“They are all from London, spreading their germs. I hope they rot in hell”. Some lessons from Covid-19

Fear of contagion is more powerful than the fear of death. 

This is partly because the former threatens the group or species while the latter merely the individual.  Our own extinction is programmed into and determines our thinking and behaviour.  Mostly – and certainly among non-believing materialists – it is the source of fear which, if it weren’t boundaried, would overwhelm us.  It is so much part of the psyche that there may even be, as Freud postulated, an inner drive towards death.  One comfort which is constructed to offset this unique fear is that the group will remain to mourn and remember us and to incorporate our legacy in the form of children (if we have them), our creative achievements (if there were any) and our possessions. As long as the group lives on, our individual deaths fall short of annihilation.

Sentimentality is always at someone else’s expense

Sentimentality involves the uneven distribution of emotional responses.  When displayed towards children and their welfare, for example, it draws emotional investment away from older people who are consigned to sheltered housing ghettos on the edge of towns remote from the mainstream or to the hermetically sealed prison of the nursing home.  Sentimentality towards the NHS, marshalled by the media, necessarily demotes those employed outside the health system who may be working harder with less reward and status in more challenging circumstances. It is always hostile to fairness and the enemy of equanimity.

Emotion is the new bitcoin: or “how does that make you feel?”

The mining and monetisation of emotion has been building for some time. Emotion has become detached from ethics to the extent that it is considered right to feel whatever we feel. Similarly, there is now no longer any ought in illness: that is to say, however we behave or choose to behave when ill is beyond the reach of reproach or challenge. If, for example, a person bereaved through Covid-19 says “my life has been destroyed by grief” (see DSM-V in the USA where bereavement is considered a disorder), a response such as “you ought not to allow your life to seem to be destroyed by grief” is no longer sayable - indeed it would be seen as a personal attack not far short of hate.

This is part of the succession from collectively agreed to individually defined frameworks for behaviour. However I feel or whatever I make of my circumstances is now insulated from the moral judgement or disapproval of others. My feelings about myself are the only coinage in town and the feelings of others about my feelings are a worthless currency. The primacy of the subjective has marginalised the dealers in objective codes (representatives of religion or the church, philosophers, thinkers, and so on) and opened up lucrative markets for those who offer platforms which release the unmoderated expression of emotion (social media providing a hotline to the id) or the promise, through so-called therapeutic intervention, of its manipulation or management. With fantasies of specialness culturally reinforced and left with emotionality untrammelled by norms, the newly minted individual feels cast adrift and engulfed.  Identification with similar others on social media and collusive forms of therapy promise rescue which never comes.

We were never meant to mourn every death

Mourning is generally localised.  It is almost universally modest and circumscribed, though this varies in degree according to culturally determined attitudes and practices. For example, in parts of the white community in the UK funerals, the formal gathering up of grief, may be quiet, short-lived affairs involving immediate relatives and close friends while in the black community they may last days, drawing in many layers of family from blood relatives to those rather tenuously connected to the dead person. There are the obvious exceptions to the local nature of mourning  in responses to the deaths of royalty, the famous and celebrities with no obvious justification for their fame whose elevation leads them or rather aspects of them to be deeply internalised by the susceptible.  The death of someone with whom the public has a close or heavily charged identification drags these aspects away with it, leading to intense feelings of loss which have to be mitigated by a collective discharge of grief on a wide scale.

Far from the acute distress of sudden personal loss being in any sense news, it is expected and necessary. Indeed, what would be news would be its absence. Yet coverage of the casualties of Covid-19 is saturated with the tears of people behaving normally.  What looks like journalistic laziness arising out of the need to fill the unforgiving media minute with sixty seconds’ worth of drama run (see Kipling: “If”), is in fact the misappropriation of grief and its use as a tool to manipulate and enlist by building up a constituency of dependent disaffection.  Thus, the neutral giving of objective information combined with the searching interrogation of those in authority is dispatched to the margin by a repeated and highly tendentious feeling-fest. Other roots of identity become attenuated and impoverished to the point where we are – only – what we feel.

The “disclosure paradox”: or “how can I talk about not talking about something?”

In his excellent treatise “The Culture of Narcissism” (1979), a fast-paced and prophetic polemic which has sadly sunk without trace, Christopher Lasch explains that there aren’t more narcissists about – it is just that they have gravitated to positions of influence. Covid-19 has given a powerful boost to the culture of disclosurism or the cult of emotional self-publicity, now endorsed with the Royal Warrant.

Angst is the American dollar of this economy, quiet coping an obscure currency with minimal buying-power.  Its staples are depression, anxiety, bereavement and trauma. Questioning the value, wisdom or relevance of disclosing one’s suffering from the multiplying platforms which are now available is experienced as a retrograde attack not far short of cruelty. The totalitarian nature of the disclosure industry is such that I must keep my reservations about a fading celebrity writing of his sorrow over his still-born child to myself. And if I were to say I found a different, more private and perhaps even more durable way of processing my grief after the cot-death of my child, I would be talking about something which I believe it is actually better, in the sense of promoting self-healing, self-reliance and feelings of self-worth, not to talk about.

