The ethics of small things
Someone was telling me recently about an old family friend; I will call her Mrs Lockyer. Although independent, and living on her own in Acton, West London, she has a lung condition that leaves her struggling to breathe. Her feet swell and she experiences spells of dizziness. For her, going to the shops is a once-a-week marathon. She has two children; one lives in Exmouth, the other in Holt, Norfolk. Before lockdown she would see them alternately; one month she would go to Holt, the next Exmouth. Her family, including more recently her grandchildren, are part of the fabric of her life. She knows she is at mortal risk should she contract Covid-19, but as neither her children nor grandchildren are vulnerable, left to herself she would visit them. Mrs Lockyer would rather run the risk of catching a virus that would in all likelihood kill her, than spend what may be the last months or years of her life without seeing them. But, being who she is, she respects the rules.
There are countless tales of this kind emerging during lockdown. People who could not visit dying relatives or could not attend the funerals of those they love. Many of these people are not likely to be much at risk but they have had to frustrate some of their deepest personal impulses, to redraw the ordinary moral shapes of their lives, for the sake of a wider public good.
Let us admit that these desires — to visit families, to say goodbye to the dying and the dead — provide powerful personal reasons to act. They involve decisions that are at once both profoundly self-regarding and moral, shaped and motivated by deep life commitments and driven by obligations to others. It is reasonable to claim that, compared to these individual desires, ‘the public good’ is abstract and dispersed; for most of us the familiar and known — what is close and concrete — has greater moral force than what is distant and ill defined. After all, we are unlikely to meet — or be able to identify — those who may benefit from our restraint.
Why have we complied?
We humans act for many reasons. Faced with the arrival of a pandemic, fear is likely to play a part in shaping our behaviour. Obedience to authority is a rational response to a threatening unknown and it has been interesting to see expertise so abruptly come back into fashion. Many of us are also habitual rule-followers; we do not enquire too much into the reasons behind laws, we simply obey them. This is something like an ethical habit, combining a blend of self-interest, ordinary virtue and social norms. But Mrs Lockyer’s reasons are surely different. Her desire to see her family is stronger than her fear and she would willingly accept the risks. And the prohibition on visiting her family presented her with a sharp dilemma; which should win out, her habitual and life-long respect for democratically mandated laws, or the deep need to see her family? With so many of us facing some version of Mrs Lockyer’s dilemma, the question arises, why have so many of us acted with such restraint?
I suggest that among the answers is that the arrival of a sudden collective threat has revealed deep reserves of unselfishness, an almost reflexive ability to suppress our immediate needs in favour of wider, shared interests. What has been revealed is a mixture of what the Canadian academic and former politician, Michael Ignatieff, calls ‘the ordinary virtues’ and what American sociologist Jonathan Haidt calls ‘moral capital’, which he defines as that: “interlocking sets of values, norms, practices, identities, institutions and technologies that … enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.”
Slightly to our surprise, the arrival of a common calamity — the possibility of a common fate — has shown us other, perhaps less-familiar, sides of ourselves that are far from unappealing. Among all the horrors of Covid-19, this should be strong grounds for hope. (And in case I am accused of being unreasonably optimistic, as the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne pointed out more than four hundred years ago, our ordinary virtues will always be at war with our ordinary vices; I do remember shoppers with trolleys full of the last toilet rolls in town.)
Our ordinary virtues require institutional support
It was not long into lockdown with these mostly hopeful thoughts fresh in my mind that, with almost cruel abruptness, the Dominic Cummings fiasco detonated. Earlier we had seen Dr Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, fall on her sword for flouting the rules by visiting a second home. This was quickly followed by the epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson quitting his role as adviser to the Westminster government after his lover visited him at home. Human enough failings to be sure — those ordinary vices again — but resignation felt appropriate: if those giving the advice did not heed it, why should anyone else?
