Public Reason in the TIme of Covid-19

Abstract

In the long history of democracy some notion of rational intercourse has always played its part. A common arena, whether concrete or abstracted, has provided a capacity for the exchange of opinion, argument and for arbitration and decision making. While the nature of this arena has evolved, a shared understanding of what the grounds of agreement, and disagreement, has usually been evident. This consensus has come under radical question in contemporary politics. The attendant concepts of communicative, or public reason — the former most closely associated with the critical theorist, philosopher and sociologist, Habermas, and the latter with the political philosopher Rawls has also been challenged from left and right. This article will present a defence of the use of public reason as an important component of the fight against COVID-19, and in the cause of both democracy and social solidarity — as these ideals have come under strain in the first decades of the twenty-first Century.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• public reason
• Rawls
• postmodernism
• différend
• human conglomerate

Introduction

Around the world democracy and trust between governments, business, civil society and the public are in a state of near permanent crisis. In the UK the 2016 Brexit campaign, and the subsequent social and political divisions, challenged an already jaded political system and social settlement. Reeling from years of austerity and provocations of division by a largely partisan right-wing press the Brexit vote brought to power a populist right-wing Conservative party purged of its “moderate” wing and hell bent on intensifying its class advantage whatever the cost. In the US the election of Donald Trump, the rise of the Alt-right and the stoking of racial, sexual and class tensions by hyper-partisan executive and its sycophants in talk radio, fringe websites and 24 h news channels led to a similarly volatile situation. There has been attendant complex, ever intensifying political and social struggles in notionally democratic states across Europe, Asia and South America.

Into this mix comes the COVID-19 pandemic. With the initial identification of the virus at the end of 2019 the perceived risks and responses varied across the world. The countries most impacted are also those with populist right-wing leaderships, often cheered on by vocal right-wing media sceptical of science and “experts” — but curiously often doing so in the name of “reason” pitched against a distorted version of postmodernism or “wokeness.” There have also been mutations of the kind of conspiracy theories and misinformation common on the Alt-right into COVID-19 denial, and theories about its origin as a military virus have also proliferated, piggybacking on an already well-developed online misinformation ecosystem.

Yet the election of Joe Biden in November 2020, running on a campaign supporting science and democratic principles of mutual respect and decency offers perhaps the first evidence that this wave has been, at least, curtailed.

In this article, I intend to focus on public reason as a broad principle so as to explore its continuing importance for actually existing democracy post COVID-19. I will do this to defend a vision of democracy and the public sphere that extends the context of political liberalism and recognises the necessity of our membership and commitment to a “human conglomerate” and to basic social justice as against the divisive populism and hard right politics that have attempted to leverage COVID-19 to intensify their regressive, irrational and reactionary politics. I will argue that the intensity of the COVID-19 crisis is beginning to show early signs of forcing a redress in the balance of power towards civility and public reason, even if the immediate crisis of misinformation and confusion challenges this.

Public Reason and the Breakdown of the Liberal Democratic Public Sphere

In framing the concept of public reason John Rawls sets out several useful conditions for the maintenance of a liberal democratic constitution and the integrity and rationality of the political process. Expanding and elaborating on the basic idea of individual sovereignty and the need to accommodate differing values and background cultures Rawls claims that, “A basic feature of democracy is the fact of reasonable pluralism — the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical and moral, is the normal result of its culture of free institutions” (Rawls 1977, 766).

This kind of “reasonable pluralism” implies at least a common set of agreements about how we organise and administrate the necessary institutions that hold any free society together. Yet it is a well-established challenge to reconcile distinct and often contradictory views and belief systems — or what Rawls calls comprehensive doctrines. Many religious systems contain truths about the fundamental nature and purpose in life that are utterly irreconcilable with competing religious or secular belief systems. To overcome deep irreconcilability public reason offers an approach that is not a compromise between visions or a way of fostering “understanding” between different ways of life, but rather one that excludes such doctrines from the arena of public reason all together. As such Rawls proposes that “in public reason comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens” (766). As such one might well imagine that the sustenance of basic health and well-being, agreements about the best way to maximise the capacity to carry out one’s daily life without hindrance, are within the purview of public reason. This must then include the management and response to COVID-19. This echoes Rawls’ doctrine of the “original position” in which deliberation on public matters should entail a hypothetical exclusion of one’s own personal interests in favour of a “veil of ignorance” that leaves one’s only public concern as a citizen in a community of citizens. Thus we find a thin doctrine of permissible discourse that brackets out matters of personal or doctrinal belief and as such, “Central to the idea of public reason is that it neither criticises nor attacks any comprehensive doctrine, religious or nonreligious, except in so far as the doctrine is incompatible with the essentials of public reason and a democratic policy” (766).

