This isn’t a medical question anymore; it’s a question of cultural allegiance.
This isn't a medical question anymore; it's a question of cultural allegiance.
T he CDC has updated its recommendations for masking, having heard the vaccinated masses cry out with one voice: Let my people go! The federal recommendation has been liberalized, but retailers, restaurants, municipal transit agencies, and the like still will have to work out rules of their own. The politico-spiritual warfare over masking rules is far from over — because it was never simply a question of public health and prudence.
In the pre-vaccine era, I took a summer trip with family to Aspen. It’s a long drive from Texas, but we have a convertible and a dachshund who likes road trips. Most of the public accommodations were closed or restricted, but the restaurants with the ability to do so were serving outdoors, which meant a fair amount of foot traffic. Aspen decided to manage that pretty aggressively, erring on the side of caution. The local powers basically drew a circle around the middle of downtown: Outside the circle, you were free to go around without a mask outdoors, but, inside the circle, a mask was required of everybody in public unless they were seated at a table for a meal or a drink. It was probably excessive, but it was straightforward. Given that our plans mostly involved hiking and cribbage, the tradeoff was acceptable to us.
But we soon discovered that following the letter of the law was not enough for some people. On a mountain-hiking trail well outside of the city-center hot zone, we happily removed our masks to let the sun shine on our faces, with the understanding that we might have to put them back on at the observation deck or in some other crowded area. The usual tribal cleavage showed up in the predictable way, as a woman with the voice of ten thousand vice principals hissed at us from across the trail: “You should be ashamed of yourselves! You’re so selfish!”
I was confused: For one thing, everybody in Aspen is selfish — that’s how they got there. But, more to the point, I thought I was following the rules. And, in fact, I was following the rules. That was the problem: I was just following the rules, when, in the estimate of my accuser (“accuser” = “satan” in biblical Hebrew, by the way), what righteousness actually required of me was high compliance. The dynamic here is the same one that explains why it is that vegans save their bitterest contempt not for carnivores but for mere vegetarians who sneak in the occasional omelet. In any case, I was glad she was wearing a mask: The volume and intensity of her hissing was such that it would have created a substantial droplet cloud.
It was all a bit much for a day on vacation. The dachshund, enjoying the fine air, took no notice.
One of the nice things about having a well-defined, bright-line — it was a literal line, in this case — rule is that you do not have to rely on your own good judgment or that of others. There isn’t social tension around the rule as long as everybody knows what the rule is and everybody goes along with it — even when they think it is a dumb rule, the observation of which is a kind of nonfinancial tax supporting community life. And, aside from a couple of enduring redneck enthusiasms (guns and motorcycles, mostly), I am pretty risk-averse, and so inclined both to observe COVID-related rules and to sympathize with the rule-makers’ bias toward caution. (“Bias toward caution” is a pretty good working definition of “conservative.”) A simple, imperfect rule often is preferable to a complex, perfect rule because it frees up mental capital to apply to other tasks, which is helpful if you are not very good at cribbage or, as much as it embarrasses me to admit, Scrabble.
But — and here’s where libertarians really run into trouble — H. sap. is not a reasonable beast or, when pressed, a rule-following one. He is a reasoning beast, to be sure, but he uses reason, logic, and tools as means to ends that most often are affairs of the heart rather than of the mind and that are, from time to time, insane. Serial killers and genocidal maniacs can use reason when it suits them. What human beings are genuinely compelled by is not rules but allegiance. “Do I wear a mask in this situation?” is not the question that really drives people — the question that drives us is, “What kind of person am I if I wear a mask in this situation, and what would it say about me if I didn’t?”
In much the same way that you can accurately predict a person’s political allegiances from his household consumption — the people who drive F-250s and get their whole milk at Walmart Supercenters do not vote the same way as the people who drive Subarus and shop for meatless burgers at Whole Foods — attitudes toward masking have followed political fissures: The people who resent masks and flout the rules mostly voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and the people who wear two masks while alone in their Subarus driving to Whole Foods and hiss at strangers on mountain-hiking paths voted for Joe Biden. But Trump vs. Biden isn’t really the issue, either — they, too, are tribal mascots.
The use of masks as a social signifier is hardly new to the COVID-19 era. Face-coverings and head-coverings have featured in the social and religious life of Muslims (hijabs and kufis), Christians (mantillas, wimples, zuchettos), Jews (tichels, kippahs), Hindus (ghoonghats), and many others for centuries. The head-covering and face-covering impulse is partly rooted in modesty (both sexual modesty and modesty before God), but it also has a community-building aspect. When the Sikh spiritual master Guru Gobind Singh ordered his male followers to forgo cutting their hair and to wear turbans, he did so in order that, as he put it, his “disciples will be recognized among millions.” Outward signs of community and solidarity inevitably take on, to some degree, a depersonalizing role, as with the military uniform, which makes soldiers exactly what the adjective promises.
In our secular time, we have reinvented a great deal of ancient practice, from community-identifying dietary rules (back to those vegans, but also paleo and keto enthusiasts and many others), modern takes on sumptuary laws, lightly secularized versions of apostolic succession, and shrines of many kinds. And, in our current plague years, we have rediscovered the religious veil in the COVID-19 mask.
The people who say “listen to science” already are finding reasons not to. It isn’t a genuinely scientific question now — this sort of thing almost never is. The reason for the kashrut prohibition on eating pork wasn’t, as is sometimes suggested, trichinosis, which wasn’t even discovered until the 19th century — a more likely explanation (though by no means an absolutely certain one) is that Jews weren’t supposed to eat pork because Egyptian Osiris-worshippers did so at religious festivals, as reported by Herodotus. Pork-eating wasn’t a medical matter — it was a matter of cultural allegiance, of us and them.
The COVID mask isn’t exclusively an outward sign of inward things — it is also, in some circumstances, a practical tool to prevent the spread of the infection. Thankfully, the time of its usefulness in that context is coming to a close — and already has come to a close for most vaccinated people in most situations. But those who understand the mask as a tribal identifier and a sign of righteousness are not going to give it up any more readily than Jews are going to start eating pork chops or Christians are going to start abandoning circumcision. That the medical evidence says what it says is beside the point.
This isn’t a medical question anymore, and it never was that alone.