Every nation, every community, has rituals and observances that bind it together. Every year, Russians celebrate the Soviet Union’s victory in their Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, and the French mark the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Not to be left out, Americans celebrate their independence each year, as well as the Plymouth Thanksgiving. These holidays and days of reflection help communities keep continuity with a shared past – real or imagined – and play an important role in how they understand themselves and their place in the world. In this fictive simultaneity, this national communion, all Russians, all Frenchmen, and all Americans share in the same moment and the same remembrance despite not being in the same place.
It is precisely this aspect of experience sharing that has made the COVID-19 pandemic so destructive for so many communities, national and otherwise. Whether our collective feasts and fasts represent memories of an actual, real past, participating in them makes us part of a community, and communities need these kinds of things to function. By cutting us off from each other, the restrictions that have arisen to combat the spread of the no longer quite so novel coronavirus threaten the ties that bind us to one another. We are none of us merely utility optimizers who go work in widget factories so we can make enough money buy more widgets, and maybe build up a nice nest widget for when we retire. Our existence is much more than than when we live and when we die. We find our meaning and purpose through the things we do together, and when people cannot be together, they can no longer do those things. As a community’s rituals unravel, so too does the community itself, for some things really do just need to be done, by real people in real places, together.
Communities unraveling poses less of a problem, though, if we can also build new ones. The present crisis all but precludes that possibility. Amidst everything else terrible about the pandemic, it has become a sadly missed opportunity for community building. The need to contain the virus and look out for the safety of others should tie us together in a common cause in a way not seen since the Second World War. Common causes within the same community should, and I stress should, lead to shared observances and practices. Sadly, in this case it has not. At a time when we seem determined to divide ourselves one from another, the pandemic may be the only experience that Americans hold in common at the moment, and we have failed to build widespread solidarity around that experience as conspiracy theories flourish, and public officials undermine trust in public health mandates by refusing to follow them themselves.
It is all for the worse, too, that this virus has struck at a time when Americans seem determined to divide and stand against each other. It came when America’s elites questioned more stridently than before the very underpinnings of American self-understanding, and disparaging America’s historic memory of itself. It may be all fun and games to play the iconoclast and chide Americans for their silly Thanksgivings and Fourths of July, but those are in fact important civic observances. It is in the feasting and the remembering that we help define ourselves as Americans. If you want to say those are bad observances that’s fine, I suppose, but you’d better be willing to offer something to replace them. The alternative to group identity isn’t no group identity, it is just a different group identity. People will cobble together some kind of civic nationalism from whatever spare parts happen to be strewn about, for better or for worse. Right now, those spare parts look a lot like public health mandates.
If we construct our communities around shared practices and experiences, what can we now share in common? What will we make the rituals of our new civic nationalism? Masking? Not gathering together in spaces, public or private? Some of these practices have become deeply divisive in a society already too divided. If people bristle at being told they must stay indoors, it may be due in no small measure to many people’s reliance for income on industries that demand people share space. Favoring the indefinite suspension of normal life is easy enough for those of us who do not depend on the generosity of tips and the volume of foot traffic to a business. For many, the civic nationalism of the United States of Covid demands sacrifices far too great. If many show reluctance to swear their allegiance to her, it is because she demands they sacrifice their livelihood, a sacrifice many of her fiercest partisans stand no risk of ever making. Already divided as we are on so many fault lines, the divide between those forcibly laid off by COVID restrictions and those who have not been should stand out as an important one. If we hold little in common right now, it may be because we have demanded that many people suffer a great deal and be happy about it.
Whatever one chooses to make of it, people will construct meaning and purpose around what they do and hold in common with others. Instead of healing fissures in the interest of meeting a common goal, the response to the pandemic has instead ripped them wide open. The natural born citizens of the United States of Covid can of course reap the full benefits thereof. Those who can do their jobs through teleconferencing and can have their groceries delivered find that the nation-state as now constituted serves them well. But their insistence on forcibly naturalizing everyone else, those who, whether by choice or by happenstance, have livelihoods that operate outside these neat confines, appears to rub many people wrong way. Those who favor the strongest possible public health mandates in the interest of protecting the nation do not appear to realize that to others, they appear to serve a nation all their own.
It also remains true that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a serious problem for many people in many parts of the country, but is also true their meaning has developed well beyond that. Public health mandates do not exist for no reason, and many do themselves no favors by advocating a zealous disregard for the safety of their neighbors. Whatever one makes of the efficacy of masking as a matter of public health, it proves so divisive because it has become a weird kind of token of national identity. To many, it is merely a justifiable and indeed necessary measure taken to control the spread of the virus; the preference of the individual must take a back seat to public health. Refusal to mask, to some people, represents a kind of disloyalty in the new civic order. To others, masking, even if they don’t believe it unreasonable on its face, object to being made to adhere to the practice nearly everywhere nearly all the time. They see it as a forced civic observance of a civic nationalism for a nation to which they do not belong.
Looking to history, we find nationalisms and civic identities so often being imposed from the top. In Revolutionary France, the majority of people did not fluently speak the language we today call French. It had to be forced on the populace by the state through the school system, a process still remembered not altogether fondly by some communities in the outlying regions of the country. In Catalonia and the Basque Country, distinctive regional cultures continue to militate against what they see as impositions by the Spanish government in Madrid. In Great Britain, school children were punished for speaking Welsh instead of English until well into the 20th century. If you’re confused as to why some people react with such visceral anger when told they have to close their business, wear a mask, and not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas with their families, consider what would happen if you went into a Roman Catholic neighborhood in Belfast and told people they had to wear orange and swear their undying love for King Billy. If your first reaction is that this example has nothing to do with public health, I would suggest you have missed the point. People are not rational creatures. We are deeply emotional, and we do not like having practices forced on us. There is no black helicopter conspiracy here, but to many that scarcely matters.
As we make our holiday plans this year, it is as good a time as any to think about the meaning that people attach to celebrations, rituals, and practices. Think about why these holidays matter to people, and what it means for people to be deprived of them. We should not discount the frustration of doctors and healthcare workers who believe such gatherings make their jobs more difficult, nor should we dismiss the pain and anger of those who have lost loved ones to this blight. But apoplexy, rage, and sneering condescension are the wrong response to those upset by their holidays being disrupted. Such observances are not mere trifles. They are instead the very stuff of which life is made. By prescribing certain practices and proscribing others, we make statements about what our communities are about. You can think your friends and relatives are wrong to do what they do. But please, try and understand what it means to do one thing, and not another, especially in a world where it seems that those who enjoy social and cultural privilege get to break the rules whenever they want.