Don’t panic and don’t surrender your freedoms

Fear is not conducive to rational debate, and we must all remember that this is a temporary crisis

The PM says “things are going to get worse before they get better”, and he is right. This week the number of deaths related to the coronavirus is probably going to rise considerably: what happened on the Continent will happen to us. It is a test not only of our resources but also our character, and we can emerge from this crisis a better country or a worse one. In that spirit, I am making two pleas to reason.

First, don’t panic. It is not helpful. People are going to die and we are doing our best as a nation to save them. But, as Carlo Rovelli, the physicist and philosopher, said last week, to see this as a battle between life and death can only lead to despair because that is a war we all lose in the end. Rather, this is a fight “to give us a little more life”, which is a beautiful way to describe medicine. Seen from that perspective the coronavirus is a challenge, not a nemesis.

Unfortunately, some people have gone a little mad in the past few days, typified by the overblown reaction to the news that Boris himself has caught the virus. “Oh my God,” someone posted on Facebook. “Oh my God.”

Why? All he has is mild symptoms, which is all that the vast majority of people who catch it will ever get. To say such a thing gets you accused of heartlessness, but we have got to stay rational, we have got to maintain perspective. It is not fair to jump down the throat of every employer who tries to keep a business open; it is not right that the police are asking us to spy on rule breakers. If a journalist raises doubts about the strategy, it does not mean they don’t care – they are expressing their right to dissent, often with courage. Fear is not conducive to rational debate. It is at times like these, when forced to watch the utter hysteria of television news, that you understand how a society talks itself into a war or a witchhunt.

And that is my second plea: let’s not abandon our freedom. According to a Telegraph poll, 86 per cent of us are willing to give up our civil liberties to help beat the coronavirus – and I think they mean (I hope they mean) temporarily and voluntarily, in which case I entirely agree. Self-sacrifice is good: the proper spirit should be “I am happy to stay at home if it helps save lives”. But it should not be “I will do as I’m told because I’m terrified and the state knows best”. If that’s the way a majority of us now think then, in the long run, we really are doomed. A society that does not instinctively cherish freedom will eventually lose it.

I say this not out of self-indulgence: on the contrary, I am practically a hermit and can live cooped up like this for as long as it takes. No, I am alarmed that powers of arrest and detention have been dramatically strengthened; that new jury trials have been suspended; that prisoners are now forced to spend up to 23 hours a day in their cells and are banned from seeing friends and family; that parole board hearings have been cancelled. Maybe all this is necessary and justifiable, but we have got to question it and we must stay on guard against Big Brother. How far we are willing to go to protect human rights is just as important a test of a nation’s character as what we will do to protect human life.

When the history of this emergency is written, let it be noted that the Government’s instinct was not to shut the churches. The churches insisted upon it.

The first published set of lockdown guidelines stated that while public services had to end, churches should otherwise stay open “for solitary prayer”, in effect giving them the status of an essential journey. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference then put out a statement that said church prayer does not meet that definition, civil servants had not thought this through, the Government was wrong and their temples should be shuttered. The Anglicans went even further and banned their priests from going into their own churches. You could infer that the Government has a higher opinion of the importance of church prayer than some Christian authorities.

Thankfully, you can still watch Mass online, which I did yesterday in bed with a cup of tea (breaking every rule in the book). Other Christians have been more proactive. I know of priests who are delivering the last rites to people dying with the virus. In Italy, a priest suffering from the disease gave up his ventilator to help a younger patient. And Pope Francis’s blessing to an empty square at St Peter’s was Francis at his best: human, direct, pastoral. Some of the churches in Rome have been reopened after an initial order to shut them. “Drastic measures,” said the Pope, “are not always good”, and he urged clerics to stay with the people, not to abandon them.

So what will historians say? They might conclude that while millions of Christians responded heroically, the Church establishment retreated into health and safety, not only because they wanted to do no harm but because Western society is postreligious, science has won, doctors are the new priests and the Church is not sure what to say or if anyone is even listening. They are wrong. This is a fight for life and many of us believe it necessitates prayer. The churches should reopen.