King Canute, Coronavirus, and the End of English Liberty

As a student of near-forgotten history and dead languages, I am often called upon to justify my interests in a society that appears to have little need for them. “What’s the point in learning about that?” self-righteous and socially-challenged STEM students often scoff. Admittedly, theirs seems the higher form of study at the moment, as the past year has been dominated by an international scramble to see who can best let ‘the science’ dictate their lives. Certainly, no epidemiology student will go without work in the near future. But amidst the constant and increasingly tedious discussion of R numbers, vaccines, journals and masks, some uncomfortable questions start to arise, questions which followers of the humanities, not the sciences, are best placed to answer. 

Thus, when forced to talk about the Coronavirus pandemic, I invoke the life of Canute the Great, one of England’s most august medieval kings. Smothered by cloying and grovelling courtiers who believed him to be all-powerful, Canute sought to teach them a lesson in rulership. Placing his throne at the sea’s edge, he commanded the tide to retreat, and not to flow over his land, nor presume to wet his feet and robes. It’s easy to dismiss this as the general madness of pre-modern rulers: after all, the emperor Caligula decided to declare war on Poseidon, and king Xerxes ‘punished’ the Hellespont by ordering it to be attacked with whips and brands. Canute was cleverer than this, however. “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings” he proclaimed, as the tide dashed over his feet. In doing so he gave his subjects a bitter but inviolable truth: there is a limit to what the government can, and, indeed, should do. 

A thousand years later, however, most Englishmen have yet to understand that their government does not hold the power of the almighty. Indeed, many appear to assume that the state’s abilities are limited only by its own unwillingness to act. Therefore when natural disaster struck the county in early last year, the public, encouraged by frenzied and histrionic media outlets, demanded that the government do something, anything, to prevent catastrophe. The nation has been in various stages of ‘lockdown’ ever since, our country’s ‘necessary yet temporary evil’. Or, more accurately, a reactionary spasm of impotence and incompetence that will never end because it is, for some brain-haemorrhage inducing reason, the most popular government policy in human history. 

Here is probably not the place to discuss the efficacy of Britain’s ‘lockdowns’, although for the sake of honesty I feel as if I should clarify that I do not possess the appetite that many students have for mandatory house arrest, criminalising all social activity, and violent economic suicide. I understand it probably wasn’t much of a culture shock to unemployed students unaccustomed to sunlight and fresh air, but for me at least, it’s been rather a rum affair. But even without discussing this aspect of the ‘lockdowns’, one is still left with the rather disturbing effect that they have had on English society. I do not think it flippant or indeed inaccurate to say that we are experiencing the death of the English liberal impulse, and the end of life (read: freedom) as we know it. 

One only needs to look around to understand this. People within my own circles, for example, have begun to sneer at those who can not or do not wear a mask ‘properly’, and have taken to boasting with perverse pride at how ‘normal’ they find it always to have on their person implements that cover their faces and muzzle their mouths. Of course, the English intelligentsia’s favourite hobby has been reprised, and lazy jeers at the ‘stupid’ behaviour of Americans invade conversations with rapidity and frequency. “It’s post-apocalyptic over there!” one friend wails, from the depths of a home she is now too afraid to leave. 

The alacrity with which the population at-large confined themselves to house arrest has also been nothing short of horrifying, and the tendency for people to describe how “good” they’ve found ‘lockdown’ has been positively infuriating. I’m sure imprisonment in one’s second home in the countryside (or a large London townhouse) isn’t all bad, but something tells me this wouldn’t wash in the cramped urban spaces in which many of our citizens are forced to live. In spite of this, though, my fellow ‘freedom-loving’ Englishmen have developed speedily the rather Maoist tendency of dobbing in the neighbours at the mere suspicion of any deviation from arbitrary government diktat. Thankfully, my family has not gone quietly into our new police state -- blessed as it is with genetic obstinacy and pugnacity -- but for the first time in my life I find myself self-censoring in everyday conversation, worried that one wrong word to the wrong person will earn me a criminal record and an unpayable fine. 

Thus, giving companionship to lonely relatives, comfort to friends, and maintaining one’s sanity has either become illegal or near impossible. But in a collective, Olympian effort of mental gymnastics, no-one in this country seems to mind very much. Oh, of course, they’d like eventually to be able to return to a restaurant or a to a pub, and we appear to sympathise with the lonely, the vulnerable, and those who have had their livelihoods destroyed; we all seem to recognise the withdrawal of cancer screenings and chemotherapies, the increased incidence of suicide, the spread of heart disease, worsening alcoholism, general unhappiness, misery, and the deployment of the army to enforce all these measures, but no-one cares. We all know that this is the result of the ‘lockdown’, but no-one dared countenance that it should have been abandoned, only adapted to. 

Therefore even now, with vaccination rates rocketing, Covid hospitalisations plummeting, and cases flat lining, there is no public yearning for life to return to what it was before 23 March 2020. We have become cowed as a society. We don’t want the freedom we relinquished to be returned to us: instead, we demand that the government restrict our lives with passports, licenses, and apps. We shall continue to salivate over government press conferences, worship the holy writ of Whitty and Van-Tam, and, much like King Canute’s courtiers, invest in Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson the power and authority of the divine.  

Pseudo-intellectual students at pseudo-élite universities busy themselves in unending discussion on R numbers, vaccines, journals and masks, how best to transform the UK into NZ, and the folly of permitting families to see each other at Christmas, but this is not only incredibly boring, but entirely secondary to the actual effect of this government’s policies. In trying to save life, we have irrevocably destroyed the liberties and freedoms which make life worth living. That will be the true legacy of Britain’s Coronavirus pandemic.