And then came Cummings. Propped up by a frail-looking Prime Minister and supported by a safe-enough Conservative majority, number 10’s chief advisor refused to budge. Tossing out hollow rationalisations, refusing to apologise and seeming to radiate contempt for those who questioned him, he weathered a week-long media storm and carried on.
It is difficult to exaggerate — from people across the political spectrum — the hostility that the Cummings episode provoked; certainly in me, and clearly in many, many others. He seemed to mock — to render foolish and gullible — those who, at great if largely silent personal cost, obeyed the rules. When Boris Johnson defended Cummings by saying that he was only following his instincts as a father, what was the impact on all those who had suppressed their own instincts? How did it make them feel about their own choices? One of my son’s friends was hit by a car during lockdown. Only one of his parents was able to visit him during the agonising weeks he spent in an intensive therapy unit. His father ‘suppressed his instincts’ for the public good. Did that therefore make him bad, wrong or misguided?
So while our collective response to Covid-19 revealed — or reminded us of — our latent moral resources, and is a source of optimism, the Cummings event highlighted a serious threat. Although a cynical and manipulative administration will not, of itself, much denude our ordinary virtues — our virtues are not so shallow — a breach of trust can make it far more difficult to accept the dictates of authority. Without trust in public life, where administrations cannot secure the respect of those they govern, collective action of the kind we so desperately need is imperilled. It is not that our moral capital will immediately be squandered. But if faith in public authority collapses, we will be uncertain where the good lies and how to direct our steps toward it. As Ignatieff writes: “The ordinary virtues depend on public evocation and on public cultivation. They may be local and personal, but they are dependent on public choice, on whether leaders appeal to the best, rather than the worst in their citizens…”
From Covid-19 to climate change
This essay forms part of the RSA’ Bridges to the Future campaign; as many contributors suggest, Covid-19 has exposed both deep inequalities and terrible vulnerabilities in our social and economic orders. For all its shock and power, this pandemic is likely to recede within a year or so, but the world post-Covid-19 will be different and new ways of working and new habits of living will emerge. The nature of these differences will be determined by some of the choices we make now.
This includes how we respond to an urgent collective threat that dwarfs Covid-19. Responding to climate change — adapting to, and mitigating, its impacts — will require us to draw much more deeply on our ordinary virtues and moral capital. It will require profound changes in what we value — or are led to believe we value — and how we live. In the face of economic recession and calls from our Prime Minister to go out and ‘shop with confidence’, our acquisitive and accumulative impulses, the lifeblood of consumer capitalism, will need restraining. We will need to set aside the idea that the measure of a good life is found in the thickness of its material comforts. This will draw long and deep on both our private and public virtues.
We are not who we think we are
Although we are desperately in need of a revival of trust in our public life, in our democratic institutions, and in those who occupy them, the architecture of that revival is not the subject of this essay. However, what I do want to suggest is that Covid-19 has not only revealed us to be better than we think we are, it has also shown us in thrall to a diminished and deceitful image of ourselves, and that if we are serious about democratic renewal we will have to get free from it.
The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has written recently in the New York Review of Books on the sources of a certain loss of hope — almost a demoralisation — in American society. She argues that underlying this is an American — and increasingly global — enchantment by a particular neo-liberal economic order (although she would baulk at the word ‘order’, seeing in it a pretence of ‘stable, rational, intentional, defensible design’). Covid-19 and, earlier, the credit crunch has, according to Robinson, revealed this to be “a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world.”
For Robinson, this widespread demoralisation — this dwindling and dissolution of moral purpose, revealed most obviously in rising rates of depression, addiction and self-destruction — has to do with the colonisation of ever more of our lives by that same parsimonious economic theory. Escaping the economic textbooks and MBA cheat sheets, this has morphed into a global ‘theory of everything.’
