Being humble in the face of nature
Part One - Humility or hubris in the time of Covid-19?
This is the first part of an essay about what it means to be humble in the face of nature.
Heaven smells like the fragrant clouds of lime blossom in June. Every year I look forward to this honeyed herald of summer.
During the summer of 2020 I had a surprising and visceral reaction to my first smell of lime blossom, as my stomach twisted with grief. Scent, emotion and memory are intrinsically connected. I knew that three months of lockdown and restrictions had dulled my appetite for the world’s subtle pleasures, even the joy of summer. I had already recognised my depressing acclimatisation to strange times. But it was not until the most beautiful of smells made me feel anguished that I thought about how adrift I was from nature. Deep lines of unhappiness in my body warned me that summer might never smell sweet again.
This disconnect from Mother Nature was mirrored by feeling unmoored from human society. Until 2020, I’d taken the normality of social interaction, as well as my freedom and agency, for granted. I realised that if they could be taken away so easily, they must have had an illusory quality. I’d misunderstood something fundamental about life.
During that first lockdown, the strangeness of human contact could feel like an affront, especially in nature. Country paths were bank holiday busy every day, as unaccustomed exercisers took their ‘permitted’ daily perambulation. They didn’t know the normal rules of countryside engagement; smiles and cheery good mornings were replaced with suspicious hostility. Faces were plunged into hedgerows to avoid breathing the exhalations of passersby. People muttered with annoyance if you were too close. Joggers were bio-terrorists. The smell of fear over-powered the lime blossom.
On Halloween in 2021, Boris Johnson uttered some words at a coronavirus press conference that made my spine straighten. He balefully reminded the nation, “we’ve got to be humble in the face of nature”.
What a strange comment, especially in a speech freighted with pledges to take “tough action”, that Christmas would be “very different”, that people should minimise contact with each other, work from home, and that pubs and restaurants must close again. Did these actions represent humility and what would nature make of it? It seemed to me we had been anything but humble in the face of nature so far.
This latest tranche of tough restrictions was a continuum of Covid-19 measures and political language which had been martial, even jingoistic, since the beginning. We were at war, doing battle with a virus, it was our greatest threat in peacetime. Johnson did his best to channel Churchill.
No government can believe that Covid-19, or any virus, can be defeated like an enemy nation; it’s a very different proposition. So what do they hope to achieve with this fighting talk? War appeals to the ego, to the need to exert control. To offer hope of winning when we feel out of control. It’s easier to cast a virus in the role of opponent. But viruses are endemic, they are part of our history, our present and our future. In fact, they are part of us. Our DNA actually contains about 100,000 pieces of viral DNA, 8% of the human genome. I offer this contextually, and not in any way to deny the need for evidence-based and proportionate pandemic plans, or the natural human impulse to put in place mitigations and save lives.
There is now a deep ideological divide between those who believe non-pharmaceutical interventions - such as lockdown, social restrictions and masks - work, and those who don’t. But to me, it seemed the height of arrogance and naïveté, not humility, to believe we could completely stop a highly transmissible airborne virus in its tracks with cloth masks, little plexiglass screens, and stop-start interruptions in social contact.
Lockdown, the rule of one, the rule of six, one way systems in supermarkets and painted dots on the ground, were the greatest tricks in the Illusion of Control. We delighted in the ludicrous debate about whether a Scotch egg was a substantial meal. We said disgracefully little about families prevented from grieving at funerals. Alternate urinals and sinks in public lavatories were decommissioned to prevent people standing too close to each other, lest they risk infection. Brides and grooms were told to sanitise their hands before and after exchanging wedding rings. (Mercifully, no rules were offered for the nuptial night.) The elderly were cloistered in care homes and prevented from seeing their families in the flesh. Among a panoply of rules, cordoned benches in the open air most visibly symbolised our futile attempt to control nature. These bizarre and Byzantine restrictions were cruel and stupid, not humble.
Being under the spell of the Illusion of Control meant sight was trained on one risk to the exclusion of all others. The Covid Key Performance Indicators - deaths, cases, hospitalisations - squatted like greedy gods on thrones of bones. What happened to the other risks of life? Mental breakdowns, economic decline, hard-earned businesses folding, marriages delayed, funerals unattended and cancer diagnoses were minions to the pandemic, numbers for the future.
