How postmodernism paved the way for lockdowns

There are many reasons why the UK adopted disproportionate and catastrophic policies in response to Covid-19, and I have gone into them in detail, including here, here and here. Deep beneath any government’s policies is a philosophy constructed by academics over many decades, and in this article I posit that postmodernism is to blame for our regressive response.

Postmodernism evolved in the mid 20th century to counter modernism, to make the case that there was no such thing as objective truth, there were only subjective truths: each person could have their own ‘truths’. Nothing was out of bounds, even the claim that ‘the sun sets in the west’. What do you mean by ‘the west’, the postmodernists might say. What do you mean by ‘the sun’? A generous interpretation of the motives behind postmodernism would be along the lines of: everyone is different, everyone has different experiences and perspectives, it is right and respectful that we acknowledge this. A less generous interpretation might be: the postmodernists are a subset of the radical Left who do not care for ‘facts’, or ‘evidence’, because, inconveniently, they turn out to not be on their side of the argument. They therefore must be discredited.

Following a long march through academia, postmodern ideas have become turbo-charged and ubiquitous in the early 21st century, in part driven by the internet, especially social media, and the expansion of higher education, which has spilled more and more postmodernists out into wider society (they’re also pre-loaded with resentment and victimhood). A ‘feelings not facts’ narrative has become the prevalent one; ‘safe spaces’ are called for in universities; transgender rights have become a talking point, and contradict feminist theory - but contradictions don’t matter to the postmodernists because that in itself would be an acceptance of rationality - and rationality is, to them, a white Western (and patriarchal) invention. The circularity of the postmodernist argument makes it impossible to take apart; truth is the first casualty of postmodernism.

Eddie Izzard is an actor and comedian who has dressed in women’s clothes for much of his life. A far-Left postmodernist, Izzard is now called ‘she’ and ‘her’ by newspapers and websites. Despite the fact that he is a man. He is biologically male and that is what we used to call a fact. Ah, say the postmodernists, no, he (or rather now, ‘she’) is what he (she) perceives himself (herself) to be. Objective truth is jettisoned; the subjective viewpoint is all that matters. In media and big tech, which overwhelmingly buy into the postmodern narrative, Izzard’s claim of womanhood, despite the fact that he can’t menstruate or have babies, is accepted because it is Izzard’s truth, and woe be on you if you dispute this. (At this point a true postmodernist might point out that not every single woman in the world menstruates or has babies…) It would be laughable were the consequences not so diabolical.

Postmodernism is the reason why Cosmopolitan magazine can put an obese woman on its cover with the line 'This is healthy!' Obesity is not healthy, it is extremely unhealthy. But our modern media isn't overly bothered by inconvenient truths.

Those who have come from totalitarian states to more free ones know what’s going on here. In totalitarian societies you have to speak what you know it is not true; you know it is not true and they know that you know that it is not true, and you know that they know that you know it is not true, but still the delusion holds. Comedian and podcaster Konstantin Kisin, who was born in the Soviet Union, sees what is happening now in the West as very similar to what happened under Communism. Of course George Orwell foresaw all this in 1984: the citizens of Oceania are told, among other mistruths, that ‘War is Peace’ and that two plus two would equal five if the state wanted it to. Saying that a man is a woman is only one small step away from this. No wonder any questioning of such a thing would be met with such ferocity by our new establishment - you will be expelled from Twitter if you tweet “A man is not a woman”. They doth protest too much, as happens when they know they are wrong.

And this matters. A society that cannot speak basic truths is a society that is ripe for disembowelment, or, perhaps more accurately, lobotomisation. If there is no agreement on the tenets that underpin civilisation then any number of terrible ideas can be smuggled in. Meghan Markle is a living embodiment of all that has gone wrong with the West in recent decades. In her recent ‘interview’ (that devalues the word 'interview') with Oprah Winfrey she said, "Life is about storytelling, about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we’re told, what we buy into." She is certainly someone who tells stories - it’s facts vs Meghan, but Meghan still wins in the eyes of most of the under-30s, who have been soaked in postmodernism from the day they opened a school text book. Never mind the fact that many of her assertions, such as only being allowed by the Royal Family to leave her house twice in four months or that tabloid newspapers were invited to ‘holiday parties at the Palace’, have been comprehensively debunked by empirical evidence, it is irrelevant because Meghan said it (and "what Meghan wants, Meghan gets"). We live in a post-truth era. 

Social media, in a weird, frightening and overwhelming way, is a real-world example of postmodernism, that has us all living in different realities. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the rest steer you into discrete social bubbles where you are less likely to come upon views you find disagreeable. Groups of people now have completely different takes on the same event. This will inevitability lead to more and more fractures in wider society; polarisation will only grow.  

Postmodernism also manifests itself dangerously in the area of policing. Since 2006 (the 1997-2010 Labour government was the UK’s first postmodern government), ‘hate crimes’ have been prosecutable under British law. Yet they rest on purely subjective judgement: who can define what ‘hate’ is, and whether it was a factor in an incident? It’s even worse than that. There are such things as ‘non-crime hate incidents’, and they are logged, on average, 66 times a day by the police. Say you called me a name I didn’t like, particularly if it pertained to race, religion or sexuality, I could complain to police that it was motivated by hate, and you could find yourself with a ‘non-crime hate incident’ logged on your records that would show up if checked by an employer with whom you had a job interview. In fact, it’s even worse than that: if a third person witnessed you calling me a name, and even if I didn’t complain to the police about it, that person could say that they thought it was hate incident, and because they perceived it to be so, then it would be logged as a hate incident. This explains why ‘hate crimes’ appear to be ever on the rise. In truth, it’s postmodernism creating its own little well of hell on this island.

