THE PANDEMIC AND MORALITY EXPOSED - LEGAL AND RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES

 

THE PANDEMIC AND MORALITY EXPOSED –

LEGAL AND MORAL PERSPECTIVES

©Wendell Griffen, 2021

University of Pretoria School of Law

University of Pretoria School of Theology and Religion

December 2, 2021, 10:00 A.M. (Central Standard Time)

 

 

          In my first lecture (Vaccination or Not:  Legal and Religious Perspectives), I analyzed the issue of vaccine hesitancy and legal and religious issues surrounding vaccination mandates related to the SARS-19 coronavirus pandemic. I said that vaccine hesitancy is not affected by whether governments have the power to mandate vaccinations. Also, vaccine hesitancy related to the SARS-19 coronavirus is not driven by whether and how personal liberty – including religious – concerns of unvaccinated persons are accommodated.

 

Rather, opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the US is based on moral incompetence. Politicians are deliberately weaponizing that moral incompetence to advance their personal political ambitions. Those politicians know that vaccine mandates are lawful. They are people in states that have long mandated vaccinations to prevent infection and spread of communicable diseases.

 

I mentioned Biblical passages from Isaiah, Micah, and the Gospel of Matthew, and I cited South African liberation theologian Allan Boesak to condemn that unprincipled political opposition to COVID-19 vaccination mandates.

 

          Three months have passed since that lecture on September 20. COVID-19 was first named two years ago, in December 2019, in Wuhan, China. The global death toll from that novel coronavirus continues to rise. Even though safe and effective vaccines have been developed, produced, and are most available in the United States and other affluent nations of the world, the highest rate of new COVID-19 cases has occurred in those societies.

 

The death toll from COVID-19 in the United States as of September 20, 2021, had reached 675,000, higher than the death toll from the 1918 influenza pandemic.[1] The death toll as of November 21, 2021, two months later, had reached 770,000.[2] Public health experts project that the probable death toll from COVID-19 in the US by December 11, 2021, will be between 788,000 and 798,000.[3] The death toll from COVID-19 in the United States, a society that boasts of its robust economy, scientific experts, and public health infrastructure, is the highest in the world.

 

          An article released by the Associated Press on November 20, 2021, reports that the Russia coronavirus task force reported 263,000 COVID-19 deaths, by far the highest in Europe. The article states that some experts believe the death toll in Russia from coronavirus-related causes to be much higher, with data showing the death toll from April 2020 and September 2021 was 462,000.[4]  

 

          John Hopkins University publishes case and death counts data for most countries in the world (North Korea is a notable exception and claims to have had no COVID-19 cases or deaths). An article in the
Guardian newspaper on November 21, 2021, reported that the COVID-19 death toll was over 612,000 in Brazil. The death toll was over 465,000 persons in India. It was over 292,000 in Mexico. The death toll from COVID-19 was 201,000, in Peru. In the United Kingdom, the death toll exceeded 143,000. In France, the death toll stood at 116,000. In each of those societies, the COVID-19 death toll was higher than that of South Africa, where 90,000 persons had been recorded to have died due to COVID-19 as of the date of the Guardian article.[5]

 

          The rising COVID-19 death toll in the United States and other affluent societies in the face of widespread availability of safe and effective vaccines for the SARS-19 coronavirus is grim proof about the moral incompetence and self-serving political calculations mentioned in my earlier lecture. Each of the deaths is tragic. However, the death toll is also a global travesty.

 

Meanwhile, political leaders across the world continue to pander to anti-vaccination constituencies by opposing vaccine mandates and governmental efforts to prevent spreading the SARS-19 coronavirus through mask mandates and restrictions on public gatherings. In the United States, private employers opposed to the vaccine mandate issued by the Biden administration based on a federal law governing workplace health and safety convinced judges on one of the more conservative federal courts of appeal to declare the mandate unconstitutional, and Republican attorneys general in more than half the US states have filed legal challenges to the vaccine mandates in five appellate courts.[6] In September 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated a nationwide eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control of the US Department of Health and Human Services that was intended to prevent transmission of the SARS-19 coronavirus among people and families living in rented residential housing.[7]

