Covid-19 and the Crisis of Legitimacy
Wherever you stand on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard not to accept that it has created a serious crisis of legitimacy for the liberal social and political order. Confidence in its integrity has been severely compromised. Allegations of cover-ups, lies and mis- or dis-information have been freely traded. As the five-year anniversary passes, commentators have questioned whether populations would accept social interventions in future pandemics. Public health’s very foundation as a means to both individual and collective welfare has been challenged. Can anyone still assume that people should follow without debate the prescriptions of a disinterested cadre of experts who know what is best for humanity?
Naturally, proposed responses vary. Some would double down on the use of state power and the force of law to compel compliance with public health measures where populations suspect that state messaging is just psychological manipulation. Others argue that, at most, states should be impartial suppliers of information, with people and organizations left to make their own choices, regardless of the wider implications. I may claim the right not to vaccinate my child against measles – but what of my child’s right to protection against a potentially fatal infection or the rights of other children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons?
Is something more fundamental going on? Max Weber, the pioneering German sociologist, proposed that modern societies were marked by a shift from ‘traditional’ and ‘charismatic’ to ‘rational-legal’ sources of legitimacy. Traditional authority derived from historically established customs, conventions, and offices. Charismatic authority was personal but endured only as long as the credibility or lifetime of the individual who exercised it. Both ultimately gave way to ‘rational-legal’ authority. Contemporary societies were governed through a more or less coherent body of rules, which applied to everyone regardless of wealth or status. These rules were impersonally administered by salaried office-holders, who distinguished the impartiality of their work lives from the emotional engagements of their private lives. No-one – service user, client or patient – could expect special treatment, whether on the basis of a personal connection or the payment of a bribe.
Weber has less to say about the foundations of that order. Its rationality lies in the application rather than the creation of rules. In theory, it is possible to have an authoritarian state with a rational-legal order. Perhaps we should think more widely about rationality. Weber distinguishes two kinds: formal and substantive. Formal rationality is where rules are followed because they have been created through a systematic and transparent process, regardless of their content. Provided proper procedures were followed, a legislature could decree that all citizens were to accept that the moon was made of green cheese. Substantive rationality refers to the content of a law. Is it based on evidence of need and likely benefit, produced by an impartial process and a reasonable consensus about the relationship between its objectives and the means chosen to achieve them? Modern science and its methods play a particularly important part in establishing the substantive rationality of a law.
In many countries, Covid policy never adequately addressed the substantive rationality of legal, and other, interventions. Pandemics were not a new and unforeseen threat. Emergency planners had long been thinking about them, and considering the evidence base for interventions. When the moment came, though, that work was summarily dismissed by many governments and policy elites, with the conspicuous exception of Sweden. No government gave a clear account of the reasons for this beyond assertions that Covid-19 was an entirely novel virus that rendered irrelevant everything that was previously known about influenza-like respiratory illnesses, including those caused by other coronaviruses. Nothing that had been learned about transmission or social interventions since the 1918 influenza pandemic could be used as a starting-point.
Although governments claimed to be ‘following the science’ – treating the findings of science as a basis for substantively rational law – they were in the grip of the pandemic of fear, which accompanies any viral or bacterial pandemic. Actions became based on other sources of authority. These either involved traditionalist appeals to the fundamental benevolence of the state and its agents or charismatic appeals to the prestige of particular individuals: ‘Follow this instruction because the all-wise President says you should or follow this instruction because the legendary Dr Fauci says you should’. In the UK, these appeals combined in the Trinity of the Prime Minister, the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientist, regularly appearing together on television to issue decrees to the audience. Members of medical and scientific elites were recruited to lend the authority of their office or personal charisma. When they invoked scientific rationality, its weaknesses soon kicked in.
Two failings are particularly important.
The first is the social distribution of scientific knowledge. Being an expert in one branch of science does not make anyone a universal expert in ‘science’. Niche expertise, and a well-connected CV, may be a pathway to elite status but being an expert in virology does not make one an expert in ventilation engineering, let alone social policy or economics. This was a recurrent issue during the pandemic. The self-correcting mechanisms that are supposed to underpin scientific rationality kept trying to operate but were widely suppressed. Debates became highly personal, with appeals to traditional or charismatic authority, rather than robust data. Research was not launched in real time to inform and correct policy. The scientific community failed to produce a body of work that would supply a legitimate basis for rational-legal interventions.
The second was the confusion of ends and means. Initially, ‘following the science’ implicitly meant seeking a state of zero-Covid and zero mortality without recognizing whether this was practically possible or necessarily desirable. As Johann Giesecke, a leading figure in Swedish public health, observed many years ago, mortality in human populations is ultimately 100 per cent. Everyone dies. If medicine prevents them dying from one thing, they will just die from another. At a population level, life expectancy is remarkably unaffected by medical actions. Public health used to recognize this, aiming to avoid the worst that might happen, rather than seeking to promote utopias of equality, diversity and sustainability. All of these objectives may be intrinsically worthy but, elevated to dogma, they rapidly undermine the reason, consent and compromise that are baked into liberal political orders.
The consequence was a set of state-backed interventions that were neither rational nor legal but harked back to an earlier time of traditional or charismatic authority. Should we now be surprised, then, to see the liberal order in crisis as political leaders arrogate to themselves the traditional privileges of monarchs or the charisma of a television host as a foundation for their policies, and demands for compliance?
