Features

Mask Wars

Do Americans agree on the meaning of liberty? Of truth?

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored how interdependent we really are and how inadequate and even naïve our thinking about liberty really is. In the United States we’ve tended to see liberty as a matter of, “I should be free from interference to do certain kinds of things.” But there are two dimensions to liberty.

Any rights that protect liberties—the rules by which we delineate and specify the kinds of freedoms that we have—have a correlated set of obligations. And my obligations are to not exercise my rights in ways that harm other people.

The masking requirements put in place during the pandemic, by both public and private entities, are a perfect illustration of this concept of rights and corresponding responsibilities. It’s true that I have a right not to wear a mask. But I don’t have a right to impose potentially fatal, communicable diseases on you and have never had that right. There’s some segment of the population that is acting from an extremely partial understanding of what our liberties entail. They’re justifying doing so in large measure in terms of “information,” or “knowledge,” or “facts” that they have adopted without paying attention to the way that knowledge is generated and disseminated through science, through the press, through sets of institutions that have checks and balances built into them. Maybe not perfect checks and balances. But if you’re a journalist, or if you’re a scientist, there are conventions on how you check sources, or run experiments, and publish your results.

People who insist on exercising their right not to wear a mask—in enclosed public spaces, under conditions scientists know and have advised the public that the virus can easily be transmitted—are doing that because they heard or decided or adopted a set of views that could not pass muster under those standard journalistic or scientific conventions.

The most worrisome trend is that there’s no shared trust in the basic arrangements by which we generate, disseminate, or agree upon what counts as knowledge and what counts as true.

We’re not even agreeing on who won the election. All of the processes by which elections are certified were called into question in 2020. As a society, we’ve given up trust in basic institutions. And one of the results is what we saw at the Capitol on January 6. That’s more disturbing than, “I don’t trust you or people like you.” There’s no institutional framework within which you and I can interact and on which we both agree.

Ultimately, there’s no scaffolding of institutions through which we can interact in a way that mutually recognizes each other’s obligations to respect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that I have to recognize your rights to life and liberty, and you mine. That lack is frightening. It’s a kind of skepticism and distrust of institutions that I have not seen before in my lifetime.

The question then is, what can be done? We can try to address the predicament that we’re in in democratic ways, or we can opt for a technocratic or authoritarian kind of response. I think we risk the latter when we label the January 6 attack on the Capitol as terrorism and say that we need to strengthen the laws against terrorism. We have laws already on the books, democratically enacted and enforced, that will cover any of the actions that the people who invaded the Capitol undertook. Revising and expanding terrorism laws that were put in place after 9/11 would simply make the world less democratic and less open.

We are really in a predicament in which we have to figure out how to accommodate antidemocratic tendencies and proclivities in a democratic way, without giving up democratic arrangements.