In American culture, the role of the cautioning fun-averse parent has been typically played by the political Right. For many years, Republicans were the party of rules and regulations, of just saying no (to drugs, to sex, to a good time in general), of pearl-clutching church ladies waging a perpetual war against smut — a category comprising all sorts of titillating material but also the Teletubbies, who were obviously perverts. The Conservatives of pre-Y2K were out to outlaw everything from skateboarding to South Park to non-missionary-position sex. If you wanted to fight for your right to party, the Right was who you were fighting.

That is not because fun is inherently a Left-wing phenomenon, but rather because it’s anti-ruling-class. The people in power make the rules; the fun-havers have fun by breaking them. “Fun — when your rulers would rather you not have it, and when the agents of social programming insist on stirring non-stop apprehension over the current crisis and the next one, the better to keep you submissive and in suspense — is elementally subversive,” wrote novelist Walter Kirn, as citizens of the US endeavoured to enjoy their first normal summer since 2020.

And if fun is inherently countercultural, then the inverse is also true: when a party finds itself in power, pucker-mouthed puritanism tends to creep up on it.

When it comes to cultural power, the moral majoritarians of my millennial youth have long since been dethroned. Now, the Left holds the keys to the castle, and the punk rockers are all wearing MAGA hats. That the forces of censorship, prudery and conformity have lately shifted their location to the political Left is not a new observation, but The Rise of the New Puritans by Noah Rothman is the first book-length work to identify it explicitly as a “war on fun”. According to Rothman, the progressive impulse toward policing fun is a feature of every puritanical movement, including the original one that gripped the not-yet-United-States back at the turn of the 18th century. History repeats itself: in 1699, Puritan leaders exhorted the public to contain themselves to the paradoxically termed “sober mirth”. In 2020, the height of socially approved comedy was Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a stand-up special that is intentionally and explicitly not funny. As Rothman notes: “Perhaps nothing is as important to the promotion of a virtuous society as what you’re allowed to laugh at.”

It’s not just what, but also how much. The rule-makers set the parameters for socially-approved fun; they also seek to quash whatever falls outside them. The content of, say, an HBO comedy special from even ten years ago is legitimately shocking to the sensibilities of our current moment. The edgy comedians of the time, like Sarah Silverman, seem to be telecasting their material not just from the distant past but possibly from another planet entirely. A 2013 standup routine features Silverman espousing the greatness of rape jokes, adding: “Who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. I mean, they’re traditionally not complainers.”

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And so the sanitisation of today’s cultural landscape is as much a question of what’s not there anymore: ribald comedy and steamy sex scenes are vanishing from mainstream film. Books are subject to review and rejection at the manuscript stage for “sensitivity”. Fusion restaurants are shuttered for the crime of cultural appropriation — which in many cases is not really about theft, but a lack of reverence for the culture in question. The Rise of the New Puritans keenly points to the prudery at the heart of such complaints, such as the one aimed by journalist Evy Kwong at a Toronto dumpling restaurant whose condiment selections included the cheekily-titled “HOT PHO U” and “JERK ME”. Kwong blasted the restaurant for “sexualizing jerk sauce and pho hot sauce” — which is to say, failing to take these sauces seriously. Irreverent condiment-based sex puns? Not in this house, mister.

Rothman catalogues how the tentacles of puritanism have wound their way into everything from food to film to football to fashion. This insistence on the dead seriousness of everything is one of the defining elements of our present moment. Everything frivolous must be taken seriously, injected with deep urgent meaning; everything fun must be seen first and foremost as a vehicle for danger, if not literal death then life-altering trauma.

Consider the way we talk about sex — and the way we attempt to scare young people out of having it. The puritans of the Nineties had their own approach to this, predicated on the notion that sex was a fun activity but it had dire consequences for those who attempted it outside of marriage (pregnancy or death from a flesh-eating STD). Today’s ideologues would instead have us believe that sex is damaging in and of itself, abetted by consent rhetoric that imagines the act as a tightrope walk over a vast ocean of potential violation. If you are ever less than 110% enthusiastic about what is happening, we tell young women, you are no longer consenting, but being raped. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect recipe for taking all the fun out of intimacy: how can you abandon yourself to the pursuit of physical ecstasy if you must also, at the same time, maintain a state of constant vigilance lest something go horribly wrong?

