The great pandemic balancing act
Our prime minister is in isolation at home with his wife, who is afflicted with the coronavirus. That makes this pandemic personally relatable for all Canadians, if it was not already.
During times of public health concerns, we expect our leaders to make a brave show of it, visiting Toronto’s Chinatown during the SARS outbreak, or drinking the water after a contamination scare. Not this time.
Discretion is now the better part of valour. We have been saying that for nearly five centuries, even before Shakespeare employed the expression in “Henry IV, Part I.”
Over the course of Thursday, I received a half dozen emails from various entities about the coronavirus pandemic. All of them, in one way or another, assured me that health and safety was their number 1 priority.
We are discovering now, in the face of a global pandemic that’s moving at a frightening speed, what a culture of safety looks like when taken to a necessary extreme. After this pandemic recedes, it remains to be seen what the long-term results will be.
Over recent decades, “safety first” has become a widespread management principle. Perhaps 30 years ago, one would have seen it written at most construction sites, or industrial installations with heavy machinery.
Then it migrated into parts of the culture dealing with children — child care, schools, summer camps, sports programs and churches. The “safety of our children is our first priority” was the message in various ways. Ontario has decided to shut down its public schools for three weeks. But in recent years, schools have been closed, or buses cancelled, for an increasing number of reasons — icy roads, cold temperatures, even forecasted bad weather that did not materialize.
It is always safer to stay home than go out; usually safer to do nothing than something. Thus it is always at least partly insincere to say that safety is the first priority when it really isn’t. It’s safer not to have a factory than to have one; it’s safer not to play minor hockey than to play it. A culture that truly put safety first would not do much of anything because life is risky.
Greater risk requires greater precautions. Driving a car is always a risk. Driving in a howling blizzard is more risky still. Cancelling a road journey because there is always the chance of accident is foolish. Cancelling a road trip due to a blizzard is not.
A pandemic gives us a glimpse — and hopefully a glimpse, rather than an extended look — at what life really is like when safety is the top priority. All “non- essential” travel to infected zones stops. And there is precious little that is absolutely essential when shops, restaurants, offices, schools and universities are closed. Aside from food and medicine, almost all important things can be considered non-essential.
“Social distancing” is advised during a pandemic, because the other person is a risk. There is something of a metaphor in that, no? The other person always constitutes a risk. Strangers could be putative thieves, or assailants. Even friends could betray us. The closer the person, the greater the risk — hence social distancing to keep away from the virus.
Social distancing in the midst of a pandemic is prudent, but it has been a cultural problem for some time now. Video games are safer than playing outside, social media avoids the pitfalls of actual conversation, pornography corrupts the heart, but shields it, too. Not for nothing did the United Kingdom create a minister for loneliness in the midst of a wired society.
So we live these strange, destabilizing days as not only a public health emergency, but a cultural phenomenon. How to balance safety and risk? How to balance openness to the other with protection from the other? How will we, after this passes, regain our balance?
Will the temporary move to online classes in universities mark an irrevocable step away from the risks of being together in the classroom? All the discussion about “safe spaces” on campus in recent years now looks different in the coronavirus light.
Will the ban on visitors to nursing homes and hospitals — which is highly effective in stopping the transmission of viral infections to vulnerable people — make such places safer for the body, but lonelier for the soul?
Safety and risk, openness and protection — that balance defines a culture. We have been knocked off balance for the foreseeable future. But being knocked down gives us a chance to see things from a new perspective. How will things look when we get back up?
it remains to be seen what the long-term results will be.