On coming apart, alone
Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced this week that he won’t permit crowds of 50 or more to gather until phase five of his reopening plan, which requires the mass availability of a vaccine or an ‘effective’ treatment for COVID-19. That could easily be more than a year away, and Pitzker is hardly an outlier in the maximum-caution lockdown crowd.
Leaving aside the hilarity that a governor of Illinois is talking about locking other people up, it’s worth weighing the cost of what this could mean.
The economic costs of some kind of rolling lockdown stretching into the future are so big we cannot yet see their full size. But the social cost could be just a steep, and so far that has gone uncounted.
Groups of fifty people aren’t just restaurants and nightclubs. They are our churches and schools and ballparks. They are the institutions which define our society. They are everywhere that we come together to have the shared experiences which form the basis for a common culture.
Depriving ourselves of them, even for public health reasons, adds up to far more than thousands of individual acts of self denial — it is the slow dissolving of our communion with each other. That’s a loss that needs to be weighed.
We also need to count the cost of what could take its place. Because if people do stay home, if we do observe social distancing (and if we have to use an offensively ubiquitous neologism), where are we going to go instead? Online: possibly the worst place in the world for human interaction.
For years, as our political and media environment have ever more closely resembled a talent show in an insane asylum, we have comforted ourselves that it all takes place in an online bubble.
Twitter isn’t the real world, we reassure each other. Most people don’t watch the performative mendacity of cable “news”. Out there, in the real world, real people still relate to each other as human beings. They define their world by their communities and the people they see and talk to every day.
Friends, family, neighbours, casual conversations at the school gate and barber shop, these are the informal fact checks and sanity anchors that keep normal people normal. What happens when we lose them and our whole ‘society’ moves online? What happens when actual social networks no longer function in the real world?
Suddenly, the online bubble gets a lot bigger — and that’s a bad thing. Twitter and Facebook distort the scale of human interaction like a funhouse mirror, and unless you come wise to the table it can be very disorietning. In the real world, if two hundred people tell you something is definitely true, there’s probably something to it; on Twitter, at least two hundred people will smash the like button to watch you eat a Tide pod.
To a great degree, social networks are how we have always vetted our news intake. If we read something that seemed outlandish, we might repeat it at the bar or dinner party table and use the room to gauge how seriously it — and therefore its source — should be taken.
On our own, at home, online, it’s harder to know what to make of that YouTube video your crazy uncle in Toledo just sent you. I mean, sure, the guy is talking about eating his neighbors, but that stuff about China sounds damn serious. Who do you ask about it, Twitter?
The results are hard to miss. On May 1, a crowd that looked straight out of a Jussie Smollet fever dream gathered in downtown Chicago to protest the lockdown.
It is hard to quantify damage to a society in a pandemic, or measure how quickly it is being taken. Death and infection rates can be plotted and charted, economic consequences can be measured and graphed. But how do you measure the damage to our common culture? What’s the stimulus plan for community?
Sadly, the institutions that might have the most important roles to play in these conversations are ranked furthest down in our leaders’ estimation of “essential,” because the one service offered by all our churches and schools and other social institutions is the one thing civil leaders don’t want: they bring people together.
Humans crave society with nearly the same intensity as they do survival — and the two instincts are linked, we are made to rely on each other. If policymakers continue to drive that desire underground and online, they may find they create a whole new kind of risk to public health.
