Amusements Rick McGinnis
With the end of the coronavirus lockdown in sight as I write this, we’ll finally get to see how the greatest social experiment of the 21st century will finally play out. By the time you read this you may be able to visit your elderly relatives or sit in a restaurant or watch a movie in a movie theatre. Perhaps one, or even two, of these – but almost definitely not all three.
And so our lives are returned to us, piecemeal.
I will not look back on this chapter of history with fondness. But I can already tell that I might miss the way that a mute button seemed to have been pressed in the city around me. With automobile traffic wildly reduced, commercial air traffic nearly nonexistent and everyone either jobless or working and studying from home, my hometown felt almost pastoral, and the parks began filling up with the first warm days.
When a downtown Toronto park was inundated with young people on one of the first balmy weekend, there was a wave of indignant condemnation that was notably missing a couple of weeks later when a wave of street protests saw similar if not larger crowds. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
Perhaps a few of us began sheltering in place with lockdown goals – a list of projects ranging in ambition from reading more books to a basement-to-eaves house cleanup, to finally embarking on a long-postponed creative project.
I can look back on the lockdown with a mixture of accomplishments. I didn’t finish a single book, but that might been the fault of starting with an 800-plus page history of the naval arms race that preceded World War I. I did, however, watch hundreds of hours of YouTube videos on saw mills, bushcraft, cooking in the wild, and watch and guitar repair. In a world of enforced idleness, it was comforting to at least watch someone else do practical things.
My business as a professional photographer dropped off to nothing, so I set myself to a series of self-assignments, shooting landscapes and street photography and dozens of still-life in our kitchen, of flowers and groceries and spring buds and trash collected from the alleyway behind our house. I also photographed a wedding, as a favour – the first I’ve shot in 25 years, one of only five people allowed in the church according to the city’s social distancing rules.
In “The Privilege of Boredom,” an essay about isolation and inspiration published in the Times Literary Supplement, Oxford professor Anil Gomes recalls the last day before lockdown when he went to his daughter’s school to teach philosophy. While the remaining teachers frantically prepared distance learning programs, Gomes sat down on the floor with the remaining students and played a series of mental games, asking them to imagine the first impressions of aliens visiting our world – if they put a chair on their head, would that make it a hat?
“A year three told me that she could sit on her sister but that doesn’t make her a chair,” Gomes remembered. “They fizzed with ideas and laughter. The next day we all withdrew into our homes.”
Using Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophyas a guide, Gomes allows us to imagine that the lockdown should be a period of massive inspiration. The French philosopher “begins with a withdrawal,” Gomes writes. “The meditator isolates himself in a warm room, free of all distractions, so that he can properly examine his beliefs and identify those that will form the firm foundation of his philosophy. There he stays for six days…”
Lockdown, of course, lasted very much longer than six days, but Gomes realizes early on that this isn’t just a meditative but a domestic withdrawal, where many of us were isolated with roommates, spouses or partners, children and even parents: “Withdrawal from the world is not much of a withdrawal when some of the world comes with you.”
Reflecting on the rare circumstances that allowed Descartes to self-isolate in search of inspiration – a world without modern communications technology, and where a man of means like Descartes could rely on servants to keep him fed, laundered and watered – Gomes acknowledges that Descartes’ creative self-exile (not very different from Henry David Thoreau’s in Walden) was very much a luxury.
Descartes’ exercises were, Gomes writes “designed to take our natural aptitude for thought, to channel it and to inculcate habits of attention. This is difficult. It is time-consuming. It is also deeply, deeply boring. And this was surely its point, for it is only by going slowly that the mind can be led away from itself to God and the truth.”
I haven’t been bored since I was a child, and even then I think I understood – as Gomes did, and Descartes – that boredom is a luxury. When my own children first complained to me that they were bored, my instinctive response was to say “I don’t care.” I’m hoping that I was able to teach them to enjoy boredom, as there will be enough in their life to come that will demand their attention, either with creativity, novelty and experience or (mostly) with duty, chores, social obligation and the pursuit of a wage. They certainly never complain about being bored any more, which seems like a miracle with teenagers.
Perhaps the lockdown will produce an explosion of invention, creativity and inspiration. That remains to be seen. The worst outcome, however, would be that millions of people, deprived of distractions and occupations, worried about paying for necessities, restricted from most human contact and kept in a simmering state of fear and anxiety, would explode out of isolation at the first excuse to voice their outrage and frustration.
Which is, of course, exactly what happened.
The needless killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police united everyone I knew, right or left, in sorrow and anger. But that only lasted a moment, and since no crisis can be wasted, protesters took to the streets, followed close behind by looters and suspiciously well-prepared rioters whose primary role seemed to be to destroy that brief moment of unity.
Crowds that were condemned as careless and even aggressive threats to public health just a week or two previously were being excused and applauded. And any baffled questions about the wisdom and severity of the previous three months of lockdown in the light of official support for the protests were quickly drowned out – a perfect way to ensure that future conspiracy theories will thrive.
A virus that kills without regard to race or gender (but concentrates its intent on the aged and infirm) was suddenly superseded as #1 threat by lethal institutional racism. The question changed from “Why aren’t you wearing your mask?” to “Are you wearing that mask to hide your face from security cameras, block tear gas, or prevent infecting your fellow protester?” As with any moment of precarious social calamity, we found ourselves asking questions we’d never have imagined asking before.
And like so many otherwise inexplicable moments we’re living through, it all starts to make sense if we appreciate it as a religious moment in a presumably secular society.
The National Reviewran a story about Smooth Sanchez, a YouTuber who posted a livestream where he wandered New York City during the height of the Floyd protests. Trolling the crowds, he approached white women and (falsely) identified himself as a member of Black Lives Matter, asking them to kneel, apologize for their privilege, and admit their complicity in crimes against minorities. He insisted on referring to Floyd as “George Foreman.” Almost no one corrected him.
Sanchez wanted to expose the gullibility of the people he approached, but by this point there was plenty of footage online of white people voluntarily kneeling to apologize for their privilege and culpability in systemic racism, some even organized by church pastors. One such event featured a pastor and his flock washing the feet of black activists, a ritual that echoes the priest re-enacting Jesus’ actions before his crucifixion – an annual ritual that’s part of Catholic Holy Thursday Mass.
“It feels as though many of those whom Sanchez films have transcended the material plane and reached a level of mystical elevation in their political fervor,” writes Dmitri Solzhenitsyn in the National Review. “To them, the woke genuflection of repentance is like unto a kneeling prayer, the renunciation of one’s identity unto devout asceticism, the obeisance of the supposed minister of Black Lives Matter unto humility before divine authority.”
I’m certain that it’s impossible to breed the religious impulse from human beings, and any student of history knows that religion –particularly the Protestant, charismatic, evangelical variety – is hardwired into America’s society and culture. Slavery and racism are often described as America’s “original sin,” so it’s not surprising that acts of atonement and penance familiar to any regular churchgoer are being acted out by and prescribed to people who might not have been inside a church since they were teenagers – if ever.
Much as churchgoers have been deprived of religious fellowship and community for months, everyone else has had their life as social beings voluntarily suppressed. One of the few activities encouraged and celebrated amidst social isolation has been ministering to the sick and the dead, and the people occupied with this task were celebrated and described like people sheltering from medieval plagues would have honoured clergy. Though I can’t help but wonder if there was a Black Plague equivalent to line dancing in scrubs on TikTok. Another one of those questions that we never thought we’d ask ourselves.
