It has long been my contention
that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a nation possessed
of a significant number of little Hitlers for whom the only thing they love
more than imposing rules on people is breaking rules they think shouldn’t apply
to them. Now this may seem axiomatic to
a lot of you, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about increasingly
frequently since the 2019 general election, and the current COVID-19 crisis has
only exacerbated this feeling. While most
people have obeyed lockdown rules for the greater good of public health, others
have, to be blunt, taken the piss (with the Conservative government’s vague and
ever-shifting advice providing a handy veil of plausible deniability in the
case of my compatriots who seem to believe that possibly transmitting the virus
to other human beings and killing them is an acceptable risk to take in the
name of enjoying a day out at the beach).
And of those who have accepted the reality and necessity of being locked
down, there would seem to be a direct correlation between their levels of resentment
and time spent grassing their neighbours up on social media for daring to be outside, with no thought given to whether they might simply be taking their legally-mandated
daily walk around the block, rather than being on their way to stand outside a
garden centre coughing on the customers. As an asthmatic with an immunosuppressed
partner, I realise the importance of enforcing social distancing to stop the
spread of COVID-19 more than most, but there are clearly a number of Brits out
there who are clearly relishing the chance to act as self-appointed lockdown
police. Not for nothing did the comedian
Stewart Lee describe Twitter as “a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers”.
It’s this resentment that I want to talk about in light of recent revelations concerning Dominic Cummings (special advisor to Prime Minister and thinking person’s moron Boris Johnson), his apparent two trips up to County Durham last month in clear violation of lockdown laws, and the extent to which this makes him an asshole. Now, to be clear, I’m not using the word “asshole” as a subjective pejorative term based on the man’s hard-right politics. Sure, he ran an abusive anonymous Twitter account with the aim of venomously smearing opponents of then-Education Secretary Michael “Tesco Value Slappy the Dummy” Gove, he helmed a Vote Leave campaign which weaponised and exacerbated rank xenophobia, and he seems to have a worrying interest in eugenics, but while I might (and do) call him an asshole for this, if you were a committed Tory you might say that these were not the actions of an asshole but of a patriot who uses robust methods to gain desirous outcomes for his country. (You’d also be cordially invited to fuck off and stop reading this blog forever, but that’s beside the point.) Rather, when I call Dominic Cummings an asshole I am doing so specifically in relation to his breaking lockdown, using the word as the moral philosopher Aaron James does in his brief, amusing 2012 treatise Assholes: A Theory.
The bulk of James’ book is
concerned with attempting to construct a working definition of the asshole qua
asshole. This does not encompass genocidal
monsters; as James explains, “There are not enough harsh names for these
figures, and it is fine to add ‘asshole’ to the list. But it would be deeply offensive to only
call Hitler or Stalin an asshole; there are much more important ways to describe
them morally.” Rather, James concerns
himself with “the mere asshole”, the kind of low-level irritant, jerk or
boor you come across every day (at least when you’re not staying home to
protect frontline health services). He
defines this kind of person as one who:
1) “allows himself to enjoy
special advantages and does so systematically”;
2) “does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement” and
3) “is immunised by his sense of
entitlement against the complains of other people”.
They are the driver who cuts you off on the motorway, or the shopper who doesn’t put the trolley back where they found it when leaving the supermarket. In short, they believe themselves exempt from the rules that others are compelled to abide by; not just in terms of obeying the law, but fulfilling unwritten moral contracts governed by innate or socially constructed sense of “the right thing to do”.
It goes without saying that the
asshole, as James has it, would not believe that it behoves them to observe
lockdown regulations, and would be far too selfish to recognise as legitimate
the argument that they should limit their own activities to protect
others. By this definition, Dominic
Cummings, despite his argument that he drove 260 miles from London to County
Durham to arrange childcare for his four-year-old son when he and his wife came
down with COVID-19 symptoms, can be termed an asshole, because he put others at
risk of infection. He did so not only by
almost certainly coming into contact with non-COVID-positive human beings in the
course of his two journeys north, but by markedly undermining public confidence in the lockdown. This undermining is especially risky for
public health because of the presence in British society of a type of asshole
that James’ book doesn’t cover: the person - usually white, middle-class and
comfortably off - who believes they have a right to bend or break the rules not
simply because they innately believe themselves entitled to “special advantages”, but
because they feel, paradoxically, that they have earned this right because
they are the sort of person who always follows the rules.
