Shall I tell you the worst thing? I suspect that people are going to look back, years from now, with nostalgia. We are actually going to miss, or at least imagine that we miss, the horrors we are now going through.
It will be like the London Blitz — the misery forgotten, the “spirit” recalled and exalted. When we talk about the events of 2020, we won’t be thinking about the poverty, the squalor, the petty restrictions. We will remember, instead, the mood of national solidarity and purpose.
Does that strike you as implausible? Are you, perhaps, reading these words cooped up in a small apartment with frazzled children? Are you desperate for the shops to reopen? Are you badly in need of a haircut? Are you wondering whether your business will survive or whether you will have a job to go to after all this? Are you worried about family members stranded far away?
Almost all of us are in at least one or two of these categories. Yet the human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary. Very quickly, we learn to normalize and work around restrictions, to focus on the positive, to take big pleasure in small things. When we reminisce, it is often the tiniest things that loom the largest.
A lot of us, I suspect, have been in touch with friends and family whom we don’t usually speak to as often as we’d like. I chatted through Zoom to my cousin in Philadelphia this week. At both ends of the call, small children were tearing about with the frustrated energy that comes from closed schools and locked playgrounds. And yet, we found ourselves swapping notes almost merrily about the things we were doing: family movie nights, treasure hunts for the children, the novelty of all of us all sitting down for meals together every day.
True, my cousin and I are luckier than most. He and his wife both work in the academic sector and so are not faced with the loss of their livelihoods. I, like most writers, was already largely working from home. Neither of us is among the millions who have already lost their jobs in Britain and the United States or the many millions more who will do so if the closures remain in place beyond Easter. But even those of my neighbors who are losing everything — the osteopath in my village, who had a thriving business until a month ago, has suddenly gone from 300 patients a week to zero — are bizarrely sanguine.
Why? Why are we putting up so cheerfully not only with economic ruin but with abominable restrictions on our freedom? In Britain, some police forces have taken with undisguised glee to the crisis, ordering people not to travel too far even for solitary walks, encouraging neighbors to snitch on each other if they are outdoors too often.
The answer lies not in the field of politics but in that of evolutionary biology. We are tribal creatures, and at times like this, we elevate the collective above the individual. Shutdowns, bans, and the persecution of dissidents become popular. People crave the smack of firm government. No politician loses votes for erring on the side of caution. No administration is criticized for acting too firmly. In Britain, as elsewhere, newspapers were demanding a “lockdown” (a ghastly term borrowed from prison) long before ministers imposed one.
In his brilliant short book Tribe, Sebastian Junger interviewed a number of people who had lived through the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. Although, naturally, they were glad that the war was over, they almost all also reported a sense of loss. They missed the feeling of simplicity and collective endeavor that the conflict had engendered, the way neighbors ceased to be strangers and became part of an extended family, the way everyone knew what needed to be done. Junger explained that crises of this kind bring us closer to our hunter-gatherer nature than anything we normally experience in an affluent Western society, where we live and sleep alone and where personal autonomy is a supreme value. It is why cases of depression and suicide actually fall at times like these.
Still, we should make a point of remembering the actual, miserable inconveniences of these days. We should lodge them firmly in our memories so that years from now, when people start enthusing about those innocent times when the skies were empty of aircraft and filled with birdsong, when we all had time to play board games with our children and the neighbors looked out for one another, we recall the real, wretched experience.