This is of course not to say that Rawls does not fully accept the right to seek and commit to substantive truths that provide deeper cultural or spiritual satisfaction, but that “truths,” such that offer complete moral systems or practices that are deemed wholly true — whether ideologies, religious systems or other totalising world views — cannot form any part of a pluralistic democratic governance because they will necessarily exclude persons that hold other “alternative” truths. As such, “The zeal to embody the whole truth in politics is incompatible with an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship” (767). The justification that public reason embodies is therefore not one that pertains to seeking truth as such, but “its subject is the public good concerning questions of fundamental political justice” (767).

This “meta-level” debate brackets political discussion and can result in a rather anaemic public discourse, with a version of reason that tends to exclude passionate commitment or limit subaltern interests (Fraser 1990). By its very nature such a politics excludes many political actors from finding much meaning, or even entering the public sphere. This has been a problem of “third way” politics and the managerialism that became associated with neoliberal centre-left governments of the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, it is that period with its “end of history” structure of feeling that arguably led to a disaffection with politics, also associated with notions of the postmodern — a concept I will return to below. However, one area where public reason is now surely a source of passion and commitment and worthy of serious consideration is in making the case for the mutual respect of social distancing and for the provision of basic healthcare for all, including vaccination for all citizens exclusive of ability to pay or other limiting considerations. In the context of a global pandemic these measures offer the key to open up all areas of life again — and as such underpin the provision of basic ontological security. But such a position is vehemently opposed from within the domains of various comprehensive doctrines, or in other contexts what we call ideologies. Such beliefs are primarily ontological, that is foundational to the extent that little empirical knowledge — be they facts, or theories drawn from inferential logic — can touch them. We can trace a trajectory of such views coming to prominence, and informing the reaction to COVID-19, in a number of recent political trends and developments that are useful in informing this reaction.

If we take two of the most passionately held pre-COVID positions of the recent political cycle in the Anglo-American world, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, then both of these are widely understood to make no sense; that is, they cannot be reasonably justified but are passionately maintained as defences of imagined freedoms. The two core claims of these campaigns, upon which the rest of their respective justifications rest “Take Back Control” and “Make America Great Again” do not hold up to even the slightest of scrutiny. Both of these positions have subsequently resonated with COVID scepticism and anti-vaccination sentiments.

As was well argued at the time of these campaigns the slogans are emotionally loaded and oriented to affect not reflection. In the case of “take back control” it specified at best a nebulous reference as to what was being taken back, or indeed whose control. These mostly referenced nothing, but rather were designed to stimulate the fantasies that had been stoked by a Europhobic right-wing press, and often operated as a cypher for unfocused disquiet or unidentified but felt social exclusion. The roots of such sentiment were generally to do with regional and class disparities, with no direct relationship to the European Union. There were, of course, concrete political issues at stake, for example, the so-called Lexit argument in which the increasingly neoliberal protocols of the EU made state support of industry difficult or placed limitations on states to exercise powers to introduce redistributive policies — but such debates played no part in broad public discourse. Much of the discourse that did take place was on the terrain of “culture wars,” which is shorthand for precisely the kind of ontological issues associated with core identities, that while inextricably linked to economic status have been dislocated from them ideologically by forty years of deracinated communities and eroded solidarity in the face of neoliberalism and the imposition of individualistic market imperatives on everyday life.

In the case of “Make America Great Again,” what we might call the “MAGA” mindset is one based purely on the refusal of epistemological and etymological norms. Epistemological in the sense that normal requirements of evidence and attendance to an ideal of justified true belief were set aside in favour of a view of reality that was bent to correspond with whatever belief was most convenient for the desired ends. Language was a tool to be used to muddy perception and leverage confusion towards a questioning of any notion of truth — even in the final phases of his presidency Trump refused to concede the loss of the election even while acceding to the transition. Much of this bending of “reality” was undertaken through social media in the spirit, not of democratic discourse or reasonable dialogue but unilateral pronouncement. As Fred Turner put it “Trump spit out bits of fiction and hyperbole. They piled up like tiny bricks, slowly but surely walling off the landscape of reality.” And in doing so “Trump succeeded in doing what every fledgling totalitarian must. He made the world look chaotic and dangerous” (Turner 2018, 143). It is also worthy of note that despite losing the 2020 Presidential election Trump still garnered more votes than in 2016, as well as managing to escape a vote of impeachment in the US Senate for inciting a riot, on purely political grounds - a fact that perhaps indicates more about the capacity of vitriolically opposed factions than a return of good sense and public reason.

