Lockdown Kitsch by David McGrogan for American Institute for Economic Research
Those of us who have been sceptical of the wisdom of lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates and other coercive responses to the pandemic have often found it difficult to pin down exactly why it is that such measures have been so popular. Too often, we have ascribed it to fear, ignorance or blind conformity. This is uncharitable, and is certainly not what I have discerned in conversation with friends and family members who, of course, have been almost universally supportive of these measures.
By far and away the most significant emotional response of the people around me to the pandemic has been one not of fear or denial, but rather compassion. It is that feeling – the unwillingness to countenance the suffering of others – that has defined the reaction of the population above all else. If we do not do these things (stay at home, wear masks, stay apart), then people will die, and will die horribly, and so we must all be compelled to do them by the apparatus of the State. It is a function not of fear, but of care. That one might think it is misplaced (what about caring about children’s educations and futures, the importance of living in a free society, the suffering of the lonely, missed cancer diagnoses, and so on?) does not diminish its genuineness.
The connection between compassion and coercion should not in fact surprise us. Lionel Trilling, writing over 70 years ago, reminds us that the thread between the two is almost inescapable: “Some paradox of our nature leads us,” as he put it, “when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.” It is, of course, at the root of our social nature: our instinct to empathize and its connection with control is at the heart of parenting, after all. Why do we impose rules upon our children, if not because we care for them? The logic of lockdowns can be seen merely as an extension of that principle, and is itself of course just an extension of general trends in developed nations – to boss people around for their own good, because we do not want to see them suffer – that have been growing for decades.
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But that only gets us part of the way towards an explanation. Why is it that people’s compassionate instincts have been so turbocharged during the pandemic? Why is it that we have come to care so much about the fact that people are dying of Covid, when we generally care so little about people dying of cancer, traffic accidents, or diabetes – or, for that matter, starvation and war in the developing world?
The pat answer is that it is because we have been subject to such a relentless stream of imagery and statistics about Covid, and that this has put the victims of the disease at the forefront of our minds in a way that simply is not the case for other causes of death and suffering in the world. This is undoubtedly so, but there is something else at work in this – something which, borrowing from Milan Kundera, I will describe as a form of kitsch.
Kundera describes kitsch not as a category or genre of art, but rather as a type of common emotional response. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, two characters watch children playing together in a park. “Now that,” one remarks “Is what I call happiness!” Partly, Kundera tells us, this character is simply moved by the innocent enjoyment of the children. But partly he is moved because he also knows that this is the kind of image that all of mankind is moved by – he is profoundly aware that anybody and everybody watching such a scene would be moved in the same way. In other words, he knows that he is partaking in a common emotional response, and this heightens his feeling beyond measure. Kitsch, says Kundera, causes two tears to flow, one after the other. “The first tear,” he tells us, “Says ‘How nice to see children running on the grass!’” But the second tear says, “How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children playing on the grass!” It is the second tear which elevates the moment to kitsch.
