Lockdowns Recreated a Pre-Modern Caste System

If you test positive or refuse to be tested at all in New Zealand, prepare to be shipped out to a quarantine camp recently established by the government. Shocking, yes, but we have an analogous system in the US. If you test positive (which is not the same as actually being sick), you will be removed from school or forbidden from coming into the office. You could lose your job – or refused the opportunity to earn money. In many places in the country and the world where you travel today, you are subject to quarantine unless you can present a clean Covid test, regardless of profound questions that still surround the accuracy of such testing.

All these policies that stigmatize the sick, excluding them from society, follow directly from a strange twist in Covid policies. We started presuming that many or even most people will get the disease but seeking only to slow the pace at which it spread. Over time, we began to attempt the impossible, namely to stop the spread altogether. In the course of it, we’ve set up systems that punish and exclude the sick, or at least relegate them to a second-class status (a Scarlet Letter C on their chest, as it were) while the rest of us wait for the virus to go away either through a vaccine or some mysterious process by which the bug goes into retirement.

What really is going on here? It is resurrecting what amounts to a pre-modern ethos of how society deals with the presence of infectious disease. It’s not clear whether this is by accident or not. That it is in fact happening is indisputable. We are hurling ourselves in fits and starts toward a new system of castes, created in the name of disease mitigation.

Every pre-modern society assigned to some group the task of bearing the burden of new pathogens. Usually, the designation of the unclean was assigned based on race, language, religion, or class. There was no mobility out of this caste. They were the dirty, the diseased, the untouchables. Depending on the time and place, they were segregated geographically, and the designation followed from generation to generation. This system was sometimes codified in religion or law; more commonly this caste system was baked into social convention.

In the ancient world, the burden of disease was assigned to people not born as “free;” that is, as part of the class permitted to participate in public affairs. The burden was borne by the workers, merchants, and slaves who mostly lived away from the city – unless the rich fled the cities during a pandemic. Then the poor suffered while the feudal lords went to their manors in the country for the duration, forcing the burden of burning out the virus on others. From a biological perspective, they served the purpose of operating like sandbags to keep those in city free of disease. Pathogens were something to be carried and absorbed by them and not us. The elites were invited to look down on them, even though it was these people – the lower castes – who were operating as the biological benefactors of everyone else.

… Lockdowns are the worst of all worlds from the perspective of public health. More than that, lockdowns represent a repudiation of the social contract we long ago made in order to deal with infectious diseases. We worked for centuries to reject the idea that some group – some caste – should be permanently assigned the role of getting sick so that the rest of us can persist in an immunologically virginal state. We abolished the systems that entrenched such brutality. We decided that this is radically inconsistent with every civic value that built the modern world.

By reinstating ancient forms of exclusion, disease assignment or avoidance based on class, and social stigma of the sick, the lockdowners have created an astonishing pre-modern catastrophe.

There is more to The Great Barrington Declaration than a simple statement of cell biology and public health. It is also a reminder of a deal that modernity made with infectious diseases: despite their presence, we will have rights, we will have freedoms, we will have universal social mobility, we will include not exclude, and we will all participate in making the world safe for the most vulnerable among us, regardless of arbitrary conditions of race, language, tribe, or class.

https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-recreated-a-pre-modern-caste-system/

Wokeness: old religion in a new bottle

Woke anti-racism certainly appears to have taken on the trappings of religion. White people have been seen washing the feet of black people and asking for forgiveness, a ritual firmly in line with the Christian tradition. And terms like ‘white guilt’ and ‘white privilege’ are treated much as Original Sin used to be – things for which humanity must forever atone.

One person who has long been exploring the religious fervour of today’s increasingly moralistic politics is the essayist and author Joseph Bottum. Indeed, his 2014 book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, seems almost prophetic. There he argued that the demise of traditional Protestantism in the US has led liberals to transfer their religious beliefs, habits and passions into the political realm, moralising it in the process. Our age of ‘post-Protestantism’, he concludes, has eroded the boundary between the religious and the political, infusing politics with a religious mindset and discourse.

spiked’s US correspondent, Sean Collins, caught up with Bottum, at his home in the Black Hills of South Dakota, to find out what he makes of the contemporary political moment, woke anti-racism and the phenomenon of cancel culture.

…

Collins: Why does the Elect have to go as far as to ‘cancel’? You could imagine a movement promulgating certain moral ideas in society, and hoping to win converts. Such a movement wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to purge others, who didn’t agree with them, from their workplaces and colleges. What drives the Elect to go to those lengths?

Bottum: Look, you wouldn’t want a Satan worshipper turning up at your Church on a Sunday. You would drive them out. But of course these people don’t live in churches any more. This is what happens when those old ideas break loose and become modes of behaviour in politics. They don’t want these people in their church, but their church is politics. Their congregation is Twitter. They want these people not to exist, they want them banished. There are the power reasons for this: look at how powerful I am; I am a 17-year-old kid, and I had a major US corporation kow-towing to me. But there’s also this kind of religious sense that we can’t let sinners into the church. That’s what shunning was for, to get people to confess their sins, to realise their sinfulness. That’s what we’re doing now – it’s just that the church, the locus of faith, is no longer your congregation on Sunday. It’s public life.

This demand that politics somehow solve everything is an apocalyptic, religious sense of politics. For hundreds of years American jurisprudence has worried about the impact of religion on politics. What’s really extraordinary is that it is finally happening – politics is becoming religionised – but it’s being done in the name of anti-religion.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/14/wokeness-old-religion-in-new-bottle/