60. On A Libertarian's View

Dearly Beloved,

Recently my wife Josephine and I went to the ancient city of Domme in South West France to listen to the Noble and Learned Lord Jonathan Sumption talk about the encroachment of law upon our freedoms. He owns a nearby Chateau,

We did not know where the lecture was to be held but we spotted the only man in 4000 sq. km. wearing a suit with the tiny, red, rosette of the Legion d'honneur in his buttonhole accompanied by a smartly dressed wife. So we fell in behind them and, inevitably, were led to the lecture hall. Sumption is of course a conservative libertarian with advanced skills of argument which eventually brought him to a successful career as a barrister and to the Supreme Court. Jonathan Sumption recently gave the Reith lectures regretting the way in which the law is being invoked and drawn into new and ever more intimate matters of our daily lives. At Domme he claimed that we have given away so much freedom during the Covid-19 pandemic that we risk loosing those freedoms forever. Instead he emphased autonomy and the need for each individual to assess risk and act accordingly. Jonathan Sumption is more concerned about our careless acceptance of lock-down rules, some of which he seems to equate with house arrest, and which he believes to be a massive over-reaction to the severity of the disease caused by the Covid 19 virus. This has been the most massive obligatory confinement of British subjects in history according to the Noble and Learned Lord. One senses the grand historical perspective here of past ages of unjust imprisonment before habeus corpus was central to British criminal law and a vision of future repression.

Josephine, my troublemaker wife, asked Jonathan Sumption how he viewed French President Macron's new declaration that effectively meant that people refusing vaccination could loose their jobs. Protests continue today against that law on the streets of France. His answer rather skated around the complexity by saying that the intention was to encourage people to get vaccinated. She also asked was it not the case that one man's freedom is another's harm? To which he responded that the important thing was that people had freedom of choice. Those who might fear becoming infected always had their own freedom to isolate themselves should they choose to do so.

Of course any evolutionary biologist is going to point out that freedom to make choices inevitably gives license to the dominant individuals in a society to do what they want (indeed they may do what they want regardless of law and regulation) and the reality will be that they act at the expense of those whom they dominate. Many ordinary people need to work during a pandemic in order to survive, to put food on the table and support their families and have little choice but to work and cannot isolate themselves, even if they want to do so.

The day after the talk an article appeared in The Guardian newspaper by the notable left wing journalist Owen Jones who, like Jonathan Sumption, has advanced rhetorical skills. He said much the same thing as Jonathan Sumption but his examples of bad, oppressive, law were different; excessive police control, suppression of demonstrations, and things like racial bias in police stop and search which of course are not particularly related to the pandemic and predate it.

Overall it seems people are out to use the Covid-19 pandemic to promote their own political agendas and world views. Christianity and its Christians should take all this in their stride, after all Christ's passion is a story of violent political suppression by a brutal regime and his era was one where there was little control over disease. Compassion and care for the sick is a traditional Christian obligation and is one of the reasons that we have made progress, over two millennia, against the viruses and bacteria that cause disease and why we have, for the moment at least, a compassionate NHS. Political repression will inevitably continue because human beings continue to fear one another despite the compassionate messages of Christ.

Peace,

Paul

Completed 16th August 2021

Photo: Paul Munton.
A sumptuous Chateau in Perigord. Original 12th century, active in the 100 Years war (1337–1453), held by protestants and seriously damaged in the Wars of Religion (1562-98). Rebuilt XVII century. Jonathan Sumption, the owner, has published a history of the Hundred Years War --5 volumes to date.







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