The Virus Within Us - Update

My mother grew up with stories of her father’s experiences in the ‘Great War’ (what later became known as World War 1): he served in the British army in India. There’s a family photo of him with his regiment enjoying the Passover hospitality of the Sassoon family – the Sassoons built Bombay’s [now Mumbai's] cotton mills and made a fortune from the textile business, much of which they ploughed back into philanthropic endeavours in India and the Middle East. 


My mother’s interest in her father’s wartime experience was mirrored in my own curiosity about her experience during the Second World War. ‘What was it like? Where were you evacuated to? Was there bombing near your home (there were shipyards nearby)? Was it frightening? What did you do for all those years?’


Born in 1953, I grew up with stories about ‘the War’ (unlike many Jewish families in the UK, we had no direct family links to Holocaust losses, though a very close friend of my mother had a number tattooed on her arm). And in Manchester, ‘the War’ was still very near at hand: bombsites weren’t cleared for many years, so the evidence was around and obvious even to me as a child when we went, by car or bus, from our home in the suburbs into the city centre. 


I never really thought I would live through such a time myself – a time about which future generations will inquire, with distant curiosity or wide-eyed astonishment: ‘You mean you couldn’t go out of the house at all? What did you do all day? Where did you get food? What was Zoom? Did people you know die? Was it frightening?’  


Here in the UK we are still, it seems, in the foothills. There’s a long slog ahead – many months, maybe a year. People still talk about ‘getting back to normal’ - and I can understand that talking like that may be a necessary narrative, a comforting fantasy. As if life will resume – at some time in the not too distant future – and we will pick up with life where we left off. It’s a narrative of hope, of wishfulness, that manages to skip over the lonely choking deaths, the mass graves, the funerals where nobody is allowed to be present except the rabbi, or the minister (and the camera). It’s a story without the civil unrest which may yet emerge, or society’s underlying toxic divisiveness. It’s a story of solidarity, of generosity, of the better angels of our nature; of community support, of collective belief that care and compassion and mutual support will triumph over selfishness and greed and fear. 


And maybe it will. Maybe crisis will bring out the best in the human spirit. There are wonderful examples of it all around. But I’m not holding my breath – to use a phrase which has taken a darker turn in recent weeks – that this benign, uplifting spirit of support and co-operation will prevail as events turn more deadly. 


Even in so-called ‘normal’ times, fear generates aggression in us. But when the fear we feel is fear of death – what happens then? Ten days ago, when ‘social distancing’ had first been advocated – and I prefer to describe this health practice as ‘social spacing’, because to survive this collective crisis we need an ethic of closeness not distance – I was in the supermarket and as I went to pay at the till I brushed momentarily against the arm of a man’s coat. I would have thought nothing of it – but he leapt back (literally, not metaphorically) several metres with a look of complete panic and horror on his face. As if he’d seen the devil. Which I guess he had, from his perspective. 


In ages past, I thought to myself, was this how a leper was treated? Was this how ‘the Jew’ was seen? (That’s an archaic, atavistic thought). But I felt I was the bearer of something that threatened life itself. Or rather: I felt as if I was being experienced as someone who threatened life itself. And I have been wondering since then: was this just an aberration, someone perhaps already suffering from some kind of social phobia, or paranoia? Or was it a straw in the wind? 


The next day, wandering with my wife on a beautifully sunny spring morning through a thinly-wooded open space in a country park, where the paths had disappeared and there was just a leafy covering on the ground, but plenty of room to wander wherever one wanted, a woman with dogs approached from behind a tree, saw us about 10 metres away and, pulling her scarf rapidly round her mouth, shouted angrily “Why can’t people keep a distance?”. Another straw in the wind?

Fear corrodes the soul. Fear is the acid in which solidarity dissolves. Fear grips our hearts and attacks our compassion and generosity of spirit.  