We can very clearly see lessons learned from this contemporary condition displayed in the responses of the populist and alt-right to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The multiple responses present across the spectrum of COVID-19 impacts, medical, political, behavioural and discursive. It is the discursive responses that are the most immediately telling, in the way that they inform all the others, and, to an extent, reproduce the political divisions defined. We see numerous examples of disassociation, from the extreme denialist approach, wherein the pandemic is framed as a designed “plandemic” or an entirely made-up event for the purposes of social control, to the low-level undermining of confidence in measures of social distancing and the effectiveness of vaccines. Reality is defined in terms of “alternative facts,” and I would also posit “alternative reason.” The invention of such “facts” or “reason” reflects the will and interests of specific individuals or groups for whom contradictory evidence could never serve to change their minds.

This speaks to the character of the current situation which goes beyond normal disagreement that takes place within the boundaries of a commonly understood set of rules, and beyond any capacity for what Rawls’ describes as “overlapping consensus” — a concept designed to account for the ordinarily plurality of modern, fractious and difficult democracies. It does not work when there is not even an agreement on what words mean, on what the terms of discourse are, or indeed in some cases that interlocutors qualify as human beings. This is not a situation of a mere failure of “public reasoning by a family of reasonable conceptions of political justice reasonably thought to satisfy the criterion of reciprocity” (767). Rather this fundamental “walling off the landscape of reality” is to attempt to drag a racist and colonial comprehensive doctrine to the very centre of public discourse and render invalid all other discourses — as such then this is as a challenge to the very possibility of public reason, of democracy.

Reason Under Question

There is a useful concept that helps us understand how such seemingly unbridgeable conceptions of the same phenomena can persist between different individual and groups — that is the différend. It is a term coined by Jean-François Lyotard and is defined as a conflict that “cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments” (1988, xi). Indeed, différends are not simply failures to agree on a point of overlap, but a term to describe that “genres” of language are fundamentally incompatible, wherein “a universal rule of judgement between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general” (xi). There is, Lyotard claims, “no ‘language’ in general, except as the object of an Idea” (xii). Rather there are sets of phrase regimens. Lyotard gives some examples of these as “reasoning, knowing, describing, recounting, questioning, showing” (xii). These each have their own set of rules and cannot be translated into each other, rather they are linked by a genre discourse that provides “the rules for linking together heterogeneous phrases” and these are “proper for attaining certain goals: to know, to teach, to be just … ” (xii). However, in the case of distinct genres of discourse the rules for linking phrases may find no common rule and here there is “a lack of a genre of discourse that enjoys a universal authority to decide” (xii). This lack of translatability between genres - or what otherwise might be referred to as language games — produces an unbridgeable gulf between interlocutors.

The gulf is not the end of the matter, Lyotard states that a différend will also tend towards the dominance of one side, that is one of the discourses will be dealt an inevitable injustice — indeed will have no access to justice per se where the judgement applies the rules from one phrase regimen to the other — here there is a relationship of colonised to coloniser, under what we might call discourse subsumption. One example used by Lyotard is that of Robert Faurisson, a holocaust denier who argued that there was no evidence of the holocaust because there were no direct witnesses to the gas chambers. This is a condition that could never be fulfilled because by definition anyone who witnessed the gas chambers was killed and unable to bear witness, “The only acceptable proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it” (3).

This has the character of the double bind and is totalitarian in the obvious sense that is delegitimises any attempt to establish evidence for a contrary position. This echoes a broader feature of claims to universal truth, wherein “There are no procedures, defined by a protocol unanimously approved and renewable on demand, for establishing in general the reality of the object of an idea” (5). To attempt a standard protocol to capture all forms of statement about reality, for example direct cognition, then so much is excluded to be a totalising limit. Thus, the need for “limiting the competence of a given tribunal to a given kind of phrase” (5).

The forms of COVID denial and scepticism that fall into the realm of the différend are likely of the character that step outside reasonable evidence, even when challenged carefully and respectfully. We can see this mechanism operating between, for example, medical authorities insisting on the efficacy of periodic lockdowns and the use of masks and vaccines to stop the spread of COVID-19 — given that they reduce the number of vectors of transmission between persons — and anti-lockdown and mask protestors demanding that their liberty be placed above any risk of spreading the virus.

In its extreme form this manifests in the belief that COVID-19 is a hoax. Piers Corbyn has been one such advocate of this view, no doubt given the media publicity as the older brother of ex-leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. Piers Corbyn was questioned on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” on the 1st of September 2020, whether the virus even exists. He was asked if the fact that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, was himself hospitalised with COVID-19 was enough to convince Corbyn of the reality of the virus, but he obfuscates an answer, asking “was he hospitalised with the virus or was he ill from something else?” and when further pressed claims that “the numbers of people getting whatever they are getting is declining rapidly and there’s no justification whatsoever for a continuing lockdown” and that “800,000 people have died and it has been labelled COVID when it might have been something else” the truth behind COVID is thus “a psychological operation to close down the economy in the interests of mega-corporations who are going to gain out of massive joblessness happening upon us now.” He then goes on to claim that “vaccines cause death” and “statistics show that more people get lower immune systems when they’ve had vaccines.” He claims there is a cure in the form of Hydroxychloroquine and Zinc, when told by a medical doctor that this supposed cure had been completely debunked in multiple studies Corbyn merely denies that this is the case and suggests this has been falsely questioned by “the pharmaceutical operations who stand to make billions by injecting people” (GMB 2020).

