The trains and office buildings are rapidly filling up, the sun is shining and there’s sleaze and petty political infighting on every front page – it’s almost starting to feel like a normal British summer. Barring disaster, within the next month, travel, pubs and universities will crank back into action.
But there remains a striking hesitancy about this great reawakening, both among the public and its leaders. Opinion polls show very little appetite to speed up the Government’s ultra-cautious timetable, and some surveys even show a majority in favour of slowing it down. Meanwhile, politicians and government scientists remain noticeably downbeat. It’s almost as if we are reluctant to leave lockdown behind.
Alongside the well-trodden scientific arguments for caution, I think we can discern other powerful motivations behind this.
The first is political – not a vast conspiracy to reorder the world in a “Great Reset” but a fashionable new vision for how society should be organised. Scientific advisers are thinking human beings, and so understandably have political ideas – now, just as a year ago, the scientists advocating a lighter touch approach are more likely to be politically inclined towards smaller government. Those that support more stringent restrictions and centralised control are more likely to favour greater state activism.
The latest furore over Sage adviser Professor Susan Michie’s apparent membership of the Communist Party is therefore just an extreme example of what we have known all along. There are senior scientists advising the Government who sincerely believe that elements of a more centralised, carefully controlled, Chinese-style regime would be superior to the lassitude of liberal democracy. The international movement in favour of long-term “maximum suppression” openly styles itself as a Left-wing political force. This past weekend, an online “Zero Covid” conference borrowed the language of workers’ movements of history, summoning “activists from across the world to build solidarity across borders”. (Borders that they want to close, it must be said.)
These political-scientific campaign groups are not about to summarily disband just because the British epidemic is in retreat. Expect public health arguments to be intertwined with politics for months, if not years, to come.
The other factor that seems to be holding people back is perhaps more existential, and may be found to some extent in all of us. The American philosopher Matthew B Crawford, in his fascinating book The World Beyond Your Head, made a study of gambling addicts on the Las Vegas strip. Instead of risk-takers, he found that the real addicts – those who can stay for eight to 12 hour stretches staring like zombies at a slot machine – are really animated by a desire for control. As they zone in, the exterior world with all its variety and opportunity fades out, leaving the only variables the three wheels in front of them; you may win or lose but the constraining of options is oddly comforting and addictive.
The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll went one step further. She identified in avowed gambling addicts something close to what Freud called the “death instinct” – the primitive desire “to return to a state of rest, stillness and peace… to extinguish life’s excitations and restore stasis.”
This may all sound a long way from Covid policy. At least superficially, most of us can’t wait for the end of restrictions. But can you really say that you haven’t been hit by the occasional pang of horror at once again juggling a full schedule of family, social and work commitments? A flash of angst at the prospect of being expected, once again, to live a full life?
Some of this hesitation has good reason – a lack of desire to resume friendships that we have been better off without, say, or the keenness to retain the home life that the pandemic made possible. But it can also be a dangerous torpor that must be overcome.
I worry particularly about older people: the faces filling parks and streets this past weekend were overwhelmingly young. How many older people are still at home, delaying plans or outings for another week or month because the prospect seems fraught or exhausting? For some, a year of being endlessly told they belong in a “vulnerable category” will have triggered a loss of confidence that they may struggle to get back. Many young people, too, will have become strangely addicted to the sense of control that strict observance of Covid rules has offered. It falls to all of us in the coming months to encourage these friends, parents, grandparents back into the world – to start seeing people, attending real world events, and reclaiming their lives.
The Covid era has become a mindset. If we really want to shake it,
it will require effort and vigilance – both to contain the political ideas which have flourished within it, and to escape the comforting appeal of locked down life.
The trains and office buildings are rapidly filling up, the sun is shining and there’s sleaze and petty political infighting on every front page – it’s almost starting to feel like a normal British summer. Barring disaster, within the next month, travel, pubs and universities will crank back into action.
But there remains a striking hesitancy about this great reawakening, both among the public and its leaders. Opinion polls show very little appetite to speed up the Government’s ultra-cautious timetable, and some surveys even show a majority in favour of slowing it down. Meanwhile, politicians and government scientists remain noticeably downbeat. It’s almost as if we are reluctant to leave lockdown behind.
Alongside the well-trodden scientific arguments for caution, I think we can discern other powerful motivations behind this.
The first is political – not a vast conspiracy to reorder the world in a “Great Reset” but a fashionable new vision for how society should be organised. Scientific advisers are thinking human beings, and so understandably have political ideas – now, just as a year ago, the scientists advocating a lighter touch approach are more likely to be politically inclined towards smaller government. Those that support more stringent restrictions and centralised control are more likely to favour greater state activism.
The latest furore over Sage adviser Professor Susan Michie’s apparent membership of the Communist Party is therefore just an extreme example of what we have known all along. There are senior scientists advising the Government who sincerely believe that elements of a more centralised, carefully controlled, Chinese-style regime would be superior to the lassitude of liberal democracy. The international movement in favour of long-term “maximum suppression” openly styles itself as a Left-wing political force. This past weekend, an online “Zero Covid” conference borrowed the language of workers’ movements of history, summoning “activists from across the world to build solidarity across borders”. (Borders that they want to close, it must be said.)
These political-scientific campaign groups are not about to summarily disband just because the British epidemic is in retreat. Expect public health arguments to be intertwined with politics for months, if not years, to come.
The other factor that seems to be holding people back is perhaps more existential, and may be found to some extent in all of us. The American philosopher Matthew B Crawford, in his fascinating book The World Beyond Your Head, made a study of gambling addicts on the Las Vegas strip. Instead of risk-takers, he found that the real addicts – those who can stay for eight to 12 hour stretches staring like zombies at a slot machine – are really animated by a desire for control. As they zone in, the exterior world with all its variety and opportunity fades out, leaving the only variables the three wheels in front of them; you may win or lose but the constraining of options is oddly comforting and addictive.
The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll went one step further. She identified in avowed gambling addicts something close to what Freud called the “death instinct” – the primitive desire “to return to a state of rest, stillness and peace… to extinguish life’s excitations and restore stasis.”
This may all sound a long way from Covid policy. At least superficially, most of us can’t wait for the end of restrictions. But can you really say that you haven’t been hit by the occasional pang of horror at once again juggling a full schedule of family, social and work commitments? A flash of angst at the prospect of being expected, once again, to live a full life?
Some of this hesitation has good reason – a lack of desire to resume friendships that we have been better off without, say, or the keenness to retain the home life that the pandemic made possible. But it can also be a dangerous torpor that must be overcome.
I worry particularly about older people: the faces filling parks and streets this past weekend were overwhelmingly young. How many older people are still at home, delaying plans or outings for another week or month because the prospect seems fraught or exhausting? For some, a year of being endlessly told they belong in a “vulnerable category” will have triggered a loss of confidence that they may struggle to get back. Many young people, too, will have become strangely addicted to the sense of control that strict observance of Covid rules has offered. It falls to all of us in the coming months to encourage these friends, parents, grandparents back into the world – to start seeing people, attending real world events, and reclaiming their lives.
The Covid era has become a mindset. If we really want to shake it, it will require effort and vigilance – both to contain the political ideas which have flourished within it, and to escape the comforting appeal of locked down life.