See that pic above? That's an American right-winger being unvaccinated to…being a Jewish person during the Holocaust.
Obviously, such a comparison is as unintelligent as it is offensive and repulsive. The question remains, why the ?%&^% do so many americans tend to believe in such outlandish things? Why do they always see themselves as history's greatest victims?
I recently read a notable British public intellectual say something jaw-dropping: "Compulsory vaccination is counterproductive in nations with liberal and libertarian traditions and is unethical."
Did you get that? Vaccination is…unethical. What? What planet is this person on? And what kind of ethics do you imagine they have, if they think that vaccination is something to be feared?
You might have had the displeasure about having to think about a question lately: should vaccines be mandatory? Displeasure because, well, it's an idiotic way to think about the question — like the public intellectual above, reaching an absurd conclusion from a foolish premise.
Let's think about it like thoughtful people then for a second.
Vaccination isn't just a matter of "individual choice." You know that, and everyone should know that. It has what economists call "externalities." That is, my getting vaccinated improves your health, too. If I'm vaccinated against infectious diseases, there's less chance you catch them. There's less burden therefore on healthcare systems and economies and society in general. Everybody's better off when I'm vaccinated, and in that sense, it's not just "my" decision, an individual choice, like being a "consumer" or choosing some dumb celeb to worship on Instagram.
It's in that sense that health is a public good. We don't speak of "private health" — we speak of "public health." Why? Because my health depends on yours. It's hard to be a healthy person in a society of ill ones — no matter how rich you are. It's easy to be a sick person in a society with poor health, sanitation, water, food — no matter how strong you are. Public health is a thing, a reality, precisely because health is something that we share collectively.
Now, many people seem to have forgotten this, especially in the West, which is being Americanized. People are told to be little individualist consumers and never think about anyone or anything else. The entire idea of public goods is under attack and denied by fanatics and extremists from Trump to Boris Johnson. Everything's reduced to a matter of "individual choice" and "personal responsibility" — even things as inherently interdependent as education, science, research, or, in this case, health and healthcare.
So the question isn't if vaccine mandates are "ethical." Unless your ethics are "your life doesn't matter, and only mine does," the question that they could ever be unethical is obviously false. And if your ethics don't value anyone else's life, well, they're not really "ethics" at all, which, by definition, are about what you value more than yourself.
To make all that crystal clear, let's take the example of vaccinated against a killer disease like Polio. Polio was endemic until about the 1970s. It only "went away" because there was a massive, massive campaign to eliminate it. It was only eliminated in America, for example, in 1979.
That's how recent Polio was. 1979 — even in a rich country like America.
And even that took a massive, massive, effort, in a different America when it came to public health and collective responsibility, though. How different?
"The American public was deeply invested in fighting polio, with 300,000 volunteers from all walks of life helping to complete the Salk vaccine trial in 1954, a massive and unprecedented undertaking. At over 200 test sites nationwide, volunteers inoculated nearly 2 million children, some with the real vaccine and others with a placebo as part of the first double-blind vaccine trial in American history."
Now let's come to today. Vaccines are indeed mandatory — in America. No vaccination record, your kid can't go to school. You can try to get out of it, as many regressive and superstitious folks do — but by and large, the idea that you have to vaccinate your kids holds. And that's eminently reasonable and sensible. Why? Because, as we've already established, public health is a collective responsibility. It's not just about you or your kid — no matter what they say on Faux News. It's about a whole, in this case, school, community, town, city. And every sensible parent knows that.
So Americans, interestingly, already accept "vaccine mandates."
The interesting wrinkle is that vaccines aren't mandatory in much of Europe. Why is that? I asked my wife, the lovely doctor. And she said: "Well, I've never really had anyone refuse."
That captures the difference between Europe and America in a nutshell. Europeans have a much greater sense of collective responsibility. Europeans don't tend to need "mandates" to tell them to do something simple like care for their neighbours.
Europeans and Americans have vastly different norms, in other words. European life is rich in public goods, woven into the fabric of everything, from town squares to public hospitals to public transport. Those reinforce a sense of shared responsibility and care and dignity and trust in Europeans. Americans, on the other hand, are notoriously greedy, selfish, aggressive, and individualistic.
Europeans don't need mandates to tell them to do the right thing — but Americans do.
That's a much more nuanced answer to the question: "should we make vaccines mandatory."
Now let's come to the flipside of the question. Does making vaccines mandatory have any kinds of negative or corrosive effects? Like American conservatives, or the foolish public intellectual I quoted in the beginning, claim? For example, if they were really some kind of huge infringement of freedom, then America would reveal its effects, because vaccines are already mandatory in America.
The fact though is that American kids are vastly better off with vaccines than without them. Nobody's being affected in any serious negative way so far as any empirical evidence can reveal by…making people take vaccines.
For example, if the claim is "making vaccines mandatory is fascism!!" then, LOL, the answer to that claim is pretty obvious. Vaccines were mandatory in America long, long before Donald Trump came along. If making kids — or anyone — take vaccines led to fascism, then a Trump would have arrived long before.
I know that's a ridiculous claim. But I want you to really understand why. Fascism? That's when hate is institutionalised by an authoritarian party, who uses the instruments of state to violently repress and brutalise scapegoated minorities to the point of torture and genocide. Vaccines are the precise opposite — they enhance and boost everyone's health. They're the furthest thing from fascism there ever is or could be.
