New Year Musings 1: Political Destiny, Uncertainty and Estrangement

I wanted to write something about 2020 that wasn't an essay or a biographical form of writing. Something that would allow me to expand on a few of the themes I've written about this year and bring together other random thoughts. So I've decided to use this conversational form as a device for doing that. There's nothing more to it than adding a degree of movement or dialectic to what would otherwise be straight prose. As usual it's turned out to be longer than expected so I've split it into two parts. Quotes are for orientation and ornamentation.

"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos". (Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn)

TX - This year has obviously been defined by the pandemic, which for many people seemed to have struck from out of a clear blue sky, without warning; though we also know that the progress of the virus across the globe had been given much attention in the news media during the early weeks of the year. Even so when the shutdown hit it was still a surprise, and since then it has dominated everything. Nothing has been left untouched, from the most everyday encounters with people, to the fundamental structures of our lives. The changes have been so all encompassing that at times it’s a struggle to think back before the catastrophe or imagine a future that's different from this awful present. What was the situation at the beginning of the year?

XT - There was a sense of foreboding around in late January, as cases started mounting around Europe and some phenomena like stockpiling food and a sudden drop in tourist numbers in London signalled the coming storm. In the UK at least I felt the nation's collective mental state was like that of a boxer after ten hard rounds; sitting dazed in the corner, unsure whether to come out for the 11th. Brexit had taken its toll, and from the perspective of the Left the general election result of December 2019 had been a kick in the teeth. But you’re right, it was still a shock when the pandemic hit. Perhaps this points to a limitation in the cognitive capacity to think the worst case, to really anticipate it, despite all the information being readily available. I don’t believe the logic of worst case thinking comes readily to people, not even the pessimists – among who I count myself. If life in one’s immediate environment is still functioning, if the shops are open, the streets are busy, and the natural sociality of people has yet to be undermined, then the storm can seem to always be moving across the horizon in some other direction.  Nevertheless, when I read my journal entries from the start of the year I do note a fatalistic tone, more than usual, and also I made reference in a book review I wrote about what I believe is the distillation of our current ethical/political situation; how to live well in a world that is dying.

TX - By world I assume you mean more than just the natural environment, the world of seas, of biodiversity and climate variation; all that which the natural sciences make visible to us and on the behalf of which scientist sound the alarm? There is genuine concern that any progress that has been made towards addressing climate change will be lost in the post-pandemic period. There is a perception that the choice facing us is a trade-off between societal damage and environmental damage, as if the destructive faculty of human existence must be directed somewhere. This strikes me as misguided. Can we imagine a situation where the natural world remains intact but the world of the human is devastated?

XT - Our own propensity towards self-destruction is inextricably linked to the destruction of our environment. They cannot be separated. The forms of social organisation which for centuries have led us to our current predicament were also always destructive of the human qua human, not solely the human qua naturae. This is also the case according to specialists for novel pathogens like coronavirus. Laurie Garrett’s book ‘The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance’, was something of a best-seller when it was published in the mid-90s. But perhaps amid all the pre-millennial tension the lesson was not taken as seriously as it should have been. It's a commonplace sentiment that the present – whether we want to conceive that as a world, a political form, or economic system – is dying, but its replacement cannot be born. I’m not supportive of this “obstetric motif” which has its origins in secularised theological notions of renewal, bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment. Its strongest formulation is of course in Marx. I find the whole ontology associated with it misguided and limiting in grasping what is going on in the present. Not to mention it encourages an attachment to this world which is fundamentally anti-messianic.

TX - There has been some writing  - buried perhaps behind the human stories - of how capitalist society bears responsibility for the emergence of the novel coronavirus. Whether or not this is true it surely cannot account for the form that the global response has taken and the public reaction to it. How striking that tens of millions of people simply abandoned their former lives as if they meant nothing to them. A switch was flipped and society was for the most part deactivated. Can we put this all down to the power of fear?