The underpinning basis of this position is one in which any piece of evidence offered can simply be discounted by a hidden agenda that nullifies it. Indeed, this is a standard rhetorical technique of conspiracy theory and fits the characterisation of a différend. There is some of the formal appearance of dialogue, but in fact there is no translatability of discourses. The clash becomes a de-facto power struggle in which contextual and affective elements take prime position. In the case of the GMB interview the segment is framed and presented as an encounter with a dangerous crank and the authority of the two presenters, both well-known TV personalities, and a medical doctor — held against the very unkempt and cantankerous Corbyn. In this instance it is very clear who comes out the winner — at least it is very clear to members of the audience who operate within the boundaries of the language and logic of GMB. As such it seems that the voice of reason has triumphed, but of course it is perfectly possible for an audience to see the badgered and beleaguered Corbyn as a victim of the very powers he is decrying if that understanding fits their beliefs.

Julie Hartley-Brewer, a well-known right-wing commentator and radio host uses the same logic on her attack on lockdowns, even after 125,000 recorded COVID related deaths in the UK. She applies the alt-right trope of the “red pill” to question the value of COVID -19 lockdown restrictions. She addresses another commentator, Dan Hodges — after his own expression of insistence on the end of the lockdown, regardless of the data — “I guess Mrs H must have brought Dan his red pill with his cup of tea this morning” (2021a, 2021b). The idea of the “red pill,” taken from The Matrix (1999), designates someone who has seen the “truth” and used as shorthand for becoming a fellow traveller of the Alt-Right. The telling inference of the red pill analogy is that it allows one to see beyond the surface of the mere empirical evidence to the deeper “truth.” Of course, this truth is visible only to those of the correct mindset. The significance of a recourse to public reason in instances such as these means that claims are placed under stricter conditions of acceptance that exclude as much as possible precisely the “mindset” from which, more often than not, the différend emerges. Taking the “red pill” is an ontological choice, not an epistemological one, and as such the scrutiny of public reason can and should occur logically prior to such commitments and as such aim to be blind to them.

There is another form of COVID denial that is more oblique, where there is no flat denial of the evidence but a mixture of undermining, obfuscation and questioning of priorities — often such advocates will distance themselves from outright denial and will, for example, claim that no matter the damage liberty comes before security. That is in effect underplaying the harm of COVID, or at least denying that the harm of COVID matters. This is a view often espoused by the right-wing populist leaders and social media voices. For example, Jair Bolsonaro, the hard-right president of Brazil, has been famously vocal in his COVID denial, or at least COVID impact doubting. On the 5th of March 2021, a year into the pandemic in one of the worst hit countries in the world he addressed a crowd, telling them, “Enough fussing and whining. How much longer will the crying go on” (Paraguassu and Brito 2021). This was the latest in a long line of sceptical statements from Bolsonaro, having earlier ‘described COVID-19 as a symptom-free nuisance for “90 percent” of infected Brazilians’ (Friedman 2020). He has been extremely reluctant to limit contacts or instigate lockdowns on the grounds that “If we cower, opt for the easy discourse, everyone stays home, it will be chaos. No one will produce anything, there will be unemployment, refrigerators will go empty” (Friedman 2020).

In the UK the nationalist populist politician Nigel Farage rebranded his “Brexit Party” as an anti-lockdown party “Reform UK.” At the start of the second national lockdown in November 2020 Farage claimed that the “lockdown would ‘result in more life-years lost than it hopes to save’ and argued that ‘building immunity’ would be more effective” and that “The new national lockdown will result in more life-years lost than it hopes to save” (Forsyth 2020). In February 2021, during the third UK national lockdown — at the point where there had been an official death toll of over 100,000 — Richard Tice, the Chairman of Reform UK, reiterated this view, saying that “the real danger is that the cure is actually worse than the disease itself” (Forsyth 2021). This discourse is not exclusive to this hard right grouping but also has fellow travellers in the ruling Conservative party. Mark Harper MP, member of the lockdown sceptic group the “COVID Recovery Group” observed that “just like COVID, lockdowns and restrictions cause immense social and health damage and have a huge impact on people’s livelihoods” (News 2021). Again, there is no overt denial but a steady chipping away at the seriousness and necessity of a range of public health measures. No one is claiming that lockdowns are not damaging, but such arguments ignore the fact that not locking down is far more damaging in terms of illness and deaths. This is a right-wing “own truths” perspective drawing on a logic they so decry in their political enemies. There is a concealed ontological choice being made that inflects the framing of empirical evidence towards liberty and prosperity for some in favour of welfare for all.

