How coronavirus is giving us a crash course in a different moral universe

There was something counter-cultural, as there often is, in the Queen’s speech to the nation about coronavirus. She often speaks about duty and responsibility. This time she spoke about “self-discipline and quiet, good-humoured resolve.” These are, to be honest, not qualities we have tended to prize in recent times.

One of the things we do value in modern life is the right, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The idea that each of us should be free to pursue our own ambitions and wishes as long as we do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same is part of the bedrock of liberal democracy.

Ever since Freud, we have been persuaded that our deepest urges, whether we like it or not, are determinative of who we are, that to suppress them is harmful and we need somehow to let them find an outlet. John Stuart Mill taught us that individual self-expression trumps social conformity. The language of human rights has schooled us in insisting on our individual entitlements and getting belligerent when they are threatened. The idea of “doing your duty” has become, not the highly-valued bedrock of society, but a dull, grey moral demand from First World War generals, scoutmasters, moralists and monarchs.

It’s a frequent observation that in the modern world we no longer have a common idea of what a good life is, but are meant to construct our own versions of it. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa points out that while this may be true, we do have almost universal agreement on the preconditions needed. To have a good and happy existence, in whatever shape you want it to be, you need enough money, friends, knowledge, health and rights to achieve it. “Secure the resources you might need for living your dream whatever that might be. That is the overriding rational imperative of modernity." The result is each of us is in a competition for the resources that enable us to live our own self-chosen version of the good life.

Now all this was a departure from an older view of society found in the classical tradition of Aristotle and Plato, continued to a certain extent in the Christian world, that saw self-restraint as vital to a healthy society. Saint Paul, for example, wrote about how leaders should be “self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.” In this moral tradition, the constant drift towards tyranny could only be held back by virtue and self-rule. Government for the polis was only possible with personal self-government. Freedom was viewed, not as the liberty to pursue your passion, but freedom from passion—understood as the unpredictable, stormy emotions and urges that disturb the soul and distort the clarity of vision that comes from a tranquil heart and a clear head. Those inner urges needed to be controlled rather than let loose, and that control was best self-imposed rather than regulated by the state.

At one time this might have been seen as the difference between conservative and progressive views of morality, or between right and left. However, as Patrick Deneen showed in his insightful Why Liberalism Failed, these days we are all progressives. Modern liberal democracies see us all as autonomous individuals who should be free from the constraints of duty or the demands of others and instead follow our desires. The only difference is that the right sees the market and minimum state interference as the key to enabling these personal freedoms, whereas the left sees state control and regulation as the way those freedoms will be established and safeguarded.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen something quite extraordinary. Without too much legal threat, we have voluntarily submitted to severe abstinence, denying ourselves the rights to mix freely, to go to pubs and restaurants, to watch live sport, to shake hands, to travel to work. As we go through this period of collective self-abnegation, the suppression of our personal ambitions and desires, we are learning how to redirect our personal longings for a greater good, to sacrifice what we would normally like to do for the good of the whole.

We are learning that for a society to work, and to stave off the threats that confront it, the prioritisation of individual choice on its own is not enough. A society cannot survive if each one of us pursues our own self-chosen goals independent of everyone else. We have to exercise restraint, the Queen’s “self-discipline and resolve,” to learn the capacity to sacrifice our own desires for the sake of the wider community.

To address the potentially even more serious challenges of climate change, or the elimination of global poverty, for example, will require an even greater and longer exercise in self-restraint. The question is, when this is all over, whether we will go back to what we have been used to in the recent past, or whether we will restore something of an equilibrium between the demands of individual ambition and the common good.

Saint Paul once wrote that the Christian idea of grace, the notion that we are recipients of goodness that we didn’t create, “teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.” It may sound quaint and Victorian. But unless we can learn to live self-controlled, disciplined lives, a little more like the ones we’re having to lead right now, there will be little future for our planet or the people who live on it. Maybe coronavirus is giving us a crash course in a different moral universe—one that might just be the saving of us.