In a previous post I began to consider how the COVID-19 pandemic stress tests our fragile social contract. I now want to pick up that thread again and ask why we are so willing to give up our natural freedom for the sake of the common good, and what the current crises reveal about the state of our social bond.
So why do we think it worth our while to relinquish our natural freedom on a permanent basis? The great classical social contract theorists of the European tradition give us a diversity of possible responses.
For Hobbes, we make this exchange out of fear: we are afraid of the violent death that could befall us in the war of all against all, and we crave the protection of the all-powerful “Leviathan” state. For John Locke, the social contract is entered into for altogether more cheerful reasons, primarily in order to guarantee life, liberty and—all-importantly—property. As for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is the soaring vision of a perfect marriage of individual freedom with the common and beneficent authority of the general will, each individual overcoming her personal animal instincts in favour of the perfect liberty of rational government. The routes are many but the destination is single: men and women freely surrendering their natural freedom in the expectation of gaining something better in return.
This willing surrender of freedom is at the heart of the social contract, and fundamental to our social fabric and the stability of our society. Were we to decide that the grand exchange were not worth our while, or that it was serving the interests of privileed groups in society rather than working for the common good, no government in a free society could hope to enforce it.
This, in fact, is precisely what has happened within social contract theory over recent decades. Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) and Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997) each highlight how social contract theory takes as the model of the “liberal individual” the atomised white bourgeois male with no family commitments and access to the public square. It is also what we are seeing in the USA and elsewhere at the moment, nowhere more vividly than in the viral and powerful intervention of Kimberly Jones:
The trust, civility and sense of mutual advantage at the heart of the social contract are crucial to maintaining a cohesive and prosperous society, but the pretence that the social contract requires a commensurate surrender of freedom for all citizens is made to ring hollow by the jaw-dropping racial disparities in COVID-19 cases in all US states where racial data has been collected, proving the truth of the saying that “When America catches a cold, Black people get the flu”. The widely circulated figures are eye-watering:
- People of colour in Michigan are 133% more likely to contract COVID-19 than whites. They form 15% of the population of the state, but 40% of its coronavirus deaths.
- Similarly staggering figures have been released for Illinois, Chicago, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York and Louisiana,
Whether the disparities are due to pre-existing health conditions,[1] social depravation or unequal access to health care, the point is the same: the surrender of freedom seems to work far better for some groups in society than for others.
COVID-19 has brought our usually latent social contract into glaring view. The UK slogan “Stay at Home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.” is a precise and elegant expression of the principle of the social contract: restrict your personal freedom for the greater good of the society to which you belong.
Politicians in many countries have praised the public for largely abiding by the measures to flatten the infamous curve, though the second wave now gripping cities like Melbourne and the prospect of an imminent spike with the slackening of restrictions across Europe are set to test the ongoing civic-mindedness of those same populations.
The rolling waves of COVID-19 restrictions are a litmus test of the health of our social contract. But there is also the second-order test of how we respond to hearing news of others who break the rules, and how we respond to the increasingly invasive modes of surveillance intended to enforce our social isolation, such as the use of contact tracing apps and drone dispersal orders.
In the years before the pandemic, an increasing number of influential voices were already ing that the social contract in Western democracies was breaking down, and that it needed revising or even rewriting wholesale. In the pre-COVID world the United Nations and the World Bank were already advocating for a renewed social contract to address societal tensions and inequalities, and in 2019 Naomi Klein embarked on a ‘New Social Contract Tour’ round the USA, arguing for the urgent renewal of our common social agreement. In the environmental sphere there were calls to expand the social contract to take account of non-human animals and the natural world, with Extinction Rebellion declaring on its website that the current social contract is ‘null and void’. In the area of emerging technologies, governments in Australia and elsewhere are currently busy drafting regulatory frameworks for the governance of artificial intelligence and big data amid worries about the increasing robotization of the jobs market and calls for a new social contract to govern our digital lives.
What does the unfolding COVID-19 crisis add to this debate? It adds a sense of urgency, to be sure, but also an apocalypse, in the sense of the Greek apokalupsis: a revelation or disclosure. The pandemic is revealing the gross inequalities in the social contractual surrender of freedom across minority groups in society. It is revealing that Hobbes was right about most of us: we are happy voluntarily to relinquish significant freedoms if we think that doing so will provide us with security against the “nasty, brutish and short” existence of the unfettered exercise of natural freedom.
The crisis is revealing to us both the weakness and the robustness of our social contract. The contract is weak because, as Michel Serres reminds us in The Natural Contract, no-one ever signed it: it is an implicit agreement assumed as the basis of our ongoing willingness to live in society, and it rests on implicit trust, not explicit regulations. It is also weak because, as we see with social distancing measures, it is ultimately unenforceable and, if someone is determined to value individual liberty over common security then there is little the authorities can do to stop them. It would only take a surge in violations of lockdown regulations to leave our social contract in tatters.
But the pandemic is also currently revealing to us the strength of our social contract, in that measures severely inconveniencing almost every citizen in every country where they are imposed are broadly adhered to by a great majority of the population, even at the expense of livelihoods and cherished relationships, because it can be seen that it is in the common good to do so.
Early in Albert Camus’s The Plague the narrator notes that we can tell a lot about a community by how they work, how they love and how they die. This final grim indicator is currently revealing to us both the fragility and strength of our social fabric.
[1] These pre-existing health conditions can themselves be ascribed to racial inequities, as affirmed by the now famous Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984:
Health disparities have always existed for the African American community… [coronavirus is] shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is because, yet again, when you have a situation like the coronavirus, they are suffering disproportionately. We will get over coronavirus, but there will still be health disparities which we really do need to address in the African American community.