Across the world, COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation persists. A November 25, 2021, article in the Guardian reported about false claims that were circulating online that Aboriginal people from Binjari and Rockhole in Australia’s Northern Territory were being forcibly removed from their homes and taken to enforced quarantine in Howard Springs, and that people - including children - were being forcibly vaccinated. Those claims were declared false by the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory (AMSANT), the local Aboriginal health services and community leaders.[8]

On May 20, 2021, the Wall Street Journal International Magazine published an article by Boris Cizelj, a political scientist, economist, and former diplomat whose Knowledge Economy Network (KEN) tries to coordinate global networks around the goal of what he calls “a more sustainable future for world community.” The following observation by Cizelj illustrates the scope and depth of the moral and ethical issues exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic has arrived when the world was facing a most complex set of challenges/crises accumulating over a long time. The virus has flooded on the surface already simmering with long-neglected problems (lack of attention to public health and elderly care, facing an exacerbating environmental crisis, tolerating huge inequalities, practically ignoring migration and refugees crisis), and facing as a consequence numerous humanitarian crises, technological and productivity slowdown, erosion of democracy, digital (dis)information and erosion of privacy, globalization backlash, economic nationalism and protectionism, trade wars - accompanied by tectonic changes in the world power structure. While the pandemic can be contained through vaccination – bringing us back to “normal” -- many of the above-mentioned long-term problems are of different nature, and cannot be fixed without radical changes in the world order in line with principles of sustainability.

These crises should thus not be regarded only as an economic or social phenomenon - or now as a health issue - but as a very complex, multidisciplinary problem and challenge. Hyper globalisation has clearly catapulted the political economy trilemma (trade-offs) between sovereignty, globalisation, and democracy, while we are facing the inability to deal with all three at the same time. Therefore, reconstructing the global economy in a post-pandemic world cannot rely on old formulas, on totally free trade concepts, or economic nationalism, but should look for more mature and sustainable political economy responses.[9]

          As I read that comment, words delivered generations ago (on April 4, 1967, to be specific) by Martin Luther King Jr. came at once to mind.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we…must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.[10]

The COVID-19 pandemic shows that the “revolution of values” that King urged, and the “more mature and sustainable political economy responses” that Cizelj called for, have not occurred. If anything, the pandemic made the inequities mentioned by King (a Black Baptist pastor born in Atlanta, Georgia during the Jim Crow era) and Cizelj (a white political economist with professional and academic ties to neoliberal capitalism) even more obvious and oppressive.

The right-wing politicians, self-described “evangelical Christian conservative” preachers, political pundits, and free market capitalists who complain about COVID-19 vaccination mandates in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere know that compliance with the mandates reduces transmission of the SARS-19 coronavirus. They know that unvaccinated people run increased risk of becoming infected.

The makers of COVID vaccines know they have not made vaccines available to less affluent societies in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and to Indigenous and communities of color in North America on a fair basis. They know that flooding affluent societies with booster shots while impoverished societies and communities do not have ready access to the first round of vaccines will widen health disparities that already torment people, with disproportionately adverse consequences to indigenous persons in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Palestine.

Again, the behavior of these political, religious, and commercial actors is not innocent. It is not inadvertent. It is not careless, thoughtless, or reckless.

It is tempting to agree with Pope Francis who warned years ago about what he termed “a globalization of indifference” based on “an economy of exclusion.” However, the social and economic inequities that pre-existed the COVID-19 pandemic are being worsened by deliberate behavior that is not indifferent. It is ruthless. As I mentioned in my earlier lecture, this conduct is diabolical.

However, it is important to discern how that diabolical conduct is operationalized. As a jurist I am concerned about the morality of legal responses to the pandemic.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. served on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) for 29 years (from 1902 to 1932), longer than anyone else in its history. In 1881, Holmes made the following observation while delivering lectures on the common law in Great Britain.

 

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, as far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.[11]

 

The conventional view is that judges are less prone than legislators, governors, and presidents to be influenced by prevailing views and public opinion when making judicial decisions. The often-quoted statement by Holmes should cause people to question the accuracy of that conventional view.

 

Law schools do not routinely graduate students who question the morality of market economics and capitalism. After graduation, new lawyers typically begin their careers with firms and government offices doing work to support existing systems – even if they are oppressive – not dismantle them. Within the legal profession, conformity is not merely convenient. It is professionally and economically rewarding. Conformity is a prerequisite for advancement.

