Rules — confusing and often unhelpful

Some of us can’t help noticing that “easing” of the lockdown seems suspiciously consistent with the introduction of yet more rules. That’s quite the conjuring trick, even in the eccentric world this virus has gifted to us. It may or may not be epidemiologically correct to wear a face mask on a bus, but to force us to do so as part of a reintroduction of our liberties seems, well, paradoxical.

In truth, the Prime Minister is finding out that government by fiat is a complicated thing. What he did in March was introduce blanket restrictions, conjoined with a list of permissions. This is a recipe for ambiguity, inconsistency and public confusion. The Cummings incident, or rather the furious reaction to it, reflected this. Was Mr Cummings breaking the rules? Or just interpreting them “creatively”?

The problem is, though, that “rules” are pretty confusing things in and of themselves. They are conceptually mischievous. Rules, when announced, tend to acquire a life of their own. They frequently rebel against the intentions of the person who imposed them.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that rules do not determine their own application: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule”.

His point is this: there are rules and it is clearly possible to break them. But only because what it means to follow a rule is ultimately a matter of publicly accepted practice. Wittgenstein’s primary concern was with the nature of language, not politics (on which he was, in any case, unsound). However, his point ramifies: in general, what a rule actually is will be in part determined by the co-operative practices of those who are supposed to be following it. Announcing something to a television camera, even when you are Prime Minister, is not conceptually sufficient. We also, collectively, bring something to the party.

The philosopher John Searle draws a distinction between those rules which regulate versus those which constitute. The rules of chess do not regulate the game of chess, they define or constitute it. The rules of law, on the other hand, are supposed not to define our behaviours but to regulate them. The problem with the Prime Minister’s approach is that he has attempted to move the country away from a system of regulation in the direction of one of constitution. His interventions in March seemed to be intended to define our behaviours, rather than to provide a context in which we could make the appropriate decisions for ourselves. Given what we knew about this virus at the time he may have felt that necessary. But it amounted to a traumatic recalibration of the relationship between citizen and state; a consequence which will always be invisible to the models of any “expert”, even one as proficient as Professor Neil Ferguson.

Mr Johnson’s approach, certainly now, is both conceptually confused and constitutionally vulgar. He leveraged the pandemic, and the panic around it, to shift us from a Lockean to a Hobbesian civil order. But rules, as Wittgenstein says, do not define themselves. Unless the PM was proposing to stipulate how his restrictions were to be interpreted in all contexts (a logically impossible aspiration) he should have allowed us to make more decisions for ourselves. The truth is, he didn’t trust us enough. That patrician reluctance has led to the tragic and absurd possibility that I might be able to home school my son in my local pub, while his school remains effectively closed.

So now that he has driven his juggernaut into a cul-de-sac how does the Prime Minister get out of it? Mr Johnson gives the impression of having been mind-captured by a clique of Establishment scientists, who are crafting for us a “new normal” as a response to a virus they clearly don’t understand, one which seems indifferent to the varied responses it has provoked in every country it has gate-crashed.

Some commentators are arguing that the public is recovering the juggernaut on Mr Johnson’s behalf, that we have in effect ended lockdown for him. I disagree. People are willing to co-operate with the “new normal” only because they have internalised his ghastly rules. He has Stockholm-Syndromed an entire nation.

And what of the many people who remain fearful of engaging with this bizarro new order? Here’s my question to the Prime Minister: when you order a child to her room, “for her own good”, and for an indeterminate period of time… are you really surprised that she ends up never wanting to come out again?

The imposition of inflexible rules, and a concomitant restriction of our capacity to co-operate in the Covid-19 response was never the only option. Trusting us was a viable alternative, as the released SAGE minutes of the time now show.

He couldn’t bring himself to do it.