We’re publishing an original piece today by Dr Sinéad Murphy, an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University, about why the empirical and moral arguments against lockdown have failed to cut through. She believes, following Professor David McGrogan, that this is because most people experience lockdowns as they would other aesthetic experiences – as a source of collective pleasure that they’re loth to interrupt. Here is an extract:
If the Covid experience is indeed an aesthetic experience, the impotence of our counter arguments, our practical concerns and our personal pains is certainly explained very well. Those we wish to convince to change their minds are not using their minds; those we wish to share our concerns do not have concerns; those we wish to feel our distress cannot see us or our distress: they are caught up in a kind of satisfaction – occasioned by the concerted responses of governments and populations to an invisible global attack – that is comprised of a heady sense of profound community, of fellow feeling on a universal scale. We cannot touch this experience with our facts and our projects and our pains. At the very most, we can only threaten to puncture its ecstasy; insofar as we do that, we are batted away as an inconvenient distraction.
An immoral distraction too – which is why the batting away can get so ugly. An aesthetic experience, Kant advised, is not in itself a moral experience. Appeals to moral content and respect for the moral law detract from the disinterest necessary for the aesthetic mode. A fourth neighbour, with concerns about the morality of sipping wine under a midsummer’s sky while nearby children suffer from neglect has made a category error too. But not because morality is irrelevant to aesthetic experience, but because particular moral content is irrelevant to it. In fact, an aesthetic experience, because it is premised upon the setting aside of conceptual analysis, worldly projects and personal preferences, is excellent preparation for the moral and a good sign of a moral disposition; it only excludes particular moral issues. This explains the most curious feature of the Covid consensus: its combination of intense righteousness and ethical indifference; its simultaneous heady capture of the moral high ground and calm disregard for moral fallout all around.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SCaSZP1siSQ
This interview from this morning with Julia Hartley Brewer is worth a watch. This twit Dr Taylor is a prime example of the sort of thinking (if you can call it that) which we are up against. It if frightening that someone so monumentally stupid and selfish can both get into parliament and qualify as a doctor. Anyone who is suffering in any during lockdown might want to write to him describing what they are going though in an attempt to open his mind. He thinks everyone should be jabbed so people might also want to invoice him to be personally liable for any harm the jab does to them.
WellI am glad he found it so funny.That was an utterly disgraceful performance. That man would have been a colleague of Mengele during the war.
As awful as he was the real worry is there is a large percentage of people who would see absolutely nothing wrong with what he said and would actually consider JHB to be the bonkers one. Not only that but people with his school of thought are those who have Johnson’s ear.
Yes – this is the point. The media can easily drag up any psychotic/sociopathic moron to grace the airwaves. It doesn’t much matter.
But the willingness of swathes of the population binning any sense of critical thinking or moral centre is what is truly concerning and puts the country with the population of 1930s Germany.
This old guy would be the first to start bleating if a locked down, collapsed economy destroyed his pension. Which it will.
“why the empirical and moral arguments against lockdown have failed to cut through.”
Sorry, no. Coronamadness advertising budget globally – £Billions. Censorship of opposing views via Ofcom etc. Big tech controlling access to information to suit their own agenda. Compliant media. Behavioural Insights Team. No political opposition.
Propaganda works
Arguments have failed to cut through because they simply have not been heard much. The blame lies at the door of the PM and the cast of filthy collaborators, whom LS like to call “Boris” and hope his hidden libertarian streak suddenly emerges.
Thinking that there’s a level playing field on which arguments are played out from both sides, is wildly inaccurate.
The complete suppression of any alternative arguments and the hysterical, sleazy used-car salesman approach to shove needles in arms should be huge red flags for almost everyone.
Yet, half the population seems to have swallowed the dogma hook, line, and sinker.
