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The architects of military coups and revolutions love to invoke “national emergencies” to suspend civil rights, impose curfews, and get around awkward constitutional constraints. The advantage of declaring a national emergency is that you can legitimate violent and anti-constitutional interventions, and unprecedented power grabs, under the pretext that you are saving the nation from imminent doom.

By David Thunder

The fact that demagogues and dictators are particularly fond of invoking emergencies to legitimate their power grabs does not mean that all emergencies are fabricated by budding tyrants. But it does mean we should be extremely wary when politicians declare emergencies as grounds for suspending rule of law or expanding their power over citizens’ lives.

The Declaration of a Covid Emergency

When a nation comes under military attack, it may be legitimate to declare a state of emergency, impose curfews, and redirect some economic resources toward national defence. But this was not the sort of situation represented by Covid-19. We were not under military attack, and we were not facing some sort of civilisational threat. Rather, we were faced with a nasty respiratory virus with an estimated infection fatality rate in the range of 0.2-0.3%, that our healthcare systems were not properly equipped to respond to.

In the face of this nasty virus, governments declared national emergencies, suspended the right to protest, shut down businesses and schools, mandated universal masking, prohibited religious services, severely restricted travel, and attempted to regulate the number of people one could entertain in one’s home. At the time, it was predictable that this sledgehammer approach to public health would cause far-reaching and disproportionate harm to human health and well-being. But the Covid “emergency” was presented as an irresistible justification for every conceivable Covid intervention, irrespective of its potential collateral harms.

Were Covid Emergency Measures Justified?

Some people claim that the Covid emergency was basically invented out of thin air in order to legitimate illicit power grabs. The truth is more subtle than that: the corona pandemic constituted a genuine emergency, at least in the initial months that it swept across the globe, but the rhetoric surrounding it – the Covid emergency talk – was hyped up to a point where it lost touch with reality, and became little more than a thinly veiled excuse for expanding government powers.

Here is one dictionary definiton of an “emergency”: “something dangerous or serious, such as an accident, that happens suddenly or unexpectedly, and needs fast action in order to avoid harmful results.” Stated in this very general way, we could plausibly describe the corona pandemic as a public “emergency” – likely the result of an artificially enhanced virus leaked from a Wuhan lab. Whatever the origin of SARS-CoV-2, there was a broad consensus among epidemiologists and political leaders that some sort of concerted response was required, to minimise its potential impact in hospitals, care homes, and vulnerable populations.

The Devil is in the Detail

But the devil is in the detail. The manner in which the Corona emergency was represented to the public by political leaders, public officials, public health authorities, and journalists, had two extremely troubling features:

First, it involved a gross distortion of the facts, of the sort that tended to vastly exaggerate the likely impact of the pandemic – for example, by continuously reporting PCR positive tests as if they corresponded neatly to confirmed clinical cases of Covid-19 disease, or focusing on highly speculative, empirically unsubstantiated upper limits on projected deaths and hospitalisations, as occurred in the public reporting of Imperial College’s doomsday projections.

Second, it was assumed in an uncritical and routine manner that suspending civil liberties and expanding political powers were justified by the emergency. Little serious consideration was given to the dangers this posed to a constitutional order, and the evidence produced to show that such measures were necessary and unavoidable was scant, at best.

Emergency Talk Can and Will Be Weaponised Again

It would be reassuring to believe that the excesses of emergency talk seen during this pandemic were an unfortunate blip unlikely to happen again anytime soon. But emergency talk is becoming increasingly popular among our political classes and among certain classes of political activists, not only in relation to Covid-19 but also in relation to other alleged “crises” such as climate change. There is no doubt that the sort of rhetoric and ideology that was used to justify Covid emergency measures can and will be repackaged and weaponised again to justify another slate of intrusive and illiberal interventions, whether to “save the climate,” or keep us safe from some other collective threat, such as terrorism.

A critical antidote to the weapon of emergency talk is awareness of its existence and the threat it poses to our freedom. Emergency talk is notoriously malleable and susceptible to abuse because, by definition, it is difficult to define the conditions of a public emergency independently of the judgment calls of political leaders. Emergency talk is especially dangerous when it is thought to empower a highly autocratic style of top-down interventions and to disempower local civil society and political actors, as it has been interpreted during the recent pandemic.

The utilitarian logic of the new emergency talk – the notion that no value or right, no matter how precious, can stand in the way of measures that are perceived as “effective” responses to an emergency – is especially insidious. Confronted with any emergency, whether real or perceived, you can use emergency talk to convince people that we absolutely must arm the government with a blank cheque to do “whatever it takes” to avert a catastrophe.

Because emergency talk activates powerful emotions of fear and terror, the invocation of emergencies can bypass people’s critical faculties, speaking instead in a direct way to their sub-rational survival instincts. This is a distinct advantage for political leaders who would prefer to save themselves the trouble of being held accountable for their actions before the tribunal of reason.

Here are some of the defining features of the sort of emergency talk we have heard during the pandemic, features that are eerily similar to the emergency discourse of environmental activists:

• speculative and unsubstantiated scientific projections suggesting very bad things will happen to us “unless we act now”
• speculative and unsubstantiated attributions of efficacy to policy interventions that nobody really knows will work
• a preference for interventions that involve a massive amount of coercion and top-down control, over interventions that trust citizens to do the right thing, or simply foster voluntary cooperation in the service of the common good
• a revolutionary spirit, that views traditional rights and constitutional conventions as inconvenient obstacles to progress
• a blindness to potential collateral harms of revolutionary, top-down interventions in the social fabric

So next time you hear a government talk about the revolutionary changes we need to make to “fix” global warming, whether steep carbon taxes, centrally imposed limits on energy usage, or the elimination of cars from our streets, you might ask yourself:

1. First, do we actually know that these top-down interventions will “fix” global warming and its effects? Just how compelling is the scientific evidence for their efficacy?
2. Second, have the architects of such policies given adequate consideration to their knock-on effects on human health and well-being, and economic development, whether in the developed or developing world?
3. Third, even granting that environmental reform is needed, do I have any reason to trust that eliteactors and institutions that used emergency talk to justify the suspension of basic liberties during the pandemic, will act in good faith and respect our fundamental liberties in the context of climate change and other emergencies, whether real or perceived?

About the Author

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer of political philosophy at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.  His passion is the study of conditions under which a functional human society can be created and preserved over time.  He is author of the book ‘Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life’.  He writes and publishes articles on a Substack page titled ‘The Freedom Blog’ which you can subscribe to and follow HERE.