XT - I don't believe so, though fear was there and has increasingly been leveraged for the sake of compliance as the crisis has deepened. It's a truism that nothing renders a population more susceptible to coercive power than fear. Truly though we were fearful before, and let's be blunt about this, if in the West so many people just walked away from their lives, then that was at least in part because there was so little to defend. Community, belonging, the capacity to live a meaningful life, all these things have been progressively decimated by Neoliberalism. They hated their lives, they saw no value in them, and so were grateful to be given permission to walk away. So yes I think we can to some degree attribute what has happened to capitalism. What I find more disturbing is the void that has been created and what else has disappeared into that void, chiefly our obligations to the dead and dying have vanished beneath an insidious ethic of superlative good citizenship which holds indeterminate risk assessed obligations to an imagined collective good to be of absolute value, even to the point of dissolving the duties we have to those closest to us.

TX - Defending life by destroying society. Technocratic governance knows little else than bodies to be managed. If it can be said that these things, these obligation, are what separate us from the beasts, then can we really still call ourselves human under these conditions?

XT - I find it increasingly difficult to make this claim with a straight face. It's hardly news that the figure of humanity we are familiar with is threatened with being washed away. Haven't we been told frequently that we are entering the post-human age? It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who can read the signs of the times that a post-human society isn't one where technology cures us of our collective failings and ushers in a reign of peace, but is actually the forcible destruction of the human as what Aristotle called the zoon politikón, the political animal. And it's important to be clear here that politikón doesn't refer only to parliaments, senates, or the other accoutrements of democratically constituted power, all of which can be stage-managed to appear operative and relevant. At base politikón refers to contestation within a community between different forms-of-life. It refers to values and the immediate experience of human being-together, which also unavoidably brings into play the problem of power. All of this - which elsewhere has been described as a particular "destiny" of our species - is under increasing threat.

TX - From a historical perspective then the upheavals of 2020 should not be seen as such a major departure from the past few decades, which have been little else but a permanent storm of crisis upon crisis. It has also been said that nothing new will come from out of the pandemic, though we should perhaps not be so reassured by this. Since as you say there was plenty already in play to threaten the human. The pandemic has felt different though, in its suddenness and in the way it has transformed our everyday experience of each other. If nothing else, it clearly represents a rupture into a new social and political configuration, even if what goes into making up that configuration were already in play to different degrees.

"If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it, even if only with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful lines engraving our oblivion on the statically enclosing walls". (Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet)

XT - I recently read a article in the mainstream news media that displayed an unusual degree of sensitivity to the everyday realities of the pandemic. I was particularly touched by the expression that there was no “new normal, only an evolving estrangement”. The author went on to talk about opportunities for belonging being replaced by a permanent feeling of rejection. Strangers step into the road to avoid you, hospitality staff cover their faces and keep their distance, and of course there is the loss of all those everyday intimacies which we take for granted. Even when we are not actually behind a screen we are screened off from each other. The author suggested this represented a loss of ritual from our lives, echoing a recent text on this subject by Byung-Chul Han. Accepting that there is any such ritual element left in Western societies, I think this is mistaken. We have substituted rituals which mark time for the sake of belonging with others, for rituals of estrangement. Displays of affection have been replaced by the rituals of "Hands, Face, Space". Perhaps this is one way of understanding how our sense of time itself has been changed. Time is now empty of belonging, empty of the possibility of an encounter with others. Spontaneity has also been largely been abolished. If our sense of time passing has been disrupted by this estrangement from others, then we should acknowledge the deep connection between community and the feeling of 'being at home in one’s time'.

TX - That in itself would be something of a revolution. Though whether such a community must depend on rituals, especially those around notions of the sacred, I'm unsure. It's significant that you found the article's candour unusual. Who hasn't spoken about these things with their friends and family? Yet in public there is a taboo which has been established. Publicly acknowledging that there are other things of value than bare biological life, something specifically human which has been decimated by the pandemic response, still risks censure. Like everything nowadays the possibility of speaking truthfully is hamstrung by polarisation. You either sing the praises of the shutdown or at the very least keep quiet, or you stand with the Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers; agents of the enemy according to this kind of thinking. This is the epistemology commonly found in wartime; “Loose talk cost lives”.