At the centre of this theory lies that dreary picture of ourselves already mentioned — homo darwinus economicus — a vision of humankind as a biological mechanism relentlessly furthering its own narrowly-defined interests. Accepted uncritically as the most essential truth about ourselves, what have been wonderfully called — by Abraham Lincoln no less — the better angels of our nature, don’t get a look in. Our prevailing view of our civilised selves is that they are, at best, a veneer, a self-interested fabrication to shield us from ourselves and allow us to sleep the sleep of vanity. Scratch away a little and the ravening truth is revealed. Asked to reach for a handy popular image of ourselves, I am tempted by those fancy-dress costumes in which a perfectly respectable suit reveals itself backless and, if worn by a man, exposes panties and bra, or some other snickering seaside peccadillo.
As a view of ourselves the best that can be said for this is that it contains a partial truth. Moral saints are as hen’s teeth. But no one with their eyes open can reasonably believe that it accounts for the entirety of our moral lives, or even the majority of it. Covid-19 has revealed us to be far more complex, interesting and, frankly, virtuous than such a picture would permit.
Watch your metaphors, mind your myths
In his compelling new book Humankind, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sets about a forensic demolition of what he calls “the veneer theory” of human nature. Acknowledging its Judeo-Christian roots, he nonetheless locates its more modern sources in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. For Hobbes, pre-civilised life — the life free from the restraining hand of social authority — was, famously, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Our natural — read pre-social — existence is one of unrelenting warfare. Only when we mutually sacrifice our personal liberty for a social contract under the protection of an omnipotent sovereign does civilised life become possible.
Bregman counters Hobbes’ vision with another foundational myth, this time Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the road to Vincennes visiting the imprisoned philosopher Denis Diderot. Reading an advert for an essay competition on whether the “progress of the arts and sciences has done more to corrupt or purify morals”, he slips into a reverie and contemplates how passionately he could demonstrate “that man is naturally good and has only become bad because of … institutions”. If Hobbes’ vision of our fundamental nature is of permanent warfare, Rousseau’s is of the submerged statue of the sea god Glaucus; like our nature, the statue had been so disfigured by “time, the sea and storms”, that it looked “less like a God than a ferocious beast”.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of these two visions of our nature: incipient god or ferocious beast. They are both foundational political myths. Conservatives lean toward Hobbes: our ‘fallen’ nature requires the restraint of authority and the sea anchor of tradition. Progressives favour Rousseau; that if we can unshackle ourselves from disfiguring institutions the sunlit uplands are ours. What they both have in common though is that they are metaphors; metaphors of depth and of concealment. In both, the truth about us is concealed. For Hobbes the truth is dark and thankfully veiled by the trappings of civilised life. For Rousseau civilisation itself is the concealment, a grotesque, barnacled encrustment; break it away and our innate goodness is revealed.
Metaphors of concealment and revelation have enormous currency in our culture. At least as far back as the return of the wily Odysseus to Ithaca “looking for all the world like an old and broken beggar”, concealment is a powerful and enduring narrative device. But powerful as it is, progenitor of a thousand narrative twists, it remains just that: a metaphor, a convenient simplification, not a description of literal truth.
As part of his assault on veneer theory, Bregman takes another look at some slightly more contemporary sources; psychological experiments said to reveal our innate wickedness but which themselves have something of the foundational myth about them. He takes aim at Stanley Milgram’s 1960s study of obedience to authority and the Stanford prison experiment’s demonstration of the rapidity with which we lapse into brutality. Bergman convincingly argues that rather than providing scientific proof of our innate nature, the experiments show that if you put people in conditions deliberately designed to provoke anti-social behaviour, antisocial behaviour is what you get. Although the studies are shown to be agnostic about our ‘true’ nature, Bregman surely demonstrates that they are nevertheless slightly thin foundations for justifying an entire social and economic order.
Aristotle’s alternative
Thinking about Mrs Lockyer, looking at our collective behaviour in the face of Covid-19 — including, yes, the behaviour of Cummings — neither Hobbes nor Rousseau seem adequate. Nor are they adequate to explain the evidence from a prior, grimmer catastrophe, one frequently drawn in comparison with Covid-19: the behaviour of city dwellers under sustained aerial bombardment during the Second World War. As Bregman argues, despite the wishes and fears of both British and German governments, in response to massive aerial bombardments, instead of descending into chaos — into a Hobbesian melee — the residents of both German and British cities emerged from their dugouts, ruins and shelters and began to help each other. They demonstrated, in fact, behaviour reminiscent of Mrs Lockyer’s.