To elaborate on how people come
to believe this, another philosophical detour seems in order, one that seems
especially relevant considering we’re discussing a matter of state intervention
in public health. The philosopher Michel
Foucault conceived “biopolitics” as the set of technologies - including statistical
analysis, public health and education - by which governments seek to create a
well-behaved and pliant population (which Foucault called a “superrace”) in
order to engender efficient economic production and the orderly running of
society. Those who are perceived to
resist this ordering, on account of actions, cultures and even genes which are
deemed deviant, are considered a “subrace” from which governments determine the
superrace needs to be protected. For
Foucault, race and racialisation are less about skin colour than a constantly
shifting conjunction of infinitely variable biological and behavioural
signifiers.
Other thinkers have sought to
complicate Foucault’s distinction between superrace and subrace. Taking a term from Roman law, Giorgio Agamben
defines those who resist biopower’s ordering of the community as homo sacer (meaning “bare life”),
suspended between bios and zoē: between superrace and subrace. For Agamben, under regimes of biopower “the
realm of bare life - which is originally situated at the margins of the
political order - gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and
exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and
fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction”. In short, they produce “a legally unnameable
and unclassifiable being” that is placed into what Agamben calls a “state of
exception [which] is neither external nor internal to the juridical order" of
the biopolitical state. As it proves
consequently “impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution
of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without
any remainder”, the people the state constructs as homo sacer remain at its
mercy, their legally uncertain status rendering them susceptible to all kinds
of abuses.
It’s not so much in vogue as a
way of conceiving technologies of political oppression as it used to be, but
many thinkers earlier in the 21st century found biopolitics very
useful as a way of framing the categories and the logical contortions the architects
of the War on Terror produced to justify its excesses (and, indeed, its very
existence). In 2002 Slavoj Žižek
wrote of “the ‘unlawful combatant’, who is neither enemy soldier nor common
criminal” as a form of bare life, and a year later Agamben himself noted the “immediately
biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure
in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges
clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on
November 13, 2001, which authorised the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by
‘military commissions’ (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided
for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist
activities.” This is not to say that
states which are willing to circumscribe or mystify legal rights within carceral
spaces will necessarily limit themselves to just that. As François Debrix and Alexander
Barder argue, “the virtual ‘real possibility’ of the exception (Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib) may also seek to draw our attention towards the idea of a supposedly
unique, unusual, extreme, or indeed ‘exceptional’ zone as if such a site were not
the norm, or as if it were not supposed to be real or actualised
anywhere else”. That is, a state which
creates a state of exception somewhere can and will do so everywhere
if it considers it necessary.
So what does this have to do with your middle-class curtain-twitching lockdown enforcers, you might ask? After all, insofar as the British state apparatus constructs homo sacer from the bodies present within the borders it administers – and it definitely does – it does not do so from among the “squeezed middle” or “just about managing”, to use two equally risible phrases coined by our nation’s two main political parties to describe the lower-middle class in the 2010s. Rather, it does so in spaces like the Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and on the streets so many have been forced to make their home in the age of austerity. However, never let it be said that the comfortably-off white British people with whom I am concerned lack the imagination to conceive the existence of people simultaneously bound by and detached from the law; more accurately, detached because they are bound. Only, they do not imagine a homo sacer oppressed by this legal indistinction, but one that enjoys the right to be liberated by it. And the identity of this pseudo-bare life is themselves.
Ours is a country whose national discourse is suffused simultaneously by a deep sense of superiority and a deep persecution complex, which leads the folks mentioned above to misappraise their standing in society in three main ways. Firstly, you have those who like to imagine themselves as some kind of oppressed minority, because the PC brigade won’t let you push dog shit through the letterbox of the Asian family down the street anymore and are gifting honest working Britons’ taxes to house definitely-not-imaginary Somali asylum seekers in palatial Kensington estates. Then there are the “what if I went to private school but had fuck all money throughout?” crew, the people who are convinced that because their lifestyle is typical amongst their social set and because they have little money left over every month because most of their salary is tied up in Porsche car loans/multiple mortgages on their buy-to-let empire/paying for their kids’ tennis lessons in an attempt to buy forgiveness for cheating on their mother with a work colleague, they are therefore nothing more or less than Average Joes. By way of example, witness this frothing gammon steak confront my local MP on Question Time to declare that he, a man earning more than £80,000 per annum, was not in the top 50% of earners in the country (the UK median salary is just over £30,000).