XT -  Another well known phrase associated with that epistemology is “the first casualty of war is the truth”. At the risk of evoking conspiratorial motifs there is something Orwellian about being told that covering ones face and avoiding contact with others is a sign of love. Love always involves risk and that is precisely the thing we are not permitted.

TX - Despite all that has been written and said about the pandemic, its effect on our lives, about the virus itself, all those press conferences and political addresses to the peoples of the world, I feel we are still fundamentally in the dark. Uncertainty rules and that has elicited an unprecedented political reaction.

XT - Power acts to cover over uncertainty, and this really has little to do with science. One basic way to understand ideology is that it converts contingency into political necessity. The fulcrum here is authority, understood not as a political but an epistemological category. This is the role of authority in forming the conditions of possibility for knowledge and action. Actions like government interventions but also the actions of individuals. What is reasonable for me to do? What authority can I draw on besides simply obeying the word of the masters, something few of us would openly admit to doing.  Law plays its part too, as both a coercive instrument and as something which is supposed to have its own kind of authority, independent from the government that makes it.

TX - Ah! The much vaunted "respect for the Law". And yet for some individuals there is simply no level of government restrictions to satisfy them. They lash out at their friends and neighbours even when they're acting within the law! The English have a peculiar fetish for rules, which I think is why so much of their sexual deviancy revolves around discipline. With so many outlets for libidinal investment closed off it strikes me that a minor culture of covid related S&M is breaking out. There are the sadists who cope by beating others for daring to believe in something beyond four walls and Ocado deliveries, and on the other hand there are those who turn inward; perfectly healthy young people refusing to leave their homes and demanding ever stricter measures. Punish me more master!  All this I suppose is also a way of dealing with uncertainty. Besides, who really believes in politicians?

XT - Governing an emergency situation in such thoroughly disenchanted times provides the backdrop to the response. Science has supplanted religion as a means to dispel the demons of uncertainty inherent in human life, and the public use of science during the pandemic is symbolic of that. Being led by the science amounts to saying 'this is what I believe I believe, and you should believe it too'.

TX - Which - we should be clear - is not the same thing as claiming the scientists involved in the response are false or intentionally misleading the public. We should be opposed to the conspiratorial position, which is also a method for dispelling uncertainty, and in a form that bears resemblance to self-harm. The good old hermeneutics of suspicion remains our best defence. 

 

Agamben was Right #1: Quotidian Life Under the Reign of Biosecurity

As the coronavirus pandemic extends into the colder months and once again Europe locks down against the rising tide of infections, what is clear is that this situation - which the naive had hoped would result in only temporary measures - is in fact ushering in a new era of political rationality which elsewhere has been termed Biosecurity.

As a preamble, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the choice between saving lives (itself a suspiciously unproblematic proposition) and saving the economy is a false choice, symbolic of a culture still seeing through the fogged glass of abstract and insufficient concepts. It is patently absurd to suggest that life - bare or qualified - can today be separated from the claims of economy, or that today we can think of an economy which does not concern itself with the management of human lives down to the smallest quanta. In the modern era, the two have become thoroughly inseparable, culminating today in the affective and big data economies which are transforming -  behind the backs of the great mass of the people - what it means to be human.

 

Nothing signifies this non-choice more starkly than the rates of suicide and attempted suicide that have been recorded during the pandemic period. The London Ambulance Service released figures this week showing call-outs to suicides had doubled between April and September, a revelation that is as tragic as it is unsurprising.