Which is where lockdowns come in. In March 2020 the British government, along with many others around the world, in blind panic jettisoned 100 years of accumulated medical knowledge to imitate the barbaric ‘lockdown’ policies of the Chinese Communist Party. A perfectly good  Pandemic Preparedness Response, honed over the previous ten years and vetted by the World Health Organization in 2019 was immediately abandoned, with inevitably tragic consequences. Lives and livelihoods have been trashed on the altar of medieval-style ‘lockdowns’, which upended every single previously adhered to medical norm. Life will be worse in many, many different ways for many years ahead.

Orwell might have come up with the following doublespeak slogans for what we have endured:

SAFETY IS FREEDOM.

HEALTHY IS STAYING IN.

APART IS TOGETHER.

NO SYMPTOMS ARE SYMPTOMS.

WE HAVE LOCKDOWNS BECAUSE WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD LOCKDOWNS.

Evidence became a dirty word. The Diamond Princess was a cruise ship that had a coronavirus outbreak in early 2020; it was a floating Petri dish for two weeks, and later told us a great deal about pre-existing immunity, asymptomatic infection and the IFR (Infection Fertility Rate). 619 of the 3,711 people on board tested positive for Covid (17%), indicating that 83% probably had pre-existing immunity. Out of the 3,711, seven people died, giving an IFR of less than 1%. No one under the age of 70 died. A year on from the Diamond Princess, the real-world figures we see are almost identical. What were not accurate, and never have been accurate, were the alarmist computer models that the likes of ‘Professor’ Neil Ferguson used to justify the cessation of human contact and the wholesale destruction of the economy.

Some countries like Sweden, Belarus and Finland, and US states like Florida and South Dakota, did not lockdown or had light restrictions in place for short periods, and they have not fared worse than all those who did. There is no correlation between lockdown and lives saved: the data screams this at us. The only correlation is that the harsher the lockdown, the greater the economic harm. More than 30 academic papers show this, the most recent being one authored by Dr Eran Bendavid and Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, which concludes: "While small benefits cannot be excluded we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions]. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions… We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of co-ordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay at home orders and business closures." 

So the data is there if we want it; the evidence is there should we wish to pay attention to it. But our government and the majority of our media do not wish to do so. They are steeped in postmodernism, which has morphed into ‘optics’ ie as long as they are shown to be ‘doing something’ it matters not whether it is efficacious. Masks as worn by most people do almost nothing to curtail viral spread but are mandated anyway, and believed in by many of their wearers. If YOU believe that YOUR mask stops YOU from getting ill then that is enough: this is my truth, do not tell me yours. We live in a post-Enlightenment era. No matter that the data show that the hospitality and travel industries do not make a significant contribution to Covid infections (they are mainly acquired in hospitals, and care homes and people's houses), they are bludgeoned by government because it looks like that might be the case. We live in a postmodern fantasyland where if you want something to mean something, it does mean something.

There is a quite extraordinary interview by Julia Hartley-Brewer with Children's Minister Vicky Ford in which she asks the minister for the evidence behind the decision to make children wear masks in school. Pressed time and time again, Ford is simply unable to say what that evidence is, and makes it obvious that she has not even asked the government's scientific advisors what the evidence is. It is actually even more extraordinary because it was the second time Hartley-Brewer interviewed her, having previously posed an identical question. In Britain in 2021, this is what passes for informed governance.

In our prime minister we have postmodernism embodied and taken to its ridiculous limits. Boris Johnson is someone at two with empirical truth; falsity and evasion appear to be woven into his very DNA. The contradictions are there, but the contradictions don’t matter because that is part of the package: Johnson IS a contradiction, a buffoonish simpleton who got a good degree from Oxford, a conservative who is not a conservative and a libertarian who is not a libertarian. Truth is a stranger to him. And it is irrelevant to him that he does not speak the truth because, in postmodernism, contradictions don’t really matter. And so he can say in late 2020 that masks for pupils in classrooms would be ‘nonsensical’, and then a couple of months later rule that they should be worn (in the complete absence of any evidence of efficacy); he can say that a second lockdown would be ’the nuclear option’, and then have one; he can say it would be ‘inhuman’ to cancel Christmas, and then cancel it; he can say that there will be no vaccine passports and then, in effect, introduce vaccine passports. This is a prime minister who can say, without any apparent sense of irony, that we should get fit and lose weight - when he has closed gyms and curtailed most sporting activities for nearly a year.

Johnson of course has form: he is a serial liar and adulterer. He was sacked by The Times for making up a quote; he was sacked from the Tory front bench for lying about an affair; he lied about conspiring to have one of his friend’s associates beaten up; he has cheated on numerous partners. He doesn’t believe in anything and he has shown no loyalty to those in his personal or working life. His version of reality is one that is bent towards whatever he wishes it to be - he is only interested in himself. He is the ultimate solipsist - anything that is outside his own mind he is unsure of - and he is a living, breathing, walking postmodernist, with all the wayward decision-making, lack of wisdom, lack of courage and lack of conviction that that means.

Some leaders influence events, some are influenced by events - Johnson is the latter. He is a product of postmodernism, whose proponents won’t be happy until the world lies in figurative ruins. Johnson has certainly done his bit to add to those ruins.