We will look back on these wretched few months with something close to nostalgia
Remember this moment. Fix in your mind the petty privations and prohibitions: the fingerwagging admonitions, the officious police, the tattle-tale neighbours. Recall, in the years ahead, what it meant to have children cooped up at home for months, the schools empty for the convenience of teaching unions, the playgrounds padlocked for… well, for no very obvious reason. Think about the economic anxiety felt by almost everyone in the private sector.
Imprint these sensations carefully in your hippocampus while the restrictions linger. Because, if you don’t, you may later fall prey to a bogus nostalgia about the whole squalid episode.
It is already starting. The imposition of house arrest on the entire population is being reimagined as a time of healing, a time when the skies were empty of aircraft and full of birdsong, a time when families sat down for meals together.
As the lockdown itself becomes more remote, these incidental aspects will come to define our collective reminiscence. We will forget about the long queues and the cancelled gap years, about the job losses and the race riots. We will remember, instead, the board games with our children, the daily walks, the socially distanced VE Day celebrations.
Memory plays tricks like that. I never cease to be amazed by the number of people from former Warsaw Pact countries who miss – or, rather, who have convinced themselves that they miss – living under communism. They don’t pine for the empty shelves, obviously, or the secret police or the closed borders. But they pine for, or think they pine for, the sense of community engendered by shared opposition to a dictatorship. They look back fondly on an era when, with nothing to buy and nowhere to go, they had more time to read and talk and think.
It goes back a long way, this hunger for simplicity. “Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread?” asked the Prophet Isaiah 28 centuries ago, “and your labour for that which satisfieth not?”
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the appeal. Over the past 14 weeks, my three-year-old and I have played football every day, built a model Eiffel Tower and learned the flags of 200 countries. I am probably fitter than I have ever been in adulthood. My garden is certainly in better nick. I have caught up with distant cousins on far continents whom I ought to speak to more often.
But there is nothing to stop me doing those things in normal times – just as there is nothing to stop today’s Poles or Czechs reading more. Our wistfulness rests on the terrifying premise that the full force of the state needs to be deployed to coerce us into more wholesome pleasures.
With the coronavirus, there is an added ingredient. A sense of communal calamity, or at least of shared threat, flicks switches in our brains, making us more publicspirited, more generous, closer to the people around us.
It was Émile Durkheim, the father of sociology, who first noticed that depression and self-harm became less common during wars and natural disasters. He would have predicted the fall in suicide rates over the past three months. He would predict, too, that the rate will shoot back up once the sense of emergency gives way to the dreary realisation that we are all poorer.
The American scientist Charles Fritz, who studied the psychology of natural disasters during and after the Second World War, had a convincing explanation for why people felt better during times of stress. A war, an epidemic or an earthquake, he said, produced “a community of sufferers” who felt more closely bound to one another by their shared experience than is normal in a modern Western society, where people are generally safe, but where they are likelier than any previous generation to live away from their extended families and to sleep in their own bedrooms. In this sense, rather than the dreich and protracted misery of communism, an apter parallel is with the Blitz when, on all but one of 57 consecutive nights, the Luftwaffe sought to bomb London into submission. To the surprise of the authorities, who had contingency plans for mass panic and societal breakdown, most people responded with resilience and cheerfulness.
Afterwards, for all the reasons given by Durkheim and Fritz, there was widespread nostalgia. Not for the bombs themselves, of course, but for the accompanying sense of togetherness, purpose and patriotism. People quickly forgot about communal shelters swimming in urine, recalling instead how sweet the air tasted in the early morning after the bombers had passed.
During the grey and indebted years that followed, those 57 heroic days burned commensurately brighter in our national psyche. The notion that that war was in fact the proximate cause of Britain’s relative poverty was too unbearable to contemplate. Now, though, we can see clearly enough that the decades of decline were caused by our slowness in dismantling the wartime command economy and by the massive debts we took on between 1940 and 1945.
Today, our national debt has again risen to post-war levels. The first seven weeks of the closures wiped away the previous 11 years of economic growth. And yet, exactly as after 1945, we are in no hurry to remove the economic controls, even though their original justification has passed. Whether because of the effectiveness of the Government’s stay-at-home messaging or because of the generosity of the furlough scheme, Britain is a global outlier in its reluctance to return to work.
Whatever happens, we are going to be poorer. Businesses are going into liquidation, tax revenues are dwindling, unemployment is soaring. We simply won’t be able to afford the things we used to be able to afford – whether as individuals or as a nation.
We shall, in short, have plenty of time to look back on the past three months. And my guess is that, even if there is no second spike, even if the pain turns out, in retrospect, to have been needless, we shall somehow convince ourselves that we enjoyed it.
‘Our wistfulness rests on the premise that the state needs to coerce us into more wholesome pleasures’