Now let's come back to the central question. Do vaccines infringe on "liberty" and "freedom"? There's a pretty simple way to answer that question. What do you give up if you have to get vaccinated? The answer is: nothing. You gain something, and so does everyone else: public health.
Your freedom is infringed not just when you're "coerced," but when you actually pay a price. It's not coercion, for example, if I make you accept a million dollars you don't want. It's not coercion if I magically put it in your bank account. You might not want it — but that's not an infringement of freedom.
Let me put that to you another way to make it crystal clear. Freedom isn't just "I get to do whatever I want, no matter what!!" That's free-dumb, the American libertarian notion, a child or sociopaths' idea, take your pick.
The best definition of freedom there is comes from the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He says that freedom is your "capabilities." That means, roughly speaking, how much potential you have. How long can you live? How many relationships can you have? How close will they be? How happy and meaningful will your days be? How much responsibility can you take for living in a way that fulfills all that potential?
That's freedom. And that beautiful, wise, noble definition of freedom? Well, they don't teach it to you in America because they hate it. All the white dudes, the elites, the economists and pundits and whatnot. Sen is Indian. He's always been against orthodox economics, which is why he developed this theory, by pointing that even a slave can be brainwashed into thinking they're free, if you give them slightly nicer stuff — but they won't be richer in potential in any way, which is what freedom really is.
This definition of freedom is so wise and beautiful because it explains why sensible people intuitvely, instantly think the American right's idea of "liberty" is so maddeningly stupid. In what sense is carrying a gun to Starbucks "freedom"? Or how is turning down a vaccine "freedom"? Or how is denying someone else healthcare "freedom"?
Sen's definition of freedom patiently explains to us: these things infuriate us because they're diminution of potential, thefts of it. The guy carrying a machine gun to Starbucks ruins everyone else's sense of safety. The one denying everyone else healthcare costs a whole society longevity, happiness, trust, peace of mind.
Sen's definition of freedom — what American intellectuals derisively call "positive freedom," and think of something to be avoided — can emerge from norms, or laws, or both. In that sense freedom itself is a public good, not just an individual one.
They don't feel like freedom because they're not.
Freedom in this sense is the diametrical opposite of American extremist notions of "liberty." Those are "doing whatever you want, even if it means someone else dies because they can't medicine, get sick, get poor, etc." That's not freedom for anyone — even you, because it costs you in the end, too, public goods, like health or education or trust or happiness. Real freedom? It's something much much more sophisticated, humane, and grown-up than American "liberty."
It's something more like: "I accept responsibility for my own potential, and for that of my society, too. Nobody here is an island. I have a responsibility to make the most of myself — not just as a consumer, but as a human being, to live a meaningful, worthy, fulfilled life. And I also have a responsibility to enable others to live that way, too. When I can balance those responsibilities in a way that yields more than the sum of their parts, then I begin to be truly free."
That's tough. It's complex. It's not easy. It requires a much, much more nuanced, sophisticated ethics than "getting vaccinated is fascism!!" It makes you think about why you're really here, and what you should really be doing with this one brief life. It makes you genuinely begin to value yourself and the lives around you in deep and enduring and serious ways.
All that is why lovers of American style "liberty" seem consistently opposed to their own freedom — and yours. They're not really lovers of freedom, at least in the sense of the expansion of human potential. They're the opposite. Bullies, authoritarians, abusers. The guy carrying the gun to Starbucks? He's doing it to bully everyone else — nobody's going to shoot him, for Pete's sake. But he's also the one, probably, crying "vaccines are fascism!" Again, that's not about freedom — how could it be? — it's just about the right to harm others.
But the right to harm others is not freedom. It never has been. Lovers of American liberty make that fundamental mistake: they equate the right to harm others with their own personal choices and responsibilities, and call that "freedom." But your freedom ends where my potential begins. You don't have the right, really, to take away my health, meaning, relationships, dignity, happiness, sanity — or at least, in a modern society, you shouldn't.
Liberty in the American notion is the right to harm, threaten, intimidate, bully, aggress — which is why America is such a weirdly hostile, abusive society. But true freedom? It's the very opposite of all that. It's not having to be that guy. The one who needs to drag someone else down to feel lifted up, who needs to hurt someone to feel better about themselves, because they feel worthless to begin with. True freedom is the power to lift up. And not just the power, but the strength — the gentleness, the wisdom, the sorrow, and the grace.
Don't let America's idiots convince you that "liberty" and freedom are the same things. They're not. Liberty is an addled, confused notion, the bastard child of Ayn Ran, Nietzsche, the ideologically fanatical Chicago School economists who worshipped them, and greedy politicians like Mitch McConnell who realised they could make a fortune off the folly of it. Liberty in the American sense doesn't make you more free — only less so. If it did, Americans would have the world's best healthcare, education, transport, the best lives — instead, they have some of the worst. Americans may have liberty — but they don't have freedom. Not yet, in the sense that Europeans and Canadians do.
Vaccine mandates in that sense are interesting because they illuminate a central question. They're one of the few things America's ever done right. They're not "liberty," in the dumb American sense — but they've expanded freedom in profound and enduring ways, by massively boosting public health, longevity, happiness, trust, giving millions illness-free childhoods. They're proof that American "liberty" doesn't free you, and that freedom doesn't come from American "liberty," either.
That's the difference, right there, between liberty and freedom. Americans would do well to think about it more carefully. Because from what I can see — and most of my European and Canadian friends can, too — America's a long, long way from really being free.
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Umair
July 2021
Image Credit: Julie Leopo
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