 

Likewise, theology schools are not typically considered places that nurture nonconformity, let alone welcome it. Divinity school graduates who do not conform to conventional perspectives about religion and ethics seldom become local congregational leaders, denominational leaders, or successful religious educators.

 

It is important to remember that reality when one analyzes the morality of legal responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Legal and religious institutions usually produce results based on prevailing attitudes, values, and behaviors in a society, including attitudes, values, and behaviors that reinforce inequities and disparities. Thus, law cases involving landowners and tenants have resulted in decisions where landowners and landlords are favored over tenants. Witness the US Supreme Court decision that struck down the CDC eviction moratorium. Cases involving manufacturers – including those who manufacture prescription drugs – typically result in decisions favorable to manufacturers and unfavorable to consumers (including patients). Employers are favored over workers. Wealthy interests are typically favored over the interests of impoverished indigenous and other people of color. That was true before the Covid-19 pandemic happened and it is still true.

 

The ruthless pandemic conduct that has worsened pre-existing inequities will continue because that ruthlessness is a frontal attack on the idea that each person owes a duty of compassion and care for every other person. Once enough people reject that sense of duty, the health and security of the whole world is jeopardized.

 

Examples of that ruthlessness abound. One recalls the decision by former US President Donald Trump in April 2020 to suspend US support to the World Health Organization (WHO). The United States provided $553 million to support the WHO in 2019 and was the largest national donor. In making the announcement, Trump accused the WHO of severely mismanaging and covering up the dangers and origin of the coronavirus infection. That accusation was a despicable and dangerous lie.        The WHO warned the U.S. and other nations as early as mid-January about the risk of human-to-human infection from coronavirus. On Jan. 30 it officially declared “a public health emergency of international concern.” Trump presented no evidence whatsoever that it could or should have taken these steps sooner.

Moreover, when the WHO issued that notification in technical guidance notes, Trump paid no attention. On Feb. 27, a month after the WHO published an official report that warned of human-to-human transmissibility of coronavirus and that transmissibility would be higher than seasonal influenza, Trump downplayed the threat (against the advice of U.S. health and intelligence experts).

Halting funding for the WHO was Trump’s ploy to shift blame for the COVID-19 death toll from his vicious incompetence and to scapegoat a multinational organization associated with the United Nations, a body he and his white nationalist base had long despised.

What made the ploy so dangerous and despicable was that people were dying – in the U.S. and throughout the world – from COVID-19 infection. Americans were not dying because of anything the WHO did or failed to do. They were dying because of what Trump did and failed to do. In this sense, the cruel suspension of U.S. support to the WHO was not only fraudulent; it was a crime against humanity.

Trump minimized the coronavirus threat. He insisted that coronavirus was no more dangerous than seasonal influenza even after health and scientific experts declared that it was exponentially more lethal than seasonal flu. He delayed declaring a national emergency out of concern about the effect on wealthy investors in the stock market if he did so.

Trump lied about how many people were being tested. He lied about the availability of testing. The Trump administration refused for weeks to use validated WHO protocols for coronavirus testing. Then the administration promulgated an invalid coronavirus test that had to be scrapped. None of these things was the fault of the WHO.

In that sense, Trump’s decision recalls a line spoken by Tyrion Lannister regarding his nephew, King Joffrey Lannister, in the award-winning HBO “Game of Thrones” series: “We’ve had vicious kings and we’ve had idiot kings, but I don’t know if we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king.”

          Furthermore, Trump’s sociopathic idiocy has been imitated by national leaders elsewhere. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the threat of COVID-19, touted misinformation and unproven treatments, and, like Trump, ignored international health guidelines on mask use and public activity. Now Brazil has the second highest COVID-19 death toll (behind the US) in the world, with more than 600,000 persons lost, as Bolsonaro faces the possibility of charges of corruption and crimes against humanity.[12] In India, where the COVID-19 death toll now exceeds 465,000, COVID-19 misinformation via the Internet, from religious leaders, and even from some sectors of government has occurred.[13]  

Thanks to misinformation from political leaders such as Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil, misinformation and disinformation spread online, and the ruthless diversion of COVID-19 resources from public health purposes into the pockets of private profiteers, the dangers that Martin Luther King Jr. warned about in April 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City – racism, materialism and militarism – which have been deliberately, actively and openly sacralized by “evangelical” religious congregations for the past half century have been normalized across the United States and spread throughout the world. In a tragic sense, the chickens of racism, materialism and militarism have come home to roost with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Roosting chickens eventually hatch their eggs. Free market fundamentalists, religious nationalists, and proponents of what former US President Dwight Eisenhower famously called “the military industrial complex” have elected politicians in the US and elsewhere who proudly questioned the need to protect public health, who cut vital social services (including access to health care, nutrition assistance, housing and public education) for people who are needy, and who questioned the need to protect people from bigotry and discrimination.

