Pandemic proves that America isn’t awkward enough
Ever since vaccines became available, people have been joking that the return to normal life would be awkward. After more than a year of relative isolation, so the half-earnest predictions went, we would surely find our social muscles atrophied. Even small talk or maintaining eye contact would feel like monumental achievements as we traded in our sweatpants and tentatively crawled out of our shelter-in-place hideaways.
Since becoming fully vaccinated, I have found the opposite to be true. Instead of paralyzing me with awkwardness, returning to normal social life has been a profound relief — not only in terms of relieving my boredom and isolation, but also by finally giving me the clear social norms that I have been lacking for the past year. While it is admittedly the least of our worries, this pandemic year has been one of the most awkward periods of my lifetime. And that awkwardness, however uncomfortable, has a lot to tell us about the state of society’s social fabric.
I remember vividly how the most mundane of actions suddenly became minefields of awkwardness.
The expectation of indoor masking became the closest to an unambiguous, universal social norm we had in many parts of the country; yet instead of relieving awkwardness, the masking norm often exacerbated it. The problem was one of enforcement, which largely relied on persuasion and social pressure, putting retail and restaurant employees in exceedingly awkward positions. For the masked, the closest thing to a solution — other than shouting matches or threats to call security — was simply to avoid unmasked people whenever possible.
On one level, the fact that masking became such a highly charged issue — even a sign of personal morality — reflects the extreme political polarization of American society. But it also reflects how desperate we were for some kind of stable norm, some way to know for sure that we were doing the right thing. Conservatives talked themselves into believing that refusing to mask was an important moral issue. Meanwhile, liberals reacted to the CDC guidance allowing the vaccinated to go unmasked almost with regret.
The supposed land of the free is also a deeply hierarchical society. The anti-maskers who got into fights with waiters and retail clerks were reacting not just to being told what to do, but to being told what to do by someone they believed should be serving them. For their part, liberals present themselves as some combination of educator and preacher, proclaiming the truth from on high. Few of us have developed the habits and skills required for meaningful discussion on truly important issues. Such conversations tend to devolve into either a monologue or a shouting match.
Overall, what the awkwardness of pandemic lifestyle has shown us is that American society isn’t awkward enough. In our haste to avoid awkwardness, we have cut ourselves off from each other. We treat our fellow citizens as servants, as students, or simply as obstacles — choosing the comfort of clear hierarchical norms over the awkwardness of open-ended and unpredictable encounters with our equals. What is most important in life — and what we desperately need more of as a society — happens in those awkward inbetween spaces that the rules did not anticipate.
The real danger is not that we will forget how to behave in “normal” society, but that we will use our discomfort with awkwardness as an excuse to return unthinkingly to our antisocial social norms. To rebuild our life together in a truly human way, we need to get past snap judgments and risk the painfully awkward dialogue that is the unavoidable prelude to real change.