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Matthew Crawford essay on Covid and Liberalism.

All things COVID
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isha
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Matthew Crawford essay on Covid and Liberalism.

#1

Post by isha »

https://unherd.com/2022/05/covid-was-li ... s-endgame/


Look it, I can't help it, I'm going to foist this on yiz, because I think it's brilliant. But I don't care if no one reads it.
It is excellent, to my mind. Really explained a lot of the alienation I have felt over the course of the pandemic.

This is helpful for background context .. what is the difference philosophically-speaking between Hobbes and Locke.

http://www.differencebetween.net/miscel ... are%20safe.
1. Locke and Hobbes were both social contract theorists and natural law theorists.
2. The two philosophers had different educational backgrounds. Hobbes was a known English philosopher from Malmesbury. On the other hand, Locke was a known doctor from Oxford University.
3. Regarding human nature – according to Locke, that man is a social animal. According to Hobbes, man isn’t a social animal.
4. Regarding the state of nature – according to Locke, man is true to his obligations and words. According to Hobbes, the life of a man would be poor and brutal in a society with continuous fear and danger.
5. Regarding the social contract – according to Locke, man has the right to life and just and impartial protection. According to Hobbes, if man simply does what he is told, he is safe.
Some extracts from the essay, but it is long and bears reading as a whole

The Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben points out that, in fact, the “state of exception” has almost become the rule rather than the exception in the Western liberal democracies over the last century. The language of war is invoked to pursue ordinary domestic politics. Over the past 60 years in the United States, we have had the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Covid, the war on disinformation, and the war on domestic extremism
.....

The pandemic brought liberalism’s deeper contradictions into plain view. On the one hand, it accelerated what had previously been a slow-motion desertion of liberal principles of government. On the other hand, Covid culture has brought to the surface the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological: to remake man. That project can come to fruition, it seems, only with a highly illiberal form of government, paradoxically enough. If we can understand this, it might explain why our embrace of illiberal politics has met with so little resistance. It seems the anthropological project is a more powerful commitment for us than allegiance to the forms and procedures of liberal government.

Our regime is founded on two rival pictures of the human subject. The Lockean one regards us as rational, self-governing creatures. It locates reason in a common human endowment — common sense, more or less — and underwrites a basically democratic or majoritarian form of politics. There are no secrets to governing. The second, rival picture insists we are irrationally proud, and in need of being governed. This Hobbesian picture is more hortatory than the first; it needs us to think of ourselves as vulnerable, so the state can play the role of saving us. It underwrites a technocratic, progressive form of politics.

......


The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasise the cognitive incompetence of human beings, deposing the “rational actor” model of human behaviour. This gave us nudge theory , a way to alter people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalised, on both sides of the Atlantic. The innovation achieved here is in the way government conceives its subjects: not as citizens whose considered consent must be secured, but as particles to be steered through a science of behaviour management that relies on our pre-reflective cognitive biases.


.......


Technocratic progressivism in fact requires the disqualification of experience and common sense as a guide to reality, and installs in their place a priestly form of authority, closer to the Enlightenment’s caricature of medieval society than to its own self-image.

It also requires a certain human type which, fittingly enough, looks like a caricature of the medieval personality: a credulous, fearful person. This brings us to the Hobbesian anthropological program.

........

In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.

......

Hobbes offers a fable of human origins, the state of nature, according to which we are originally in a condition of acute vulnerability. Even after the rise of political society, civil war is always a threat, and is the problem that his politics is meant to solve. The problem comes down to the fact that we are prone to pride, or vainglory; we are ornery. This is based on a false consciousness in which we place too high a value on ourselves; we then feel slighted and insulted when others fail to recognise us. Such aristocratic brittleness leads to faction and civil strife. The good news is that it can be overcome through a shift in perspective, if we (and especially the proud) come to identify with the weak rather than think ourselves strong. We are all potential victims, and this is the self-awareness that grounds political authority in consent. Out of fear, we consent to a social compact in which we all submit to Leviathan, whom Hobbes calls “King of the proud”.

......


A therapeutic para-state of social workers and psychiatrists arose early in the 20th century and was well described by Christopher Lasch. It has long required fragile selves, more as clients than as citizens. With the rise of the biosecurity state, this demand has taken on a new dimension.

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There's loads more but I will leave it to anyone interested in reading the essay. You would need a cup of tea or a beer to go along with it.
I'm going to have to reread it a couple of times. It really helped me sort out a perspective on what has happened lately in the world.
Thinking out loud, and trying to be occasionally less wrong...
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PureIsle
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Re: Matthew Crawford essay on Covid and Liberalism.

#2

Post by PureIsle »

I have to admit that on one reading some of that went over my head, but the basic import was clear.
Yes it does help to explain what has been happening over decades, and what we finally saw clearly, as a result of the declaration of a pandemic.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
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