So enough with this false trade-off; this obfuscating "balance". The question about the meaning and implications of the pandemic cannot be sought within such a mundane horizon of thought. That being said, if the concept of Biosecurity, elevated by Giorgio Agamben and a few select others to the level of a political rationality (or governmentality to use Foucault's term), is to be properly characterised and distinguished from previous iterations of a similar kind, then it will be useful to furnish that thinking with some examples from the present crisis, some of which, do appear quite petty and mundane. That's what most of what follows consists of.

 

Making Space / Controlling Space

Already it is clear that many of the facilities brought in to minimise the spread of infection are here to stay, including the elimination of cash, the forcible shift to home working and the restriction of public assembly, not to mention an explosion in the requirement for individuals to surrender personal data in order to participate in a wide range of social activities. The complexities of these events and the legislative machinations which have enabled them demand an equally careful and detailed analysis. However, it is conspicuous that despite some resent cracks in the consensus, questioning voices  - especially those on the Left - have largely been absent.   

 

It’s essential to note that most, if not all these developments, have been on the way for some time prior to the current crisis, and that the pandemic has merely provided the occasional cause for pushing these trends to their natural fulfilment, at a moment when the demos has its guard down and public scrutiny has been similarly in absentia.

 

In many major cities across the developed world an increasing proportion of public space has already been given over to private ownership, allowing corporations and private security to restrict or regulate activities in these areas; in particular to outlaw protests of any kind. Think back to the Occupy movement in London, where the original target location for the camp, Paternoster square in the city of London, could not be reached owing to the fact that it was owned by a Japanese real-estate company and heavily protected by police.

 

More recently the large retail development around London’s Kings Cross Station has come under scrutiny due to its heavily securitised and monitored approach to public space, which includes restrictions on photography of any kind and enforcement by facial recognition cameras (now made somewhat redundant due to the prevalence of facial coverings). It would not be surprising to see this relatively crude method of recognition replaced by something more in line with the shift towards mobile phones, Wi-Fi and GPS tracking, systems already central to the notion of "smart cities". Why bother with installing and maintaining cameras when anyone entering the space can be monitored through their phone, perhaps also listening for potentially seditious or anti-consumerist sentiments.

 

Home working, which for many of us has come like a sudden exile, has similarly been on the rise for some time, coextensive with the growth of jobs which require only an internet connection and the advance of video networking facilities. It’s also been the case that with soaring rents in most European capitals many businesses have been looking to minimise their office footprint and make use of legal loopholes to convert permanent staff into precarious "gig economy entrepreneurs", who rarely, if ever, have to show face at an office. The mass unemployment being caused by coronavirus measures will provide an ample source for industries wanting to bolster their use of low paid "legal" casual labour.

 

Making Law / Making Money

Wherever we look we see the pandemic being used as an opportunity for forcing through changes that under normal circumstances would be contested or at least scrutinised or mitigated. From central government, down to local council level, provision of education, and businesses, life is becoming ever more closely managed, monitored and open to coercion; not to mention the growing alienation of people from each other, beneath the pall of a generic and ungraspable fear. The use of emergency legislation has been the driving force for much of this, but behind headline making primary legislation like the UK Coronavirus Act 2020, dozens of instances of secondary legislation have been enacted by governments without any legislative scrutiny whatsoever. In the UK this has taken the form of Statutory Instruments, many of which have been made under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 using an exemption which permits orders to be enacted without a draft even being submitted in writing to Parliament.

 

The exemption's wording mirrors the vague form characteristic of exceptional powers, making provision for ministers to create law by fiat if they believe "by reason of urgency, it is necessary to make the order without a draft being so laid and approved". The function of Parliament in these cases is to rubber stamp legislation that is already a fait accompli. All of the recent changes to laws mandating face coverings, as well as the chaotic system of local lockdowns in England have been enacted in this way. Only recently, seven months into the pandemic have MPs threatened a revolt and pressurised Prime Minister Boris Johnson into some minor concessions on Parliament's oversight of how the pandemic response is being (mis)managed.

