In his latest Quadrant essay, Theodore Dalrymple ponders possible changes in modern man’s attitude toward authority in light of the Chinese pandemic.

What struck me so forcefully during the COVID-19 shutdown, then, was the docility of the populations in many countries, the vast majority of whose intellectual class would have considered itself by nature rebellious and viscerally opposed to the constituted authorities. In the event, no herd of sheep could have been more compliant or docile, indeed I have in my time observed more individualistic or refractory sheep.