The myopic focus on Covid also ignored other viruses. Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is normally common in the winter, but lockdowns, as well as the dominance of Covid-19, might have changed the behaviour of infection. RSV disappeared in the winter of 2020-2021, but reappeared in an unusual summer spike. Some experts thought that people experienced a temporary waning of immunity due to months of isolation at home and lack of exposure to RSV, increasing the pool of susceptible people. Put simply, if you’re not exposed to RSV for 18 months and suddenly come into contact with it, you’re more likely to get a symptomatic illness. This was one relatively small but serious unintended consequence of lockdowns on the immune system. It was reckless, not humble, to think we could over-ride millennia of evolution.
Vaccines are elegant, medical solutions, but the human body is an elegant marvel too, and natural immunity appears to out-trump the Covid-19 medical corrective. The jab was to be an imperative punctuation mark to an out of control situation. The CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla initially said that the vaccine was 100% effective at preventing Covid cases. By 2022 he put forward the more meagre suggestion that three doses of the vaccine plus one booster offered “reasonable protection” against hospitalisations and deaths. (He was specifically referring to protection against the Omicron variant.) Was placing our early hopes in rapid human invention humility or hubris?
At various times in the epidemic, we have been told by scientists and politicians that unlocking will cause death and destruction, akin to cult leaders who warn that if you leave the cult or if you break the cult’s rules, there will be terrible destruction, bad karma, or some such disastrous consequences. Yet from the first panicking about people brazenly dancing the (socially-distanced) conga in the streets on VE Day in 2020, to the sneering scorn poured on people on the beach in Bournemouth in the same summer, through to the re-opening of schools, the fears about ‘Freedom Day’ in July 2021 and the warnings about a “tidal wave” of Omicron cases, our human behaviour has done very little to alter the course of the virus.
Safety measures do make some people feel safer, even if they are not without consequences. They may be trapped in a negative feedback loop of warnings, fears, and measures which provide a feeling of comfort. The psychologists - who should know better, physician heal thyself - appear to be particularly prey to fears and doom-mongering.
Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology, who advises on SPI-B was adamant we should not open up on Freedom Day. He tweeted that Boris Johnson was making a mistake: “What sort of sign does he want? The Thames turned to blood? A plague of frogs? Writing on the wall that spells out 'we are all doomed if you don't stop your dithering’? But seriously, what sort of sign does he want?” In fact, all was well after Freedom Day.
In December 2021, amidst calls that another lockdown was needed, Robert West, a professor of health psychology who advises on SAGE, said: “It is now a near certainty that the UK will be seeing a hospitalisation rate that massively exceeds the capacity of the NHS. Many thousands of people have been condemned to death by The Conservative Government.” We never came close to SAGE’s projected deaths of 600 to 6,000 a day, or exceeding NHS capacity.
I interviewed a multitude of experts close to government when researching my book, A State of Fear. One of the SPI-B psychologists I interviewed said two things which really struck me and are relevant here. One was that psychologists are quite neurotic. This particular psychologist acknowledged being too scared to go to cafés during the pandemic, just in case. And the other thing that they said was that psychology has had a really good epidemic.
The luminaries of this time have offered little light. We have not beaten the virus into biological submission, but beaten ourselves into psychological and moral submission. I’m not the first person to say it has been like living in a real world Milgram obedience experiment or an Asch conformity experiment, observing how people respond in authority and to authority. As I said in A State of Fear, epidemics come and go, but our basic psychology is here to stay. In the dark before the dawn we have to light our own way by better understanding our nature.
Our nature is social, yet we criminalised contact. Tragic harms can be at least indirectly linked to social restrictions, such as the rise in opiate addictions, alcohol usage, self harm, eating disorders and domestic abuse. The recent revelations of Downing Street parties and the famous allegations about politicians and scientists in flagrante delicto prove two things: firstly, that wrong-doers had a different understanding of risk to the one they conveyed to us; secondly, that denying human nature is futile.