It is hard to miss the fact that there is little margin in self-work and much gain to be captured by vested interests in declarations of pain and neediness. In spite of a study of over 74,000 respondents by UCL which showed that stress and anxiety fell markedly following the unprecedented social changes made necessary by Covid-19, we are told that mental health services are overwhelmed. What makes institutions themselves anxious, of course, is the prospect of a dwindling market. Thus, sensing that many children have rather enjoyed being off school and, with parental collusion, have managed to wangle contact one way or another with their key friends, no fewer than 146 charities and other organisations have written to the Prime Minister about “unprecedented threats”, “an eerie world, full of uncertainty”, a “shadow for years to come”, “uncertainty and worry [which] will lead to anxiety and mental health problems” and so on. To add (anecdotal) weight to this plea, the BBC chose a mother with children who are fearful to go out and struggling with panic attacks and at times suicidal inclinations.

The validity of her subjective experience and worries more generally about “the Covid children”, as she puts it, are beyond question, of course.  But reminding her of her responsibility to manage her own anxiety before perhaps projecting it onto her children and putting up a different parent, say a single mother, who had found inventive, creative ways of both entertaining and stretching her son during lockdown, would be ideologically unthinkable. What would be characterised as a kind of rightist attack on the needy and distressed is instead suggesting that quiet self-sufficiency, a state of mind deeply feared by the market (of which charities have become an integral and inseparable part), may be a route away from alienation and the cult of the individual towards independence and authenticity.     

Neurosis handles real threat better than it does imagined threat

It has been said that neurosis consists in stupid behaviour by non-stupid people. For example, the person who avoids flying because of an intense fear that the plane will drop instantaneously to the ground from five miles high will also be aware that the chances of dying while driving are per mile many hundred times greater. Underlying this kind of life-altering anxiety is the magical or superstitious belief that worrying actually prevents bad things happening.  In other words, it was my worrying about my wife’s late return one night that made her safe and, if I had instead relaxed throughout her absence from the house, this would have made her death from a botched mugging much more likely.

In fact, my subjective distress about the prospect, for example, of my unwell son going missing is likely to be greater that my subjective distress when he actually has gone missing. The neurotic intensity of anticipating a traumatic event may well be more charged than the disturbance felt when trauma is alive and being dealt with or processed.  Similarly, a morbid fear, say of cancer, may give way to a sanguine and composed attitude when cancer is diagnosed. The reduction around the world in the suicide rate during the first world war of 15.3% and of 13.5% during the second world war suggests that the pure outward threat of war may elicit a cleaner, more pragmatic response than the messy inward churning of existential worries: that is, risk to one’s physical survival may be easier to bear than risk to one’s psychical survival.

 

It is impossible to have two major anxieties at the same time

Hypochondria, I have observed, is a serial matter. I can’t be worried about the onset of multiple sclerosis at the same time as detecting the possible prodromal signs of a malign brain tumour.  Similarly, I realised with surprise at a time some years ago when a tanker drivers’ strike led to a severe fuel shortage which produced fears of societal collapse that I was feeling almost positive about my overall physical health.  More topically, my intense daily worries about a close relative who I was caring for during lockdown led me, completely contrary to what I would have predicted, to be unconcerned, even uninterested, in the shutting down of society and the closing off of all those activities which I believed were essential for my mental well-being.

This phenomenon can be seen in, for example, persistent self-cutting or overdosing where the anxiety before and around such behaviours does not so much shut out other anxieties as mean that they do not exist. This explains, of course, why we become so attached to our anxieties because to let go of one would allow another to muscle its way in. And ultimately, for the neurotic, having no anxiety at all actually generates anxiety in novel and alarming form: I am worried that I am not worried.

Caged in Compound UK

Richard Lovelace, a Royalist poet, wrote from his prison next to Westminster Abbey in 1642 to his lover, real or imagined, the famous couplet: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”: his love for Althea rendered him and his soul free.  

Today the inverse of his beautiful notion is true. Walls and bars are no longer needed to jail us: we are all prisoners now. The abrupt halting by Covid-19 lockdown of blind consumption and the flight of fevered mobility has provided an opportunity to reflect on the true extent of our virtual imprisonment.  We now know that we can all be democratically detained in our own homes at the twitch of a government diktat or a casually drafted statutory instrument. 

This has been backed up by a pre-existing infrastructure which, of course, in time will be seen as touchingly primitive.  Algorithm, the new God of surveillance, gathers, processes and deduces from every interaction we have with the machine; ANPR, another key member of the pantheon of repression, monitors every turn of the steering-wheel; CCTV, no longer a clunky fixed camera high on a corner building, pans and zooms in the hands of expert voyeurs in the hi-tec centre of the web of control; microphones detect incipient violence from key vantage points in the cityscape; facial recognition software obliterates anonymity; cashless transactions feed back through banks to government; each journey we make is on the record forever; details of our addictions, preoccupations and personalities are easily retrievable from a central health databank, the dyke of confidentiality being a flimsy and porous bulwark against the swirling currents of subjugation and coercion; we may leave the country but our exit, activities abroad and return are watched by the State’s all-seeing eye. Soul-capture is already here.

We have eagerly entered the cage of control by importing its key tool, the smartphone, into our pockets and succumbing to total dependence on its presence which, since Covid-19, is now compulsory in some countries such as South Korea. In a slow, covert coup the State has deposed an all-seeing God, promising its captives “you will always be safe but you can never be free” in the knowledge that our most primitive wishes and fantasies will always win in the end.  And when the neat gun which is pointed at our foreheads to read our temperature is replaced by the slim device to read our brains, we will accede like a baby cushioned in impotent comfort in its mother’s arms.