Last year, I made two trips around the United States trying, among other things, to decipher the reasons for the unexpectedly passionate enthusiasms and hostilities that that had seized and divided the country during the plague year. I wrote about what I found for a mystified Hungarian audience here. And my main conclusion surprised me.
“It is risk, of course, that divides America today — though the fact that the policy-making classes inhabit the risk-averse half [of the country] means that national policy on COVID emphasizes the medical necessity and moral obligation of masks, lockdowns, and social distancing, together with the constant media scolding necessary to enforce them. Those in the other half are repeatedly told to feel as uncomfortable as I was for sins like eating out . . .”
My surprise may surprise you by now, but as historians such as Niall Ferguson have noted, major epidemics had swept the country in 1918,1957, and 1968 without evoking anything like the same anxieties; without producing anything like the same lockdowns, social distancing, or mask mandates; and without costing anything like the same amounts of public money. A survivor of the 1950s epidemic told Niall Ferguson, “We took the Asian flu in our stride.” (And without accusations of racism among epidemiologists either.) The Covid pandemic was taking us in its stride, concentrating all our anxieties on a single risk, persuading us that we could sensibly forget all other medical treatments, neglect all non-medical matters, and remain sedated and jobless at home.
Not everyone enjoyed that. Half the nation at the time wanted to take Covid-19 in its stride and get past it. My visit to Fort Worth introduced me to crowds of tourists, unmasked and forgetful of social distancing, roaming the old Stockyard district, eating, drinking, rubbernecking, and avidly reading its historical plaques that boasted of where “famous gamblers like Luke Short, Bat Masterson, and Wyatt Earp, and outlaws Sam Bass, Eugene Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are known to have stayed.” Not the usual civic boosterism, and a far cry from the deserted silent cities of the East Coast, New York and Washington, but oddly evocative of an earlier America that did not stay home and shrink from risks.
There were, as so often, two Americas: one embraced Covid as a lifestyle, the other resisted it as a lifestyle. But both were governed by forces that had a professional interest in painting the bleakest picture of what Covid might do: the media and public-health officials. Until the good news of the vaccines arrived, their joint power was largely employed to exaggerate risks and downplay benefits, feeding the public’s risk-aversion still further. America’s mainstream and social media then took a national mood of panic and shaped it along partisan lines so that Democratic politicians, like New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo, became prudent stewards of public health, while Republicans, like Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, were depicted as little better than reckless mass murderers. In the pages of the very best newspapers, medical and economic disputes about how best to respond to the overall Covid crisis were forcibly merged with partisan divisions between red and blue states to produce an artificial ideological narrative: conservatives were the party of death, progressives of life — which didn’t seem to be reflected in the vacationing crowds of Fort Worth or the silent streets of Washington.
Such a distorted narrative could not possibly survive reality, and indeed it began to fall apart when the death rates of New York overtook those of Florida. For as long as these partisan interpretations of Covid held sway, however, disputes over lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, and mask mandates grew increasingly angry, bitter, and vituperative. Accusations of murder were not uncommon against people not wearing masks or politicians opposing mask mandates. And this fractious edgy mood continued until just the other day.
Its last skirmishes have been over mask-wearing and mask mandates, and they illustrate the oddly deep attachment that sections of American society have developed to the symbols and methods of “the war on Covid.” Even now partisans of mandating masks are resisting the instructions of those mayors and governors who have decided, either from principle or electoral self-interest, that its time is up. Some visibly lust to bring masks back when Covid statistics get worse. Neither Democrats nor the media seem to have entirely abandoned their desire to mask America permanently. Yet as a method for combating Covid the mask is the one least justified by scientific evidence — as the distinguished statistician, Jeffrey H. Anderson, laid out persuasively in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books (from which I have drawn much of what follows). At the same time, the case for the mask is passionately asserted — and asserted on some grounds that ignore its possible usefulness against Covid transition.
The Guardian‘s Julia Carrie Wong interviewed Americans from different cities who positively enjoyed wearing a mask and hoped to continue doing so indefinitely. “It’s been such a relief to feel anonymous. It’s like having a force field around me that says “don’t see me,’” said Francesca, a New York professor who, already vaccinated, had less reason to wear one. An LA screenwriter, Aimee, savored the emotional freedom that came from “taking away the male gaze,” while Bob, a male retiree from New Jersey, felt that a mask freed him from the need to ‘appear happy.’”
These are bizarre reflections and evidence of deep risk-aversion, even a toxic suspicion, in social and personal encounters. They are the opposite sentiment to the sociability exhibited by the tourists in Fort Worth or the crowds on Florida beaches where I went on my trips. Yet the Guardian comments are not those of isolated neurotics either. It is evident from Twitter, multiple private encounters, public events, and even the writings of some senior doctors that they represent the opinions of an important section of American opinion
Anderson is not the only intellectual observer who finds this desire for anonymity in public to be a disturbing one. In “The Masking of America,” he pits the Guardian interviewees against such Western philosophers and scientists as Plato and Darwin who in different ways see the unmasked face not only as essential to private sociability and public trust, but as the mark of a distinctive Western civilization.
Some contemporary social critics, usually those of a conservative disposition, feel even more strongly. Anderson quotes Pierre Manent, debating the use of veils in Muslim communities in France, who drives the point home trenchantly: “To present visibly one’s refusal to be seen is an ongoing aggression against human coexistence. Europeans have never concealed the face, except the executioner’s.”
My own conclusion is tentative but gloomy: Mask wearing for reasons unconnected with protection against Covid is something of a paradox: the mark of an identity that seeks to conceal its individual self within a comforting collective anonymity. It shows hostility, even aggression, towards those who insist on revealing the face on the grounds that they are selfish, indifferent to others’ welfare, and proud. And it is self-righteously happy to impose its tastes on everyone else. In short, masks are emblematic, literally so, of the politicization of everything, including identity itself, that is the Left’s main instinctual drive today.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/if-the-mask-fits-be-very-worried/