 

On a local level (and I did promise some mundane examples) councils in London and other major cities in England have been using emergency coronavirus powers to introduce what they have called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. In practice this has meant closing off large numbers of backstreets around the capital, often enforcing these closures using number plate recognition cameras, rather than physical barriers, to issue fines. In my own area three shorts streets connecting the two main arterial roads have been closed to through traffic. I say closed, but what has actually occurred is that cameras have been installed and signs placed at either end, forcing yet more traffic down to an already busy junction, while undoubtedly bolstering the enforcement revenues of Hounslow council.

 

Measures such as these have been introduced under the guise of providing space for cyclists and pedestrians during the pandemic. No problem, as a cyclist myself I'm all in favour of making streets safer for bikes; though one might wonder why when deaths of cyclists in London have been in the news for years that it took a pandemic for local councils to pull their collective fingers out. Under normal circumstances such closures, which merely shift the problem onto other streets as vehicles take alternative routes to avoid the restrictions, would have to involve local people in consultation. But under the emergency powers this democratic engagement has been entirely bypassed, thus mirroring central government's use of secondary legislation to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.  

Another example from the summer of how these emergency powers are being flagrantly misused occurred in Dorset in late June when the Liberal Democrat (a byword for opportunist flakery) council leader declared a Major Incident under the UK Civil Contingencies Act 2004. The event that precipitated this was the beach at Bournemouth becoming crowded, thus making social distancing potentially harder to achieve. Declaring this a Major Incident placed the crowded beach on the same level as a terrorist attack or some other imminent threat to the security of the UK. Visiting the beach was perfectly legal (I'd been there myself the week before) and it seemed not to cross the minds of the council leader Vikki Slade, or local constabulary that failing to either open the public toilets or provide sufficient waste bins on what was the hottest day of the year might create some aggravation. The lurch towards 'emergency measures' during 'unprecedented times' is symbolic of the loss of proportion and rise of arbitrariness under conditions of Biosecurity. Overnight camping suddenly becomes a national threat.

Fringe Voices and Silenced Voices

It's easy to dismiss lockdown protesters as "covidiots", not least when they include so many far Right activist and overt conspiracy theorists. Followers of the vile QAnon conspiracy, which indulges a bizarre oedipal fantasy casting Donald Trump as a crusader against deep state cannibal paedophiles,  join forces with the now familiar 5G paranoiacs and Anti-Vaxxer types, alongside folk carrying banners for the long thought defunct British Union of Fascists. As undoubted an insult to taste and good sense these people are, there is rarely a strategic virtue in allowing one's own position to be defined by the position of one's enemies, or fringe lunatics for that matter.

 

When we hear talk about totalitarianism or loss of freedom (often from the mouths of those same fringe lunatics) it is useful to think in terms of a State or other entity's capacity for interference, rather than fixating on the content of conspiracy theories. Doing this means we don’t have to find examples of police kicking doors down (though this happens often enough) or secret plans for forced vaccinations, and instead examine the legal, institutional and practical arrangements of power that may or may not enable such interference. The questions we should ask are, what would stop them? What keeps us free in a society, and towards what kind of world does this form of government by decree tend?

 

Thinking in this way should not distract us from highlighting overt authoritarianism and state violence, many examples of which can be found over previous months. In Australia several individuals have been arrested and charged with incitement to breach coronavirus laws after publicly criticising the government's restrictions, which are some of the most draconian in the world. They included Zoe-Lee Buhler, a pregnant 28 year old woman who was removed from her home in handcuffs in front of her partner and children for setting up a Facebook event called Freedom day, criticising the extent of the state of Victoria's lockdown restrictions. And in August a woman with a medical exemption was violently choked and arrested by police in Melbourne after she was found outside without a face covering.

 

These incidents follow on from the "detention directions" enforced in July upon a group of tower blocks in suburbs of Flemington and North Melbourne where over 3000 predominantly low income and ethnic minority residents were prevented from leaving their homes for any reason. Armed police guarded the exits to the blocks to enforce compliance of the order, which came without warning. Those familiar with Australia's use of offshore detention facilities, such as on Nauru will no doubt recognise some of the key features here in the state's treatment of its "internal" immigrant population. Indeed, one justification for the use of such offshore camps has been to prevent the spread of infectious disease onto the mainland; a better example of the paradigm of Biosecurity in nuce is hard to find.

