Sphinx

It’s an interesting coincidence that this week I happen to be re-reading Marshall Sahlins’ Apologies to Thucydides. Sahlins explores the contrast between the idea of a monolithic, predictable and universal ‘human nature’, such that behaviour is assumed to be determined by a limited number of normative principles (an idea he associates, slightly unfairly, with Thucydides; it’s rather a feature of one tradition of the modern reception of Thucydides), and the idea of ‘culture’ as innately human but also endlessly various, highlighting the many different ways in which one might understand and relate to the world, society, other people etc.

What is striking about UK government pronouncements about the lifting of coronavirus restrictions, echoing most of their rhetoric throughout the pandemic, is their combination of these two positions: a rigidly absolutist concept of national culture.“Other cultures” – the publicly acceptable expression of “scary inscrutable orientals who all look and think the same” – may be happy to continue wearing masks and following social distancing rules for the collective good, but noble freedom-loving Brits will never stand for it! The fact that mask-wearing in countries like South Korea is an acquired habit following the SARS outbreak cuts no ice as an argument that maybe the British could also learn new behaviour under new conditions; they accepted it because they’re all instinctively conformist anyway.

Strong echoes here of the argument last year that lockdown would never be accepted; obviously this government is congenitally unwilling to do things that people (and especially the right-wing press) might not like, but they also seem determined to frame issues in a way designed to heighten tensions and accentuate contrasts – why sell 19th July as ‘Freedom Day’ if not to compel people to embrace it as the only reasonable way forward? You’re not opposed to freedom, are you? Why are you pro-lockdown and in favour of mental illness, domestic violence and keeping children out of school? We can’t let the virus rule our lives by cowering at home. Etc. I am faintly surprise that we haven’t yet had the old Thucydides quote – “The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage!”, or variants thereof – but perhaps that’s being saved for the press conference when they insist on pushing ahead with the abandonment of restrictions despite ever scarier infection rates.

Open up now or remain in lockdown for ever! Open up completely or you might as well not bother! There are times when I wonder whether this is solely messaging, or whether it’s an inadvertent expression of their own fears. I mean, why not stick with rules about face masks, or at least give a consistent message about them? Perhaps because masks are all too visible: they can’t ignore the rules they set for others, and there is a constant reminder both that the pandemic is not actually over (they don’t want it forgotten, as I wrongly suggested on the Twitter; they want it to have been defeated, and to reap the credit for the vaccination programme) and that they screwed up last spring with their obsession about hand washing for months after the role of aerosol transmission was becoming unmistakable. Also, of course, masks work as a means to collective benefit – my mask helps protect you, your mask helps protect me – in a manner that they clearly loathe and so try to project their own self-centred, privileged individualism onto everyone else as a national trait.

My anger at this is not driven by personal concern. I realised, sitting through endless repetitions on Radio 4 of the question “How do you feel about the lifting of all coronavirus restrictions on July 19th?”, that my basic reaction is Meh; I’ve spent so much time over the last year dealing with the anxiety of wondering whether my lingering Long COVID symptoms might flare up again or whether I’ll ever get back to normal that I’m now – irrationally, given possibilities of re-infection – completely unconcerned about the actual virus. I wear a mask and keep my distance purely as a social duty; after the 19th, I suppose it will also become a kind of political statement, perhaps even more provocative than wearing my EU face mask.

I am, finally, fourteen months on, feeling that I’m really recovering: less fatigue, fewer aches, and above all the brain fog is clearing and I can actually concentrate – and write! – for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Bouts of feeling that my creativity and career are effectively over (yes, I realise that my sense of self-worth is unhealthily bound up with my ability to write books and articles; it doesn’t matter if anyone else reads them, but I need to feel creative and productive) are rarer.

I would not wish this on anyone, but especially I would not wish it on the young. I am very conscious of my enormous advantages in getting through this. It’s not just that I’ve got financial security and a nice garden in which I could spend lots of time recovering, and the sort of job that could easily be done from home and actually leaves lots of scope for regular breaks, even when teaching. It’s also experience – the repertoire of techniques that I can fall back on to manage a class, even when feeling rough, and the fact that I needed to do less preparation – and reputation, such that I don’t have to worry too much about adverse consequences from having a very unproductive year. And I think about how much my undergraduate, postgraduate and early career development depended on having huge amounts of energy, let alone the fact that today’s students and trainees are expected to do so much more on much less, and I get a cold sweat imagining what it would be like to try to do all that with no energy and little ability to think – and about the consequences of missing a year, falling behind.

Maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe, as the virus is let loose to run through un- or semi-vaccinated young people and children, the percentage who get serious symptoms will indeed be tiny and the number whose symptoms then linger will be negligible. We’re going to find out; not at once, because all the headlines will concentrate on hospitalisation and death rates, and my guess is that they are going to remain pretty low. What I fear is an increase, gradually becoming discernible over the next few years, in the number of students with fatigue and concentration problems and depression; and, even harder to measure, young people who don’t make it to university who might otherwise have done, and those who don’t make it into their chosen job, or who struggle to manage the demands of full-time (insecure, underpaid) jobs – and, given what we already know about disproportionate infection rates, the extent to which this will also be a race and class issue.

And all for a month or two of continuing limits on some elements of behaviour, until more young people can be vaccinated. It is difficult to avoid a sense that their lives were shut down last year for the benefit of older people, and now we’re all safely vaccinated they can be put at risk for the sake of getting everything back to normal for us; probably too cynical, but it would be easier to believe that we’re all in this together if government policy actually reflected that.

“Other cultures” do not seem to be quite so contemptuous of their own young.