Nowhere to hide

A short note in response to a wonderful piece by Chris Creegan on the parallels between the AIDS crisis of the the 1980s and COVID-19:

https://medium.com/@Chris_Creegan/how-do-we-survive-a-plague-together-b61feaccb86c

NOWHERE TO HIDE

In drawing a parallel between the Aids crisis of the 1980s and the pandemic crisis of today, writer Chris Creegan asks, how do we survive a plague?

Chris’s beautifully simple answer: together, points to a form of survival deeper than merely staying alive. This is the survival of the soul. And who would argue with the thought that that’s only really possible together?

Chris says: “Responding to this crisis is a constantly evolving game of catch up which touches every part of our lives, and so the response it demands from state and third sector alike leaves no hiding places”.

Even in a crisis that is literally forcing us to hide, there are no hiding places. We are increasingly confronted, overwhelmingly, everywhere we look, by the sheer horror of it. And that places a demand not just on the state and third sector but on everyone. All people, everywhere. No-one is exempt, however distant one remains socially.

I am proud to be part of the response justly demanded from the state. We civil servants are responding with purpose and insight.

But I am also a human being, confronted. A father, a son. Confronted with nowhere to hide. (A spiritually naked civil servant, so to speak.) How then can I respond? How must I respond both as a human being and a civil servant?

Are these not the same thing? Yes and no. In part. It’s certainly true that the defining values I have espoused professionally for 20 years now – honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity – seem not just right but exactly right in the context in which we find ourselves.

Right now, in the face of the crisis, these values are not merely contractual. If ever there was a time for deeply honest, objective, impartial heads focused relentlessly on the evidence it is now.

But even so these values don’t seem to get me the whole way to where I need to be. These values are certainly not wrong but are nonetheless inadequate.

This note is if anything just an attempt to explain, confess what this inadequacy amounts to.

Every day as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic becomes clear, the response demanded requires ever more of us. We can see it in each other’s eyes. This is beginning to eat not just into our time but our souls.

What’s at stake is horrifying and horrifyingly close at hand. It is beginning to weigh heavily. I fear that we are spending deep capital that is not easily replaced. Can we carry lightly enough what weighs so heavily? Carry it light enough to stand a chance to confront this plague as it runs its course.

I am conflicted. One way to express this is to say that I find myself caught in a paradox. One could call it the paradox of policymaking.

By policymaking here I might as well talk about its bigger brother: thinking. Not mere thinking certainly but not quite doing either. Policy is action at best at a distance.

There are times when reality seems to extend beyond thought’s reach. (No policy can guarantee its own success.) That constitutes a crisis in and for thinking. This is in essence what Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara have described as a conceptual emergency, which is unfolding alongside the all too real (medical) emergency we are facing.

Our concepts, and so our words, no longer seem to make contact with the reality of reality. In a sense, our experience is simultaneously too real and not real enough. The words we feel tempted to utter in response to what is utterly real seem thin, watered down.

But it’s “just the flu”. Just as for Ann Widdecombe, the plague of AIDS was “not as devastating as feared”. Can we live in a world in which such things can be said, and meant truly? How could one look at the world that way and not recognise the utter emptiness of such words? How could one live with oneself if one ever had the insight to recognise one’s own utter superficiality?

Following philosopher Cora Diamond (channelling John Updike) we might call this the difficulty of reality:

“what is expressed . . . is the sense of a difficulty that pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one’s thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling.”

Let us offer an explanation rather than condemnation: when there is nowhere to hide, all too easily, our thought and words seem drawn inexorably toward a shallowness, an emptiness that deflects us in crucial ways from the sorts of rich significance that real life actually has, with all its moral difficulties, horrors and disgraces. It is instinctual. We deflect to defend.

Who can blame those who choose not to confront, but to hide? We let ourselves be shouldered out of life.

What a oddly wonderful phrase: shouldered out of life. Diamond takes that from Ted Hughes’ “Six Young Men”:

That man’s not more alive whom you confront,
And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak out loud,
Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,
Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;
No thought so vivid as their smoking blood;
To regard this photo might well dement,
Such contradictory permanent horrors here,
Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out
One’s own body from its instant and heat.

Here is the paradox – the difficulty of reality – made plain in words. Not policy words but poetic. The paradox of “Six Young Men” is the paradox of the simultaneous utter reality and irreality of the smile of six young men captured in a photograph, all of whom having died forty years previously in the first world war.

It is not possible for a dead man to smile warmly. Yet here we are.

To regard this photo might well dement, such contradictory permanent horrors here smile from the single exposure and shoulder out one’s own body from its instant and heat.

We simply cannot accommodate the reality we are exposed to, our concepts cannot reach, and we are left utterly exposed, demented, shouldered out of one’s body, one’s life, “from its instant and heat”.

I can think of no better way to express what I feel right here, right now than exposed, the exposure of the coming apart of thought and reality confronted by what is sublimely unimaginable.

And of course there is nothing more human than that.

Back then to Chris Creegan.

I think Chris is right that it would be all too easy to despair in the face of our exposure. “Staring into the void gets us nowhere”. And “social action is in our gift”. His answer remember to our exposure to the plague: together.

But read his words very carefully: “social action is in our gift”. They do not represent salvation, yet. A gift’s fulfilment only comes in its being accepted. As Aristotle might well have said, a gift must be both given and received to be a (proper) gift.

So the togetherness – the social action – that Chris says protects us from our exposure to the difficulty of reality is an achievement not a given. We cannot assume it. It requires us to reach out actively and ask to be together.

This little note is me reaching out.