On the Greater Good

We've all seen them. Whether it's an email forward or a post shared, approvingly or not, by a friend on social media. It's been a phenomenon almost since the very start of the pandemic: people objecting to social distancing guidelines, then to mask mandates, then to vaccination requirements, grabbing a phone or camera and recording themselves as they try to obtain service at a grocery store, a restaurant, a government building, a doctor's office: challenging what they see as an overreach of authority, often brandishing and quoting pieces of legislation that they believe bolster their case.

I've noticed that there's one thing common to almost all these videos. The person doing the recording is adamant that their rights are being violated. Theirs. And only theirs. Never, in the ones I've seen, is there the tiniest morsel of consideration for anybody but the person doing the filming. Sometimes, I grant you, they will bring along family members, particularly children, to show that they're not just doing it for themselves. This should fool nobody.

The other thing these people always seem to be is American. This is significant and at the same time odd. Americans, or at any rate modern Americans, tend to have enormous trouble with the concept of the greater good - the notion that you, the individual, make sacrifices in order to help society as a whole, even if that means compromising on your personal freedom. (Modern Americans also often like to use the term 'freedoms', as if there were more than one kind, but that's another topic.) Many of them have the truly sad outlook that their personal rights and liberty are sacrosanct and inviolate and to hell with whatever that means for anybody else.

This is an odd perspective because many of them also yearn for a return to what they regard as the halcyon era of America. There never was such an era, of course, but in the time period they're thinking of, very little could have been accomplished without everyone pitching in for the benefit of the group as a whole. The resourceful lone frontiersman who built the country is an American icon, but he's also a myth. Anyone who'd tried fending entirely for themselves in that environment would have perished in the wilderness or been slaughtered by Indians. Every step westwards was very much a community effort. It had to be.

Just imagine the pioneer who happened to be in possession of the only stash of ammunition left in the wagon train as a menacing band of Comanches approached, who insisted that they were his bullets and he was going to defend himself with them and himself alone, and nobody else was getting any. Who never admitted the briefest thought as to the fate of his fellow travelers once the enemy warriors descended. As likely as not, his companions would have shot him, taken his ammo and divided it amongst themselves.

Or perhaps they should have stayed back east. That's another common argument, of course. When challenged with the observation that people who run around in public unvaccinated and unmasked are putting vulnerable groups at risk, the "my rights" crowd will respond that well, those folks should stay at home then. Which further gives the lie to their fine posturing about personal liberties. Once again, they're most anxious to preserve their own liberties at the expense of rendering other people prisoners in their own homes.

So there's something fundamental that these video crusaders just aren't getting - fundamental not just to the concept of liberty but to the whole idea of a functioning civil society. Yes, you have rights and freedom - but so does everyone else. As the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is said to have once remarked, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." So with your right to throw a punch comes the responsibility to ensure it doesn't come into contact with someone's face - unless you're defending yourself from an attack, or unless you're both boxers in which case he's given you implied permission to hit him.

You don't ever see these charlatans arguing that a guy who shot someone during an argument shouldn't be arrested and face charges. Yes, they'll argue until they're blue in the gonads that it's the guy's right to pack heat, but they understand that said heat must be packed responsibly. Yet they don't extend this understanding of responsibility to other arenas of civic life. It's somehow... different, apparently.

I often find myself wishing that the people being confronted by these self-styled John Browns and Martin Luther Kings would respond with a few questions of their own. I hear your points about how your liberties overrule the government's concerns about public safety, sir, but I'm a little curious. How did you get to the grocery store today? Oh, you drove? OK. Is your vehicle duly registered and insured, and do you have a valid license to drive it? Did you wear a seatbelt? What side of the street did you drive on? Did you stop at traffic signals when they were red? Did you obey traffic signs and speed limits? Did you park in a marked parking space as opposed to sprawled across whichever bit of the sidewalk took your fancy? ...Yes to all those? Interesting.

If you actually issue such a challenge, be prepared that you're likely to hear a response along the lines that those are not the same, for reasons that vary depending on who you're talking to. Which is bullshit. The basic principle doesn't change just because the details are different. You might as well say a zebra isn't a mammal because it's different from a dolphin. But it's a convenient way for someone to get themselves out of a rhetorical corner. And that, at root, is what this is all about. Convenience. Theirs, of course. Not everyone else's.