Social distancing

We are being encouraged – in some cases, instructed – to maintain social distance.   In London, this currently means: wash your hands regularly, wear a mask in shops, and try to keep at least two metres away from others, unless they are part of your household group, which is limited to six people.  The rules change frequently and somewhat arbitrarily, depending on whether the government feels a greater need to assuage its libertarian or paternalist critics.  The population response varies according to temperament, tolerance for risk, propensity to follow rules, and the extent to which paid work necessitates direct rather then mediated contact with others.  Some have made radical changes to their patterns of work, travel, family life, and social interactions, while others have hardly changed their lifestyles at all.  

It is too early to judge which countries have managed themselves best through the pandemic.    We do not yet know, by any consistent and accurate measure, the full impact on short-term mortality rates, that is, the number of excess deaths per capita.  Nor do we know the degree of short-term economic disruption in terms of lost production and lost jobs.  We might have a better sense of these numbers in about March of next year.   It will be many years, however, before the medium- to long-term costs can be assessed: loss of well-being, including not only excess deaths but damage to mental health; declines in the early detection and treatment of other illnesses such as cancer; significant loss of economic activity and capacity, including business failures and premature retirement; the hollowing out of the performing arts sector; and a generation of school children and students, whose prime years for knowledge and skill acquisition have been curtailed. 

Everywhere the costs will be high, but some places will fare worse than others.  One of these costs will be a further decline in social cohesion, or what we might call instead a permanent increase in social distance.

What the authorities mean when they use the phrase ‘social distancing’ is, of course, physical distancing.  Viruses spread in various ways, including through the air and on the surfaces of objects, and it follows that we can reduce their transmission by sanitising surfaces regularly, including our hands, and avoiding as far as possible particles emitted from the mouths of those in our vicinity, hence the importance of masks, especially indoors. It is these physical actions – keeping our distance, cleansing our environment, blocking the passage of airborne water droplets, being careful what and whom we touch – that act as barriers to the rapid spread of the virus.  There are not social actions.  Viruses do not express any form of social preference when they seek a new host; when they leap from one human to another, they leap to those who are physically proximate rather than those who are socially connected.  By contrast, a virus on a software programme can leap across oceans and continents, as files are shared electronically by users in communication with each other, with no regard to the physical distance between the two hardware devices. 

Let me put this point another way.  For the protection of my laptop and smartphone, it really is my contact list that matters.  If someone who has my phone number or email address sends me a contaminated file, advertently or not, it makes no difference whether we are sitting next to each other, or if we are in different hemispheres – in fact, we might never have met physically – the damage is done when I open the file, which I do because I trust the source.   For the protection of my physical health, it does not matter whether my friends in the US or NZ remain well (although, I hope they do); what matters is the health of the person who sits next to me on the underground train, or who serves me in a shop, or who stands too close to me in a queue, while talking loudly on their phone.  To avoid Covid-19, it is my neighbours not my network that I need to worry about.  For which reason physical distancing is the smart approach. 

I remember being a little surprised on the first day of my first visit to Namibia, in 2008, when a waiter in a café admired my new BlackBerry handset, then told me he had the same phone and asked if he could borrow my charger because his battery was low.  All over the world, people are wearing the same clothing brands, listening to the same music, watching the same football games, and sharing information with their friends on the same social media networks, using the same make of phone or laptop.  As the economy becomes more global, so too our societies are tending to become more insulated, more narrow, more homogeneous.  These same people, while switched on to globalised market culture, are easily able to find others who share their more unusual interests and concerns, whatever they might be, and to immerse themselves in the small community of like-minded people who care about just those things they care about. 

This might not matter when the topic that brings together a small group of enthusiasts is urban beekeeping, Japanese poetry, ukulele playing, or collecting vintage posters from Citroen garages.  May a hundred harmless hobbies blossom.   What damages the health of our societies, especially their political health, is when small groups of like-minded people spend all their time talking to each other and never listen to anyone outside their group.  Prior to the pandemic, most societies in the Western world were becoming fractured in such a way that many people now only ever mix with others from their own social group.  They do not know people from other social groups, which means that they do now know what other people are like: what they feel, what their concerns are, what their challenges are, what makes them happy or sad, what makes their lives better or worse, what they hope for and what they fear. 

The formation of sects, or factions, was perceived by many Enlightenment political philosophers to be a threat to the possibility of democratic society.  For politics to work, citizens had to be able to look beyond their narrow interests – whether their family, their guild or trade, their town or city, their class or tribe – to see the wider interests of the whole polity.  Moreover, political leaders had to be willing to meet and talk to their rivals with civility.  T S Eliot – radical in poetry, conservative in religion and politics – noted that a parliamentary system required constant dining out with members of the opposition.  The purpose of mixing beyond one’s own narrow circle  – what we would now call, our network – was that it forced people to see that society is made up of many sorts of people, engaged in different activities, with conflicting interests, divergent hopes and ambitions, a broad range of temperaments, and some deeply held but irreconcilable values.  In brief, wide social engagement teaches us to be wary of simple, template solutions; to understand that most problems can only be resolved by compromise; and that the strength of our conviction about any issue is a poor indicator of the importance it will be accorded by others. 

Global society – made possible by cross-border trade, travel, and finance – does not imply the universal embrace of cultural diversity, although it does make possible a broadening of horizons for those with the curiosity and courage to do so.  It also makes possible the gathering of physically disparate people, who share the same values and prejudices, into social groups that reinforce these beliefs.  Whether we think of the followers of Leon Trotsky, Ayn Rand, Osama bin Laden, or the Dali Lama, their ability to connect with others across oceans and deserts has not made them any less narrow in their thinking about the world.  As physical proximity has decreased in importance, social clustering has become more widespread. 

This pandemic will be temporary.  In time, we will find a preventative vaccine, improve remedial treatment, and learn to live with this virus as we have with many others before it.  The new normal will, I suspect, look much like the old normal.  If we want to make significant change to our societies for the better, then we need to abandon our total preoccupation with healthcare and attend more closely to social policy. 

We need to find ways of reducing social distancing.