Spring Memories

I love the beginning of spring. The air is warmer. The evenings are brighter. Birds are kicking off their karaoke season.

But five years ago, it was not such an optimistic time. At some point in March 2020, I found myself wondering if it was safe to take my bins outside. What if a stray COVID particle was lingering in the air — ready to pounce on anyone who opened the door?

Like a lot of people on the very online right, I had been getting more and more concerned about COVID-19 since January. It seemed obvious that it would migrate from China across the world, and the scenes from Wuhan looked apocalyptic. That Western and international institutions were so complacent — recall the head of the WHO insisting that stigma was more dangerous than the disease — only made us more alarmed.

A lot of esoteric right-wing posters were dressed in hazmat suits in their profile pictures on Twitter. Tech nerds were wearing masks and abstaining from handshakes. This was treated with mild bemusement in the press — until, of course, COVID barrelled into Europe and people began to lock their doors.

I think most of us were less scared for ourselves than for other people. I was concerned on behalf of my girlfriend at the time, who was asthmatic. Others were concerned for elderly relatives (which made the prospect of “killing granny” so powerful for establishment messaging). People often forget the extent to which we had voluntarily locked down even before government measures were imposed. The virus seemed more intimidating than the cops.

I remember stocking up for fear that it would become impossible to shop. For us, that meant Monster Energy, Polish beer and a few bags of pasta. Thank God it wasn’t a real dystopian situation or we would have been screwed. But at least we would have had a fun time first.

Soon, the unthinkable had become the unquestionable. Politicians who had pooh-pooh’d the idea of closures and masks were insisting on them with unprecedented severity. By and large, I agreed with them. In fact, almost everyone agreed with them. Apart from Peter Hitchens, the only dissenters I saw online had names like “Education Realist” and “the G-Man”.

It feels like it should have felt very sudden. But actually it almost felt like an inevitability. There were surreal moments — like seeing empty playgrounds, and wondering if a balaclava counted as a mask — at first the whole thing felt very natural, as if my mind had been preparing me for what would happen before I had quite appreciated what was happening.

Still, I had some reservations. I banged on about people not being screened or even treated for major illnesses like cancer and heart disease because of restrictions or plain old fear. By May, I was griping that lockdowns had “passed the point of diminishing returns”. Yet the problem is that once you back major government interventions, you can’t expect the state to adopt your own boutique framing of them. Once shutdowns had been imposed, they were not going to be lifted for a long, long time. The state was not going to be charged with “killing granny” just because the threat of institutional collapse — which had inspired shutdowns to begin with — had either passed or been exposed as overdramatic. They were here to stay.

Those of us who were concerned about harming others with the virus had to appreciate how others were being harmed by the shutdowns. Businesses collapsed. Young people’s education was disrupted. People died from illnesses that went undiagnosed. Mental illness spiked among teenagers. People grew more sedentary and (one presumes) unhealthy.

I’m not going to claim to know exactly what should have been done in March 2020. Certainly, the foremost “lockdown sceptics” did a lot of bad thinking themselves. But the fact remains that there is no solid evidence that lockdowns were especially effective in preventing deaths (see Philippe Lemoine’s “The Case Against Lockdowns” for more). When governments were imposing legislation that made martial law look lenient, this really, really mattered.

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I don’t blame anyone for being scared (as indeed was I). What was more obnoxious was the emergence of a kind of lockdown kitsch. At times, as David McGrogan wrote in an insightful essay, one has “the sense that one does not merely feel something, but that one shares in that feeling with a great society of others”. Swathes of liberal England got a kick out of the pandemic — revelling in the sense of virtuous community. People clapped for carers every evening. Tom Moore became a national icon for raising money for the NHS at the age of 99 (a phenomenon which soured when it became clear that his family had been exploiting the old man’s accomplishments). Scowling behind their smiles, hundreds of thousands of Britons reported their neighbours to the police for breaching lockdown regulations.

The whole thing was like Albert Camus’ The Plague as directed by Richard Curtis. Granted, in crises there can be value in a stoical sense of “we’re all in this together”. But its value is contingent on the value of the cause. It is striking — as in the case of the strange and cynically engineered outbursts of communal feeling that smother indignation in the wake of terrorist attacks — that the compelling leftist critique of the Blitz nostalgia that had been draped across Osbornite austerity was nowhere to be found.

Sometimes, you could almost think that the pandemic was a bit of a jolly lark — a chance to slow down, do yoga and get into baking. For others, of course, it means poverty and frustration — but you can’t expect liberal England to look through its bourgeois bubble.

The combined severity and sentimentality became unforgivable when formal and informal COVID regulations were softened to enable the Black Lives Matter protests. Visiting loved ones — even dying loved ones — had not been considered a valid excuse. Participating in an orgy of iconoclasm based on the cruel death of a man on the other side of the world, though, absolutely fine. Truly, it was a radicalising experience — but not always in the sense that its architects intended.

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I hated lockdown. It had its charming moments (like realising that walks with friends could be as fun as drinks). But months of working in my living room and lying in my bedroom made me feel as if the walls were closing in. Granted, there is an element of privilege to saying that. Some disabled people can never go outside, lockdown or no lockdown. But the increasing sense of irrationality compounded the frustration.

Watching my mother die through the screen of a smartphone was the lowest moment — an experience both painfully real and eerily disassociative. Of course, I cannot appeal for exceptional pity here. Others had endured the same emotions when they were hundreds of metres from their loved ones and not a thousand miles away.

It would be easy to declare “never again” — but it would be too easy. There could well have been a virus which, like the Spanish Flu, targeted the young as virulently as the old. Institutions were very wary of acknowledging the unequal effects of the virus — as they would be later when monkeypox was largely targeting gay men — but the fact is that Mother Nature does not have our qualms about discrimination — and the pandemic might have been a lot worse if she did. One can acknowledge the very real horrors of COVID-19 while also accepting that it could have been far worse.

When it comes to the origins of COVID-19, I don’t know enough to side with the lab leak hypothesis or the zoonosis theory. Gain of function research and wildlife markets both seem pretty damn irresponsible to me — as does factory farming. If you’re confident that a far worse disease will not emerge from such environments, I wish I had your sunny disposition.

But I hope that the pandemic taught me something. First, be wary of a consensus, but be wary of a counter-consensus too. The establishment was wrong, first in its complacency and then in its alarmism, but the dissident right’s commitment to esoteric pessimism had not been rational enough to begin with. Second, what can seem like an inevitable course of action can be both a choice and a bad one. We are fortunate that Sweden ended up being such a bold and striking counter-example. Third, the “precautionary principle” can mask carelessness in vigilance. If you’re going to do X in response to Y, you have to be damn sure that it isn’t going to end up being worse — or, at least, if you’re in power, you have to be flexible enough to adapt if it is.

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I was wondering why there hasn’t been more discourse about COVID-19, five years on. Millions of people died, of course, and freedom was curbed on an unprecedented scale. You’d think it might have left a more vivid impression.

I thought it was because the whole period was too weird and depressing to remember. This would make sense, but perhaps it doesn’t seem quite weird enough. I wrote in late 2020 that the pandemic “has led to a kind of reductio ad absurdum of modernity”. With or without lockdowns, we have fewer relationships, fewer kids and fewer friends. With or without lockdowns, shops and pubs are closing. With or without lockdowns, more of us are working from home. I don’t want to minimise the exceptional misery and stupidity of the pandemic age — but it feels a bit like we are all accepting the extended lockdown of the soul.

As the air gets warmer, and the evenings get brighter, and the birds kick off their karaoke season, let’s make the most of the spring. Who knows what the world will be like next year.