 

In Myanmar, garment workers have been arrested and police have violently broken up strikes under laws designed to minimise the spread of the virus. The workers were protesting against factory conditions which have deteriorated during the pandemic, demanding better protection against getting infected. Actions such as these are the most visible signs of repression, but it is often the more subtle techniques that have the greatest effect. The use of fines to stifle government opposition has been a technique successfully deployed by Singapore for decades and has contributed to the microstate's reputation as a benign dictatorship which was much admired by the then chairman of the Chinese Communist party Deng Xiaoping.

 

£10,000 fines are now being issued to organisers of protests in the UK. In August one such fine was issued to Piers Corbyn, brother of the former Labour party leader, after organising an anti-lockdown protest, which as a political protest was exempt from the regulations. In a sign that coronavirus legislation is already being used to stifle legitimate protest of all kinds, the climate change campaign group Extinction Rebellion cancelled planned events in the Spring after being threatened with similar fines. When they did go ahead with actions in late summer many organisers and activists were pre-emptively arrested and the protests placed under restrictions using coronavirus laws which made them practically impossible.

 

At the same time professional psychopath and nominal UK Home Secretary Priti Patel was attempting to have XR classified as an organised crime group, claiming in a speech to the Police Superintendents Association that the environmental campaigners were "attacking our way of life". That way of life, it's worth remembering, is leading us to planetary extinction. Since the system of tiered restrictions have been introduced the number of fines issued have dramatically increased, with minorities being disproportionately targeted, and gatherings in private homes frequently falling foul of regulations, which even regional police and crime commissioners seem not to understand.

 

Tracking and Tracing from Serco to Xinjiang

In case you haven't noticed, digital apartheid is here. For those of us not terrified to leave our homes entrance to many venues is now dependent on downloading apps and using smart phones to book or access services and to register on test and trace. Having an up-to-date smart phone and submitting to the reign of total surveillance will increasingly become a prerequisite for accessing any public or private service, from transport and council facilities, to accessing concert and theatre venues, to simply entering a pub or bar. Those who cannot or will not maintain their digital passport will effectively be frozen out of society. And those who do comply will be under the permanent gaze of ubiquitous surveillance technologies and data harvesting, which in turn are used to produce tailored advertising and political messaging.

 

In China, Korea and Singapore, citizens have no right to privacy or data protection from government surveillance. In China, technologies developed to monitor Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang province have been rolled out nationwide to enforce lockdowns and other coronavirus measures. They include systems on public transport which can detect whether a person is wearing their face mask correctly. The lack of democratic oversight and normalisation of surveillance technologies is however not limited to illiberal East Asian countries. Across Europe few limitations have been placed on the use of track and trace data accumulated through mobile phones and other methods.

 

In the UK which has had several faltering attempts to introduce a centralised system, track and trace data is not comprehensively covered by the UK Data Protection Act. This has meant that developers of apps downloaded onto phones for the purpose of "checking-in" to venues, cafes, cinemas and restaurants have been able to sell on databases of contact details as well as additional metadata harvested from the user's phone. There has been a spate of scam track and trace calls where the scammer attempts to obtain bank account details by claiming they're needed to allow the person to book a coronavirus test. The UK government's test and trace system is being marketed as an NHS service, but is in fact being run by Serco staff. The outsourcing firm has come under pressure as the time taken to get test results and trace contacts have ballooned, along with the cost of running the service.

