What’s public, what’s private?
Robert Reich compares different ideas of freedom:
Trump and many Republicans insist that whether to wear a mask or to go to work during a pandemic should be personal choices. Yet what a woman does with her own body, or whether same-sex couples can marry, should be decided by government.
Trump and most Republicans are not very good at thinking about (or noticing) the ways individual acts can affect other people and/or the world we have to live in. In the abstract, absolute freedom sounds appealing, but in the reality, we live among people and most of what we do affects others. It’s about degrees and kinds as opposed to freedom v not-freedom. Flouting public health measures during a pandemic doesn’t take a whole lot of careful thought before you can figure out how it harms anyone.
What’s public, what’s private and where should government intervene? The question suffuses the impending election and much else in modern American life.
It is nonsensical to argue, as do Trump and his allies, that government cannot mandate masks or close businesses during a pandemic but can prevent women from having abortions and same-sex couples from marrying.
Trump doesn’t really give a shit about either abortions or same-sex marriage, he just likes sticking it to the liberals and being the meanest Republican who ever republicanned.
During wartime, we expect government to intrude on our daily lives for the common good: drafting us into armies, converting our workplaces and businesses, demanding we sacrifice normal pleasures and conveniences. During a pandemic as grave as this one we should expect no less intrusion, in order that we not expose others to the risk of contracting the virus.
But we have no right to impose on others our moral or religious views about when life begins or the nature and meaning of marriage. The common good requires instead that we honor such profoundly personal decisions.
The when life begins question is tricky, because ordinarily you could say that’s a scientific or philosophical question, or both, or some of each. The reason you can’t leave it at that in the case of pregnancy and abortion is the troublesome fact that the question takes place inside the body of a person, a woman. All the way inside it. The pregnancy, the process of becoming, is internal to one particular woman. It’s personal to her first of all. Even if you think the fetus has rights, even if you think the fetus has a soul, even if you think the fetus is not just alive but a person, you still have no right to dismiss the fact that the fetus is inside a woman. Her wants have to matter.
“Freedom” is a meaningless term unless you specify:
• Whose freedom to do what to whom?
• Whose freedom from having what done to them by whom?
It doesn’t take a genius to see that these are often in conflict. I once had a friend of the Ayn Rand libertarian persuasion who gave the following example of what “freedom” meant to him: Rich people should be able to buy up large areas of land and deny entry to whomever they wanted. When I pointed out that this seemed like a massive intrusion into other people’s freedom to access those areas, he instantly backtracked* (“I don’t necessarily mean it exactly like that, but…”), but insisted that “the principle” still stood. As others have put it, arguing with him was like trying to nail soup to the wall.
* As he always did since none of his sweeping, categorical statements were ever really thought out, just random ideas that went through his head at that very moment.
It’s similar to the conversation at my school when they were considering going to a non-smoking campus. Not just in the buildings, those were already non-smoking. Anywhere on campus. The smokers were saying “you know, you have to be exposed to a lot of smoke over a long period of time before you get cancer from it, and walking through smoke as you go out the building won’t do that”.
I finally had enough and jumped in. I pointed out that my asthma can flare to potentially lethal levels with no more than that. They had to move an office mate I once had because his coat smelled like smoke, and I was struggling to breathe. It doesn’t take much. My right to breathe should outweigh someone else’s right to smoke…in a sensible, just world.
Our campus is now non-smoking, but they waltz around the mask question. The mandate they put in place keeps getting talked about as a suggestion, and I don’t see a lot being done to enforce it even as our hospital is near capacity. With flu season coming, they are worried they will overflow soon, like so many other hospitals are doing, and we still do not have a lockdown order at any level of government.
I’ve heard some variant of the “rich people will go and live somewhere by themselves and then where would you be?” idea a few times, often involving islands in warm tropical places. I’ve always wondered how they’d get their toilets cleaned, their computers fixed or their fires and floods managed. But more importantly, it’s clear that such a society is dysfunctional.
Here’s a living breathing example. Ghana and Nigeria both discovered vast oil reserves in their territory around the same time. Ghana has used that wealth to become one of the most democratic countries in Africa, has made significant industrial and technological progress and has features of government and society you might associate with more developed nations such as universal healthcare, social security and better rights for women. Nigeria on the other hand, has not fared so well. All the money from the oil is tied up in the hands of a few very rich people. There is rampant corruption, crime and violence, poor government funding for basic needs and widespread poverty. Ghanaians seem to regard Nigeria with a mixture of pity and scorn. I am frequently told by Ghanaians I meet and work with that it would be quite dangerous for me to go to Nigeria without a security guard. I’m not sure how true that is, but being a white, blonde female Westerner certainly would make the proposition risky.
That’s not to say Ghana does not have problems with corruption, crime or any of those other things. But it’s a completely different level and not one we have any rights to condemn (especially in the era of Trump and Johnson).
So why are the countries so different? As far as I can tell, it’s the presence of a large middle class, promoted by extensive access to education even for those born in extreme poverty. Being born in a shack in one of the worst parts of Accra (the capital city) is not as much of a barrier to becoming a doctor, lawyer, CEO, accountant etc. as in Nigeria. Nigeria is a land of extremes – huge wealth or desperate poverty.
A healthy middle class is fundamental to a functioning democracy and therefore a more even distribution of wealth. Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and a major figure in the liberation of Ghana (previously the Gold Coast), had principles about freedom and democracy that he sought to impose on Ghana’s emerging political structure after they threw out the British.
In summary, the destruction of the middle class in the US is not an accident, it is by design. It is a route to even more enormous wealth for the few and much poorer standards of living for everyone else. The trouble is (for them) that such a structure can be as unstable as it is uneven and can be toppled by revolt. The unrest in Nigeria is growing right now – I am watching the developments closely.
PS for anyone interested: Kwame Nkrumah’s name is pronounced KWAR-may UHN-crew-mar. The A sound in Kwa does not have a direct sound comparable with English since the A is somewhere between the a in bar and the a in cat. But you won’t do too bad with rhyming with bar.