Coronavirus aesthetics may be the way to get the great unmasked on board the battleship
Some of the more curious forms of human behaviour on display around the world over the last few months have been linked to the so-called “debate” about the wearing of masks. In SA, as in Covid-19 epicentres such as the US and the UK, we have our anti-mask lobbyists. Here, as there, they nail their individualist colours to the mast — simultaneously betraying an uglier ideological position, one that is closer to the ethnonationalist, elite-serving, right-wing populism of British Tories and US Republicans today than it is to a putative tradition of liberalism or libertarianism.
A generous view of non-mask wearers is that they confuse the intention of wearing a mask to protect oneself (the full efficacy of which may be contested) with that of wearing a mask to protect others from oneself. But this isn’t just stupidity; it is also the death drive writ large as a political world view. A sarcastic quip from a Facebook friend of mine is apposite: “I hadn’t previously realised that ‘It is my inalienable right to give you my disease by not wearing a mask’ was a fundamental principle of conservatism.”
I’m willing to admit that there is a grey area around masks and exercise. But this is no excuse for the kind of braggadocio you can see on display in any SA suburb between six and nine each morning. Earlier this week I saw a pod of cyclists — yes, predictably, they were all white men in their fifties and sixties — bunched together closer than a peloton of professionals. Eleven of them (I counted). Not one mouth or nose covered.
Okay, boomers. I’ve stayed at home for the last two months to protect people in your age demographic, but you go ahead and breathe all over each other. Feel free to take up private hospital beds, safe in the false knowledge that you’re not part of the curve. A couple of you may die. You probably won’t connect the dots. A common manifestation of mask folly is the half-hearted, fence-sitting action of hanging a mask around your neck or tucking it under your chin like a cloth version of Abraham Lincoln’s beard. Recently I tried to explain to a chin-wearer that he was only making things worse by adopting this clumsy compromise between being an upstanding citizen and a selfish git. Arguments based on principles of science and hygiene held no sway with him. Eventually, in desperation, I ventured to point out that, quite simply, it made him look like an idiot. “Fair point,” he mumbled, shifting the mask to the parts of his face it was designed to cover.
This got me thinking. Perhaps the best way to win people over to good public health practices is not rational persuasion but rather an appeal to that most basic of human impulses: narcissism. You could call it “Covid aesthetics”. Much of the groundwork has already been laid by Instagrammers and other sexy influencers posting masked selfies. Now we need to merge that with the scruffyhaired, overweight look that most of us have been cultivating under lockdown, so that being masked is a normative and necessary condition for being considered attractive.
I realise, of course, that this strategy would be lost on the cyclists. After all, it’s part of their cachet to look extremely silly. The pitch to them would have to be different — say, that protective gear is another way to spend ostentatious amounts of money on their hobby? They could, for instance, buy a really expensive helmet with a Coronavisor fitted onto it.
If all this seems facetious, there is a serious side to the Covid aesthetics coin. Because aesthetics, as any visual artist will tell you, is not about being looked at; it is about how we look out at the world around us. Do we see differently with our masks on? Do we appreciate the infinite variety of colour and light that awaits us beyond the thresholds of the homes with which we are now overfamiliar? Do we observe more carefully — hopefully more sympathetically? Or do we close ourselves off to new people and places and things, avoiding the gaze of others as we try to avoid touching them?