Sadly they have –
You are completely correct — all the things you have just pointed out are true and it is depressing in the extreme —— I now Loathe Boris Johnson who has proved himself to be a vain weak man who is prepared damage the country and the people of the UK by his failure to lead or show any sense or backbone — Keeping low grade people in positions of power in the hope they will carry the can for this humanitarian disaster
Too right. If you are a stupid, selfish, grasping, lying, cowardly toad you are hardly lime.y to surround yourself with subordinates who are intelligent and have integrity.
The simple answer is that men go mad in herds and only slowly recover their senses. Hence we must band together and resist any further reimposition or new normal.
individually…recover their senses..
Great piece of writing.
Since we now know that dating apps allow users to skip those declared unvaccinated, we should assume that fashionable people who are looking only for the best – the vaccinated – should be called the ‘wed-betters’.
I suspect that it’s more carrot and stick than aesthetic experience. The stick of fear, softened by the carrot of furlough. However, the illusion of being a ‘hero’ for staying at home and letting other people bring you things probably appeals to some on an aesthetic level.
We can be heroes, just for one day… Sorry, 14 months and counting…
The Psyop has been relentless, this is true. The deliberate supression of data etc is also true. BUT, this has been 50 years in the making. Populations have been ‘worked on’ to produce this response. Education has been dumbed down, ‘big society’ in all its various characterisations has been encouraged. The ‘hive’ mind is ready, covid is the test, zero carbon is the result.
Scientific thought has been replaced by ‘the science’. The individual has been replaced by ‘society’.
It may have started as Frankfurt School thinking in the 70s, but its been adopted by the new capitalist elite to disrupt economies. Its a new feudalism, a new totalitarianism based on biotech fascism.
The rather naive idea that it can be changed by voting for a different governing party is now shown to be invalid. The powers that feed off this process are diverse, not national, not ideology based, but a collection of elites and their henchmen. Its probably true to say that they don’t plan or control most of it, but direct its trend. They are so rich they can take opportunistic benefits as it develops.
Great piece, as usual from Sinead Murphy. No answers yet about what we can do, since empirical, moral and even “other-aesthetic” arguments won’t work.
The one character who doesn’t appear in this piece – obviously, because the others have more explanatory value – is the other person who responds correctly and appropriately to an aesthetic experience. The person who responds to “Isn’t this great?” by saying “Yes, it’s awesome”.
I think people, everyone, needs aesthetic experiences, in this sense. And that adds another crime to lockdown’s charge sheet. Lockdown has stolen aesthetic experience from us, by monopolising it. I wonder whether artists have felt stunted, for reasons over and above the lockdown crimes we already know so well – the devaluation of “non-essential” things, the impossibility of human contact and company, the isolation, the destruction of livelihoods.
I’m not an artist of any distinction, but I truly hate the way lockdown has colonised the aesthetic space. That open space, where you and everyone around you agrees that something is sublime, has been planted with a crop of nasty, shallow little weeds, rooted in lies. People seem happy to do without the aesthetic dimension, because vacuous little slogans like “all in this together”, dreamed up by horrible little manikins, satisfy that urge in them. I’m also thinking of Amos Elon’s introduction to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, where he suggests (or is it a quote from Arendt herself?) that only good has any depth – evil can only be extreme. The aesthetic has been replaced by something shallow, shrill, extreme, which never stops screaming about its own importance.
I absolutely agree. Having been to a live music concert and an art gallery recently, I found both experiences have been so taken-over by the ‘we’re all in it together’ aesthetic, that it was absurd. Absolutely nothing to do with music and art, only the show of music and art.
I got the impression most people were there because that’s what you do if you’re middle class and compliant. Nothing whatsoever to do with art (which inherently must be at some level irreverent, challenging of the status quo etc).
Seeing (at Tate Modern) masked (mostly white) zombies staring a photographs of South African queer people….you couldn’t make it up. Absurd
And btw, Sinéad Murphy is and has been one of the most brilliant thinkers and feelers throughout this time. What a relief whenever I see she’s written something!
Kitsch is the opposite of art.
