The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a harsh, unflattering spotlight on something most Canadians would like to believe comes naturally to us, something that differentiates us from our neighbours south of the border: the importance of personal social responsibility.
The concept of social responsibility covers a lot of territory, from corporate financial and ecological responsibility to individual ethical responsibility.
The narrow and more pragmatic definition of social responsibility suggests that each individual has an obligation to work and co-operate with other individuals and organizations for the benefit of society at large.
But no, despite rising incidences of COVID infection across B.C., we still see nightly news reports of large group parties, street celebrations of Halloween (some irony there, when you think about it) and determined non-maskers in grocery stores.
The general theory of social responsibility is built on a structure of ethics, in which decisions and actions must be ethically validated before proceeding.
If the action or decision of the individual causes harm to society or the environment, then it would be considered to be socially irresponsible.
Educators have tried to include social responsibility as a background to curriculum. In the early 1980s, reference to social responsibility was included as a component of B.C.’s public school curriculum for K-10.
“Socially responsible individuals show ‘community-mindedness’ in their responses to school, local, national, and global issues and events,” said the accompanying curriculum guide.
The Ministry of Education performance standards framework went further than that, suggesting that “this attitude is the basis of a functioning and flourishing democratic society. Human and social development is one of the goals of the B.C. school system.”
So far so good, I guess, but it took something like a national pandemic with a quarter of a million cases and over 10,000 deaths reported in Canada alone, with new numbers trending upward every day, to bring the failure of personal social responsibility into focus, even as the large-group unprotected partying reported on the nightly news continues.
Reports, warnings and recommendations from leading epidemiologists and provincial and national health experts seem, for some sectors of the population, to simply feed the “it’s all about me doing whatever I want” increasingly popular state of mind of those not personally affected or infected.
According to an Oct. 14 CBC report by Laura Glowacki, young people are among the most prolific spreaders of COVID-19, with more people in their 20s having tested positive for COVID-19 across Canada than any other age group, and people in their 30s coming second.
David Sweanor, an adjunct law professor at the University of Ottawa who has worked on anti-tobacco health policies for more than three decades, points out “just say no” messages have a long history of just not working,” adding that “a new issue comes along and almost immediately we get this reaction of, well, we just need to tell people what to do.”
“Authoritarian approaches don’t work very well … scare campaigns only work if you give people clear, actionable steps for other things that they can do … give them an alternative, give them somewhere to go.”
So who is the “them” Sweanor is pointing the finger at?
“Forty per cent of people aged 20 to 39 who became ill in recent weeks acquired COVID-19 while in close contact with someone outside their household,” said Ottawa medical officer of health Vera Etches in late September, singling out indoor social gatherings.
According to Ottawa Public Health, more than three times as many people in their 20s have tested positive than have people in their 80s.
Safe to say that the B.C. Ministry of Education curriculum writers in the early eighties, as innovative as their thinking was at the time, never envisaged anything as socially, economically, politically divisive or just plain nationally destructive as a virus with immediate and long-term consequences both we and the science community are still struggling to comprehend.
So, what to do in the meantime, as health experts and educators try in good faith to negotiate COVID compliance with facts and recommendations?
As ominous as it sounds, it has been said that before a negotiation can proceed and be completed, what is outside the scope of negotiation needs to be clearly understood.
When we have reached a point when democracy means “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge,” and when education and knowledgeable advice fail and are set aside, it is probably time, comparable to wartime, when certain freedoms of the few are set aside in favour of protection of the health and safety of the many.
Geoff Johnson is a former Superintendent of Schools. [email protected]
