The real story of masks isn't one of public health but a marriage of fear and toxic politics

It’s the end of the road for the mandatory wearing of masks. When they were introduced, few subjects proved more polarising and more capable of provoking visceral rage between the two sides of the debate. As we prepare for their wearing to become a matter of personal choice, the controversy has brewed up once more, and the topic is just as divisive.

What is it about the face mask that gets us all steamed up? What is it about the mask that makes us see not just someone with a difference of opinion, but a walking, talking moral outrage? Whatever way you look at it, masks were not a part of our life and our culture before the pandemic, but they had a meteoric rise. Why did face masks catch on

 

IT was the public that led the way with masks. In fact, a BBC NewsNight investigation last year claimed that the World Health Organisation’s rapid change of heart on the utility of masks resulted not from a sudden and dramatic change in what ‘the science’ was telling us, but resulted from political lobbying. People were wearing masks, and they wanted politicians and experts to oblige others to do likewise.

So a narrative was born! In fact, at best the evidence for cloth masks in the community is extremely weak; at worst it’s totally non-existent. Experts pretended they’d never previously said so; the media didn’t remind them that they had; the public didn’t care to find out. The need to wear a mask was as self-evident as the need to wear a seatbelt.

 

Masks served (and continue to serve) a useful psychological function in meeting our need to reduce uncertainty. Intangible, directionless fear can be transformed into tangible actions that we can easily convince ourselves will make a difference, given that we lower our bar for persuasion when frightened.

The mask became a way for people to feel in control – to feel like they were doing something useful and, crucially, to signal this to others. More than anything else, the mask became the visible totem of the messages we were expected to absorb and the attitudes we were supposed to adopt.

The mask got incorporated into a simplistic tale of good and evil. Whilst good people stayed at home, placed rainbows in the window and endured hour after hour of Zoom work meetings, selfish and thoughtless people complained, got on the tube, didn’t manage home schooling the kids whilst learning 8 languages and knitting PPE for exhausted nurses, didn’t observe social distancing and went outside for more than an hour a day – sometimes even sitting down for a bit!

But nothing else could communicate quite so instantly to others which side you were on as the face mask. And so it was that we became a nation of tutting lunatics, fuming over the incorrect way he was wearing his mask, and pouring scorn on how she took hers off to drink her coffee rather than raising and lowering it between sips, as anyone opposed to killing grannies surely would. Masks, in short, gave us a way to be on the right side of good and evil – and without requiring any time, money or mental effort, it was such an easy way to be good.

 

Yet there’s more. Masks didn’t flourish just because of fear. More than any other pandemic measure, the mask policy captured the hearts of the fascinating coalition that has sustained the high popularity of lockdown despite the unending bleakness of it all and the series of broken promises.

The mask mandate involved the state actually imposing its will upon how you dress – something we once thought was reserved for women in dark age countries like Saudi Arabia. What’s more, in covering the face and hiding all the individuality and personality that it communicates, it was on another level of intrusiveness.

But for the new left, intent on political dominance via establishment takeover rather than old-school revolution, it represented a major moment of progress in bolstering the ability of the state to control individuals.

It marked a highly successful outcome in testing the boundaries of what the state could do to us within parameters we would tolerate – indeed which we would happily enforce. It vindicated the public health machinery, riddled with people whose utopian philosophy leaves little room for the pesky libertarian emphasis on the individual which frustrates what must be done for the greater good, about which, naturally, they know best.

But conservatives also found something to tickle their political taste buds. It’s commonly thought that conservatives place a great deal of emphasis on the individual, and whilst it’s true that we increasingly equate conservatism with libertarianism, it’s actually very different.

Traditional social conservatism actually places very little emphasis on the freedoms of the individual. It emphasises the role of social institutions for sustaining stability and conserving the community’s way of life. The individual, whilst possessing fundamental rights, is primarily viewed as part of the community, to whose good and well-being their own individual wants and desires are to be subjugated.

A traditional conservative, principally preoccupied with threats to the way of life, would not necessarily find anything instinctively jarring or alarming about claims of a threat, apparently so exceptional in nature that extraordinary mitigations must follow. They would, in all likelihood, approve of the decisiveness in such a response, and regard it as a matter of public duty to go along with it.

Such traditional conservatives, therefore, have equally found something to like in the sweeping authoritarianism and overt bossiness of the lockdown, and most certainly something rather pleasing in the ease with which the attitude to and presentation of a face mask demonstrates the apparent regard for our ultimate duty. It’s a case of do as you’re told, or you’re a bad person; play your part, or have no part!

 

And that’s the truth behind the rise of the mask: we are all deeply invested in what the meaning is behind something so visible, so impossible to wear or not wear without signalling something to the world. We’re arguing about what that something is.

For opponents of the mask, it’s a capitulation, at best, to iffy science; at worst a mark of psychological warfare and a pandering to the irrational fears of those choosing a child-like need for safety over an adult dose of bracing reality, as well as those for whom the mask moulds society in a manner that appeals to their desires.

Ultimately, the extent to which professing mask enthusiasts really are true believers will depend on how quickly their masks come off. IF it’s about fear or lauding it over others, the mask zealots will make a big noise and grow increasingly vicious in their demonisation of those of us who will be ditching our masks, before quietly letting go of theirs too when they realise the milage has run out and the threat they feared or exploited really has been jabbed into submission.

I think that things will calm down, but now the great mask experiment has taken place once, I see every reason to think there will be calls for mask mandates again – perhaps a bad flu season will be the excuse. I think that there will be many who would like to see a replay, which might have sounded weird, were it not the case that the real story of masks isn’t one of public health but a marriage of fear and toxic politics.