Loss of autonomy suddenly seems a small price to pay when it preserves what you now know to be your fragile, vulnerable body.

But does any of this philosophical chit-chat really matter? Can’t we just learn the political lessons from the UK’s lockdown mistakes, hold a government inquiry, sack the Health Minister, draw a line under the whole debacle and move on? Perhaps we can. But one wonders what “moving on” would really amount to in such a scenario. Those same governmental understandings of personhood would still be in place – indeed, if anything, they’d have been strengthened by many months of getting away with ordering people not to die. That’s likely to be a bit of a problem when it comes to “moving on”. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that another pandemic hoves into view in six months’ time. What then? The type of pandemic response advocated by most lockdown sceptics – i.e. no lockdown, or just quarantining those most at risk with everyone else getting on with the business of daily life – presumes precisely the type of resilient and autonomous citizen that Western governments no longer recognise or want to factor into the design and implementation of their policies. They just don’t see people in the same way that lockdown sceptics see people. Almost certainly, then, a return to lockdown would quickly ensue.

Perhaps if we “moved on” for a long enough amount of time, we’d wake up one day and find that as vulnerable, fragile people we needed lockdown protection from more than just global pandemics. “Arrgh! Nigel Farage’s about to release another video documenting illegal immigration through the port of Dover. Quick, kids! Into the panic room!” “Eek! Sales of wood-burning stoves in the UK increased by 3.7% during the last financial quarter! Keep an eye out for tsunamis and head for the bunker!” That’s the problem with “moving on”: it treats the problem we’ve got right now as a purely political one. But look hard enough behind anything you regard as a “political problem”, and you’ll almost certainly uncover a well worked-out philosophical position structuring it.

That’s why the historic data discussed in this essay is so relevant to the current political problem of how we might unpick the West’s burgeoning lockdown cultures. 1957 isn’t just 60 years ago; it’s an entire philosophy away. It provides a position from which to envision disaster responses very different to our own. The ideal person whom policy makers had in their minds when they designed policy back in the 1950s wasn’t a vulnerable hysteric: it was an autonomous, capable and resilient being. If policy makers thought that way once, they can (potentially) get to thinking that way again.