Martin Luther King Jr. warned in 1967 that a nation which spends more every year on war making than on programs of social uplift does so at a peril that King called “a tragic death wish.” We are now seeing that “tragic death wish” play out in homes, neighborhoods and communities across the U.S. and the wider world thanks to the cancerous effects of free market fundamentalism, religious nationalist conservatism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and social media disseminated xenophobia coupled with the crass materialism of the misnamed “prosperity gospel.”

We are cursed. And our curse includes willful amnesia and deliberate disregard by religious leaders about the moral incompetence, vicious idiocy, and shameless dishonesty of political leaders. That willful amnesia and deliberate disregard for truth and justice, which defined public religious discourse and influenced public policy in the United States for generations, now threatens the world.

I hope when future generations examine the words and actions of this period, they will discern the relationship between the moral, religious, and social perspectives of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee, Billy Graham and Franklin Graham and the racist, materialist and militarist policies that resulted in US voters electing a vicious idiot who suspended aid to the World Health Organization during a deadly global pandemic.

I hope future generations will condemn religious people in our time – yes, condemn the pastors, educators, denominational leaders, and congregations – who embraced those perspectives and policies and supported local, state, and federal politicians who governed by them.

I hope they will not give thanks for those religionists and politicians and the suffering that occurred because of our curse.

Instead, I hope they will denounce the multi-generational moral, ethical, religious, economic, social, and political hell they inherit as a legacy from our era. Perhaps then something akin to repentance will happen. Then future generations will repent and pray for deliverance from the curse we have placed on them. God will have mercy on them. Until then, our curse will continue, as it should.

However troubling our situation appears to be (and is), people who believe in love and justice should not throw up our hands in despair. There is nothing new about greed, self-centeredness, and other harms associated with injustice. The inequities exposed and worsened by the pandemic are deeply rooted in existing legal and religious systems and practices.

 

But something else is also rooted. That something else is the unflinching and unrelenting moral and ethical prophetic imperative to speak the truth about injustice, dismantle systems of injustice, and develop, construct, and support just systems of health, public safety, and social well-being. This unflinching and unrelenting moral and ethical prophetic imperative inspired the lives and work of Isaiah (see Isaiah 58 and 59), Jeremiah (see Jeremiah 1:6-10), Ezekiel (see Ezekiel 2:3-7), John the Baptist (see Luke 3:1-18), and Jesus (see Luke 4:14-19). It also inspired Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Cone, and Katie Cannon in the United States, and inspired Albert Luthuli, Steve Biko, Winnie Mandela, Allan Boesak, Tinyiko Maluleke, and other champions of liberation and justice in South Africa.

 

That moral and ethical prophetic imperative is active during every age and can be found in every society. But it requires people with enough discernment to recognize threats to justice. It requires people with enough courage to meet those threats. It requires people with sufficient insight, perseverance, and skill to battle the threats.

 

And the moral and ethical prophetic imperative requires that people have enough compassion and humility to recognize that the goal is liberation and setting up just community. It is not destruction and oblivion of those with whom we disagree. The aim is not to reform existing systems that produce injustice. Rather, our goal must be to dismantle those systems and replace them with processes and policies that produce justice.

 

In doing so, we should remember that people develop policies, implement procedures, and remember what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said about experience being the lifeblood of the law. We will not dismantle existing oppressive policies and procedures by relying on people who have devoted themselves to constructing, reinforcing, and advocating for them.

 

Finally, we should recognize that the people who critique and dismantle oppressive systems may not be same people who create and staff their replacements. We need to remember the insights Dr. Allan Boesak shared in Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood Red Waters.

 

At Chapter 2, Boesak calls for prophetic people to not be afraid to speak a different language concerning what he and Pope Francis have termed “the globalization of indifference.”  Boesak joins Pope Francis in calling on prophetic people “to not be afraid” to speak a different language about human suffering, in these words.

