How to survive lockdown — and beyond | thearticle

I’ve started a Facebook page logging the (completely fictitious) lockdown transgressions of my (equally fictitious) local community. These range, in my imagination, across a broad spectrum

of offences: from shopping in the (non-essential) Marks and Spencer’s food hall at the expense of the more modestly priced Iceland next door, to the hiding of superfluous Easter eggs at the

back of the well-cultivated indoor cannabis factory. Why? So that when the lockdown is lifted, the bad habits of thought it encourages will stand a chance of being lifted with it. Currently

there is a division between those who argue that the government is right to act on the available scientific advice, that such advice in fact _obliges _this lockdown; and those who dispute

this on the basis that the current measures are based on one _version _of “the science, that the modelling excludes incidental casualties, and that the strategy dissolves a distinction that

should be maintained: that between scientific advice and settled government policy. If we are honest, we will admit that the rightness or wrongness of the current approach is currently

indeterminable, and that any evaluation can only take place _post hoc_. But we can surely agree that locking down the country involves doing harm, whether that harm is necessary or not,

calculable or not, mitigated or not?  So, we can, presumably, further agree that when the lockdown is lifted the harm it is inflicting must be lifted with it? But we are moving into a

situation which makes such simultaneity highly unlikely. And that movement is largely of our own volition, whether active or passive. The former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption last week

suggested that we are in the embryonic stages of the development of a police state. He pointed out that when governments suspend our freedoms it is invariably with our acquiescence. But this

is only partly right, because acquiescence implies consent which in turn implies the ability to think clearly about what we are consenting to. The danger in the current situation is that we

have internalised the grammar of lockdown. We have manufactured from this crisis a prism through which all things are seen. Lockdown is becoming what Wittgenstein called a “form of life”,

and once you’re embedded in one of those, it’s hard to think your way out of it. The virus, or at least the response to it, has colonised our minds, and it’s far from clear that lifting the

lockdown would be followed by any immediate liberation from that cognitive incarceration. We need to start planning the prison break now, because our society has become atomised, our thought

has become uniform, and dissent from the orthodoxy has become subject to the unpleasant policing mechanisms of the national and social media (usually a sign that the orthodoxy has something

seriously wrong with it). So, dissent of some type is necessary, whether the lockdown is right or wrong. Because even if the government strategy is the correct one then two things still

follow: that we need to survive the lifting of the lockdown as much as the lockdown itself — which requires that we do not become brainwashed; and for the more general reason that, as Mill

would argue, systematic criticism will sharpen a correct policy, both in terms of substance and presentation. The question then becomes: what form should that dissent take? There is an

“ethic of dissent” when its expression comes in the context of a shared crisis. And I do not advocate the defiance of government instructions, or the law. But we can develop mechanisms of

benign subversion intended to keep us sane and in good shape for what comes after. When the culture becomes oppressive, even (especially) when the oppression is necessary in the short-term,

then being a bit _counter-cultural _becomes essential for spiritual health. Christians on mission (i.e. not the hour-a-week-on-Sunday types) have the jump on us here. As the philosopher

William Lane Craig pointed out, if you aren’t being counter-cultural when the culture is a secular one, then your discipleship is defective. The early Church had a sense of this when it

referred to itself as “the Way”. St Paul, following Our Lord, stressed in his letters the importance of obedience to the political order, while finding a different “way of being” within it.

_Repentance_, the necessary if insufficient condition of salvation, is translated from the Greek _metanoia —_ literally _change of mind_. You do not need to be a Christian, or even

religious, to see that a template is available here. We can take these lockdown restrictions seriously in two ways: by dutifully observing them, and by recognising the absurdity _in_ them,

if not _of _them. We thereby fulfil our obligations to the community and to ourselves. We need, in short, to purge ourselves, daily, of incipient ways of thinking which unchecked are likely

to acquire their own destructive inertia. We need to lose what the AA Fellowship calls “stinking thinking”. Because if, when these restrictions are lifted, we find that we have at best moved

into the cognitive _open _prison, then we will leave ourselves vulnerable to the intrusions of a future, less benign, government, and without the spiritual resources to push back. If the

government’s response to this crisis sets a precedent, then our reaction to that response must set one as well. When the lockdown is lifted, the harm which attends it needs to be lifted as

well. That will only happen, and a proper future evaluation will only be possible, if we are pushing back _now_. Not through disobedience, but through irony, appreciation of the current

absurdities, and an intolerance of those who demand a paralysis both of thought and appropriate curiosity. Not everything is the government’s responsibility. Top of the list of things which

aren’t is how we respond to the way it interprets those things which are. So, when a public servant announces that staying at home is an _instruction_, and that failure to follow it might

result in a ban on outdoor exercise then why not get counter-cultural and order a new pair of running shoes, with the intention of never using them? You’ll be financially worse off, for

sure, but the spiritual and mental benefits will more than compensate.