Corona tribalism has reached its peak – now it’s time to pick a side

My friend Lucy texted the other day to say she was feeling shaken. She’d been for a walk with a friend; not a close one, but still. Let’s call the friend Sarah. As they’d walked, Sarah revealed that she was going to see her elderly parents that weekend. Lucy expressed surprise. Wasn’t that a bit risky what with, you know, the pandemic? Sarah laughed. Who, she asked Lucy, believed what the Government said?

Of course she’d go and see her parents. She tittered some more, as if the pandemic was all a big joke and the Government making its rules up for a laugh. Worse, she seemed to be mocking Lucy, who was shocked and upset that someone she considered a friend could take this approach. Lucy herself has been a very careful rule-abider, embracing the regulations in both spirit and letter.

Versions of this kind of tribal warfare have been playing out throughout the lockdown, as a plethora of responses to rules and risk has emerged. There were the neighbours keeping a beady eye on those who stepped out more than once a day. There were the snarky signs appearing on windows. There were those who wouldn’t be seen dead outside without a mask, and those who never bothered, even in shops. And there were those who thumbed their nose at the whole thing entirely, going to illicit garden parties etc – not bothered by either catching or passing on the illness.

After weeks of finger-pointing and bickering about how to interpret the rules, we have finally entered a moment of peak corona tribalism.

Last week, as the storm surrounding Dominic Cummings continued to rage, the country broke into factions. Many were outraged – and want him gone. To this tribe, the rules must be followed to the letter, by everyone at all times. Others thought Cummings’s actions were hypocritical but not career-ending; these understood his motivations and may have done the same, but they despise it in him. Some are simply obsessed with his failure to apologise. And then there’s the relatively small tribe (mine) which thinks he showed admirable, relatable common sense, correctly acting upon the assumption that the rules were never meant to be followed at all costs. Indeed, with corona, it’s all got very complicated.

Brexit was tribal, but it was simpler: you were either for or against, or over it. The pandemic, however, has forced each of us to reckon with our personal response not to broad-brush political change, but to our own mortality, our bodies, the entire notion of risk, personal and collective, and the imprint of unprecedented intrusion from on high into how we live our lives. It has also invited us to pass judgment on how other people interpret all these things, too.

The proliferation of issues on which to judge people means lots of unexpected new fractures in friendships. Friends with whom I generally agree on everything political have been horrified at my response to Cummings. I’ve had seething messages from some laying down the law, as they see it, on his hideous, unconscionable toxicity.

One of the clearest and most profound tribal divides to emerge, however, has nothing to do with politics or opinion: key worker vs WFH-er (work from home). Over the past few weeks, I’ve got to know someone from a nearby flat who reads in our communal garden. He works with adults with learning disabilities, shares a flat with three others and takes the bus every day. When I mention lockdown, he laughs, pointing out he’s never had a lockdown. When I fret about distances, or hand-washing, he looks bewildered and I immediately see how I must appear: as a delicate lockdown flower. (Which I am, thank you.)

A doctor acquaintance is the same. He also rides the bus to the hospital every day, probably had coronavirus some time in April, and looks off, bored, into space while I talk about my Covidrelated anxieties. He wears a mask on the bus for other people’s sake, rather than his own. The idea of even getting on a bus, meanwhile, is enough to fill me with fear.

Whoever you are, as workplaces, pubs, cinemas, museums and travel find their feet in the drearily uncertain middle distance, masks and other checks will become an even greater part of life. There will be more rules to police and more to ignore, and so a new kaleidoscope of fears, preferences, convictions and judgments will soon be upon us. Once-solid friendships will become fraught.

But with no vaccine in sight, a different tribe is bound to win: those who decide that they can, and must, get used to living with the monster in the shadows.

Friends I usually agree with are horrified at my response to the Cummings affair