According to the visuals and the commentary in the media, people want back their bars and beaches. They also want back auto racing and baseball even if there are no crowds in the stands. This goes contrary to what health specialists are saying, which is that opening up the economy will lead to an increase in the number and rate of deaths from coronavirus. It may be that people are willing to pay in lives lost for their pleasures, whether those are haircuts or tattoos or hanging out on crowded streets. The problem, however, is that this is more than an economic argument, in which case it would refer to the fact that all those people unemployed as a result of the shutdown need to be rehired so that they can put food on their tables. It goes deeper than that. I have heard people protesting in front of state legislatures that they are losing their liberties, that they are being imprisoned, which is a passionate and meaningful plea despite the fact that health emergencies have always been regarded as problems that can be subject to the intervention of state authorities who can order quarantine or keeping the bodies of plague victims in a house that included uncontaminated people until the time of the regularly scheduled pickups of corpses arrived, and also that I don’t know any provision in the Constitution that says that you have a right to infect other people with your diseases. Yes, coronavirus has deprived people of their liberty without due process of law, but this is a special kind of liberty, not the political kind which is what the Constitution refers to. Now what is this liberty that the protesters and I are speaking of?
The sense of liberty comes not just from being outdoors or mixing with people, though I have indeed argued that mingling with strangers on the street and in shops is a complex and wonderful experience. Liberty also comes from making choices about what to do with one’s “free time”, which means the time one does not have to give over to whatever employment provides you with a career and a paycheck. Do you lounge around the house taking long naps? Do you go shopping for clothes or groceries? Do you engage in any number of activities described as “leisure time activities” such as being a spectator at sports or theatre or engage in voluntary associations such as book clubs or regularly scheduled poker games? Each of these are exercises in making choices according to one’s own preferences rather than carrying out duties either for better or worse when one time and judgment are at the disposal of a superior, a boss, or ingrained as the art and craft of carrying out a profession to which one has devoted oneself.
Thinking of liberty as what happens with and in only leisure time is to engage in the sort of thinking that motivated trade unions to take higher wages as a tradeoff for a failure to improve working conditions. Work was drudgery while money to spend on consumer goods that would make a wife’s life, in particular, eased with labor saving equipment like washing machines and vacuum cleaners and the like seemed a good way to exercise liberty of judgement, a choice that made one free and which was itself free. It is a transvaluation of the idea of leisure and culture from what was understood by Marx, who knew full well that culture could distract from the rigors of work and worried that leisure would be the opiate of the masses, religion and circuses distracting people from the rigors of their work lives. But that is what has happened. Yes, every once in a while, workers can see themselves as heroes, as in a pandemic, where grocery clerks are heroes for keeping the shelves stocked because they are putting themselves at risk by doing so. But most of the time, heroism or its most general case, unrequired leisure choices, which is the most heroism any of us are likely to need to manage, consists in what David Riesman considered the way modern people would fulfill themselves with their hobbies, by becoming amateur cooks in the morning, and members of book clubs in the afternoon, and consumers of theatre and streaming services in the evening, allowed to regard themselves as something of experts and so choosing to think their pastries not so terrible, and their taste in books of some moment, choosing to like one book or pop music group rather than another, or to be the amateur critic who has things to say about the merits and defects of the movie caught the night before on Netflix. In leisure, you lose your chains and become a master of whatever it is you care to contemplate.
A lot of matters that seem to carry with them a high moral weight also devolve into being consumer choices. I decide whether I want to be cremated or buried and my friends wonder about what that says about me: do I despair about life if I go the route of cremation? Or am I just being a good atheist who doesn’t think that what happens to your body matters? If I send my children to private schools, does that mean I am not really in favor of the poor and disadvantaged? I boycotted South African wine when South Africa was under Apartaid rule. Should I boycott Hobby Lobby or Domino’s Pizza because I don't like the politics of their owners? Even heavy moral issues are consumer choices. Abortion is a choice in the Constitution, and service in the military is voluntary. It seems more and more things, like marijuana use, are no longer to be included in the criminal code and to be regarded instead as a free choice, which means a consumer choice, the old dictate “Let the buyer beware” coupled with the idea that “the customer is always right”. The doctrine of free will is reduced to whatever it is that one can make choices about as those are supplied by the market. There is no categorical imperative or any other absolute moral principle. Murder is still bad because it is not legally available at a market price, but much else is. So you can have a taste in ties, in politicians and in sexual morality, and only some clergy and politicians will say otherwise.