Then you have the third kind: the
assholes. Specifically, the assholes who
believe that their shining virtue in following the rules gives them the right to
flout them, and to not be punished for flouting them (and, indeed, to not be
considered to have flouted them at all) by dint of their being, at their very
core, “the sort of person who always follows the rules”. Now, we already know that your freedom to
disobey laws, rules and conventions is largely dependent upon your class, race,
gender and political alignment. Contrast
the wall-to-wall media coverage of mostly white Brits attending “socially
distanced” (but clearly not actually socially distanced to anyone with
eyes) VE Day street parties with the solemn advice issued to Muslims to observe
the holy day of Eid ul-Fitr within the privacy of their own home. Or consider the recent row wherein Sarah
Vine, right-wing newspaper columnist and wife of cabinet minister Michael Gove,
in an apparent attempt to rub her privilege in the faces of her “trolls”, tweeted a photo of their shared bookcase which included, amongst its many delights, a
discredited tome by a “race scientist” which argued that black people are
inherently less intelligent than whites, and a history book by a convicted
Holocaust denier. I know that playing
the “can you imagine the media reaction if Jeremy Corbyn had done this thing
that a Tory did?” game is incredibly futile, especially now he’s been replaced
as leader of the Labour Party by a sentient necktie with a nice line in
forensics and shafting the left, but come the fuck on. Already widely castigated as an anti-Semite by
the right-wing press (and much of the liberal media at that), he’d have been
raked over the coals. With regard to
Dominic Cummings, the risible clown college known as the Daily Telegraph ran a piece yesterday by anti-immigration flange David Goodhart which argued
that “There is a kind of hyper-democratic rancour abroad that refuses to
contemplate that our rulers, at least while they are ruling, deserve some
special treatment”, which I at least appreciate for saying the quiet part loud. I could go on.
However, we’re specifically talking about the people who claim the right to defy rules not by dint of race, class, gender or political bent, but by their own lawfulness. The British like to imagine themselves as people who go about their lives guided not only by the rule of law but by manners that are not codified in any statute but are followed because they are moral goods in and of themselves. It’s how we get this fetishisation of good-natured queueing as an especially British trait, despite the fact that 1) foreigners seem perfectly able to do this as well even if they’ve never been to Hemel Hempstead, and 2) people in the UK have a capacity to become extraordinarily rude and irritable if the amount of time spent queueing is, say, 10% more than what was expected. As such, many - especially those comfortably-off middle-class whites unused to being told “no” - feel entitled to a reward for doing things “the right way”. You see it in the deployment of the phrase “otherwise law-abiding motorists”; as the argument goes, I pay my taxes on time, I’ve never stolen or committed assault, so why shouldn’t I be able to break the speed limit if I want to? After all, I’m a model citizen, and I always obey the law.
It’s this dynamic which explains the ferocity of the reaction to Dominic Cummings’ breaking of lockdown by newspapers and commentators usually so slavish in their support of the Conservative Party (when the Spectator is calling for you to go, you done fucked up); newspapers and commentators enjoyed by vast swathes of the social group described above. People who shrugged away or even celebrated existing double standards regarding rule-obeying and rule-breaking are up in arms because the expectation of reward inherent in the construction of the “otherwise law-abiding” pseudo-homo sacer has been violated. Free speech absolutists in the Tory press who defended Sarah Vine’s right to own books by a Holocaust denier, knowing full well that the same freedom to own whatever books one desires is not necessarily possessed by others without the privilege of being employed by said Tory press - we might call these people “asshole enablers” - have suddenly discovered that “special advantages” are not acceptable when someone in power has wielded a perceived right (the right to defy lockdown for the sake of one’s family) that these enablers believed themselves unable to enjoy. What an asshole, they think. Was being an asshole an option all along for me as well?
Let me be clear what I am not arguing. I am not calling ordinary people assholes for quite rightly wondering why Dominic Cummings is able to drive to County Durham with COVID-19 symptoms while they were forced to watch relatives’ funerals via Zoom. Rather, it is precisely because they felt the pain of loss and of the unfairness of not being able to be there to hold their loved one’s hand as they slipped away, and then stayed home anyway, that they are not assholes. There is nothing wrong with being angry that the platitudes of “we’re all in it together” issued by the Conservative Party were not true after all (as indeed, they were not true when David Cameron’s government was slashing public services to the bone in the name of “balancing the books”). However, it is important that we do not react to the asshole behaviour of Dominic Cummings by becoming assholes ourselves. “I guess I’ll just do whatever I want if this guy can” is not a helpful response to this outrageous behaviour, nor is it going to help us save lives. There’s already enough people out there potentially spreading disease by refusing to socially distance, sometimes while complaining about people refusing to socially distance (“otherwise law-abiding plaguespreaders”). And under our constantly changing “new normal” there’s already enough leeway for people to place themselves into a zone of “legal indistinction” (as Agamben might have it) in the name of their own freedom or convenience if they so desire. Be “the sort of person who follows the rules” not because you expect it to earn you the right to disregard them when you so desire, or even because you wish yourself to be imbued with some nebulous moral virtue, but for the simple reward of saving another human being’s life.
Essentially, what I’m saying is
that we need to be better than Dominic Cummings. Based on his actions over the last few days,
and the last few years, it isn’t hard.
