The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home. We
have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in
recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the
Wuhan bat flu. One type of protest, such as that which took place
in Steinbach on the 14th of November, expresses opposition to
the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of
association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional
civil rights. The other type of protest expressed the views of the
socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and
their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the
CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan
Thorpe. Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the
government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly
enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment
the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths
we have seen since September.
My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as
anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already
knows. I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters' basic position. I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil
disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed
at those protests.
While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to
their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many
if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of
the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.
When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do
everything in its power to slow or stop the spread. Indeed, it has
a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread
of the virus. This is because the government has the power to do
tremendous evil as well as good.
Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is
in itself a good and worthy goal. Stopping and slowing the spread
of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a
good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable. Slowing the spread of
the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time
we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise
be the case. That can hardly be regarded as desirable in
itself. Quite the contrary in fact. Whether this is an
acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved,
depends upon a couple of considerations.
First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing
the spread of the virus in saving lives. If the method is not
effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic
is much less tolerable.
Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing
of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.
If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out
the pandemic.
Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of
support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a
good end, such as saving lives.
With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear
that any lives have been saved in this way at all. Indeed, at the
beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase
“flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that
it would not decrease the total lives lost but merely spread them out so
that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once. This, in my
opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not
one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.
This brings us to our second criteria. The means by
which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of
the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good. On the
contrary, they are positively evil. They inflict all sorts of unnecessary
misery upon people. Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain
that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save
lives. This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were
valid. The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely
that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.
Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other
people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that
if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat
to be “non-essential”. It forces people to act against their nature as
social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their
psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical
wellbeing. Mens sana in corpore sano. The longer people
are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation
will erode away at their mental health. Phone, e-mail, and even
video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.
All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is
that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being
imposed. The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second
lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same
year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair
on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation. The government has
kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of
alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for
self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among
other things, hope, to close. This is evil of truly monstrous
proportions. It can only lead to death – whether by suicide,
addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.
The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he
leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and
not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are
wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are
wrong-headed about everything. The government does not become
morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are
extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving
lives. Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into
the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes
one health complication too many.
Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with
regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill
others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply
give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent
Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.
Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures
of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just
numbers but people. This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he
hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he
knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he
admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by
manipulating their emotions.
Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?
What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had
decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been
exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you
cancelled his job as "non-essential", took away his social
life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation? Do you
not realize that he is a person as well?
In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out
to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu. In which case
all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller
number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger
number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood.
