The COVID crisis and the state of perpetual emergency

Can we ever afford to treat each other the same way again?

We seem to be awash in crises. There’s a climate crisis, a housing crisis, a nursing crisis, a cost of living crisis, a mental health crisis, a disinformation crisis, and, just to switch up the terminology, an obesity epidemic. And, of course, we’re living in the aftermath of the COVID crisis and will be for years to come. If you’re in glass-half-full mode, all these crises present opportunities. As Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to President Obama, famously said at the outset of the Global Financial Crisis, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” But what kind of opportunities are they? Perhaps a necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention opportunity to innovate—or, according to some scholars reflecting on our COVID response, an opportunity for panic and authoritarianism with far-reaching consequences.

One of the striking features of our very first lockdown was how compliant we were. The entire population of New Zealand was confined to our homes, with very limited exceptions, and barely a question was raised. Even when the High Court found that the first nine days of lockdown were illegal, the response was little more than a shrug. Positively, this speaks of a high degree of trust in government and in our public leaders; negatively, it suggests a naïve faith in people who wield considerable power. Professor Susanna Trnka, an anthropologist at the University of Auckland, describes this as “demonstrating the extent to which a democratic government can demand the reshaping of social, economic, political, and community life and the majority of the populace willingly take part. … As far as governance during a crisis goes, it appeared to be an amazing success story. Until it wasn’t.”

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

Let’s look a bit more closely at the “wasn’t” part. Our pandemic response began as a “grand narrative” of cohesion, says Professor Trnka, with the Ardern government “focused on fostering a sense of unity” and on “the interest of the collective good.” Our initial pandemic response successfully suppressed COVID’s spread; kindness had apparently vanquished the virus. But things changed: “Approximately one year into the pandemic, the rhetoric of collective unity developed a more pronounced sinister edge, with the government doing little to stifle, and at times explicitly encouraging, moral panic and outrage against ‘rule breakers’.” This included dedicated phone lines for “dobbing in” suspected rule breakers to police, “to the point that the police launched a tailor-made online form to streamline accusations.” Professor Trnka goes on to argue that there was a “reconfiguring of social belonging as premised on upholding anti-COVID measures.” Where we had been a “team of 5 million,” “not complying with the vaccine mandate ejected one from the ‘team’.” Eventually the national response pivoted again; everyone became responsible for making their own COVID choices as vaccine mandates and passports were phased out, leaving us to make sense of life in this new normal where some have more choices than others.

How we make sense of our circumstances has much to do with our imagination and what informs it. It is, as Trnka says, “vital … to grasping the here-and-now”. How do we understand what we should expect to experience over the course of our lives? History and memory play a large part here and, during the pandemic, were notable largely by their absence. COVID was routinely described as an “unprecedented” situation, which was true only in a narrow sense. In fact, challenges like this are extra-ordinary but still within the realm of human experience. This matters because, “Crisis is never neutral. It is always morally, politically, and historically laden.” At the beginning of the pandemic, “mainstream media remained largely on the same page as the government,” feeding the public imagination with stories that supported the government’s response “and largely side-lining the narratives of those who were struggling.” By the end, the public square was characterised by “moral panic” as “public outrage was politically deployed.”

There’s two lessons in this for how we approach future crises—first, that we shouldn’t play fast and loose with the label. In Trnka’s words, “naming something a crisis demands of us—as leaders and followers—to act outside of the norm.” In a crisis, there’s pressure to do something, anything—to expand state power, to move fast and break things, to marginalise dissent and dissenters. So before we name something a crisis, we should check whether that’s really justified. Is this genuinely an extraordinary, emergency-like state of affairs that requires immediate and drastic action? Do we understand the causes of the alleged crisis, and have we thought critically about the available solutions? Can we say, hand on heart, that calling this situation a crisis is a responsible thing to do, and that it won’t be done in a way that weaponises the situation against questioners and disfavoured groups?

The second lesson is that the cure may be, or become, worse than the disease. The philosopher Matthew Crawford says that, post-COVID, we’re living in a “state of perpetual emergency.” Everything’s in crisis, all the time—or so we’re told, as the list of contemporary “crises” at the start of this post suggest. This matters because, as Trnka puts it, “Under a state of emergency, power is shored up by … enhancing the reach of state agencies, from law enforcement to welfare.” After all, the rational response to unprecedented times is unprecedented action. In a real crisis, we bear the costs and risks involved in this concentration of power because the alternatives are worse. But if the situation is really more like a challenge, or a difficulty, or a long-term but slow-moving trend, or even just an economic cycle, then invoking a crisis mentality gives us all the risks of concentrated power and unaccountable authority without a good justification.

It’s true that we shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste—and in this case, the best thing we can do in response to the COVID crisis is ask whether we can ever afford to treat each other the same way again.