Coronavirus: The first post-truth pandemic tinged with Brexit thinking

We are infecting one another with fear and anxiety, which is spreading faster than the virus, says Andy Martin

Panic-buying when there is enough food to go around creates shortages (AP)

No more hugs. No more handshakes. No touching. We are entering the new age of social distancing. As for “how are you?” – it’s no longer a polite hello. It’s a real question, verging on interrogation. But do they know how they are; do they have it? And if they do, are they going to be honest about it? Wouldn’t it be better to avoid asking, assume the worst and steer clear?

Obviously, I’m already infected: by the virus of fear and paranoia, the epidemic of suspicion. But I’m trying to calm down and get it under control and not become more misanthropic than I really have to be. The facts are that, ultimately, we will probably all get a dose of Covid-19 and some of us (a very small percentage) won’t make it. But our reaction to it is also viral and spreading faster than the coronavirus itself. We are infecting one another with our fears and anxieties.

So much so that, just for once, for a short while, the government started to sound almost reasonable and moderate by comparison. The PM and his scientific minders were stressing the need to be measured and responsible and proportionate, to act, but not to overact. I was already in favour of hand-washing before this started, so I’m glad that’s catching on. Similarly, not coughing or sneezing in someone else’s face. The basic prerequisites for everyday life.

But the popular mood was racing way ahead of the government. It wanted “draconian”. It got draconian, at the expense of shafting pubs and clubs and cafés. (Draco, it is worth remembering, was an Athenian lawmaker responsible for harsh laws who was eventually driven out of Athens – and it's loosely connected to dragons, Dracula and Draco Lucius Malfoy, of Slitherin house). The Premier League shut itself down, without being asked to, as soon as the Arsenal manager tested positive. Teachers were impatient and wanted the schools to close, which they duly did. Psychologically, we are already into lockdown. No football, no classes, in case anyone gets sick. In which case we might as well give up on sports and education completely, forever. The message now is do panic and don’t be calm and carry on.

The new Oxford Street mentality exemplifies the irrational fear factor at its most acute. Mingled with xenophobia. Several young Brits attack a guy from Singapore, and give him a severe beating, while also lecturing him in some morally superior way: “We don’t want your ‘effing coronavirus here, thanks!” Thugs are parading around as if they are the emergency services. Just as when Jews were blamed for the bubonic plague, illness has become a pretext for racist violence. It is usually hard to observe social distancing while walking down Oxford Street. It’s probably easier now. But making aggressive physical contact with anyone who looks like they’re a foreigner is not exactly informed by medical science.

The paradox of our current crisis is that we communicate more than ever and yet we have never been more afraid of one another

The paradox of our current crisis is that we communicate more than ever and yet we have never been more afraid of one another. Our Oxford Street have-a-go hooligan heroes are an instance of the virus of fear and loathing in action. But viral thinking is normal. Thoughts are transmitted from human to human as if by contagion or infection. Bertrand Russell reckoned that there were two kinds of knowledge: one comes from “experience”, the other from “description”. But description – or what we would now call “information” (which bears little or no connection to truth) – has far outstripped sense data. Most of our ideas about other people and about ourselves are not based on solid evidence, but come to us through myth and fake news and Facebook. Science arose out of a sense that there must be a better way of doing things: let’s try making hypotheses and testing them through experiment and rejecting them if they don’t work. Science is the realm of uncertainty.

A rare sight of an empty Oxford Street as fear – and the virus – spread (Reuters) (REUTERS)

But we crave certainty. We need to get ahead of the evidence, dissatisfied with any ifs, buts and maybes. The malaise of the moment has little to do with the numbers. There is a theory (and it is only a theory, but an increasingly plausible one) that our brains are partly the product of a viral invasion at some point in the distant past.

This was a cognitive-friendly virus that made a positive contribution to consciousness and the swelling up of the human brain. But the side-effect is that the way our synapses fire depends on our densely packed population of neurons bumping into one another and shaking hands (at reasonably high speed, most of the time) and passing it on. And then we pass it on to someone else. We are all hosts to self-replicating rumour and constantly spitting out droplets of thought. Small wonder then if we do behave virally and go about stealing hand sanitiser from hospitals and emptying supermarket shelves with our panic-buying. This is the epidemic of stupidity.

The first virus wasn’t even identified until the end of the 19th century by Dmitri Ivanovsky in his study of diseased tobacco plants

The very concept of a virus is a relatively recent invention. Viruses have probably been around since the dawn of time, before the dinosaurs. They got here first, but they really got into their stride after we gave up hunter-gathering for farming and settled down to create civilisation. The Bible, Rousseau and James C Scott in Against the Grain all reckon we were probably better off before we started growing wheat. Civilisation, sickness, and fear have been inseparable. But the first virus (from the Latin for poison) wasn’t even identified until the end of the 19th century by Dmitri Ivanovsky in his study of diseased tobacco plants: the bacteria were all filtered out, so it couldn’t all be explained by Pasteur. The bad news for bacteria is that even they can have viruses.

