The casinos after the pandemic
How the coronavirus is giving us an intensive course in a different moral universe.
One of the things we value in modern life is law, as the declaration of American independence, life, freedom and the search for happiness says. The idea that each of us must be free to pursue their own ambitions and desires provided that the rights of others to do the same is part of the foundations of liberal democracy are not infringed.
From Freud, we are convinced that our deepest impulses, we like it or not, are decisive of who we are, that suppressing them is harmful and we need to let them find a way out. John Stuart Mill taught us that individual self-expression exceeds social conformity. The language of human rights has taught us to insist on our individual rights and to be belligerent when they are threatened. The idea of ‘fulfilling your duty’ has become, not the highly valued base of society, but a boring and gray moral demand of generals, heads of explorers, moralists and monarchs of World War I.
It is a frequent observation that in the modern world we no longer have a common idea of what a good life is, but we are destined to build our own versions of it. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa points out that, although this may be true, we have an almost universal agreement on the necessary previous conditions. To have a good and happy existence, in any way you want, enough money, friends, knowledge, health and rights to achieve it are needed. ‘Ensure the resources you may need to live your dream, whatever. That is the primary rational imperative of modernity.’The result is that each of us is in a competition for the resources that allow us to live our own self-choose version of the good life.
Now, all this was a departure from an old. San Pablo, for example, wrote about how leaders should be ‘self-controlled, straight, saints and disciplined’. In this moral tradition, the constant derives towards tyranny could only be stopped by virtue and self-government. The Government for the Poli was only possible with personal self-government. Freedom was seen, not as the freedom to pursue your passion, but as the freedom of passion, understood as unpredictable emotions and impulses and torments that disturb the soul and distort the clarity of the vision that comes from a quiet heart and aclear head. These internal impulses needed to be controlled instead of letting themselves be, and that control was better self-imposed instead of being regulated by the State.
At some point this could have been seen as the difference between the conservative and progressive visions of morality, or between the right and the left. However, as Patrick Deneen demonstrated in his insightful ‘why liberalism failed’, today we are all progressive. Modern liberal democracies see us all as autonomous individuals who should be free from the limitations of duty or demands of others and instead follow our desires. The only difference is that the right sees the market and the minimum interference of the State as the key to allowing these personal freedoms, while the left sees the control and regulation of the State as the way of establishing and safeguarding those freedoms.
In recent weeks, we have seen something quite extraordinary. Without too much legal threat, we have voluntarily submitted to severe abstinence, refusing the rights to mix freely, to go to pubs and restaurants, to see live sports, to give us hand, to travel to work. As we go through this period of collective self-denial, the suppression of our personal ambitions and desires, we are learning to redirect our personal desires towards a greater good, to sacrifice what we would normally like to do for the good of the whole.
We are learning that for a society to work, and to avoid the threats that confront it, it is not enough to give priority to the individual choice alone. A society cannot survive if each of us pursues their own objectives regardless of others. We have to exercise moderation, the ‘self-discipline and resolution’ ’of the Queen, to learn the ability to sacrifice our own desires for the good of the community in general.
To deal with the potentially serious challenges of climate change, or the elimination of world poverty, for example, an even larger and longer self-control exercise will be required. The question is, when all this ends, if we will return to what we have been accustomed in the recent past, or if we will restore some balance between the demands of the individual ambition and the common good.
Leave feedback