 

Staying the UK, a particularly egregious example of intentional mismanagement for financial gain has been the return of students to UK university campuses, a move very much pushed by both the government and the universities themselves. No sooner than student halls of residence were full than the government ended its relaxation of the restrictions and began imposing local lockdowns. Students lured away from home found themselves under house arrest after being conned into handing over cash for university accommodation which they were now being prevented by security from leaving. Trinity college Cambridge has forced students to sign tenancy agreements which say they can be evicted at short notice and instructed them only to bring the bare minimum of belongings. Teaching is now predictably all remote. A trend which is likely to be permanent for many courses.

Wither Opposition?

As the above litany demonstrates, the pandemic is being used opportunistically from top to bottom.  It is regrettable that opposition to the current regime of arbitrary restrictions is predominantly coming from the conspiracist fringes and far Right. The Left for the most part has walked in lockstep with every government measure, save only where they demanded that restrictions should go further, as has recently occurred with Labour leader Kier Starmer's demand for a circuit breaker lockdown in the UK. Giorgio Agamben in one of his numerous interventions during the pandemic has pointed out the “paradox of organizations of the left, traditionally in the habit of claiming rights and denouncing violations of the constitution, accepting limitations on liberty made by ministerial decree devoid of any legal basis and which even fascism couldn’t dream of imposing”.

 

A very charitable reading might wonder whether leftist demands for a second national lockdown in the UK are designed precisely to precipitate the kind of economic collapse upon which a new post-capitalist form of social order could arise. Could Starmer yet be a deep cover Corbynista agent? In all seriousness, it has come to something when we have to rely on “disaster nationalists” like arch Brexiteer Steven Baker MP to make the case for liberty and oversight in Parliament.

 

These are some of the day to day realities of living under Biosecurity measures. With no end in sight we can expect the kinds of societal changes I've highlighted above to become more deeply entrenched. Anyone who believes that the emergency powers and Biosecurity legislation brought in will disappear after the pandemic should think back to the months immediately after September 11th 2001 and the raft of draconian powers brought in during the War on Terror. The majority of those powers, such as the US Patriot Act 2001 and the UK Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001) are still on the statute books. Many have been extended over the years, adapting to new possibilities afforded by developments in digital technologies. Power does not let a crisis go to waste, and a crisis combined with a fearful population does not bode well for the health of democracy.

A Note on the Sacredness of Veils

 

On the eve of yet another round of rule changes and legislation to bring in new nationwide restrictions, it is time for a statement of the obvious. The mandating of face masks in public places has been a complete failure as an attempt to prevent a second wave of Coronavirus infections across Europe. The question remains as to why masks have become such a shibboleth for so many people; so politically symbolic and socially divisive.

 

I, like the majority of the population have gone along with the requirements as they have evolved over the last few months; from first having to mask-up on public transport, then in shops, and finally the somewhat absurd ritual of wearing them when standing up in a restaurant or pub between my table, the door and the toilet. But let me be clear, I have gone along with this not because I thought that I was contributing to the general “fight against the virus” or that I believed mass mask wearing would prevent a second wave of infections. I did this principally to avoid confrontation, to avoid explaining myself and being treated like a leper. I prefer a quiet life moving across the city rather than having to fight my way from East to West with my face uncovered. I have my suspicion that many other people are similarly motivated.

 

The mass psychology of mask wearing is something that will furnish many a thesis in the years to come. “But the science shows” … enough! There is no more science in the wearing of masks than when your grandmother told you to cover your mouth when coughing. The difference is that until now no one proposed making her advice the subject of legislation which could lead to financially ruinous fines or incarceration. Many things can be speculated about the mass wearing of masks and we should remember that until the beginning of the summer the general tilt of that speculation was towards the “don’t know” or “probably won't make much difference” camp. Indeed the World Health Organisation has never claimed that masks in themselves have a role in significantly reducing infection rates when mandated for the general population, nor as yet has there been evidence to the contrary. This was good honest advice and after all, what exactly would such evidence look like and where would it come from?