Our nature is both inspiring and frightening. It craves conviviality and cruelty. Beyond our individual spheres, and the psychological and therapeutic, it shapes how we form groups and communities and how we are governed. Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations and propaganda - he wrote the book Propaganda - sought to manipulate the forces of human behaviour to sell products and to lay the way for government policies. Not much has changed, as demonstrated by an array of government departments and staff dedicated to nudging and shaping our behaviour.
In the last century there have been devastating attempts to corral human nature in unnaturally organised societies. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent decades trying to understand the history of the human destruction of the Russian Revolution, and the obscenity of the gulags. He said, “if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Lockdown was not the gulag. Previous free and democratic countries have behaved in an authoritarian way, although they are not yet totalitarian. But there are echoes in the demonisation of Covidiots and the unvaccinated, the demands that the individual must sacrifice everything for the collective and the state, the discrimination and the segregation that is occurring in eerie synchronicity around the world.
If it was intentional, it was the height of manipulative genius to give people the shield of virtue while they enacted lockdown, the greatest act of self-destruction in our time. As I have set out explicitly in my book, we were compelled to follow the lockdown rules in all their draconian complexities through the use of fear, and the other egregious methods of shaming and norming. Human beings are frightened of infection and death and that natural inclination was deliberately amplified to encourage compliance. We hid indoors to protect the NHS. We covered our faces to protect others. We vaccinated ourselves to protect others. Survival instincts were cloaked in solidarity. Fears were disguised by moral collectivism and obedience. Is it human nature to be cruel while pretending we are being good?
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago both hurts and expands the heart:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
At some point, the sooner the better, we need to confront our nature and trace this line of good and evil. We have been anything but humble in the face of nature, and our hubris is certain to cause waves of unnecessary trauma.
Last summer, the lime blossom did smell sweet again. Everything has a season, even pain. Humans are subject to the same cycles as the wider world. It is hubris to forget we are part of nature, and the humility due is in remembering our own.
Part Two - The Collective and The Self, will be published next week and explore self-individuation and psychic epidemic. EDIT: Part Two will be delayed by a week as I was distracted by a matter of conscience.
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Lovely article Laura. Thank you. I would like to see a campaign now to completely unearth ALL the psy-op manipulations, games, plans, techniques and campaigns that have been so very effective during the last two years in undoing the mental health of the nation. I can't think of anyone who has not been affected by them. And then there's the children! So wrong. There needs to be a discussion around the ethics of all of this. Is it right that a government should invoke fear in it's population at all? I would argue that it is not, that the more grown up , truly respectufl relationship would have a government being upfront with the citizenry, about the risks and the harms of say a virus such as this. It's not okay to destroy our mental health. Will we see a moratorium on this issue? A campaign perhaps ? There needs to be a complete rethink on use of psychological weapons upon our own people. It's actually domestic terrorism, and is I believe already against the law, but you wouldn't think so.
Dear Laura…..I’m in tears reading this…and the comments. As a small child I witnessed my mother battered, bruised, teeth broken by a wicked stepfather. I grew up an angry person, hating bullies and getting in trouble because of it as a young man. My dear mother remained gentle and forgiving throughout her difficult life. I made a promise to her on her death bed 14 years ago that I would lose my anger….it troubled her. I learnt to meditate and pray, I gave up my rat race job and switched the 2 hour commute for a 2-3 mile walk or run in nature every morning. Whilst I am a changed man, I suffer from health anxiety, I have real symptoms, heart problems, mental anguish at lumps here and there, digestive problems that I think are the worst thing it could be….but turn out to be fixed with ACV. I’m sure that if I could just release my anger I wouldn’t suffer so much. These last 2 years I’ve felt like the little boy looking through the gap in the stairs watching his mum get punched and kicked…the same torment in my head, the same feeling of helplessness, the same pent up anger that I have to hold inside me. My body holding the emotion, It feels like I’m having a heart attack every day, I have dizzy spells….my intuition sees these government policies as no different to the abuse of my wicked stepfather. Add to that the daily threats from certain people in the media attacking unvaccinated, unmasked, anti lockdowners….add to that the video’s on social media of policemen punching 14 year old girls in the face, throwing elderly women to the floor then spraying the point blank with pepper spray etc etc. I am angry, I do not fear these people I fear that a time will come when I break my promise to my dear mum. I’ll continue to pray, meditate and lose myself in nature.