Conspiracy? Lockdown’s the result of health obsession

WE appear to be getting used to the lockdown logic, where safety from one disease, ahead of all others, has become a trump card played over and over by politicians who continue to endorse and enforce restrictions on life and freedoms that one would only expect in a state of emergency.

To help understand how this state of being and limited living has come about I would recommend a little book called The Tyranny of Health, written by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick in 2001.

In it, Fitzpatrick gives an account of the rise of lifestyle politics, a politics built on the fragments of the collapse of the old left and the rise of the new and how, in the 1990s, state intervention shifted from a focus on industry and services and retreated into the realm of personal and family life and, most of all, into health.

Now, radical doctors, health experts and professionals have turned themselves into solvers of social problems with, for example, the transformation of structural issues, like poverty, being magically re-imagined as a matter of “health inequality”.

From being a separate sphere of life, health, health awareness and the management of the minutiae of behaviour became government priorities.

Not only was being healthy politicised, Fitzpatrick notes, it also became moralised, replacing traditional moral restraints with the new absolute of safety; where the idea of good and evil was repackaged as notions of “safe” and “unsafe”.

Here we see the moral elevation of health, the beginnings of an approach to life that could and would, given the right conditions, result in the health service becoming sacred.

Only when collective organisations and interests had evaporated and the public had become divided could this interventionist approach to our private lives and behaviour become an accepted norm. The “worried well”, a growing section of young middle-class health obsessives, became a new model army for endorsing and promoting an atomised outlook (or in-look), where staying healthy and constantly striving for “wellness” became both a political and personal fixation.

The lockdown logic is not a conspiracy, it is the result of the logic of a diminished political elite and the loss of a collective public. A situation within which a wider sense of what is good for society has been lost in a sea of atomised anxieties encouraged by an empty political class that has lost any sense of the common good.