Living in a Western society, it is easy to take certain things for granted. One is the fact that we peacefully share a social space with people from a wide variety of ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, pledge our allegiance to a shared set of political institutions, and by and large move around and access the very same public amenities with relative ease. We could be torn apart by ethnic, religious, or political conflict, but instead we have enough mutual trust to walk the same streets, share the same coffeeshops and restaurants and buses, and live peacefully under the same political system, even when our preferred candidates lose the election.
A free and open society, in which citizens of a wide variety of different ethnic, religious, political, and cultural backgrounds live under the same political institutions, play by the same basic rules, and treat each other as political equals, is a delicate achievement, and certainly not one to be taken for granted. There are relatively few times and places in history when people of different religions, ethnic origins, political ideals, and cultures have managed to recognise each other as political equals and share the same social space, the same government, and the same broad narrative of political legitimacy.
Much more frequently, people have lived in rigidly hierarchical societies, with limited social mobility, and have been bound together into tight-knit social enclaves, tribes, or classes, with limited openness to other groups and cultures. Very often, different social and political groups have borne attitudes of distrust, animosity, and even violent rivalry toward each other, and those who managed to rise to the top revelled in their political and social superiority over rival classes and social groups.
A Dangerous Precedent
The speed with which the universal rights and liberties characteristic of the open society were suspended in deference to speculative, unorthodox, and unsubstantiated theories of disease control should serve as a stark warning to us that the hard-won achievements of the open society can be bartered away for the subjective experience of a little more safety.
That most of these liberties have been restored in many parts of the West does not remove the fact that we now have a dangerous precedent that most Western governments and opinion leaders have yet to condemn or repudiate; a precedent that may well be invoked to justify renewed restrictions on citizens’ liberties during a future crisis, whether real or manufactured.
A New Social Underclass
The moment we start to build a “papers, please” society, in which citizens have to meet onerous vaccination or medical requirements in order to sit down in a restaurant or theatre, we are beginning to tear down the open society, and construct in its place a regimented, class-based society, in which some citizens, more willing or able to assume the burden of this or that bureaucratic requirement, effectively constitute a superior class of citizens, while others, either unwilling or unable to live the way the government is asking them to live, are ejected from “polite society,” and become a new social underclass, supposedly unfit for citizenship (as President Macron’s suggested in his disparaging remarks about unvaccinated citizens).
The existence of any social underclass is undesirable and in tension with the ideals of a free and open society. But the deliberate erection of such an underclass, whether permanent or temporary, is a gross insult to the ideal of a free and open society, and a fertile breeding ground for distrust, resentment, and violence, as a substantial minority of citizens feel arbitrarily excluded from the social contract, on the say-so of some bureacrat or petty tyrant. Once such a vile precedent is introduced, it lingers ominously in the background, ready to be invoked by unscrupulous or shallow rulers, should a suitable occasion present itself again in the future.
Forgotten Values
The architects of lockdowns, vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, which introduced the infrastructure of a “papers, please” society, appear to have a shallow understanding of the values that make Western societies places worth living in. Those who oversaw the introduction of lockdowns and mandatory vaccine apartheid, in spite of their insistence that they were just doing their best to respond to a public emergency, were instrumental in the steady erosion of civil rights during the pandemic, with very questionable, and at best speculative, public health benefits to be gleaned in return.
Basic civil rights, such as freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to protest, the privacy of the home, the right to access public venues and services, and even the right to informed consent to medical treatment, were set aside in the name of public health, with no compelling evidence that such rights violations would make any substantial difference to the medium and long-term disease burden, and little or no serious public debate about the social and moral costs of such draconian measures.
Many of our political leaders, opinion leaders, and fellow citizens have forgotten who we are. We are, or certainly aspire to be, free and open societies, in which each citizen moves around at his or her own discretion and can, for the most part (barring cases of criminality, delinquency, and gross incivility), access the same public venues and amenities as his or her fellow citizens, without being confronted on a regular basis with raised eyebrows, insults, or systematic discrimination.
Until we understand what it means to live in a free and open society, and why it matters for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren, we are liable to continue putting the speculative projections and strategic goals of technocrats ahead of the liberties of citizens.
If you enjoyed this, you might like to read the follow-up post, “On the Nature of a Free and Open Society, and Why It’s Worth Fighting For.”
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In case you missed it, here is the latest episode of Thunder Off Script: “Can We Rehabilitate Our Ailing Public Sphere?” - plus a two minute excerpt below:
A Free and Open Society is a Delicate Achievement, Whose Future Now Hangs in the Balance
Thank you David Thunder. Very well written and truthful article