Radical niceness will see society through the coronavirus crisis
We’re living through a time of national, and international, crisis. Our systems are falling apart, we’re being separated from friends and loved ones, frightened and unsure as to how life may be about to unfold. “Reality” seems to lurch from one worrying scenario to another. Information and advice keep changing — nothing holds fast, except the idea that something, everything, is going desperately awry.
As a psychotherapist who is used to working with clients who suffer from climate anxiety, I’ve become familiar with people’s fantasies and fears about the breakdown of life as we know it. Many of us have been hearing, and speaking, for years about the risks of societal collapse due to extreme weather, and the resulting disintegration of the systems that hold society in place — not to mention the devastating effects on nature.
However, few of us suspected that so many of our gloomiest predictions would be so suddenly realised, albeit for another reason (although pandemics are actually very much on the list of climate-related concerns). Like climate collapse, coronavirus is a threat to our livelihoods, our social lives, our health, our certainties.
Psychological trauma, which is one way to think about the effects of what’s going on today, comes from a combination of an extreme event and its difficult aftermath: “trauma” literally means “wound”. We know we will all be wounded in different ways by the pandemic, and suffer different losses. Our recoveries, too, will follow different paths. However, we can make choices now about how we act, and it is very important to our future recovery that each of us will be able to live with our actions afterwards. Doing the “right thing” — insofar as we can know what that is — is of the utmost importance.
History is full of catastrophes: world wars, tsunamis, terrorist attacks. These events are liable to expose the cracks in individuals and societies, as if we only find out who we really are when everything goes wrong. At the heart of many people’s climate-related fears is the notion that nothing really holds us together, that we will all become self-interested monsters the moment the shit hits the fan. On the flip side, extraordinary examples such as the French resistance, or the heroism of the firefighters dealing with 9/11, give us hope and allow us to continue to believe in the value of our human project. Emergency workers in the aftermath of Fukushima, too.
So which is it to be? Will coro
navirus make us fall apart, or stick together? Fights over loo rolls suggest the former, while people’s rush to join neighbourhood support groups suggests the latter. It will bring out the best and worst in people. When picking up the pieces after the event, remembered moments of bravery and selflessness are very often the things that help us to see the point in continuing. The choices we make now — even tiny ones — will make every difference to how we feel about ourselves, and others, in the future. The social bond is everything — and perhaps now that we’re unable to express it physically, even with a handshake, we can see it in even sharper relief. If we can trust ourselves not to behave badly, it will be far easier for us to believe that other people, too, can be decent. Good relations, in this troubling new reality, are perhaps the most valuable thing we have.
This crisis is peculiar in that it demands isolation. Still, we can — and must — be there for each other, acting responsibly, even if that means keeping one another at arm’s length (or even a little further). Many people’s worst fears are being realised — the unthinkable is happening. Kindness, care and fellow feeling are the qualities most likely to pull us through — even if we have to dish it out through the sometimes alienating medium of electronic devices.
“Niceness” is a much derided personal quality. It sounds polite, boring, and maybe even a bit fake. Nobody wants to date a Nice Guy — he’s only doing all that “understanding” crap to trick you into bed. But perhaps there’s a need right now for a more radical form of “niceness” — the actual, real deal. People who suffer from post-traumatic stress are often said to be trapped somehow in their own past, unable to disentangle themselves from the accidents, atrocities or tragedies that have befallen them. They relive the event as if hoping to correct it: “What if I had done things slightly differently? Turned left/said ‘no’/resisted temptation?” Although this pandemic has surely taken us by surprise, things aren’t moving so quickly that we can’t think and make choices about how to act within it. If we do the right thing by one another as much as we possibly can, there’s a hope that, whatever wounds we are about to sustain, we’ll be able to heal together.
•Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and author