Marshall McLuhan spoke of the “virulent” effects of media. I think that it was the French, now subject to Macronian measures, in their analysis of the way ideas are propagated through time and space, who started the theory of an intellectual virus that could affect or infect our minds. But it was our own Richard Dawkins, the biologist, who came up with the “meme” as a unit of cultural transmission. He thought of it as being like a gene, but he was thinking of ideas like “God” that get handed down, vertically, through the generations. And that word has now been hijacked anyway. “Virus” is surely better for the horizontal, electronic, semi-instantaneous global dissemination of fear.

The success of Covid-19 owes much to our connectedness. Whether or not its origin is related to bats in Wuhan, its speed of transmission is down to globalisation and the relative ease of travel. Our reaction, naturally enough, is to close down transnational traffic and amplify border control. We have all become anti-globalisation. But that reaction has been intensified by connectivity. This is the first post-truth pandemic.

Remember swine flu? Only just over 10 years ago. Another pandemic. Not that dissimilar to coronavirus. Covid-19 may be more virulent, but we are also infinitely more paranoid than before, more hysterical

We are irrepressible doom-mongers and we were already geared up for the end of the world. When I interviewed the Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees recently, he said: “Please don’t mention X, whatever you do.” Because X was the thing (statistically improbable) that would bring about the annihilation of our solar system. And as soon as you mention X it’s the one thing that everyone zeroes in on. His X was light years away; the new X-factor is strictly terrestrial. But we automatically tend to think in terms of an apocalypse wiping out the earth. In a way it seems like a solution – let’s start again, from scratch. Year Zero.

Remember “swine flu” (a variant of H1N1 flu)? Only just over 10 years ago. Another pandemic. Not that dissimilar to coronavirus. Covid-19 may be more virulent, but we are also infinitely more paranoid than before, more hysterical. The politics of fear was already in place, only waiting for a good hook to hang its hat on.

Swine flu caused a pandemic in Asia in 2009 but there was no social media to fan the flames of fear

There are certain obvious super-spreaders, the “entrepreneurs of fear” as Frank Furedi called them. When President Trump spoke of a “foreign virus” he paved the way for a neurotic reaction by ramping up fear of Mexicans and Chinese people and just about anyone else who is not American. The irony of “Project Fear” in the UK is that Project Fear theorists were themselves guilty of stoking up irrational fear of the other. Our reaction to the advent of the new virus may be “science-led”, as the government keeps saying, but it is tinged with post-Brexit thinking.

As if we didn’t have enough trouble with viruses, we invent our own and use them to infect computers. But the virus has become normalised. The other big difference from the last pandemic is the rise of social media. We speak of tweets or images or videos “going viral”. Our natural viral tendency has been re-engineered and reinforced by Twitter and Facebook. Social networks rely on contamination. Immune to the real, we become extremists online. The Internet is now almost indistinguishable from scams and scaremongering. Our inherent penchant for scapegoating and witch-burning gets unleashed online. But it often enough takes off in the streets too, exemplified in the headline, “BUDDHISTS GO ON RAMPAGE”.

Personally, I have long been a fan of self-isolation. Like anyone else, I occasionally need to get away from the madding crowd, close the shutters and lock the door. But I’m not going to throw away the key. The word “isolation” comes from “insula” or island, so it means that I have to operate as if I were an island, divided from other islands. But, as John Dunne pointed out, no man is an island, we are all “part of the main”. Quarantining (from quarante, or forty, suggesting 40 days as the appropriate period of isolation) was once the only means of treating illness and it still makes sense, but only if you are in fact ill.

‘Hell is other people’ wrote Sartre when he was living in Paris during the Occupation (Getty)

When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote “hell is other people” he was living in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War. And the default metaphor of being “at war” (with the so-called “invisible enemy”) has now established itself. Sartre wrote later that he had never felt more “free” than under the Occupation, but I suspect we are going to feel increasingly confined.

I think we need to ease up on using the word “vulnerable”. It only victimises and marginalises people. I am completely sympathetic to the 70+ constituency (or 65+ in California) who don’t want to be locked up in their own homes, regardless of how well they are. Enforced isolation, policed by the army and gendarmes as in France, is just imprisonment by another name. At this rate we’ll have vigilantes hunting down rogue OAPs or informing on them to the local Stasi. I know of one 70+ woman who said that she is going to pass herself off as 69. But what if the age-police ask for her ID? “Then I will fight,” she said. Good for her. She isn’t afraid. Maybe that attitude will go viral. I’m still going to walk the dog, come what may. I think that comes under the current government heading of “exercise”.

But there is an upside to the downside of the current crisis. It has been noticed that when a new virus comes along the rates of infection by the old viruses go down, because we are more risk-averse and have better standards of hygiene. And, according to the latest satellite data, toxic emissions are way down. We were flying too much before. Now we’re not flying at all and the airlines are going into a death-spiral. The roads are a lot quieter too, just as if Extinction Rebellion had set up one of its roadblocks. It’s a taste of the future, which is increasingly like the past. At least the old-fashioned telephone call is making a comeback as we postpone those face-to-face meetings.

Assuming we can ever meet anyone from now on, could it be that we will re-discover true romance? I heard of one young man who went to see his girlfriend in London, but felt that he could not, in all fairness, touch her, and they each returned to their self-imposed isolation. There is something beautiful, almost transcendent, about sublimation and yearning for the beloved from afar, like looking up at the moon.

Andy Martin is the author of Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me and With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher (published by Polity)