I don’t want to be a killjoy with increasing optimism over the COVID-19 vaccines, but there will be years, if not decades, of fallout from the lockdowns and the disturbing authoritarian impulses that have been revealed in Western societies.
British peer Daniel Hannan has a grim assessment at the John Locke Institute, saying the virus—specifically the reaction to it—has killed the liberal order:
“As we haul ourselves from the pupa of lockdown, we find we are subtly transformed. There is more demand for authoritarian governments of both Left and Right. There is more protectionism, and thus more poverty. There is less tolerance of dissent. There is more identity politics – the ultimate form of collectivism, because it defines people, not as individuals, but by group.”
That whole read is more than sobering, but some commenters dismiss his point simply because he’s a Tory.
At times I waver between such deep pessimism and a sliver of hopeful optimism, as I have on so many levels about Our Brave New World over the last year.
Yet I find it hard to gain any kind of detached, dispassionate perspective while living in the middle of something so surreal and transformative.
How profound this will all become remains unclear to me, but I am sure it figures to be guided by the irrational fear that has underlined the West’s panicked response to the virus.
Foremost among them is a new search for mearning that has been borne out of that hysteria, the cloth symbol being what Laura Dodsworth and Nina Murden call “Faith Masks.”
Their article this week in The Critic, a new British current affairs and culture journal, reflects a more sophisticated mask skepticism than exists in the U.S., which is simplified mainly along lines of whether one is pro- or anti-Trump.
Many of us are neither, but that’s beside the point.
A professional photographer, Dodsworth has been one of the more intelligent lockdown skeptics I’ve read and isn’t afraid to wade in dicey waters (“I’m not shy about taboo.”).
She lays out the deeper cultural implications of mask-wearing in a nation whose fealty to the National Health Service is paramount. Above all, this has become a religious ritual:
“Will we throw off our masks in 2021? Some public health officials, our new priests, want us to keep them, perhaps because they are true believers in the protective power of the mask, or perhaps because masks symbolise our obedience and compliance to the new creed: public health policy. If you don’t wear a mask, or point out the scant evidence in favour, you are labelled a Covid-denier. The implication will be you do not care. There are fines for such heretics. There is also public shaming.
“Masks symbolise values that go far beyond science, a new creed we are finding the words for. They emblemise a nascent ‘religion’ in which the moral code is based upon extending life, not securing your place in the afterlife. But in this liminal time, before we have the words and authoritative codification, make no mistake about the symbolism.
“Masks are the vestiture of the faithful, signalling belief and, importantly, obedience. Handwashing and sanitising are daily baptisms, washing away our innate human infectiousness just as the Christian baptism washes away our innate sin.
“Cathedrals play host to mass vaccinations in a powerful intersection of the old and new religions. Spaced congregations of the masked elderly wait, listening to organ music for their modern miracle, the rite of biomedical transubstantiation. As with all religions, your priests demand obedience and piety.”
Here’s Murden, a seamstress:
“Anyone who suggests that there could be a different way forward is labelled a heretic. Witness the daily use: masks are often dirty and unwashed, slung under noses, hanging from ears, dropped and picked up from pavements, taken off when sneezing, stuffed in and out of pockets, crumpled up in work vans.
“They litter the streets and green spaces, clog drains, and choke turtles on far-flung beaches. Does this look like faith or sacrilege?
“What did we believe the reward for our compliance would be? That a virus would retreat and we would all be let out to live once more, and those Covid-only daily-death figures would recede into the shadows?
“This promise is wearing pretty thin, like the ragged masks themselves. Is our collective belief dimming or are we desperate adherents to the faith? Mask-wearing in perpetuity is purgatory and I am not a devotee of that earthly hell.”
If you really want to weigh the full implications of what our societies are becoming, how can you not consider those now lumped in as the new social lepers?
Because they truly are regarded as such by so much of the public health, media and political establishments.
On one hand, it’s thrilling, to be labeled a subversive (something I’ve gotten accustomed to for much of my life).
On another hand, however, given our increasingly comformist societies in the West, heretics have less room to lash out.
People have lost jobs and livelihoods, have been booted from their social milieus and have had their work third-railed. Artistic, literary and journalistic fields are monocultures, preaching the gospel of the woke Holy Trinity obsessions over race, sex and gender identity.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the decay of cultural flourishing that has marked once-free societies foreshadowed the erosion of broader human flourishing in the Age of Lockdown.
Another artist who refuses to buckle is American novelist Walter Kirn. In 2018, he wrote for Harper’s about what’s happened to non-comformists as the embrace of illiberal values metastasized during Trump’s presidency:
“This great liberal switch from skepticism to sanctimony about the most powerful arms of the Establishment is matched by a viral fear of Russia that reminds me of the John Birch Society pamphlets I’d come across now and then when I was young. Somehow, instinct told me then that they were crazy, exaggerating the cunning of the enemy, the depravity of the collaborators, and the vulnerability of America. The liberal comedians who lampooned such claims on shows such as Laugh-In were my idols. They dared to speak the most radical truth of all in a time of panic and paranoia: the sneakiest adversary is the mind. The Cold War was real, of course, and deadly serious, as are the tensions with Putin’s Russia, but my liberal heroes of the Seventies discerned other dangers that were closer to home. Rigidity. Stridency. Shrillness. Self-righteousness. One way they answered the period’s harsh conservatism was to hang loose, not get uptight. Love, not war. Remember?”
Western lockdowns have added many new dimensions to this dynamic, but I’m seeing something of a ray of light in that more and more political liberals are speaking out.
That’s material for another post, one that I hope to write soon.
Rights Of Mind 