Implemented by Australia’s most left-wing government, here was “social distancing” at its truest: the poor, branded as an especially hazardous source of contagion, sequestered in overcrowded homes, while the better off were subjected to far less intrusive forms of surveillance.
That was, of course, exactly what “social distancing” meant when the term first appeared in English in the early 19th century.
At the time, rapid urbanisation was leading the “dangerous classes” to invade an increasingly densely populated public space, erasing the chasm separating them from their betters.
As “successful industry” brought “the toe of the commoner” into contact with “the heel of the noble”, warned Victorian novelist Fanny Trollope, “social distance” would inevitably be strained — and the risk that public health might then be fatally compromised weighed ever more heavily on the age’s imagination.
“Social distance” was therefore something to be defended, especially from the beggars and vagrants who comprised up to a fifth of Europe’s urban population. And once Georg Simmel, the great German sociologist, took up the term at the beginning of the 20th century, “social distance” became established as designating the gap dividing trustworthy citizens from menacing strangers.
Simmel’s work inspired a torrent of studies in social psychology that relied on a “social distance scale” to quantify that gap and measure the anxieties that fragile social boundaries aroused.
It also helped spawn the pioneering analyses of Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger, who redefined “social distancing” as the spatial limit to which a member of a species could be pushed before losing the protection of the group: the point, in other words, at which it was on its own, cut off from the shelter offered by mixing with its kind.
But faced with the threat of contagion, human communities had hardly waited for Hediger’s concept of “social distance” before enforcing it, often savagely, on the poor.
When Giovanni Boccaccio, in what is widely regarded as the first masterpiece of early modern European literature, described the plague that ravaged Florence in 1348, he contrasted the rich, who owned splendid palazzi in the sparsely populated hills, with the “woeful spectacle of the common people, locked in to their own parts of the city, and falling ill daily in their thousands”.
Equally, Daniel Defoe, in his masterly A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), denounced the Hanoverian establishment that, as the plague spread, “fled out of the City and went to Oxford, where it pleas’d God to preserve them”, while the “cruel and Unchristian” method of “shutting up” was inflicted on London’s teeming paupers.
Segregated in their houses, which were often shared by four to six families, the city’s poor “died by heaps and were buried by heaps”, while their liberties were trampled on by the 15,000 watchmen who, under England’s Plague Act of 1604, could “hang anyone with plague sores found communing with others, and whip anyone who escaped household quarantine”.
Little wonder French social theorist Michel Foucault, in an enormously influential lecture delivered at the College de France on January 15, 1975, viewed the plague epidemics as the “moment when political power (could be) exercised to the full”, “the extreme point” at which rulers, in claiming their right to protect life, first seized control over “life itself”.
The “bio-politics” that moment gave rise to, Foucault argued, starkly prefigured the instruments of the contemporary state. The rulers of early modern Europe primarily governed by the terrifying infliction of death, otherwise leaving their subjects to exist as best they could. However, once bio-politics came into its own, it was life they sought to discipline, “sectioning, subdividing and regulating the population” in ways that would “constantly reach the grain of individuals themselves, their use of time, where they live, how far they can move and what they may do with their bodies”.
Whenever epidemics struck, those controls reshaped territorial boundaries, imposing barriers where there had previously been free movement. However, what the epidemics primarily induced, over the centuries dividing the first major outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1348 from the last in 1720, was the development of sweeping means of surveillance.
Those means of surveillance, said Foucault, laid the foundations of the 20th century’s totalitarianisms. But even in its milder forms, the bio-politics of “healthism”, with its quest for the utopia of perfectly healthy populations, was inherently repressive.
Once its instruments of control were in place, they invariably imposed “minute and constantly monitored differences” between the worthy citizens who observed the “healthy living” guidelines that experts decreed and the unworthy ones who did not.
That Foucault had a point is undeniable. But viewing the modern state as a machine, he ignored the sheer incompetence into which seemingly powerful governments could descend.
Defoe, on the other hand, knew that incompetence all too well, stressing the abject hypocrisy of the royal court — which, though it “put on a Face of just Concern for the publick Danger”, remained “Gay and Luxurious” as the plague raged — and highlighting the complete inconsistency with which it administered the increasingly draconian measures it announced.
Given that contrast between appearance and substance, he wrote, who could blame London’s inhabitants for doing what they could to evade the restrictions, to the point where “it would fill a little Volume, to set down the Arts us’d by the People of (locked down) Houses, to shut the Eyes of the Watchmen, to deceive them, and to escape”?
So, even more tellingly, did Alessandro Manzoni, who placed the hubris of rulers at the heart of his brilliant, meticulously researched, plague novel, The Betrothed (1827). How other than by wilful ineptitude, Manzoni asked, could one explain the fact that as the plague threatened to reappear in 1630, Milan’s rulers, ignoring the advice of the city’s two leading doctors, allowed a vast public procession to proceed, blatantly contradicting their own calls to avoid contagion?
And once the disease began to spread uncontrollably, how other than by a miserable lack of civic courage could one explain the rulers’ persistent denial of responsibility, as their failure to properly manage the watchmen and “monatti” (corpse removers) whose role it was to enforce the restrictions triggered the city’s collapse and imposed devastating hardship on the poor?
There, in a nutshell, lies the path that led to the ugly scenes at Melbourne’s towers: Dan Andrews may have the soaring pretences of omniscience described by Foucault, but his government’s performance bespeaks the arrogance, haplessness and lack of accountability derided by Defoe and Manzoni. Having surrounded himself with bag carriers, he has finally lost his grip.
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