Covidian conformity is the opposite of virtue.
I had a similar experience at a pub recently- we were celebrating someone’s birthday and the experience was so different, so depressing that I’ve told everyone not to bother for my birthday next month. It was awful- we had to wait in line until we were allowed in, told to sanitise, scan the app, follow to the table, leave masks on, etc. everything was so slimy from the hysterical sanitizing, everyone seemed so fearful and there was no atmosphere because everyone was so far apart, (we had to sit at separate tables as there were 7 of us). The latest conversation piece is about when you had your jab and how you can still get ‘it’ even if you’ve had you’re jabs so you can’t be too careful -one family member refused to come because he felt that tables were too close in pubs and he knew you can still get ‘it’. The whole experience left a bitter taste and unless/until we have full re-opening I’m done.
People have been injected but acknowledge “you can still get it;” these idiots have had lobotomies as well. Obviously unable to see the ridiculous absurdities of their position.
God help us.
I feel the same about all this enforced outdoor drinking, I go home and open a bottle..fuck em…
“Absolutely nothing to do with music and art, only the show of music and art.
I got the impression most people were there because that’s what you do if you’re middle class and compliant.”
I haven’t been to any live music or galleries, and may not for a while, because I fear feeling exactly as you describe. It’s bad enough to go to a pretend-pub, but pretend-music, pretend-art?
And your impression, I notice, is of the people, not the art or the music. That is, again, exactly the reaction I fear in myself. I would struggle with it, try to rationalise it: “come on now, underneath the masks these are real people like me…”. But because that’s a rational argument, it misses the point (as explained above in the article): it can’t bring back the absence it’s a response to.
The problem, for me, is: other people are dead to me. Lockdown has killed them. More precisely, thanks to the article: the lockdown aesthetic makes them no longer trustworthy, as full people. Analytic philosophy used to be full of thinking about “theory of mind” – ascribing mind to others, on the flimsiest of evidence. I’m talking about something I could clumsily call “theory of aesthetic kin”. And Kant (above) seems to imply that other people, perhaps even if only imagined in solitude, are necessary to an aesthetic experience: so aesthetic experience is impossible.
I struggle against this, not because I want to be full of fellow-feeling in a kitschy “all in this together” way, or even want to like other people because that’s a virtuous way to be (I’d actually settle for disliking someone, because of something real about them) but because life without fully existing other people is actually unbearable.
I’m back to Sorley MacLean, who wrote this 80? years ago:
“But for you, the sand that is in Talisker…
would be an endless plain to my expectation
On which the spear desire would not turn back.
… but you have set up an edict above my pain…”
As an artist who has exhibited widely for over 50 years Art lost its way years ago now it is a derranged mess of ‘identity issues’ half baked low grade agit prop race stuff and boring ‘conceptual bollox.. I’m done with galleries and just do my own stuff as a vision quest..
As an artist I can answer this in the affirmative.
I now have to drink quite a bit to see any point in listening to the Schumann Fantasie, when a few years ago I spent two years of my life learning it.
I have to try much harder to do my work these days because I unconsciously feel it isn’t valued. This in spite of the fact I KNOW my customers do value it. I’m starting to get on top of this I think, but ultimately it can never fully resolve under this climate.
I know what you mean about music. I find it difficult to practice these days. I play piano and the emotional content is tarred with a feeling that it’s surplus to requirements. Yes, I know one should cultivate that almost Goethe like self assuredness, that existential unconditional self-worth, but that’s much easier said than done, especially when you feel that even that isn’t appreciated.
We are well beyond the existential crisis. We are no longer lost souls in a meaningless world, no, we are trapped souls in a deluded one.
I have attended three small shows of paintings and photographs in the last month. Any pleasure gained from them was purely from the exercise of ‘getting out’, seeing one or two friends and heading for whichever cafe was there or nearby.