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And then there’s the pandemic, the impact of which is not addressed in The Rise of the New Puritans, but which certainly helped make the book’s subject go mainstream — much as the Salem witch trials were fuelled by an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that arose out of the fear of smallpox. The threat of Covid made explicit the connection between fun and danger, as every enjoyable social activity was recast as a vector for the spread of disease. It’s hard to think of a better example of “sober mirth” than the grim delight of the New Puritans as they padlocked the playgrounds, filled skate parks with sand, or patrolled the beaches in Florida dressed in a hood and a scythe. Forget problematic comedy, irreverent jerk sauce or bad sex. Here was a chance to send the entire world to its room, with a warning: if you attempt to go out and have fun now, you will be literally killing people.

For over two years, the contemporary puritans found their highest calling as pandemic enforcers. But it also seems possible now that this is where the fun police will make their last stand: rather than return to the cancellation trenches, targeting this restaurant or that television show for its offences, many of our most dedicated culture warriors have turned taking Covid seriously into their sole priority, seduced by the potent combination of performative asceticism, high stakes and low effort. Not only can you fight this war from home, your position is that much more unimpeachable if you yourself never leave the house. And they don’t; instead, you will find them online, railing away in the comments sections. Even now, they want to close the schools, ground the planes, mandate the masks. They are, invariably, martyrs to their own cause, which only fuels their righteous anger — if I haven’t gone to the theatre, dined indoors, or hugged my family since March 2020, then why should you?

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Here’s the thing: you can only see them online, and here they are preaching to the choir in an otherwise empty church. It is only the true believers who are left, feeding on and off each other, stewing in fear and resentment while everyone else goes outside and has fun. And as loud as they might seem to themselves, and each other, within the confines of their echo chamber, the truth is that outside of it they’re not just irrelevant, but nearly invisible. Their power, and their numbers, are diminished by the mere existence of normal people living normal lives.

And when this movement collapses under the weight of its own joylessness, as it almost certainly must, it’ll be the proverbial tree falling alone in a forest, unnoticed and unmourned. Because while the progressive puritans among us are, to paraphrase the H.L. Mencken quote, tormented by the notion that someone somewhere might be having a good time, the fun-havers are having too much fun to think about them at all.

Clearly, something very odd has happened. Consider, for instance, the events of the last week. On Good Friday, the Christian community reflects on Jesus being taken before the Roman Authorities, charged with setting himself up as an alternative king. This year, the Polish Roman Catholic Church of Christ the King in Balham had the ingenious idea of incorporating a real police raid into the liturgy. The police broke up the gathering of Christian worshippers, rather effectively making the point that even in the most apparently benign of political circumstances, Christians derive their authority not from the law of the land but from a king who is not of this world.

Unfortunately, of course, it wasn’t a creative piece of liturgy. Someone had phoned the police to complain. We do not know if his name was Judas. But breakup the service they did. “This is an unlawful gathering,” announced the boys and girls in blue, threatening to fine those gathered in prayer. Despite the fact that — as images of the service clearly showed — most of the congregation were social distancing, wearing masks and had pre-booked their attendance, the police closed down the service on one of the holiest days of the year.

It was clearly not close to being a proportionate response. And the church was right to be furious. The right freely to worship is an ancient freedom that ought never to be messed with so casually. And so, for the first time in my life, I phoned a lawyer in advance of opening up for the Easter weekend. “It is guidance”, she explained, “not law”. As long as I had done a risk assessment, I would be covered. (It’s worth noting, of course, that the Polish church had done precisely that — but it didn’t stop the police.)

I also posted the first section of Magna Carta on a pane of glass on the front of my church door the evening before our Easter service. We are only a few miles from Balham, and we all wondered if the police would be breaking up more church services. The first clause of Magna Carta reads thus:

“First, that we have granted to God, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed.”