Fortunately, barnacled god or gilded beast are not the only self-descriptions available to us. The drawbacks of metaphor are closely aligned to its strengths. They can brilliantly simplify and make clear. But when trying to understand phenomena as complex as human moral behaviour, simplification is not always our friend. As the American sociologist, Amitai Etzioni, argues in The New Golden Rule, we need a subtler and dynamic — as well as clear-eyed — view of the sort of things we are, and are not, to navigate the challenges ahead.
One interesting alternative emerges from the Aristotelian tradition. First, we can take from Aristotle the view that it is meaningful to talk about human nature. Not as something fixed or given, but neither as absolutely open-ended: there are limits to our capacities — we are extraordinarily plastic — but not infinitely so. Because we have a nature, howsoever malleable, it follows that there are social and political conditions more and less conducive to our wellbeing. And further we can see this view of our nature as a moral resource, something to draw upon when seeking institutional reform. We can also take from Aristotle, suitably updated by neuroscience, that we are social animals, born with latent pro-social capacity. But although we have this potential, there is no guarantee it will flourish; it is not self-realising. Diverting from Rousseau, Aristotle puts heavy emphasis on the need to inculcate the virtues necessary for those social instincts to be realised.
As Covid-19 has also shown, the most highly educated and exquisitely civilised among us are prone to temptation. From Aristotle (via Montaigne) we can take the familiar insight that our ordinary virtues are always wrestling with our ordinary vices. Set against the extraordinary acts of self-denial — set against Mrs Lockyer — we have seen this is not a reason for pessimism, but for a certain realism. To put this in the context of the Cummings fiasco, to be properly realised our virtues need political and social institutions to teach, reinforce and support them. Our reserves of moral capital are not unlimited and will not survive corrupt institutions indefinitely. As Michael Ignatieff puts it: “ordinary virtue in private life is dependent on trustworthy institutions. It is a fantasy to believe that if only the fetters of the state could be removed from daily life, ordinary virtue would flourish”. We need healthy, trustworthy public institutions properly to manage Covid-19; we will need them even more to respond to climate change.
This essay is called the ethics of small things for a reason. Its origins lie in reflection on the numberless acts of small, but nonetheless difficult and far-reaching acts of self-denial that have been seen during the months of lockdown. Asked where universal human rights began, Eleanor Roosevelt famously replied, “In small places, close to home; so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world”.
In addition to the need for public renewal, it strikes me that Covid-19 has shown us some truths that we would do well to take home with us. First, we are better than the popular image we have of ourselves. We are more than backless suits and are capable of acts of extraordinary selflessness. That the diminished view we have of ourselves marches in lockstep with the market economy and the global cash nexus should itself give us pause.
Second, we need to step back from the litany of bad news about ourselves that fills the media and start to look around us with our own eyes. What we will see is likely more complex, interesting and hopeful than we are led to believe. Thirdly, we need to be careful of our metaphors. Metaphors of depth and concealment are powerful aesthetic devices, but they can mislead. We are divided things, our better selves perfectly capable of building bulwarks — think of the American Constitution — against our possibility for vice. This is the clear-eyed view of ourselves that the renewal of our institutions needs to understand and be guided by. And finally, it is worth remembering that among all the hardship, this pestilence has brought a strange gift: both a pause and a certain self-revelation. We have a new perspective on ourselves, fresh evidence of our complexity, and some time in which to ponder it.
Julian Sheather is a writer and ethicist. He is an ethics and human rights adviser to several leading medical and humanitarian organisations, both nationally and internationally. He has been advising the Government on ethical aspects of Covid-19.