Those of us alive today, of whatever age, have never experienced anything like this invisible, deadly ‘plague’. To orientate myself I find that I search for narratives of those who have lived through plague times in years gone by. Such descriptions are – and are not – useful. What can I learn, for example, from Daniel Defoe’s narrative of the plague that ravaged England in 1665? Written at the time but not published for nearly 40 years it takes us back, inevitably, to a world very far from our own – and yet disconcertingly familiar. Let me share a few paragraphs of it with you, and conclude this blog with some reflections on it:  

Great were the confusions at that time…when people began to be convinced that the infection was received in this surprising manner from persons apparently well, they began to be exceeding shy and jealous of every one that came near them. Once, on a public day, whether a Sabbath-day or not I do not remember, in Aldgate Church, in a pew full of people, on a sudden one fancied she smelt an ill smell. Immediately she fancies the plague was in the pew, whispers her notion or suspicion to the next, then rises and goes out of the pew. It immediately took with the next, and so to them all; and every one of them, and of the two or three adjoining pews, got up and went out of the church, nobody knowing what it was offended them, or from whom.

This immediately filled everybody's mouths with one preparation or other…some perhaps as physicians directed, in order to prevent infection by the breath of others; insomuch that if we came to go into a church when it was anything full of people, there would be such a mixture of smells at the entrance that it was much more strong, though perhaps not so wholesome, than if you were going into an apothecary's or druggist's shop…

 Yet I observed that after people were possessed, as I have said, with the belief, or rather assurance, of the infection being thus carried on by persons apparently in health, the churches and meeting-houses were much thinner of people than at other times before that they used to be. For this is to be said of the people of London, that during the whole time of the pestilence the churches or meetings were never wholly shut up, nor did the people decline coming out to the public worship of God, except only in some parishes when the violence of the distemper was more particularly in that parish at that time, and even then no longer than it continued to be so.

Indeed nothing was more strange than to see with what courage the people went to the public service of God, even at that time when they were afraid to stir out of their own houses upon any other occasion... This was a proof of the exceeding populousness of the city at the time of the infection, notwithstanding the great numbers that were gone into the country at the first alarm, and that fled out into the forests and woods when they were further terrified with the extraordinary increase of it. For when we came to see the crowds and throngs of people which appeared on the Sabbath-days at the churches, and especially in those parts of the town where the plague was abated, or where it was not yet come to its height, it was amazing… 

[Full text is available at : https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm]

There’s the self-imposed ‘social distancing’; the fear of contamination; the wish to “prevent infection by the breath of others”, even those who appeared healthy; the flight to the countryside by those who can.  The most obvious difference though is in the need for religious folk to continue to meet with their co-religionists. Or is it so different? In the current crisis many synagogues and churches are continuing with technological solutions to the problems of self-isolation by streaming  services and activities through a variety of platforms. Perhaps in these times now when real contact is impossible, mediated community contact becomes even more important for many. 


(Questions about God, and prayer, I will leave for a future blog – in’shallah)

In decades to come – for the rest of the 21^st century - we will be judged by how we responded to this crisis: will it lead to a re-evaluation of what really matters – interconnectedness of societies, peoples  and nations; care of the marginal and vulnerable; preserving the quality of the air we breathe and the environment that all humanity shares;  global economies focused on the highest standards of health care and education and justice – or will it lead to a descent into selfishness (personal and national) and the squandering of the greatest opportunity for transforming the fundamental values of civilisation that modernity has ever been presented with? 


I hope you and your loved ones keep well in these perilous times.

The Virus Within Us

“From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible. And, no doubt, he would have continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realised that all were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life.” (Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947). 


Yes – as if we didn’t know this before, that we are all ‘in the same boat’, Planet Earth – the arrival of Covid-19 has forced us into a new awareness of the interconnectedness of all of us with each other, and with all life forms on earth. 


And if we are not yet carriers of Covid-19 we are nevertheless all carrying the coronavirus. Because the virus is inside us, in our heads: we are carrying it in our thoughts, it is incubating and mutating within us. Nobody can escape it, it is contaminating our mental well-being. It is causing fear, panic, anxiety for our loved ones, concern for our health, concern for our livelihoods, sometimes concern for our lives. 