As it would happen, the police didn’t show up to complain. Instead, and far more peculiarly, the only hostility I experienced happened after I shared an image of the poster on Twitter. “Magna Carta is only quoted by ignorant ideologues,” was one of the more polite responses.

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What particularly surprised me, though, was that the pile-on wasn’t confined to the usual vulgar suspects. In fact, a number of the critical comments were from medievalist historians, pointing out — often in quite a superior tone — how the foundational text no longer applies; that it was rescinded by the Pope just a few weeks after it was published. And then there were the lawyers, informing me that the text has no legal force. “Bless,” replied one prominent lawyer and blogger, patting me on the head, patronisingly.

Now I must say that, when I stuck the poster to my church’s window, I wasn’t aware quite how contentious a subject Magna Carta has become. Since lockdown, some business owners, including a Bradford hairdresser, have been posting clause 61 on their shop windows to warn off the police; others then accused them of populist numskullery.

Back in January, the Guardian even published a piece claiming that “in the far-Right spaces of social media in particular, Magna Carta is invoked as a digital rallying cry”. Apparently, it continued, Magna Carta is a “delusion” which “converts discontent into a dangerous politics”. It seems that, without me noticing, Magna Carta has become a kind of Right-wing meme, a whole new frontier in our never-ending culture wars.

But there is something very strange about all of this. How did the Left fall out of love with Magna Carta? Back in 2007, a Guardian article attacking the 90-day detention period for suspected terrorists was headlined “Protecting Magna Carta”. Indeed, only in 2015, at the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, Left-wing commentators were falling over themselves to laud the charter as the foundation of not just English freedom, but the very fount of human rights themselves.

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Interestingly, back then it was Right-wing people such as David Starkey who banged on about how “Magna Carta is a great theme for guff”, and progressive human rights lawyers like Dinah Rose QC who disagreed. “I don’t think it is ‘irrelevant guff’,” she said at the time. “I think it is very important. Not for what it meant in 1215 but for the symbol that it became and for the significance that it acquired as a part of the common law.”

Rose is right. Little of Magna Carta remains on the statute book — though, technically, the first section I quoted still does. But its significance has little to do with its current force in law, and everything to do with the fact that, especially from the 17th century onwards, it became a kind of rallying cry against perceived despotism. The Levellers brandished it against the king, the “People’s Charter” of the Chartists took its name from Magna Carta, and Eleanor Roosevelt, credited as the inspiration behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, referring it to the “international Magna Carta for all mankind”. Bless!

Even hard-nosed lawyers think it important. Lord Denning, former Master of the Rolls, called it “the greatest constitutional document of all times — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. Former Lord Chief Justice and Master of the Rolls Lord Bingham said “it can plausibly claim to be the most influential secular document in the history of the world”.

So how on Earth did today’s Lefties come to think of Magna Carta as some kind of Right-wing bogeyman? On one level, it’s not so surprising that given the mess the Left now finds itself in over their uncritical enthusiasm for lockdown, it has now turned on one of the most powerfully symbolic expressions of resistance to over-weaning executive power. Add to this that dreary Enlightenment propaganda, now taken as gospel by many liberal progressives, that anything medieval is as relevant to contemporary life as praying to a dead saint’s fingernail, and all the conditions for a political upending are in place.

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And so, what was until recently a Right-wing position, exemplified by David Starkey, has flipped into a Left-wing one, with liberal elites sniggering at the ignorance of thick Bradford hairdressers and Polish Christians for seeking to claim some very old and popularly understood freedoms. The world has turned upside down, and not in a good way. As the comedian Tony Hancock famously put it: “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?”

Yet Magna Carta is not some kind of magic amulet that can be used to ward off the police from the church door. It has long been a rallying cry for those who want to assert some basic freedoms, including the freedom to worship.

