I have been mulling for some time now, perhaps since the start of the pandemic, on the moral attached to being in lockdown. The GF and I were talking about it this morning, of how locking down, of shutting down, was given a sort of moral weight, and more a political weight: we care for lives, they care for the economy. When Wuhan was locked down, back at the start of the year, I remember beng amazed, that a city could just… be shut down. At the time it felt like something only China could or would do. Then it was followed by all the others. And, in the meantime, those who didn’t follow whatever were the accepted modes of behaviour, were morally deficient, from the passerby who dared come to within a metre’s distance, to the person who wore a mask although it clearly did nothing to protect him, to later, the person who didn’t wear a mask and thus didn’t care to protect others. At home, in Pakistan, there were the jahil multitudes and the parha likha few who kept themselves socially distanced as far as it was convenient and because they could. Why isn’t the government acting, we parha likha types asked. Because they care more about the economy than about lives was the answer.
Maybe. But the point was made then by them, that a failing economy also costs lives, and though one might think it, one could not say it, perhaps one could not dare think it, because it doesn’t fit ones allegiances, which are to lives not $$$. But there are also other allegiances, to the performing arts, for instance, that fell by the wayside, or were subsumed in the argument that the government should take care of them instead of bailing out banks, or that this is why there should be a universal basic income. But the arts have withered anyway, it seems.
That said, in Pakistan at least I think the lockdown as it happened was a good thing. There was a moment when there was a spike – a moment that may return, and then it seemed to level out. And the economic fallout was limited by pure luck and perhaps an economy where no one works anyway.