This analysis of consumer choice also applies to politics, though in a far different way than that was meant by Paul Lazarsfield, the father of political polling, who said that people would vote on the basis of their demographic characteristics regardless of the issues of the campaign. Rather, people drop in and out of their interest in politics, attracted to Trump because he hogs the stage, which even Liberals will admit, and runs the nation like a reality show, what with good guys and bad guys and surprises and intrigues. People love or just like the spectacle of politics and involve themselves or withdraw at their leisure; they are not even required to pay attention and make critical comments the way they do with streamed movies. They just advocate, or let loose steam or venom, not needing even a modicum of information to inform their judgments. This is a far cry from the view of the voter as the responsible citizen carefully weighing the issues and applying whatever wisdom he has to the choice of a candidate. Nor is it that other idea of the electorate: people looking for the candidate who is most likely to feather their own nests with tax breaks or more federal largesse. No, it is all entertainment-- and perhaps that is the way it always was, at least if you consult William Sidney Mount, the artist who portrayed a mid Nineteenth Century election day as a frenzy of activity and a good time had by all, people congregating to drink and, by the way, cast their ballots.
In short, leisure activities are not to be treated as frivolous matters, pastimes a way to kill time between trips to the factory floor. Rather, they are necessities in that they provide people with the opportunity to make real choices that define themselves and not just what they do to make a living. It is therefore necessary to find ways to open up the economy because the economy provides more than jobs. It provides people, most people, with what they find to be fulfilling. Building a life around one’s job may satisfy the Protestant Ethic’s claim that everyone needs a vocation of some sort or another and so work is good for you, something to be insisted upon in exchange for getting the benefits of the social safety net, but it does not meet the requirements other people may have for establishing their identities through their clubs and hobbies, their evenings at the tavern, their curling up with their children on the sofa to watch television in the evening, that being the be all and end all of their lives, their jobs just a way to pay for that. So don’t disparage the opening of nail salons and tattoo parlors as things that are not really missed. They are missed by some sectors of the public.
That leaves the question of how to balance the very largely felt need to open up the economy, both to supply jobs and to provide opportunities to express and be the kind of person one is, with the public health question of whether to suspend or relax stay at home orders and to promote wearing masks and social distancing, those two the most important hedges against the pandemic until treatments and vaccines are available. There is no easy answer to this question. It becomes a matter of advocacy. Politicians want to open up because that is what their constituents want and because Conservative politicians believe that waiting too long to open up the economy will hurt its recovery, even though we have no precedent to draw on in that prior economic recessions and depressions in America were not the result of an epidemic and so we don’t know how or to what degree the economy will recover this time. Public health officials, for their part, want to stay closed as long as possible because of their own concerns. There is no formula, easy or hard, that is available to solve this dilemma because the two concerns are so different. There is no formula to maximize the trade off between health and the economy. President Trump sees it as self-evident that it is necessary to open up as quickly as possible and health officials, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, see the world through their own blinders, and so caution against opening up. It would be nice if the people in favor of opening up had a more articulate spokesmen, but people vote with their feet, and so, sanctioned or not, people are opening up their society. And here is a problem for everything becoming a matter of consumer choice. People advocate more than they summon arguments. They imagine one priority or the other as being essential and so cast their opinions as if it were a ballot and so to be respected whether there is evidence or argument for it or not. They, or at least a lot of people, do not see the need to surrender their chosen opinions to the views of the experts.
Yes, Governor Cuomo does put out guidelines about which regions of New York can open, these based on practical matters such as how many beds will be needed by hospitals if there is a new surge in coronavirus cases rather than on what the history of pandemics tell us happens as the crest declines. There is no solid evidence because this virus is different enough from other viruses that we do not know as yet how it impacts upon a population over time. Cuomo is guessing that staying at home and other safety recommendations were what caused the decline in cases in his state. Maybe it was that the European strand of the virus is different from the Chinese version. Cuomo reports that health care and emergency response workers have lower infection rates than people who stay at home. He says that is because they take more precautions, but they are also at greater risk. How does the virus make its way into the homes of those who shelter in place? We don’t know and yet we, the citizens, are supposed to rely on authority, especially when there is no clear cut justification for following one policy than another, and our free choice society is not willing to do that, which is a good thing. As Cuomo says, he can give orders but it is the citizenry that has to decide to obey them. Consumer and citizen choice can be in conflict with even expert opinion and that may not be a bad thing even though, at the moment, it does play into the hands of the Know Nothings of our time.