Back in March, the Scottish courts ruled that its Government’s church shut-down was unlawful, exceeding their legal authority. I do not claim any sort of authority on the law. But I do know when a government has crossed a line with regard to the freedom of religion — and police closing down a Good Friday service is precisely that. I will never seek the permission of Caesar to celebrate the Holy Mysteries. That’s why, for a while at least, Magna Carta will stay taped on my church door.

Wearing their primitive breathing apparatus sets, Fourt-Wells and Stocking were sent down into the acrid smoke with an instruction to locate the seat of the fire. They were never seen alive again. Their bodies were eventually found among piles of frozen meat packets and animal carcasses.

The incident became the catalyst for a powerful campaign led by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) to modernise equipment and safety procedures. The union called for breathing apparatus sets to be equipped with low-pressure warning alarms and audible distress devices, and for a better system of monitoring firefighters while they were working in such hazardous conditions. The campaign was a success. Government and fire service bosses were eventually forced to concede that the demands were eminently reasonable. As ever, it had taken a tragedy to spark change.

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The FBU’s campaign was a commendable example of a trade union looking beyond the battleground of pay, and lobbying for the safety of its members at work. 60 years after the event, I hosted proceedings as a plaque dedicated to the memory of Fourt-Wells and Stocking was unveiled at the spot where they fell. We will never know the number of firefighters whose lives were saved — and, mercifully, whose names it was never necessary to inscribe on such plaques — thanks to the union’s efforts.

Other trade unions can justly lay claim to having been instrumental in bringing about a safer working environment for those they represent. The annual number of workplace deaths has been dramatically reduced from an average of over 4000 at the beginning of the last century to fewer than 200 today. This is why anyone who tries to persuade me, a lifelong trade unionist, that unions have no business interfering in such matters is liable to get short shrift. History shows that trade unions are overall a force for good when it comes to safety in the workplace, and we shouldn’t forget it.

All of which brings me to Covid-19. At all times and on all matters, trade unions must strive to ensure their demands are measured and pragmatic. Crucially, union leaders must always seek to take their members — and, where possible, the public too — with them. This is even more the case when the issue at hand is one that is politically contentious.

In that vein, it is surely vital, when assessing how best to keep a group of people safe during these times, to start from the point of acknowledging that the virus poses a meaningful threat to only a small minority of people — almost exclusively those who are either elderly or suffering from underlying medical conditions, or often both. For the vast majority who contract it, Covid-19 is not a serious virus, let alone a killer one. Most will experience either mild symptoms or none at all. In fact, as of 16 September 2020, the number of Covid-related deaths in England involving individuals under the age of 60 and free from existing medical conditions stood at just 308. And, for several of these, it is possible that Covid-19 was not the thing that actually killed them.

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So it is against this background, and out of genuine concern for the credibility and reputation of the trade union movement, that I express alarm over the manner in which the leadership of some unions have taken unreasoned and insupportable positions in their approach to the virus.

Look, for example, at what is happening in our universities. Last week, the leader of the University and College Union (UCU) — which represents lecturers, academics and support staff — reiterated the union’s call for a ban on face-to-face teaching until the Government had curbed the spread of the virus. That the level of risk to those on campus is infinitesimal wasn’t enough to stop the demand being made. And given that universities are already in turmoil — as a consequence of mass self-isolation, threats of disciplinary action against those caught breaching social distancing rules, and the prospect of Christmas on campus, the demand, though not without its supporters, has caused exasperation among some students and members of staff.

Several universities, presumably motivated in part by an earlier threat by the UCU of strike action, have already switched to online-only teaching, leaving some staff feeling adrift and angry. A lecturer from a university in the Midlands told me this week of the deep sense of frustration felt by him and his colleagues after their impending return to physical teaching was abruptly blocked on safety grounds. Of eight members of departmental staff, only one had expressed a desire to avoid face-to-face lessons.

For most who do it, teaching is more than just an ordinary job or source of income: it is a vocation. Many educators feel that if someone is going to prevent them from doing what they love, there had better be a compelling reason.

