The West’s coronavirus response betrays a medieval mass neurosis

We nurse both a desire to save every single life and a dark age fear that the end is nigh and we deserve it

Can this really be happening? The British are famously – and proudly – the most difficult people in the world to terrorise or bully. The population that stood with tireless phlegm and humour against relentless bombardment, that made its historical mark with an unflinching rationality which never permits hysteria to sweep the public discourse, must now be chivied into leaving the confines of their own homes or the safe harbours of their immediate neighbourhoods.

Where did this come from? Well, on the one hand, it is perfectly clear: with an official government campaign deliberately designed not only to inculcate fear but to suggest that protection against the great threat was simple and clear-cut. And furthermore, obeying the “stay home” edict would not just protect you and your family but the rest of society as well. So locking yourself away was a moral obligation as well as an insurance against personal danger. The combination of anxiety and appeal to conscience was unbeatable – even when it involved deprivations of liberty which would once have been unconscionable.

So where are we now? Trapped in a state of what appears to be a spiral of fear so profound that it has become a permanent condition.

Of course, as everybody has said, the Government’s incoherent messages have something to do with this: one day there is solemn talk of an inevitable “second wave” and the next day... well you know the rest. But how much of this epidemic of national trepidation is pretext? We gather that a great many professionals – particularly those in the service industries on whom the British economy depends – are really quite smugly pleased with their new home-based arrangements. They are so relaxed, it seems, that when government ministers try to tell them that, actually, they might be putting their jobs at risk by becoming permanent ghost-like unpersons in the workplace, they rise up indignantly – as if refusing to venture into the office was now a right.

In fact, of course, the new government advice is simply common sense. If an employee can do his job from home indefinitely, so could a floating freelancer who will be owed no security, no sick leave, no health insurance, pension benefits or parental leave. All the protections and rights which employees have won over the generations will count for nothing once managements discover that most of the functions now carried out by those in formal employment can be done anywhere by people prepared to carry out the same functions on their own premises (and providing the necessary equipment at their own expense).

But surely those clever professionals in their home offices could have come to this conclusion themselves. Anybody who has ever worked in an organisation knows that there is more to a successful career than simply doing the tasks that are required. So why has such a large cohort of the educated population suddenly become so perversely obtuse about what was once a commonplace of adult life?

There has to be something bigger involved in this startling social development which nobody, so far as I recall, foresaw. Nursing my own personal grief over the loss of the cultural landmarks of the year – the concerts and the theatre, the opera and the art exhibitions – it suddenly struck me that virtually all of these events had been hit recently by their own traumatic identity crises. I found myself thinking aloud: “Western culture has been considering a means of suicide for awhile – maybe it’s finally found it.”

In moments of despair it had occurred to me that there was something of a medieval Dark Age about the current mood: Extinction Rebellion with its child saints and the self-flagellating woke culture. Being given an apparently sound reason to disable the most notable manifestations of that historical tradition which we are now being encouraged to denounce: what could be better suited to the weird, vaguely hysterical, fashion of the times? Fear may be the most dangerous contagion, but I am coming around to the view that this is not simple fear. It is a mass neurosis of which irrational and prolonged anxiety is a symptom: a corrosive loss of confidence and understanding of one’s role and identity which will, if it prevails, ultimately undermine the quality of modern life more irrevocably than any virus.

It is not only our official cultural institutions that are at risk here. One of the most fundamental principles of post-war liberal democracy is on trial – or, at least, coming up for examination.

The pandemic has been a moral predicament at least as much as a health crisis. When this whole bizarre chapter is finally over, the questions that needed to be put, but for which there was no time, will be luminously clear. How much should we have asked the general populace to sacrifice in order to protect what we knew, almost from the start, would be a quite small, vulnerable minority? Is personal liberty – normally of unquestionable value in a democracy during peacetime – expendable when healthcare systems are under sufficient strain? Where exactly do we draw the line on the right of governments to dictate the terms of personal relations?

Perhaps we have learnt more than we wished to know about the assumptions that underpin government in the modern era. If, for example, we accept that the state should provide healthcare in some more or less comprehensive form, does that mean that it has the right (or even the duty) to ensure that its medical infrastructure is not threatened? And does that provision oblige the state to put the protection of every individual life above, say, the quality of life of the unaffected majority? Is that the essence of the modern political conscience, and if it is, hadn’t we better discuss it openly?

So there was an odd mix here: on the one hand, the very modern idea that it is the duty of governments to prevent a single life being lost – a notion which the medieval mind with its fatalistic acceptance of mortality would have found absurd – combined with a dark dread of some unfathomable threat. Everybody is saying that we have lived through a strange time. It may have been stranger than we knew.

Terror of the coronavirus is not the only contagion. There is also the panic that comes from a loss of confidence in our role and identity in the modern world