Then she came back to herself. She was brought up in the war, her family were bombed out and so she understands risk and mortality. She got to the point where she wanted the choice to exercise her discretion. She didn’t agree that her choices should be taken away from her.
Sadly I think she has gone downhill – not because of the fear she felt, but because she hasn’t had enough to fill her days. The rug has been pulled away from her.
We would break the rules and visit her in the garden with a cup of tea. It was very important for all of us that we keep seeing each other. When I hear about people who let one of their family die alone in a care home, I am amazed that they put away the very essence of being human. How could they have been so compliant?
You have to work out the risks you want to take. We shouldn’t let fear manipulate us out of proper reasoning. I think people should be encouraged to be stoic and strong and we’ve had the exact opposite.
When we are navigating life, fear is not the right compass.
4. FEAR IS A PAGE OF THE GOVERNMENT PLAYBOOK
‘Fear is the foundation of most governments.’
John Adams, Founding Father and second President of the United States
Once upon a time, the fear of nuclear war travelled on the wind from a snowy, far-away country, where an abstract red button might be pushed. The Cold War marks a starting point – out of a number you could pick – in the trajectory of the threats we have faced in modern times and the fears they inspired. In this trajectory, the weapons we fear have become smaller and the enemies closer to home.
Covid did not travel on the wind of a weapon of mass destruction: we were told it is a stowaway on human breath. The threat is from the intimate whisper of your lover, pleasantries exchanged with a shop assistant, the convivial conversation of friends in a pub, a hug from your grandchild or silent travellers on public transport. The danger is not an enemy on the other side of the world, but every single person you come into contact with. And that means you are their enemy too.
The ‘war on terror’ bridged an arc of exploitable fears between the Cold War and Covid. Terrorists could inflict destruction anywhere, at any time. They might be from faraway lands, but they could also be among us in a world of leaky borders, immigration and air travel. Suspicion could be directed at anyone who leaves a bag on the train station platform, or who looks like a ‘certain type’. Terrorism is smaller in scale than nuclear war – it destroys a building, or a bus, not a continent or a country – yet it is unnervingly random.
But an infectious virus makes terrorists of us all. Anyone on the train station platform or next to you in the pub could present a danger, not just a ‘certain type’. The weapon we find ourselves at war with has reduced in size from nuclear bomb behemoth, to weapons concealed on the body, to the body itself. The enemy shifted from a foreign government, to foreign terrorists, to every single one of us.
Geopolitical borders are now not just between countries but between our own bodies. We must stay apart, observe distances of two metres, wear masks, not shake hands or hug. All for our own safety.
In 2020, we became the enemy.
Once lockdown was announced, passersby on pavements danced a nervous minuet, keeping a formal distance from each other, skirting the edges of pathways, or huffing and puffing with ostentatious righteousness into the road. The anxiety was palpable in public in the spring of 2020. Many proclaimed on social media how angry they were when people broke the rules and breached their two-metre perimeter. People were scared, skittish, and defended their new borders from intruders.
Can we be at war with a virus? Politicians and journalists think so. The language is martial: it’s the ‘greatest threat in peacetime’; we are ‘at war’ with a virus; we will ‘defeat’ it; NHS workers are on the ‘front line’.
The report Behavioural Government,1 produced for the government in 2018, observed the importance of ‘framing’ policies and the language used into ‘a coherent and comprehensible pattern… by providing a powerful governing image or metaphor.’ The report gives the examples of describing crime as a beast, or as a virus infecting the city. Of course, language used by ministers is – at least sometimes – considered very carefully.
Donald Trump kept calling Covid the ‘Chinese virus’, a foreign threat equivalent to a hostile nation. Angela Merkel said Covid was the greatest threat Germany had faced since 1945. Boris Johnson did his best to channel Churchill. In a speech2 in the summer of 2020 he compared Gavi (The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations) to NATO, revealing a seismic paradigm shift in how we perceive our ‘enemies’. The Metro’s front-cover headline was ‘Careless talk costs lives’ on 12 January 2021, evoking the Second World War.
Truthfully, no government can believe that the virus can be defeated like an enemy nation; it’s a very different proposition. So what do governments hope to achieve with this fighting talk? War appeals to the ego, to the need to exert control. To offer hope of winning when we feel out of control. It’s easier to cast a virus in the role of opponent. But viruses are endemic, they are part of our history, our present and our future. In fact, they are part of us. Our DNA actually contains about 100,000 pieces of viral DNA, 8% of the human genome.
Governments may feel obliged to do whatever it takes to steer us through a crisis, and that means we have to swallow it like bitter medicine, even if we don’t like it. War requires populations to be resilient, make sacrifices and obey their leaders, like