 

We are in no position to offer comfort, compassion and justice to a suffering, bleeding humanity overwhelmed by a petrifying indifference, if we do not believe that there is good news they should hear. And we cannot speak a language of hope and resilience, of resistance and redemption, if we do not unlearn the language of imperial compliance: of domination and subjugation, of carelessness and indifference, of diplomatic evasion.

 

We are no longer in a position to deny that the pope is right:  something is wrong, and it is more wrong today than ten or twenty years ago. The time has come for us not to be afraid to say it. I am not talking about simply mentioning, enumerating, or bemoaning the wrongs we see. To not be afraid to say it has everything to do with how we say it. Do we say it with truth, with courage, with compassion, and with faithfulness to those who suffer? The wrongs we see are not just happening; they are caused to happen, and they are happening to the vast majority of God’s children who are vulnerable, targeted and excluded from human consideration. They are not happening randomly, they are deeply systemic, deliberately built into systems of oppression, domination, and dehumanization. And we must not be afraid to say it.

…

 

We must not only break the silence. We must speak a different language. Our language must be a courageous, liberating, transformative, healing, inclusive language … We should learn to resist the temptation to see the global realities through the eyes of the powerful and privileged, but rather through the eyes of the suffering, the weak and the vulnerable, the dehumanized and the demonized, the outcasts and the excluded…

 

We must be much more alert in our awareness … that our global reality is an imperial reality… Empires not only create realities of dominations and subjugation; they also create myths:  of invincibility, endless power, infinite duration, great beneficence, and divine incarnation. Crucial to all these is what Walter Wink called the “myth of redemptive violence.”  Instead of acknowledging the violence it uses because it is needed for continued domination, subjugation, and exploitation, the empire “enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war makes peace, that might makes right.”  Consequently violence is not only necessary; it is the only thing that “works.” [14]

 

I agree with Allan Boesak that prophetic people must stop being afraid to speak the language of anger, courage, and audacious hope. This is the language of Matthew 23 that dares to condemn the idolatry of empire. This is the language of Jesus, John the Baptist, and the other Hebrew prophets. This is the language of Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Jordan, Jeremiah Wright, and Marian Wright Edelman.

 

This is the language of the gospel. This is the language that must be heard and heeded by people who seek answers from prophetic people in our divisive time.

 

When we are not afraid to speak this language, we will be vilified and persecuted. When we are not afraid to speak this language, those who define religious effectiveness by attendance, buildings, and cash will leave us.

 

But then we will speak like Jesus. We will sound like Jesus. We will be heard as Jesus was heard. And the redeeming results of our witness will endure long after our words and our voices have passed from memory.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. never lost his prophetic discernment and zeal because he was never willing to substitute the vocation of politician for his calling as a prophet and pastor. Politics is, fundamentally, the business of compromise and bargain-making. Oppressed people are not well-served by politicians who lack the toughness needed to reject offers to compromise about fairness. For oppressed people, questions of fairness are matters of life and death.

 

Despite the moral and ethical issues exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, we should not lose heart. Each generation and every society must grapple with issues of justice, peace, and liberation even without the extraordinary challenges presented by a global pandemic. What each society and generation needs are people of sufficient moral and ethical discernment, courage, perseverance, skill, and experience to manage power responsibly, meaning with justice for all.

 

We who believe in justice now must find, develop, promote, and deploy those people so that they will be competent to deal with a global pandemic, war, climate change, racial and gender-based injustice, wealth disparities, and other issues. If existing schools of law, religion, and theology are not nurturing places for people to embrace King’s “radical revolution of values” we must create them. We must recruit faculty and students to them. In doing so, we will have to be disciplined and intentionally reject calls to “reform” or remodel the systems, policies, and practices that perpetuate and promulgate the injustice that is killing and threatening people around the world.

 

This hard yet necessary work is ours to do. The future of the world depends on whether we have the anger and courage to do it.


[2] See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html (accessed November 21, 2021, 6:50 a.m., Central Standard Time).

[10] Martin Luther King Jr., A Time to Break Silence, from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr., James Melvin Washington, ed. (Harper and Row, 1986), p. 240-241.

[11] Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., THE COMMON LAW (1881), p. 1.

[14] Allan Aubrey Boesak, Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters:  Prophetic Critique on Empire-Resistance, Justice, and the Power of the Hopeful Sizwe—A Transatlantic Conversation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), pp. 81-82.

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