We also need to see beyond the myopia of the current crisis to its long-term consequences. What awaits us when the pestilence passes? What sort of world will we be living in? Will the lessons learned lead to the restoration of lost liberties or will we find that the freedoms we relinquished in this time of emergency are never returned to us? Will the coronavirus signify the descending of a dark night which presages a new dawn, or is it the twilight that precedes the darkness?

There is no doubt that we are living in confused and confusing times. The “experts” have shown themselves to be as clueless as the rest of us with respect to how the crisis should be managed. People are divided between those who advocate continuing the lockdown and those who favour a phased reopening of the economy. Particularly distressing has been the manner in which people have abandoned any semblance of charity in their dealings with those who disagree with them. Even those who claim to be Christians have been turning on their neighbours with unrestrained splenetic scorn. In the midst of this irrational and irascible dogfighting, we need a restoration of fides et ratio and the charity and clarity that they provide. We need to practice what we preach with respect to loving our neighbor, even when our neighbour has become our enemy.

We also need to see beyond the myopia of the current crisis to its long-term consequences. What awaits us when the pestilence passes? What sort of world will we be living in? Will the lessons learned lead to the restoration of lost liberties or will we find that the freedoms we relinquished in this time of emergency are never returned to us? Will the coronavirus signify the descending of a dark night which presages a new dawn, or is it the twilight that precedes the darkness?

In such times as those in which we now find ourselves, and with these axiomatic questions in mind, we would do well to heed the cautionary words of Winston Churchill:

[W]e must not be led into adopting for ourselves the evils of war in time of peace upon any pretext whatever. The word ‘civilization’ means not only peace by the non-regimentation of the people such as is required in war. Civilization means that officials and authorities, whether uniformed or not, whether armed or not, are made to realize that they are servants and not masters.

If we take these words of Churchill in conjunction with Lord Acton’s axiom that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” we will apprehend the danger that lurks in the shadows of the post-virus future.

As in time of war, the COVID-19 crisis has necessitated a state of emergency in which governments world-wide have wielded unprecedented power over the people they govern. As for the people themselves, they have accepted a curtailment of their civil liberties as they would do in time of war, knowing that a clear and present danger requires great sacrifice, including the sacrifice of liberty in the short term so that such liberties might be preserved in the longer term. This is all very well, as long as we are aware, as was Churchill, that we must not accept the draconian use of government power once the crisis has passed, “upon any pretext whatever.” And we can be sure that those who hold power, and have held it with a tighter grip than ever, will offer all sorts of pretexts for holding it more tightly in the future. Such is the nature of power and such is the nature of those who seek it and hunger for it.

Before we dare prophesy about the post-viral future, it will be helpful to learn the lessons of the past. Indeed, we need to know that the past is a prophet and that we can only see the future clearly if we are seeing it through the lens supplied by history. The whole of history, understood in terms of political philosophy, is an oscillation between the centralization and decentralization of power. There are times when power is centralized in fewer and fewer hands, periods of tyranny and empire, and times when power decentralizes to localities, periods of relative freedom. In the twentieth century, with the exception of the break-up of the Soviet Empire and the consequent restoration of localized governments, the tendency had been towards the centralization of power into fewer and larger political entities. This process of centralization has accelerated in our own century in the headlong and heedless rush towards globalization and the rise of the globalist political structures that are guiding it.

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