COVID sceptics are unable to overtly express their claims in such arenas because of the overwhelming overlapping consensus emerging in favour of prioritising welfare for all. Here we can detect the presence of the grounds of the application of public reason, that is in supporting, legitimating and actioning that emerging overlapping consensus. The need of COVID sceptics to disrupt this is a clear priority for them. Their sceptical positions are reliant on creating the illusion of an honest challenge to that consensus by adopting a semblance of the phrase regimens they are not members of — in this case the appearance of a regimen of scientific probity and welfare to provide cover for the logic of capital, legitimation by efficiency and so on. This reflects similar approaches in the history of tobacco harm denial and climate change denial. This is a subtle use of discourse subsumption; in this way such voices can claim to be the voices of reason and decency. Hence illustrating the pressing need for a return of a widely and rigorously applied public reason to challenge such subsumption.

While the philosophical conceptualisation of the différend can help us understand the technical “how” of these profound social divisions, and the mechanism through which the unstated economic interests of many COVID deniers is parsed, there are also psychological mechanisms of denial that perhaps explains the reason for the wider spread and adoption of such ideas into the general population.

Hijacked Reason

The psychologist Mark Whitmore explains that “denial is a way for people to defend themselves against anxiety” the person in denial’s strategy becomes “simply to deny whatever the threatening source is exists.” There is also the variation of this of rationalisation in which “people try to explain away or diminish the threat or source of anxiety” (Marples 2020). There is also a possible neurological contribution to such denial which is linked to anti-science views and low science literacy. Bruce L. Miller argues that “Beliefs grounded in false information, just like those grounded in truth, have neural origins and reflect connections in dedicated brain circuits.” He makes the point that, “Individuals are organized to hold beliefs and to evaluate their merit based on facts and experiences.” However, in certain cases of individuals with neurodegenerative disorders their beliefs can cease to be based in reality, where impairments “hinder rejection of a belief” and their brains “lack the circuitry to needed to determine whether information received is true of false” (2020, 2255). Miller does not suggest that all COVID deniers or conspiracy theorists have neurological disorders but that there are possible links. He argues that the overwhelming amount and complexity of evidence on COVID makes a lack of comprehension easier to turn into a lack of belief, which in turn leads to a sense of confusion and that “without reliable sensory data, individuals may be forced to look for other sources of information that resonate with their own feelings, including conspiracies that deny the existence of a threat” (2256).

This coping strategy echoes Marples assertion about the need to use denial to offset anxiety, as Miller himself concludes, “Conspiracy theories may bring security and calm,” and as such are an appealing salve. In that regard failing to develop and employ the dedicated brain circuitry that allows for the rejection of false beliefs and faulty reasoning is an ongoing threat, and as such “the medical community should mount systematic efforts around science education” (2256). Such individual reactions are both provoked and reinforced by community beliefs though confirmation bias, “where you create a bubble by surrounding yourself with people who believe what you believe, and you search out information that supports the way you believe” (Marples 2020). The world of social media is well designed to support this where “social media-fuelled echo chambers amplify these theories, reinforcing false beliefs” (Miller 2020, 2256).

The real problem in this instance is not really the différend in itself, though it gives a useful frame of reference to think through these issues. Rather my claim is that the differend’s “logic” has been hijacked as part of the arsenal of the right’s reactionary culture war, another mechanism of discourse subsumption, and used to take advantage of the basic human defence against anxiety and need for ontological security.

The tendency towards the acceptance of the inevitability of irreconcilable differences chimes with a strand of Postmodern thinking. I use this term advisedly here because it is one employed mostly by its enemies more than any fellow travellers, and in this case, there is a distinct irony that it is this term that is employed as a way to denigrate and delegitimise opponents of the right, along with the associated pejorative use of “woke.”