The once-unimaginable irony of a handful of silent, masked attendees following arrows around empty rooms in order to admire depictions of fellow humans, all with faces, maybe in groups singing, fighting or making love, seemed lost.
Until art galleries outrightly refuse to implement ‘scientists’ stipulations or visitors en masse refuse to comply with them, they should limit their displays to only the least figurative of Rothko-like canvases or perhaps pictures of glorious sunsets.
Imagine a zoo in which leashed, muzzled animals were led around to peer into the infinitely large cages of free, unchained fellow members of their own species.
https://www.aier.org/article/lockdown-kitsch/
AIER had a related article recently.
It’s pretty similar to Brexit: pure emotion and mass psychology a la Lebon, aka Cult membership.
Brexit’s consequences have been mitigated by Covid, of course.
It’s Cult members have just been incredibly lucky in that regard, but, naturally, they would never accept that verdict, preferring to believe that they have been vindicated already instead.
(FWIW, I think Brexit was a mistake and that the EU/€ could have been fixed, but I also now think that the € will implode.)
The current illusion of the Covid cult members is that the vaccines are a success and that they will mitigate the consequences of lockdowns and justify them.
None of that would have been possible at all without zero rates/the MMT lunacy though.
And the priming of the population and march through the institutions of fascist ‘progressive and moralistic (at least late in their life)’ Boomers over decades that peyrole describes here was also a key prerequisite, as was the miseducation of Millennials and Zs in conjunction with the social media horror show by them and the by now too cowed Xers.
The 4th Turning explained and predicted all this 25 years ago, to the exact year even.
It predicts that we will remain in this communitarian, illiberal state for at least another generation, before the yet unborn might start to revolt and turn that tide again.
It could happen quicker, if the cult ends earlier and, as they usually do, in the catastrophe, which I can imagine as being millions of vaccine deaths and/or the money running out (currency reset preceded by hyperinflation).
But a major war, the Great Reset going wrong and being fought etc. could also be triggers.
I cannot fathom how anyone can enjoy ‘a sunset’ and sigh ‘Aahh’ when millions of people died and continue to die in their back and around them and the stench of their rotting corpses simply can’t be ignored anymore by anyone, nor can the task of burying them and what else that means.
But maybe, their smell and vision have now fully gone and likely, they will just need to be attacked by the vultures and worms which they only brought into play themselves before they get off their ar*es.
Serves them well at least.
I admit to finding the first weeks of domestic imprisonment last year, following that lying and patronising speech by the smirking Dictator, an aesthetic experience that I almost enjoyed.
Nocturnal walks on empty streets, the weird silence and a slow building tension – all made me a bit player in a film.
Novelty soon turned to nauseating tedium of course as, I think, the realisation that this was now for real – a new normal for the foreseeable future, phrases until then un-noted, meaningless. A New fucking Normal.
Learning that facemasks were soon to become compulsory on, at first, transport – news delivered by the slimy get-rich-quick shit Shapps – I prepared myself by buying one of the things from a local chemist. At home I tried the Chinese-made muzzle on and in seconds knew there was something palpably evil here, ripped it off and binned it. Nevermore.
The true horror of what must be confronted has revealed itself in due course – as all here know. It is the apparent and incremental acceptance of an intolerable future by nearly everyone out there.
But I never liked what most liked anyway and I know it’s not just me.
Another framing is to say that covid has been a certain kind of story.
Once a story is begun, it has to be told to the end. No story ever told ran through chapters one to four and then backed out again.
The genre-switching story, the unreliable narrator, the stream of consciousness: these will always be unsatisfying experiments. The twist ending: that’s a more familiar device, but not to everyone’s taste.
What we demand is something simple and epic. A mystery, a villain, reverses and crisis, finding new resolve, a final confrontation and victory.
Brilliant article and it has put into words something I’ve been trying to grasp for a year. So thanks Sinead.