We are struggling to get our heads round what Camus names as “the new conditions of life”: holidays cancelled, trips abandoned, meetings postponed, plans thwarted, stocking up on products, self-isolation, ‘social distancing’, a dread about the future with the awareness that this is only just beginning…


I seem to veer between two poles in my thinking. The first is that this will be – as the dulcet tones of the official chief scientists paraded before us daily on our UK screens calmly portray it – an inconvenient but temporary health crisis that the country will be well able to manage if the public take suitable precautions. Though it is hardly reassuring when these precautions - soothingly and rationally presented on one day - segue seamlessly into quite different soothingly and rationally presented precautions the next day.  Like magicians whose skill is not to let you see how the trick works, the official TV faces of scientific knowledge present their magical thinking with sincere and serious panache. 


The second pole of my thinking – and, as I said, I oscillate between these thoughts – contains a cluster of much darker glimpses into a world twisted out of shape by the consequences of this plague. The stock market crash may be a prefiguration of a radical change to our social, economic and political realities. This global pandemic event, which is only just beginning, could mark this century in ways comparable to the ways that World War One inaugurated a century of profound dislocation, wars, revolutions and suffering. 


Of course that was not the whole story, but (consciously or unconsciously) we carry the memory of  20^th century trauma in our psyches. Humanity saw into the abyss – the destruction of peoples, of cities, of the natural world – and the abyss is still there, even if we look away. Hiroshima, Auschwitz and the environmental destructions of the Anthropocene era are signposts into the chasm. They are the deadly hole in the heart of humanity. 


If borders close, businesses go under, pensions shrink, food supplies reduce, social contact is restricted, no amount of online activity (for those able to access it) will compensate for the losses to ways of life we take for granted. Governments are talking up the relatively short-term nature of the measures they are ‘suggesting’.  A few weeks, a few months. This is supposed to reassure us. I am not reassured. 


In the UK in this last decade we have been assaulted by austerity-sadism and torn apart by Brexit antagonisms –- so on one level Covid-19 could ‘bring people together’, as they say, the recognition that we are indeed ‘all in one boat’. But the UK’s psychological wellbeing is not in good shape, in fact it is quite fragile: witness the aggressions, the racism, the undisguised anger simmering under the surface and erupting online or in public. How well set up are we as a nation to follow recommendations about what we ‘should’ do in terms of self-isolation and distancing? How soon before a much more draconian approach will be implemented? And how will we fare then? 


When doctors face agonising decisions about who to help and who to let die in hospitals – and, like the God-stories of old, they will have to choose who will live and who will die– how well equipped are we, and the social fabric, to withstand and survive these ravages on our sense of fairness and justice? 


We are as yet much too close to events – which evolve day by day – to see anything clearly about what this virus will do to us, as individuals, families, communities, nations. We have no ‘outsider’ position from which to look at events. I have seen it said that this crisis will show us that concerted, collective action can make a radical difference to how a society behaves – a sign that the environmental crisis could be tackled by immediate radical changes of behaviour once the will is there and world acts together to avert disaster. Greta Thunberg’s message has fully arrived.

I have no sense of which of the two poles of my thinking will turn out to be nearer the mark. But my gut feeling is that these events – which, as I keep saying, are only just beginning -  will lead to profound, but as yet  unpredictable, changes in our patterns of life. 


Meanwhile I am trying to carry on with my work, my relationships, my thinking-about-things, with as much continuity as possible. But I do feel at odds with the prevailing narratives. This may be foolhardy, but there it is. For example, as I wrote to a colleague this week:
“in these fraught times when the impulse we are being told to follow is to self-isolate, create ‘social distance’, I am taking up the counterintuitive stance that we should retain as much as possible live connections between people for our own emotional and mental well-being - because our inner psychological and spiritual well-being is a powerful (not omnipotent) prophylactic in the safeguarding of our physical well-being. We know that good human contact has restorative and sometimes preventative benefits for our physical well-being, and we shouldn’t abandon the wisdom of what we know in this present ‘crisis’”. 


At the end of his powerful evocation in ‘The Plague’ of a city living with plague and forced into isolation – a metaphor for the German occupation of France during World War Two, but also a universal portrait of the bravery and selfishness of people when faced with radical disruptions to the continuity of their lives and wellbeing – Camus writes about the end of the plague and that “as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux [the novel’s hero, a doctor who treats the sick regardless of the risks to himself] remembered that such joy is always imperilled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves…”


I wish you all safe passage through these beleaguered times.