The term itself has a long and complex lineage, dating back, and in some instances beyond, the work of Lyotard in the late 1970s. In Lyotard’s oeuvre it is closely associated conceptually with the concept of the différend. Lyotard defined the term in his text The Postmodern Condition as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” (1979, xxiv). The incredulity towards metanarratives comes precisely from the increasing awareness of a différend, and reluctance to acquiesce to a more dominant phrase regimen. The example used in The Postmodern Condition is that of “scientific” as opposed to “narrative” knowledge, in which a scientific discourse, with its origins in Enlightenment thought, has claimed the preeminent position as the mode of access to universal “true” knowledge. Meanwhile narrative knowledge is reduced to a form of folk knowledge that is local and limited to specific cultures and perspectives, as such Lyotard claims that “scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always exited in addition to, and in competition with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative,” and “its model is related to ideas of internal equilibrium and conviviality” (1979, 7). It is the case that the legitimation of science, as a social principal and purposeful activity, always reached beyond its own phrase regimen to rely on elements of narrative knowledge. This is precisely the meaning of Enlightenment, in which science is framed as a grand project to lift humanity out of the dark ages, the story of history is one in which science represents progress and aims which are undeniably values utterly absent from within the scientific method itself. It is the collapse of this legitimatising narrative — with the development of technology, computing, nuclear bombs, concentration camps and so on — that has led to the general collapse of belief in scientific knowledge as an overarching and uniquely legitimate discourse that characterises the postmodern. It is imperative to make the point that Lyotard does not claim the end of all truths, of verifiable knowledge but of the faith in this historical meta-narrative.

It is not of immediate significance here whether the philosophical claims of such “postmodern” positions are defensible in and of themselves. Particularly concerning is the way the arguments of Postmodernism, intended as a critical counterbalance to the power of capitalist techno-science, have been actively distorted to become a tool of reactionary and regressive forces for the purpose of cultural, political and economic gain. The effect of this in our current context is to make COVID’s impact even worse. The insights that “postmodern” thinkers could offer to critically engage with issues of “post-truth” and the alt-right are thus effectively recuperated.

Let us take the arguments of Jordan Peterson as a case in point. Peterson is an icon for a certain right-wing voice of “common sense” and has been seen as a standard bearer of “reason” in fellow travelling and Alt-right, circles. In the preamble to a debate about “Political Correctness” in 2018 Peterson defines the concept of “postmodernism” as a catch-all term that indicates a “collectivist doctrine” that is a “neo-Marxist pastiche that makes up the radical Left philosophy” (Griffiths 2018, 31). He then asserts that collectivism “assigns people to their identity via their group membership” and that from this postmodernism reads “history itself as a battleground between competing groups” (32). This notion entails the claim that for the left “you’re not essentially an individual” (48) and from that comes the claim that “you should be essentially categorised along with those who are like you on that dimension in that group” (49).

Peterson extrapolates to a series of claims about postmodernism being a dominant force in universities and the health care field, without offering any specific instances or evidence of this, and makes the claim that on the “radical left” — which for him is synonymous with postmodernism — there is no commitment or belief in free speech, “you can’t have a debate about free speech from that ideological position because there isn’t any such thing” (37). The logic of this being that for the left, in Peterson’s conceptualisation, “everything is a power game on behalf of your group” (49). In short, the assertion is that the left eschews reason and believes only in power, that postmodernism enables this, that having made that move the left then is able to use its claims to being a victim of power to irrationally and brutally oppress all fair-minded rational-thinking persons such as Peterson himself.

This direction of thought extends to claims that educators who express related ideas are “dangerous people” who are “indoctrinating young minds” and have “made it their mission to undermine Western civilisation itself.” The postmodernists, Peterson tells us, “produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers.” Peterson insists that the ideas that most clearly identify the postmodernists are “the holy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion.” It also seems that postmodernists, “refuse to believe that people of good will can exchange ideas and reach consensus.” Peterson claims that “All these concepts originated with Karl Marx” and we must now prevent the identarian ideologies of the “postmodern neo-Marxists” doing to the entire Western world what they have “already done to its universities” (Peterson 2018).

Peterson is creating a false paradigm in which he presents postmodernism as a cipher for any idea he finds distasteful, and as such a threat that must be crushed. In so he allows himself the justification to attack and dispense with the “holy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion” — concepts which are in fact at the heart of public reason. He does this in defence of the status quo and his authoritarian version of rational free speech. The curious aspect of this position is that he has adopted an imaginary and distorted interpretation of postmodernism, which he then uses to denigrate not only postmodernism but any ideas which he designates to have family resemblance. The voice of reason is then claimed, by association, with his conservative position — an increasingly common practice. This is itself of course a form of totalitarian thinking and utterly contrary to the open and inclusive notion of public reason and the goal of an overlapping consensus. In this instance public reason would support the non-intrusion of comprehensive doctrines as a way of managing the différend without submitting to discourse subsumption, but of course discourse subsumption is precisely the aim of Peterson’s position.

