Happy New Year to all my readers of “Surgeon’s Note.” May we start the new year with the hope and optimism that 2021 will wipe clean the opprobrium, the mortification, and the affliction of the year 2020 humanity has just so painfully traversed.
On New Year’s Day morning, I was driving through the roads of Cambridgeshire in the UK in the mist, and though the mist for the most part was mild, at times it was particularly dense, reducing visibility to a minimum. It was well past nine on the clock; however, there was not a soul on the road, and being the middle of winter, the land looked desolate -- the trees had turned bare and exposed, and the roadside soil appeared barren.
My mind went back to the events of the past year that has been exceptionally challenging for the world community. From the very dawn of the year 2020, the coronavirus pandemic determinedly swept through the transcontinental planes and set one of the century’s records for human misery, death, and destruction. Human civilization was exposed bare, and made to suffer an immeasurable adversity with resultant regression rather than progress.
The year 2020 had justified major hold-up and curtailment of individual liberty, necessitated by the need for public health demand, forced on human civilization by the ruthless and disastrous pandemic.
Both man-made and natural global disasters demand hard choices, shifting and modifying priorities. One of the foremost prerogatives to be compromised and curtailed in a global public health affliction and misfortune is individual liberty that regresses into triviality, compared to the gravity imposed by the necessity of human health and as such, personal freedom becomes almost irrelevant -- occupying a back-seat, unnoticed, and forced to make way for measures, surprisingly so easily acceptable in the face of the importance demanded by the urgency of public health.
State paternalism instinctively appears a necessity and agreeable even to the most ardent of the liberals. However, this necessity for importance required in a public health calamity also acts as the fertile breeding ground for evil pretexts, strengthening the weapons of repression by the cynical autocratic regimes to bury individual and eventually people’s liberty.
Many an autocrat has seized the coronavirus as an excuse to dominate their critics, to deliberately destroy any dissent, to curtail severely the freedom of press and media, the list goes on infinitely.
We know very well that some restriction of individual freedom is unavoidable when ensuring the protection of mass population becomes important. That is mainly the reasons why a society would be willing to accept without much deliberation many a restriction for the good of the greater society but this pretext also opens up unlimited space and opportunity for despotic autocrats to impose their egotistical and narcissistic agendas indiscriminately, taking full advantage of the propitious junctures aided by the full buttress of the state apparatus. The despots in their hunger for power deprive individuals to begin with, and ultimately the deprivation culminates in loss of liberty of population groups and eventually the entire population, as individuals, groups, and entire populations are interlinked and interdependent for continuity of life.
The despot is not outside the realm of the population and it is not too difficult to postulate the eventual demise of a despotic regime, which usually is perpetrated in the most unexpected, undesired, and unsavoury way.
According to the most prominent English thinker-philosopher-economist of the 19th century John Stuart Mill, who in his masterpiece “On Liberty” stated that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” So, lockdowns, social distancing, wearing masks, ensuring hand-washing, and implementing etiquettes of coughing, sneezing, and spitting with in-built deterrent of fines and imprisonment may readily be accepted as public health measures in preventing the spread of Covid-19 with an objective to minimize harm to others.
In a similar approach, there would be requirement of other necessary policies supporting citizens with financial and other appropriate aid from the public funds managed by the state authority, until such time as citizens are able to earn, acquire, and manage essentials of life themselves.
The despots would acclimate and abuse these public health restrictions and privileges to dispose the minutest of any opposition to their capricious mode of conducting the state affairs as noticed recently in many parts of the world, having been adapted by so many of the authoritative administrations worldwide.
Some may have utilized these opportunities with extreme callousness, resulting in multifold increase in death brought on by the pandemic. Many despots have used these absences of accountability and transient immunity to consolidate willful power; some bigots have ruthlessly used the moment in siphoning and robbing precious state, public, and private finances, others are using the acquiescent perspective for wholesale ethnic cleansing, in the shadow of the implementation of public health measures and state acting as the principal financial controlling character.
To end today’s “Surgeon’s Note,” I would emphasize on the conclusion that the statesmen who have successfully harmonized the admirable philosophy of evaluating individual freedom as of the highest importance, and simultaneously ably recognized the need of the society in the current pandemic, not to be dwarfed by accepting and appreciating such principle of individual liberty, would occupy the highest position in the “honour list” of revered statesman. May the year 2021 bring universal peace, harmony, and happiness.
Dr Raqibul Mohammad Anwar is Specialist Surgeon, Global Health Policy and Planning Expert, and Retired Colonel, Royal Army Medical Corps, UK Armed Forces.
