Posted by Ben Walters, 28 March 2020, 10:44am.
After five years of public life in thrall to exploitative fantasy and disingenuous discourse, coronavirus presents a sudden, head-on collision with the real.
The real can be fucking terrifying. Devastating numbers of lives and livelihoods are being lost, bringing grief, anger, exhaustion, despair. Even if you aren’t affected to that degree, it’s normal to be scared, sad, panicked, numb.
But the real can also be beautiful. This week has brought unexpected moments of pleasure and love – not erasing the bad but there all the same. New channels of togetherness. Extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity. Cleaner air, quiet sunshine and blossoms. These are also real and worthy of attention.
It’s confusing. Precariously woven and maintained fabrics of culture, community and care are tearing, some at huge cost. But longstanding orthodoxies of inequality are buckling too – around the value of cleaning and delivery work, say, or the benefits of public ownership of infrastructure.
This is chaos and it may last a while. Perhaps it’s a good time for queer thinking and feeling – being okay with instability, novelty and ignorance – acknowledging that so-called normality is neither permanent nor sufficient – that reality is complex, fluid and contradictory – that we can choose whether to meet this or deny it – and that, even amid chaos, justice and happiness come more easily from attending empathetically to the connections that bind us than from violently maintained structures of separation and control.
The passing of the old normal is both alarming and inspiring, bringing destruction and potential. It’s always easier to notice existing things crack and crumble than to anticipate what new things will emerge and sprout. But they will, both welcome and unwelcome.
For me, the welcome developments of recent weeks seem to track along a certain pattern, a certain way people and organisations have of meeting the chaotic real. They connect, support and mutate.
New forms of connection have proliferated. Many formerly comfortable people have been obliged to connect with reality, the actual value of a ventilator or bag of flour suddenly putting pressure on imaginary investments in wealth or status. There’s been an explosion of interpersonal connection online too, highlighting the capacity of digital technology to bridge physical separation, albeit weirdly and contingently. And there’s also been extraordinary new local connection among neighbours, in person or across a couple of metres or even through a closed door. Connection is easier than it seemed.
It’s inspiring when people try to use this connection to support one another. The culture of competitive individualism encourages us to think that supporting others is a chore if not a kind of self-sabotage. But the urge to help is real and deep, especially at times of crisis. Using the material and emotional resources at our disposal to reduce the suffering of others reduces our own stress and fortifies connection. And it is most powerful when it addresses real needs: food, shelter, health, money, tools, space, company, entertainment, love. Great reservoirs of such support have been revealed.
In the face of chaotic reality, to support often means to mutate. Pursuing a core aim or value might now require the evolution of new forms and processes that work in our changed circumstances.People and organisations are finding powerful news ways to do their thing. So neighbours become carers. Parents become teachers. Electoral campaign groups becomes mutual aid societies. Cultural institutions become welfare departments. Live performers become online beacons. London, from the right angle, becomes a sculpture park or nature reserve. Mutation can be elegant, beautiful, efficient.
Connect, support, mutate. For me, the big public round of applause for the NHS and key workers on Thursday evening showed these things in action. People came together to express moral support for those providing material support, through a novel form apt to our new conditions. And it showed our continued capacity for collective joy. As I stood clapping and cheering, looking round the courtyard of my estate, I was deeply moved by the confused and delighted faces of kids on balconies opposite. I wondered if this was their first pleasant surprise after weeks of unpleasant ones.
Meeting the chaos of reality can bring good change as well as bad.
I’m not sentimental. This crisis offers many opportunities for a resurgent right that has proven remarkably adept at building support while deferring any decisive encounter with the real. But cracks are showing. Billionaire wide boys cheered for spouting heartless garbage in the name of Brexit find themselves obliged to apologise for the same now. And it’s hard to convey state authority over the virus when the prime minister, health secretary and heir to throne have all got it. Reality bites. (I hope they recover.)
Strategies of deceit, division and control might yet hold sway. But paths toward justice and joy multiply, I believe, when we connect, support and mutate. And this gives me hope.