Of great interest here is that this formula provides cover for the sorts of COVID denial and anti-lockdown attitudes that have become prevalent, and which in turn reveal the tactics of an increasingly intolerant and threatening right more broadly, what I would refer to as the cynical-right. Peterson’s fellow travellers, including celebrities and commentators, consistently use the same technique. For example, ex-actor, COVID-sceptic and would be Mayor of London Lawrence Fox professes a hostility to the imaginary figure of “woke,” that he associates with mask-wearing vaccine advocating and “freedom stifling” tendencies. The London Mayor Sadiq Kahn stood in for many of these tenancies in Fox’s pronouncements. Fox has “railed against the ‘constant woke proselytising’ of Sadiq Khan, criticising the Mayor’s statues review and support for the Black Lives Matter movement.” This “woke” approach is then linked to an anti-lockdown position that is deemed to be equivalent, “This is the mistake we made in this country — we have given our freedom away. We should all have been anti-lockdown from day one, but the debate was stifled and shut up by Government” (Lydall 2021). We see elsewhere his self-presentation as being a reasonable person who has been victimised by the irrational and hysterical “woke.” In an article written in 2020 after his initial rise to prominence he stated that “unless we can accommodate multiple understandings of a situation soon, it will all end with us abandoning words and reason, the tools given to us to heal and come together” (Fox 2020a). A view he is able to square with his claim that, “Lockdowns don’t work. That’s a legitimate argument. There is no evidence that they do” (2021a). The use of “reason” as a rhetorical tool is clear, also in its use as an initial tag line, “Reason, Reform, Progress” (Newsome 2021) for his newly minted political party, “Reclaim.”

Fox is clearly an admirer of Peterson, Tweeting admiration (Fox 2021b) for an interview in which Peterson is defended against a satirical representation of himself in the Captain America comic book which is deemed a “slanderous account.” Again here, a similar representation of the reasonable being silenced, a trope well established for Peterson since he was “no platformed” by Oxford University in 2019, an event that was widely presented as a result of politically correct outrage, but was later confirmed to be a decision made by the Faculty of Divinity’s Research Committee (Marsh 2019). The networked ecosystem of cynical right-wing commentators shares this phrase regimen, one that is defined by self-righteous victimhood. Another member of this ecosystem is Darren Grimes, who runs a campaigning website he has named, in line with my comments above, “Reasoned.” Grimes was an organiser of the youth “BeLeave” campaign, which was beneficiary of the Leave EU campaign which used them to funnel large amounts of money towards social media advertising, circumventing campaign funding restrictions in the UK. Again, what we find is the use of the notion of reason as rhetorical mechanism to attack any vaguely left leaning “progressive” cause, often labelling them as “Cultural Marxism,” a common line of attack of the Alt-Right (Wendling 2018). Despite being a rather fringe self-appointed figure Grimes is regularly invited onto mainstream news programmes as a commentator, for example onto Sky News’ daily newspaper review.

The overlap of the claim to reason and COVID scepticism, further reveal the purely cynical logic of these networks and the extent that it is indeed these groups who display the epistemic “flexibility” and victimhood that they ascribe to the left “postmodernists” and, represent a direct erosion of the capacity for public reason and for the “democracy” they so widely proclaim to be committed to. This contradictory reversal is not out of character more broadly and is, again, a well-established practice of the Alt-Right. As Mike Wendling has observed “They like nothing more than to flip the script on their opponents” and “if your opponent calls you a name, just shout it back at them” (2018, 73). This describes precisely Laurence’s Fox’s response to being called a privileged white man on the BBC’s question time programme, where he jibed that to call him a white privileged male was racist (Fox 2020b). It is as well to note that Fox lost the Mayoral election with less than 1 per cent of the vote.

Defending the Human Conglomerate

In this intellectual and political climate, the defence of public reason becomes an ever more important pursuit. This is to make the case for vaccination and mandatory mask-wearing, social distancing and self-isolation where necessary — not as acts of oppression but as instances of mutual recognition and reason as care. Where phenomena such as post-truth, anti-vax or other such positions cynically deploy distortions of the postmodern condition, conflated with highly partisan representation of identity politics, public reason offers a counterbalance. This explains why, when these cynical groups are attacked or critiqued, the response is to denigrate the critic as either an elitist, speaking from a position of arrogance, or a “snowflake” speaking from a position of privilege. Such responses are thus purposefully counter-factual, contradictory and fluid — as such precisely disarming of the kind of discourse typified by public reason and its enactment in acts of democratic legal enforcement.

This is a lesson we can take from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure of material reality, in its immanently bodily and viral forms, makes it increasingly difficult for the forces that are actively pushing to challenge and undermine our capacity for reasonable democratic decision making. What COVID has shown is that while the public, via social media in particular, have been subjected to and influenced by disinformation, this can be challenged and kept in the margins. In much of the public domain the presence and weight given to scientific evidence, and the simple scale and overwhelming character of that evidence have been compelling even in instances where the instincts of governments may have been in a different direction. What needs to be recognised is that science can be applied not as a comprehensive doctrine of reason raised to the level of a Hegelian grand truth, but as an intellectual and empirical defence against overt lies and misinformation. Genuine postmodern critiques of science as ideology do not invalidate public reason and “small” empirically tested truth claims. Indeed, they emphasise that narratives still matter in everyday sense-making and that the smaller “stories” of science also need to be told.

