Freedom is not free
Yesterday, one of my best friends told me that she had sent her 13 years old son to buy some bread at the supermarket with his identity card in his hand, with a note describing the needs he was fulfilling, as required by the measures taken to keep Covid 19 under control. “Now you know what to live under a regime is like” she said to him, explaining that he should not take freedom for granted. I was moved: she showed a strong civic sense in saying these words.
Many people praise the government’s decision to shut 60 million people at home with just some tens of thousands of cases of Covid 19 infection. When I point out that this is a strong compression of our constitutional freedoms, most people remind me that it is foreseen by the constitution, in article 16, that restrictions like this can be made for health reasons. I honestly doubt that the constituent fathers had the current outcome in their mind when they wrote article 16. Until then the concept of cordon sanitaire hasn’t been applied but for a small percentage of infected patients in a whole country. Quarantine was intended for likely sick people, not for likely healthy ones. In the past the cordon sanitaire has been done where virulence was high and also (here we are!) mortality was very high. And the latter is a point on which one could argue, given a 3% percentage of deaths. 20% of ill people suffer complications, it will be objected to me, and we have not enough intensive care units. Yes, it is true and this must worry us. But I also wonder: this attempt to fully remove risks can be successful? If in other countries the disease continues to expand, how can we think that after that in a few weeks the disease will drop we will be free from it forever? Won’t it come back again, maybe from abroad? And, again, won’t we be forced to shut down our country once again? But, can we shut down our country forever? Can we compress our freedoms until we have a vaccine?
The cordon sanitaire is a practice that began in the eighteenth century to limit the damage of plague, yellow fever and cholera, whose mortality rates were able to destroy communities. Are we facing such a risk? Don’t have we any alternative, like isolating only individual outbreaks and people at risk? Are we really sure that we can completely fulfill the leap between our desires for happiness and harsh reality? I wish I had this certainty, but I don’t have.
It’s what people want
Beyond all questions we can ask ourselves however, the current lock down is what people in Italy want. It seems that the government took its decisions reluctantly, pushed by people who asked to free Barabbas instead of Jesus. Will people change their mind when realizing how many families could remain on the brink after a protracted crisis? Will people turn against those who freed Barabbas instead of Jesus? We do not know, even if the memory of September 8 suggest that the popular favor don’t lasts forever, at least in Italy.
Four considerations
However, there are some considerations that should be made, and here I come to the core of my lecture.
The first one is that the loss of faith and religiosity has got out of the interference of priests in our public and private life, but on the other hand has left people exposed to a blind fear. If beyond life there is only nothingness and death, many people will be tempted to think that we have only this life to enjoy and that it should be preserved at all costs and that, perhaps, freedom is not so important. A man for whom the end occurs with death has only this life to live, and he will be more willing to put all his good in the hands of the first comer as long as he allows him to live longer.
The second consideration is that Hermann Göring was right when he said that the people, if stimulated by fear, tend to react beyond all limits. It is not the first pandemic in republican Italy. The 1957 asian flu made 30,000 deaths out of a population of 50 million people, but was also treated in a much milder way by public authorities. The 1968 Hong Kong flu killed significantly less people (20,000) but already generated more panic in the newspapers. The generation of 1957 was the same that had lived through the war and probably related with fears in a different way from us.
The third consideration is that we come from 28 years of economic crisis and that the country is increasingly tired and disheartened. We did not know how to renew ourselves, we lived in the feeling that we could keep up with the times even without sacrifices, and our refusal to make sacrifices made the management of our country very difficult. The only reform that goes in the direction of what needed, the Fornero one, is just the result of a strong emergency, and is considered like a red cloth in front of the muzzle of the bull. People have increasingly exalted populists leaders who offer easy (and impossible) recipes, and seek enemies elsewhere (the immigrants, the Europe…) without ever making a self examination. Covid 19 finds us tired and disheartened. I have notice of people in small hill towns invoking draconian measures for people who go out from their homes. People from southern Italy that left Milan to go home were defined idiots and plague spreaders, without thinking that we are all healthy people until reasonable suspicion and that they had only one chance in a thousand of not being so. People usually have trouble in understanding the concept of probability and, by indiscriminately applying an abused precautionary principle, consider sick even those with one chance in 1000 to be infected. This crisis, perhaps, will pass, but the wounds on which it is throwing salt will bleed even more in the coming years. And if it does not bring our public finances directly to default (if you do not allow people to live and work, how can they pay taxes?) It will further aggravate the current situation pushing up our public debt to unknown territories.
The fourth consideration is that in a society of people who feel alone and isolated, all this being called together to do something for a higher destiny for the whole community, has the advantage to break solitudes. We are observing a palliative cure for our individualism, but not demonstrating that our individualism doesn’t exist. After all, Italians have always been divided between individualists who break the rules and those who, not being able to break them, mutter against those who break rules, showing more envy than a real civic sense (Indro Montanelli said he had known scoundrels who were not moralists, but he never knew moralists who were not scoundrels, and this is also my own experience).
Plato’s republic is coming?
My thoughts turn to the Korean War memorial in Washinghton: freedom is not free is written there. I hope that more and more people sooner or later will realize it. What the generation that lived the first epidemic of 1957 knew and that we, perhaps, no longer know, is precisely this, that our freedom is not given forever. And that the problem is not our government, nor conspiracies around the world, but only our neighbor who, in order to quell his fears and his envy for other’s people freedom, thinks that shutting us inside our walls is not a great problem.
I don’t fear that fascism is coming back, it’s dead and gone, but I fear something far more subtle and ambiguous: the coming of a Platonic republic where only the wise has the right to speak and to decide. In these days the mediatic success of some virologists has completely compressed political space, since in Italy politics is now weak and discredited. Parliament also entered quarantine and, instead of being the garrison of the constitution as it should be, it was… empty. The centrality of parliament in our system is wounded. And it’s bad. The task of the technicians (including virologists) is to indicate to us all the possible solutions. The task of politicians is to choose the most practicable one among many possible ones, also taking into account areas outside the competence of these technicians (including virologists), such as constitutional rights and economic stability. In short, I think that politics must be central again.That’s the reason why, today, I thought that my friend telling those words to her son did a great act of civic sense, legal and constitutional civilization, reminding him of the value of freedom.
