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The Basic Limiting Principle: “There are certain limiting principles which we unhesitatingly take for granted as the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined. Some of these seem to be self-evident. Others are so overwhelmingly supported by all the empirical facts which fall within the range of ordinary experience and the scientific elaborations of it (including under this heading orthodox psychology) that it hardly enters our heads to question them. Let us call these Basic Limiting Principles.” *C.D. Broad in his scholarly piece, “The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy”, 1949, in the journal Philosophy.
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While listening to a recent National Review podcast of “The Editors”, the discussion among the editors turned to the issue of masks, as a prophylactic in government guidance or commands regarding the epidemic. I recall that the general consensus of the 3 editors was supportive. The more their view settled in my head, the more disturbed I became. Broad’s limiting principle came to mind, as did the possibility of severe social and psychological disfigurement from this “new normal”. My conclusion: this has to end sooner rather than later.
One editor, Charles C.W. Cooke, true to his libertarian bias, equated the mask to the right to bear arms. The comparison is foolish, but I get it. The Second Amendment is integral to our understanding of ourselves as a self-governing people in a citizen republic. How does mask-wearing fit into that constitutional construct? It doesn’t, unless disguising one’s appearance in public is the “new normal”. Conceal-carry doesn’t undermine fundamental social interaction like conducting public life from behind a mask.
For the podcast participants, a great emphasis was placed on its usefulness in an epidemic, citing Asians in 1 million+ urban centers who are accustomed to wearing them in their pollution-addled air. Granted, but the excuse of an epidemic had better be carefully defined with much more than boundaries of geography and longevity. However, the treatment of this contagion is morphing into a never-ending crusade. We are about to confront the limits adumbrated by sociologist Robert K. Merton in his law of unintended consequences as we continue to treat the issue as the 14th-century’s Black Death. A simple plank (masks) in the program to fight the disease may result in something more than “flattening the curve”. It will flatten our psyche and our social connectivity. The emotional, social, and economic negative spinoffs will be profound.
The practice of hiding much of our face in public, and a good portion of everything else, is indicative of near-totalitarian social and political regimes. Does Sharia and the burka remind you of anything? Do the Guidance Squads of the Islamic Republic of Iran remind you of anything? No need to worry about the niqab’s impracticality for ID photos. Women are not supposed to drive … and vote, be educated, be business leaders, or stray too much outside the home in many of these places. The rule applies to only women, but it conveys an alarming assumption about the person. Hiding the face – or a good portion of it – is incompatible in a free society of free individuals.
How do we freely interact if the person is a stranger and if the contact isn’t carefully staged beforehand? Identification from the bridge of the nose up is nearly impossible; the voice is muffled as in the electronic distortion to protect a Mafioso turncoat; the initial attraction of people to each other is marred by the absence of two-thirds of the face. Identifying criminal suspects becomes impossible since the photo on the ID is difficult to match with the hidden face, unless the thing is removed thereby defeating its purpose. Plus, how do you distinguish the bank robbers from the crowd of seeming bank robbers on the street? The whole thing is ludicrous for finding a mate and protecting people’s savings accounts.
It’s beyond ludicrous. It’s creepy. Have you noticed the mangling of the social space under a regime of masks and social distancing? Yes, I’ll add social distancing since it is the policy cousin to the masks; its purpose being the same: reducing the risk of picking up and transmitting the bug. A restaurant resembles Madam Tussauds wax museum with mannequins seated at tables to give the patrons a phony sense of bustle in an atmosphere of lockdown. I’m reminded of the makeshift suburbia in nuclear tests. Others have invented ghoulish alterations to eat and drink through the things. Does the “new normal” look like this? Huxley or Orwell couldn’t have surpassed what we are proposing to do to ourselves.
And then there’s the plastic experience of simulating a touch, handshake, or hug through a broadband image on a monitor. Now we are one step closer to the digitized world of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” (acted by Tom Cruise in the movie). Masks, mannequins, and Thanksgiving dinners limited to the immediate household and TV images of grandma and grandpa promises to be our “new normal” if some of our overlords get their way. What happens to a society with much less personal contact? We become a people awfully resembling solipsistic automatons, a shadow of our former selves.
The “new normal” verbiage, and what it advocates, with its masks and ersatz social life, should be dispensed with immediately, except in targeted locations with flare-ups and serious rates of infection. Charles C.W. Cooke, this isn’t the same as a coal mine. Masks are limited to miners, not as a public ethos for everyone. Apples and oranges, buddy.
Once breached, the standard of masks imposition comes easier the next time. If it was good for the coronavirus, why wouldn’t they be good every flu season … or permanently? After all, human beings are walking founts of pathogens, at all times. Forget about that passionate French kiss. Forget about foreplay. Expect an intensification of the birth dearth. I wonder what romance looks like behind masks and a restaurant of mannequins. My guess: it’ll be as rare as the births.
Too bad the Wampanoags in the 17th century didn’t have their own blue-state governors. They wouldn’t need the warrior face paint to appear fearsome since they’d be frightening enough in a N95 mask. They’d also be around today in greater numbers given their complete lack of herd immunity to the Europeans’ influenza, smallpox, measles, and typhus. But then again, knowing the probable negative effect of masks on romance, they’d still experience empty maternity wards. They’d still end up with the same declining numbers.
Herd immunity (the possession of the antibody in enough people to dampen a contagion’s spread) is the key. Here’s how it worked in Harris County, Tx., regarding a measles outbreak.
Being as isolated as they were – and as we are trying to be with sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and masks – the Wampanoags were virologically innocent children waiting for death. Since Wampanoag medicine didn’t include vaccines, they either faced death or salvation from a European retreat from the continent. Given the acquisitive nature of human beings, the latter didn’t happen. For us, we can simulate herd immunity with vaccines, but the things are partially successful and difficult to create. Holding out for one in the meantime could result in some of us ending up like many of the Wampanoags or experiencing a Kafkaesque mangling of life and society, or both.
My choice is to aggressively clamp down in hotspots at the onset to limit the devastation, then loosen ASAP. We must be mindful that after a while the social and economic costs come to be insurmountable. Lockdowns should be narrowly construed and then dropped like a hot potato. 2 months is too long in the absence of flare-ups, and even then only applied locally.
Herd immunity or no, vaccine or no, we must recognize that the risk of contagion is always present. Paraphrasing Matthew 26:11: you will always have pathogens among you. It’s a truism that should restrain us from doing the same thing again. No nation can endure the constant and ugly prospect of an on/off life overhanging us every fall and winter. The lockdowns, business closures, social distancing, shelter-in-place, and masks came with no real sunset provisions. If you live in the disease’s epicenter in the Northeast, you might look upon the smothering and mauling of social and economy life differently. Anywhere else, it’s grotesque in the extreme.
Down with masks and the rest of it. As per C.D. Broad, we have to acknowledge the explicit and inherent limits.
RogerG