 

The basic proposition that a covering over one’s face reduces the spread of infectious agents into the surrounding air is obvious and clearly doesn't need any major research studies to demonstrate. As I said, even your grandmother knew this. The problem is that there is so little data and practically no way of modelling the effects of masked vs mask-less approaches in different settings during a pandemic situation. One of the reasons for this, as should be plain from the ever changing pronouncements on rates of infection, is that the hot spots are constantly changing. One week it’s transmission in the home between households, the next it’s between groups of friends in pubs, then it’s students in halls of residence. None of these pronouncements, backed up by data which is at best opaque and at worst dubious, is able to tie in how mandated mask wearing has succeeded or failed in each case.

 

To put it bluntly the entire discourse around masks is hyperbolic, and while “common sense” tells us - just like your grandmother used to - COVER YOUR MOUTH!, the reality is that it has made no demonstrable impact in preventing the virus getting out of control across Europe once again. And we should remember that many countries introduced mask wearing in public places earlier than the UK. It didn’t save them, it isn’t saving us. You might well object and claim that “if it weren’t for the masks our infection rate would be even higher!” That may be true, but it’s only speculation, and we’re being “led by the science” yeah? The bottom line is that the basic claim that mass mask wearing would control the infection rate and help prevent another national lockdown has proved to be false. And yet the discourse around masks, on TV, radio and on the street would have you believe that they are still the only thing between us and total oblivion. How did we get to this point?

 

In the face of such a counterintuitive response there is only one conclusion; masks have become a collective comfort blanket.

 

This shouldn’t surprise anyone that was paying attention to the rhetoric around masks back when their introduction was mandated at the beginning of the summer. In his speech of the 5^th of June World health Organisation director general Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus summarised the issue in these five points:

 

-People can potentially infect themselves if they use contaminated hands to adjust a mask, or to repeatedly take it off and put it on, without cleaning hands in between.

-Masks can also create a false sense of security, leading people to neglect measures such as hand hygiene and physical distancing.

-I cannot say this clearly enough: masks alone will not protect you from COVID-19.

-Masks are not a replacement for physical distancing, hand hygiene and other public health measures.

-Masks are only of benefit as part of a comprehensive approach in the fight against COVID-19.

 

As the summer sneaked in and lockdown measures were relaxed there was a general push across Europe and America to get people back to work and the economy up and running again. Both these aims required that people return to workplaces, use public transport and visit restaurant and hospitality businesses. Here we should absolutely note the second of the Director General’s points, that masks can create a false sense of security. A sense of security? False, perhaps, but from the perspective of politicians wanting to get the economy up and running, absolutely desirable. During the summer we were bombarded with positive rhetoric about “Covid security”, all the while playing up the role of masks in both “keeping you safe”  - still in contradiction to the WHO advice - and preventing another lockdown. Could it be that this rhetoric which has metastasised into yet another front in the Culture War was cynically deployed as part of a strategy of providing false security and getting the economy up and running again?  

 

A second related effect of the obsession with face masks is that it conveniently deflects criticism of the government’s handling of the pandemic onto “selfish anti-maskers”, or “Covid deniers”. We find ourselves projecting all our anger and fears onto that stranger huddled in the corner of the train carriage, furtively pulling down his mask below his nose. All the tens of thousands of deaths and disruption to our daily lives is suddenly heaped upon his shoulders, and we sit fuming hoping that the weight will crush him to a bloody puddle before our eyes. Nothing is more useful to an incompetent government than a public ready to scapegoat anyone but it for the situation we find ourselves in.

 

I’m not proposing mass disobedience to the mask regulations. I have my justification for complying and in many instances there is little enforcement anyway. Masks, and the pathological rhetoric around them are irritating and a pointless locus for staging a protest. By blaming each other for non-compliance and wanting to “kill my grandparents” we avoid the real battleground which is the accelerating destruction of democratic life and its replacement with a totalitarian digital dystopia which every day is tightening its grip. The question that few are seriously posing is what kind of world do you wish to survive into? Moving “beyond the mask” means (metaphorically at least) casting off the comfort blanket and looking reality in the face.