How can it be that the most liberal countries in the world have suddenly become the most authoritarian Covid dictatorships?

The judgement by an Amsterdam judge forbidding Thierry Baudet from comparing the current discrimination against the unvaccinated with discrimination against the Jews during the Second World War; the prohibition against unvaccinated people using any form of transport in Canada (which means that you cannot leave Canada, by plane for instance, if you are unvaccinated); the massive police hunts in Australia[1] against three Covid-free[2] people who escaped from a quarantine facility near Darwin (perhaps ‘concentration camp’ would be a better term, since the ghettos established in Warsaw and other Polish cities were labelled ‘Seuchensperrgebiete’ – zones closed to prevent epidemics – as you can see from this article[3] on the web page of the Warsaw Ghetto museum and also from numerous photographs[4] from the period) – all these have occurred in countries historically associated with long traditions of civil and political liberty. To be sure, other countries with different traditions – Austria, Italy - have also introduced authoritarian measures[5] but there seems to be a particular viciousness emanating from the Anglo-Saxon world and now also from the Netherlands.

Where does this come from? There are, I believe, two sources. First, the Puritan and Calvinist traditions are no strangers to the notion of punishment; on the contrary, they thrive on it. Protestantism is deeply influenced by its sense of self-righteousness and its rejection of the Catholic sacrament of confession and the associated practice of forgiveness. Today, the old ‘fire and brimstone’ sermons of fundamentalist Protestants may have been relegated to the fringes, as these societies (especially Britain, Canada and Australia but also the Netherlands) become overwhelmingly secular. But there is no doubt that the punishment ethic forms and integral part of the political DNA of Anglo-Saxon countries. I am not just referring to well-known historical phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the ‘fast sermons’ preached in the English House of Commons, and across the country, during the English Civil War (1642-1651): in one of the most notorious of these, a man called Stephen Marshall called on Roundhead soldiers to smash babies’ heads against walls. I am also referring to the fact, of which neither the USA or Australia likes to be reminded, that their very origins lie, at least partially, in punishment: Australia was used as a penal colony two years after the American revolution prevented the American continent from being used for the same purpose, as it had been since the 17th century. This is why in 1769 Dr Johnson said of the Americans “Sir, they are a race of convicts and ought to be content with anything we allow them short of hanging.”[6]

The second tradition is more recent and more relevant. It is Epicurianism. Over two and a half centuries after the Protestant Reformation, ‘the pursuit of happiness’ was put alongside life and liberty as the most ‘sacred’, ‘undeniable’ and ‘inalienable’ God-given rights proclaimed by the US Declaration of Independence of 1776. Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews[7] had already given visual expression to this very English ideal of unheroic domestic contentment 20 years previously; Jeremy Bentham gave philosophical expression to it in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence (which was also the year in which Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations), in his Preface to A Fragment on Government where he proclaimed that ‘the measure of right and wrong’ was ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Bentham later went on to develop not only the absurd ‘felicific calculus’, which, he thought, would enable the legislator to calculate the social consequences of any measure with scientific exactness, but also a similar calculus for punishments which, he argued, should be very precisely calibrated to the crime and with the goal of deterrence. Indeed, Bentham’s magnum opus, An Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (1780), which elaborated his theory of utilitarianism, was originally written as a penal code.

The two traditions – Puritanism and the pursuit of pleasure – might at first seem to be opposites. But we know that historically they are not. 17th century Amsterdam was anything but puritanical; restorationist England was the country of Purcell and Handel, even after the Protestant succession was guaranteed in 1689. Moreover, the two traditions are linked at their deepest level by two immensely powerful political ideas which are far stronger than their apparent differences: the belief in progress and the view that law is an instrument by which the state controls society.

Progress first. Protestantism in its initial years regarded politics as struggle and human life as the great theatre in which the drama of salvation is played out. Protestantism is millenarian because it seeks to achieve on earth what Catholics think can be achieved only in heaven. From the early 17th century onwards, the father of the modern religion of progress, Francis Bacon, wrote (as did his contemporary, the poet John Milton) that the advancement of science would enable man to regain the control over nature which he had lost when expelled from the garden of Eden.[8] This is the point at which progressivism elides into authoritarianism: science (knowledge) is about regaining power over nature and about improving man; law is an instrument for producing certain outcomes in the name of this progress; and the goal of social engineering is happiness. The state is there to make the greatest number of people happy - and if that means quarantining healthy citizens, too bad.

Friedrich von Hayek tried to bring the Austrian tradition into Britain. Throughout his life in London, he battled against his colleague Keynes at the London School of Economics. He pleaded with his readers to understand that law is not an instrument of social control (a goal which is always impossible) but instead an intelligible order which enables individuals to deal with unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. He denounced ‘the fatal conceit’ of socialism which believed that society could be managed. “What we must ask the reader to keep constantly in mind … is the fact of the necessary and irremediable ignorance on everyone’s part of most of the particular facts which determine the actions of all the several members of human society … The structure of human activities constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody … Civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge we do not possess.”[9]

Hayek’s teaching fell on stony ground. Only the bourgeois message of ‘enrichissez-vous’ was retained under Mrs Thatcher, not his urging that freedom is not just a right but also a value. A state based on command and obedience, which by definition regards disobedience and even questioning as an existential threat, soon haemorrhages into sclerosis because society is more complex than any individual or any government can know. State commands are therefore necessarily damaging. By contrast, a society based on freedom and the law will flourish because that unsurmountable ignorance is turned into a source of regularity and inventiveness, as people use tradition and the law to respond to new events. Although it also produces material well-being, such a society is above all based on intelligence by turning to its advantage the knowledge which is dispersed across society, but which no institution or individual can have in its totality. Intelligence is not just useful for its material benefits, it also defines what it is to be human, i.e. precisely not just a materialist animal. Yet consumerism and infantilism have reduced our societies to something resembling a herd which expects nothing more than to be guided and protected by its shepherds.

The Covid dictatorship has not come out of the blue: it is instead the direct result of decades of the nanny state which is itself based on a constant and deliberately engineered fear. Climate change? More state power! Terrorism? More state power! An epidemic? More state power! The only thing people are not afraid of today is more state power – and that is precisely the problem.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-01/multiple-people-escape-howard-springs-quarantine-facility-darwin/100663994 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/01/nt-police-search-for-three-people-who-escaped-from-howard-springs-covid-quarantine-facility [3] http://1943.pl/en/artykul/it-is-not-about-eradicating-the-epidemic-but-about-exterminating-the-jews-the-wall-around-the-warsaw-ghetto/ [4] https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1160210 [5] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/watch-alexander-tschugguel-raises-alarm-on-covid-tyranny-in-austria/ [6] James Davie BUTLER, British Convicts Shipped to American Colonies, American Historical Review, Vol 2 No. 1 (Oct. 1896), pp. 12-33 [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_and_Mrs_Andrews#/media/File:Thomas_Gainsborough_-_Mr_and_Mrs_Andrews.jpg