Just recently, I noticed this “we’re all in it together” attitude when I walked past a queue of people waiting for the jab. They had that serene mini-smile of their face you often see at polling booths. It says, we are doing our duty even if we don’t really think it makes much difference. It is a shared experience / virtue signalling / fingers in the ears duty. And they take pleasure from doing it especially if they can’t really see the point.
Replying to myself – there is also something of performance art to it all. People have developed an elaborate way of stepping around people to keep their social distance or ordering beer in the pub or simply talking to each other. A whole load of nods and winks have grown up to draw people together into one effort to fight this “terrible enemy”. It shows you how much people crave for community and since we have had 50 years of it being broken down (in England especially) people have jumped at the chance to find something in common with their neighbour.
The irony is that the thing they’ve jumped at to create “community” is an elaborate aesthetic affirmation of the lack of it. They are finally united in their impoverishment.
Yes – but these ‘aesthetics’ are not primary drivers – they are the adaptations to make the Fear-engendered selfish incoherence bearable.
Thus ‘we’re all in it together’ is a diversion from the hard fact that we’ve all been put under a shit-shower.
Belief becomes a shield against the hard recognition of the evil than stalks around : of course abusive daddies can only do the right thing.
‘Enjoying’ the peripheral effects of lockdown diverts from the horrible social reality.
Noumenon, I agree with your comment and RickH, I agree with your elaboration of it.
I tend to believe that if it wasnt covid….. I know hypochodriac’s who switched to covid as their illness of choice, one used to have ME. They’ve always been there but covid has given their hypochodria meaning and recognition. If they want to have covid terrors they shouldnt be out, simple as that. Re hospital admissions, I heard covid is below hedge trimmer mishaps
This does explain how the furloughed, who appear to want this to continue, are so selfish. Can’t see job losses and business collapsing around them
Brilliant article…. and goes at least some way towards explaining the otherwise inexplicable behaviour of what I used to call normal intelligent human beings – or ‘friends’. I can – just – get my head around a universal shared experience of a sunset – though how this manifests by universal wearing of a panty liner on your face is a bit trickier
I’m quite simply a huge fan of this intellectual Titan. Please never stop.
Now people are wearing badges on the Tube stating, “I am vaccinated.” Have they made a minor mistake in this phrase: shouldn’t it read, “I am retarded”?
This is interesting. It would explain some parts of covidmania.
In this particular case of sunset (a natural phenomena), the person enjoying it doesn’t harm anyone. The pleasure of enjoying a sunset this person is experiencing won’t make the sun god(s) make sun brighter and ruin the crops of the potato farmer.
On the other hand lockdowns (a state of action caused deliberately by humans) do cause a lot of harm and people enjoying them and maybe giving support to them in various ways, are contributing to that harm. At the very least they are stifling resistance to them by obliging with all the lockdown rules 100% even when they don’t have to, or they even go beyond (e.g. double or triple mask wearing).
I actually don’t find this particularly compelling.
The role of Fear is the single most compelling issue. Call that an ‘aesthetic’ if you like. I wouldn’t.
Of course, there are other components that are woven in to make the basket, but I don’t find philosophy much of a tool for analysing it all.
I thought it was an interesting read. I have lost count of the people I’ve talked to who simply do not want to know any facts whatsoever that counter the official narrative and will openly and willingly state that they are not interested. The thought of anything puncturing their ‘all in it together’ idealogy is not up for debate. For many people, this is ‘our war’ complete with the supposed camaraderie that goes with it.
I don’t think Sinead Murphy would disagree with you about the fear (nor do I), but she is describing the next stage if you like – the acceptance of the narrative and its adoption into every day life and then its adaptation into a kitsch covid aesthetic.
Oh yes …but it’s a bit errr … kitsch.
The adoption of the narrative is much better explained in the frame of social psychology – which, ironically is the frame that is used tp perpetrate it.
Another brilliant article from Dr Murphy. Lockdown Sceptics should at least group all her articles under one heading so that we can easily refer to them in the future.