The Blog

2020-

2020-12-09 e
THE COVID-CON II
"Dr Mark Sklansky, an American cardiologist, told Time he has always hated hand-shaking. ‘Hands are warm, they’re wet, and we know that they transmit disease very well’, he said. But where ‘being anti-handshake was fringe thinking’ in the past — !! — it is now increasingly common to be handshakephobic, says the wise doctor. Put your wet, diseased paws away, everyone."

Down with the New Normal

Who wants to live in a nerdy world of no handshakes and no big sweaty crowds?

Few phrases inspire more horror in me than ‘the new normal’. It is falling from the lips of public-health experts and lockdown-loving commentators everywhere. Forget the ‘old normal’ of going maskless into the streets, or ramming yourself into a crowd of thirsty punters at the bar in a pub, or taking a lover without constantly worrying that he or she might make you ill with his or her breath. Such reckless libertinism was for the old world, apparently, the era BC (Before Covid). We are all now heading into the New Normal, a brave new world of forever social-distancing being built for us by a benevolent bureaucracy that simply wants to protect us from disease.

Everywhere you turn there is talk of the new normal. Out will go bare faces, hand-shaking, hugs and sweaty crowds, and in will come masks, elbow-bumping, and sitting six feet away from everyone else at concerts and shows. Bye bye, mosh pits. Yes, even when the vaccine comes, which is when many of us hoped we would see our freedoms restored, the uber-cautious habits we have developed during the Covid crisis should continue, experts say. Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said this week that these ‘habits’, including face-covering, should continue for ‘many years’. Better safe than sorry, eh?

Van-Tam isn’t alone. Many experts and commentators are predicting, and even welcoming, a decline in social engagement and physical contact as we head into the new normal.

... Their new normal — for this new era is entirely an invention of the out-of-touch expert class, not of democratic debate — sounds awful. Some seem determined to cultivate a world in which social atomisation is not defeated, but institutionalised. In which we will enter the social sphere not as citizens keen to engage with one another, but as vectors of disease, as possessors of dirty hands and virus-spreading breath, who must be kept apart. In which we will be actively encouraged to view others as a threat.

... No, it isn’t a conspiracy. They haven’t all sat down in a Covid-secure committee room and decided to rob the public of its hard-won freedom to hug and smile. Rather, what we are witnessing in all the talk of the new normal is an intensification of trends that have been apparent for quite a while. From safe sex to safe spaces on campus, from the depiction of a boozy come-on as a threat to one’s physical safety to the growing cult of germophobia, the elitist insistence that other people are a threat has been around for some time. Other people’s words will hurt you; sex with them could kill you; their wolf-whistle on the street is a dagger to the heart of your self-esteem. So you had better hide in this safe space that forcefields you from disagreeable ideas, always wear a condom, and phone the police if a stranger tells you you look fit. Misanthropic suspicion of others has been the meat of public-heath agitation and the political class’s nanny statism for years — the Covid crisis is merely taking it all to the next level.

... If we unquestioningly enter the new normal, faces covered, hands behind backs, heads bowed, we may find that it will be very difficult indeed to get out again. Recovering our everyday freedom is the most important task facing humanity right now. (read more)

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