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Professor Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist who has attracted prominence and acclaim for her criticisms of the lockdown approach, believes those demanding a ban on face-to-face teaching have called it seriously wrong. “The risks are not sufficient to justify us not doing our duty — which is to teach our students. To not teach them is a dereliction of duty,” she told me.

Of course it is right that trade unions pay close attention to emerging risks and seek to shape any institutional response. No one could reasonably argue against robust measures to protect the genuinely vulnerable in any scenario. But what possible merit is there in a strategy that strives to keep healthy lecturers and students apart out of fear of a virus from which, should they contract it at all, the overwhelming majority — if not all — will make a full recovery?

After the Summer brouhaha over the question of whether and when children should return to the classroom — an unnecessary and near-hysterical ruckus in which the teaching unions this time had a hand — a similar excess of caution has infected our schools. Such is daily life now for many children, they could be forgiven for assuming that a world of facemasks, social distancing and relentless hand-washing was the natural order of things. Never mind the risks of contracting Covid-19; we are in danger of creating a generation of OCD sufferers who think the environment around them will always be fraught with danger. Again, the sense of panic has not been commensurate with the level of risk.

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On one level, the over-reaction of the UCU and others might be seen as entirely rational. After all, the Government and media have done such an effective job scaring everyone witless, those demanding the most draconian and extreme measures might genuinely believe they are saving lots of lives.

The brutal truth, however, is that one thing has been missing throughout this entire debate: proportion. Safety in the workplace, as anywhere else, should be about implementing sensible and proportionate control measures to alleviate risk. It is this principle which underpins health and safety legislation. Instead, we have arrived at a point where, for many in positions of authority, any risk at all is too much and, where it exists, drastic action is required to eradicate it. That attitude serves no-one. Society becomes afflicted by paranoia, and individuals lose their ability to quantify risk — an essential skill in the armoury of any human being.

The easy thing for a trade unionist like me would be to go along with it all. After all, as long as most union members are still drawing a salary, why should it matter?

Well, it matters because the education of our young is being harmed, not to say our economy devastated, livelihoods destroyed and civil liberties curtailed. And when unions themselves are part of a crusade whose demands are utterly out of proportion to the risk, it behoves those of us who care about the movement to warn them to pull back, lest they alienate large numbers of rank-and-file trade unionists and incite wider public scorn over “bloody intransigent unions”. What a tragedy it would be if so much of the historical good done by unions in preventing death and injury in the workplace was overlooked as a consequence of the overzealous and irrational demands of a handful of leaders.

As some B-listerer turns on the lights on Oxford Street, and the television offers up another excruciating visit to Mrs Brown’s Boys, I generally have prophet Isaiah running on a loop in my head. “The people who have walked in darkness will see a great light.” My job is to point to that light, to hold it up and offer it as hope to those living in darkness. But it can get lost amid all the twinkling light pollution of the season and I worry that my role as the local master of ceremonies for Christmas cheer is too complicit with the spirit of bacchanalian bonhomie that obscures the simple story of God coming into the world as a child.

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This year it may be different. Christmas is under threat, they say. “Without real leadership from the feeble @churchofengland Christmas simply won’t [sic] be Christmas,” the political journalist Isabel Oakeshott tweeted out this week. To which the Archbishop of Canterbury — I imagine properly cheesed off — was driven to reply, sarcastically: “Thanks Isabel, we’re all very pro-Christmas in the @churchofengland.”

Thanks Isabel, we’re all very pro-Christmas in the @churchofengland. At Christmas we celebrate God’s love for us in Christ, who shares in all our troubles and joys. I pray it brings us together, as it has in past times of joy and sadness, and doesn’t become a cause for division. https://t.co/enAaV9GIj8

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) September 22, 2020

This is one exchange among many. The lights won’t be on this year. The fireworks have been cancelled. The pubs will close early. The journalist Rachel Johnson even suggested a return to prohibition, banning the sale of booze. Students, we now hear, might not be released home for the holidays. There will certainly be no large family gatherings. So a pall of winter misery is about to envelop us. Christmas is being cancelled.