We can see that to the extent that government scientist and academics in the field of virology and epidemiology have achieved unusually significant profile and presence across all parts of the media. For example, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, Jonathan Van Tam, has made regular appearances in press conferences and other public information sharing events and has gathered a following due to his forthright manner and use of engaging analogies. He has referred to the strategies for limiting the virus as a football match, wherein the development of a vaccine was the equivalent of “scoring an equaliser in the 70th minute of a football game,” but it was vital “not to lose it, not to throw it away at this point because we’ve got a point on the board” (Morton 2020). Another well used and adapted analogy was that of the approval of the Pfizer vaccine to boarding a train, wherein the train slowing safely at the station and opening its doors was the vaccine approval, but “what we need now is for people to get on that train and travel safely to their destinations” (Morton 2020). The BBC’s reading of this was that such an approach has been generally well received by the public and such analogies have clarified and communicated otherwise difficult to digest information (Morton 2020). This is the point at which public reason meets effective communication strategies, we can see the framework of narrative knowledge being employed in the support of science rather than in tension with it. As such the translation of a reasonable argument based in empirical evidence into a narrative can take the form of scientific knowledge accessed through the means of narrative. In this regard the application of the concept of overlapping consensus is helpful. It does not deny the existence of misinformation, of contestation and well-crafted lies, but enables the recognition of overwhelming consensus in the scientific field.

The hope to be taken from this is that notions of an empirical reality rooted in the exchange of verifiable validity claims remain at least partially impervious to the obfuscation techniques of the cynical-right. Survey evidence is emerging in several Western European countries that, “there is a clear pattern of more positive attitudes towards science” and that “the pandemic brought the public interest closer to science.” In North America “3M” research in science attitudes, undertaken during the pandemic, reveal “an overall decline for the first time in three years in the ‘skepticism in science’” (Jensen et al. 2021). An ongoing survey by MORI of attitudes towards science during the COVID-19 pandemic reflects these findings, showing that “the UK public have a positive disposition towards science and scientists, and this carries through to the role of scientists in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.” Indeed, there is an appetite for more scientific information in the public sphere: “Over twice as many people thought they saw and heard too little scientific information about it (34 per cent) than thought there was too much (13 per cent).” In a time of general scepticism and mistrust “most people trust scientists, including the scientists specifically advising on the UK government’s response to COVID-19” (Skinner, Shah, and Garrett 2020, 1). Trust in scientists is still significant amongst younger age groups, where more information is gleaned from social media, 55 per cent for 16- to 24-year-olds, as opposed to 61 per cent for 55- to 74-year-olds (10). Though interestingly in those younger age groups, trust of social media sources themselves is much lower, at 18 per cent, which indicates that younger people are making judgements based on a broader set of criteria than those found in social media alone (19).

What we are seeing is public reason building overlapping consensus. Other symbols of this situation are the large take up of mask wearing around the world where it is requested and argued for, the adherence to social distancing, support for front line workers and health care workers. The increasingly desperate claims of the disproven sceptics and deniers evermore push us to the contrary conclusion that society not only exists but that its bonds are fundamental and prior to all else, this was something well understood by Karl Marx regarding the character of the “human conglomerate.” In the Grundrisse Marx notes that, “in this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate” (Marx 1973, 83). This detachment has been the defining characteristic of the neoliberal age. But Marx argues “The more deeply we go back in history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole” (84).

What takes us beyond a purely liberal application of public reason is the addition of a mutual defence of fundamental wellbeing and an understanding of the welfare state as something to be defended and extended. The return to the recognition of dependency has meant that we are reminded we cannot function as a society in separation. Reason is a collective act of care, not an isolated abstraction. This recognition must inform the challenges we face to include the crises of climate change; global inequality and poverty; racism, sexism and all forms of exclusion; malevolent components of the digital communications infrastructure - all of which COVID-19 has rendered more visible. We, the human conglomerate, need to pursue the pragmatic construction of an overlapping consensus that enhances and strengthens not only the conceptual, but the shared material interests, of this conglomerate of overlapping beliefs and interests — public reason is not only the means, but also the strategic goal, to maintain the commitment to the freedom and welfare of a planetary commonwealth.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Joss Hands

Joss Hands (corresponding author) is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, UK. He is author of @ is For Activism (2011) and Gadget Consciousness (2019), both from Pluto Press. His research interests are focused on digital culture, democracy and critical theory. Email: [email protected]