There have always been two Christmases, of course — the Christian one and the secular one — and they exist in an uneasy yet symbiotic relationship. The Church grumbles that Christmas has become too commercialised and ever so slightly resents the appearance of drunken strangers sniggering at the back of at midnight mass.

For their part, the non-churchgoing world complains when the Church refuses to acquiesce to the season of generalised sentimental benevolence that is used to sell hard-up people stuff to give to people who don’t really want it. It’s a season they believe starts sometime at the beginning of December (but about now in the shops) and which ends with a roasted bird and an orgy of ripped paper. Indeed, even the timetables of these two Christmases are entirely different. The Christian Christmas begins the very day that the secular one ends. As the star appears over the stable, most people are snoozing on the sofa.

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With the advent of Covid, this relationship is becoming one of open hostility. One prominent cleric, Rev Miranda Threlfall-Holmes commented in response to Oakeshott: “You don’t get to tell us to put lives at risk just because you want a nice carol service to complete your Good Housekeeping view of ‘a good Christmas’.” And the Archbishop re-tweeted, signalling his approval.

You don’t get to tell us to put lives at risk just because you want a nice carol service to complete your Good Housekeeping view of ‘a good Christmas’.

— Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (@MirandaTHolmes) September 22, 2020

Of course, I understand their irritation. I often share it. I hate Slade and Mariah Carey. I hate those smug, religion-lite “season’s greetings” cards from politicians and their perfect families. I can feel the grump coming on as I write these words. But there is nonetheless a problem with my reaction. For better or worse, we are the established church. This means we have a duty of religious care even to those who do not darken our doors — yes even to those with a Good Housekeeping view of Christmas. We are not a membership club for the religious, we exist for the benefit of non-members. And this means we are the purveyors of Christianity both in the espresso form (neat, for the aficionado) and the latte form (diluted with warm milk).

This tension is embodied in the question of how regular churchgoers relate to the folk religion that surrounds them. And from the perspective of the sort of Christian life that has been schooled by exposure to regular Bible reading, prayer, confession, and the whole pattern of the Church’s year, the latte version is not just thin and insipid, but often seriously misguided.

The folk religion of Christmas doesn’t generally appreciate the astonishing and — from the perspective of the Jewish understanding of God from which it emerges — even blasphemous idea that God almighty, the creator of Heaven and Earth, might appear in a smelly shed, shorn of all his divine superpowers. God-become-human is a terrifying prospect, with Heaven emptied, and all the hope of the world invested in a tiny, defenceless child.

By the time the Church reads out the story of Jesus and his family running away to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous rage, the folk religion bandwagon is already packing up its toys for another year. They have missed the point that the vulnerability of the infant to worldly violence is a sinister prefiguration of the bloody end this child will one day meet. It’s not just a festival of bouncing babies. It’s a festival that prefigures the shadow of death.

And it’s important to get that bit because otherwise the message of the angels — “fear not” — doesn’t really make much sense. “Fear not” said he “for mighty dread had seized their troubled mind,” we will sing. And what more appropriate message could there be as we prepare once again to walk through the shadow of death, as Covid stalks our land?

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Christmas is not an escapist fantasy that gives us all a little break from the gloom in which we are enveloped. It is a direct response to the land of death. As St John puts it in that famous reading that ends every carol service: “What has come into being with him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The church is widely perceived not to have had a good Covid crisis. Many have criticised it for substituting too much soft left social commentary for proper theology, preferring to channel the message of a fearful lockdown than the ‘fear not’ message of the angels. And there is something to this. But at Christmas the message is distinctive and counter-cultural: despite all our failures as priests and bishops, God is faithful. The church only survives because even when we are rubbish, God is not.

Often, this message gets lost because Christmas comes too early and knocks out the season of Advent. Advent is that period of waiting, where we sit with our own fears and hopelessness, with our own vulnerability to death and failure, looking out for something that will speak words of hope into our desperate times and deepest fears. Unless we are prepared to sit in that dark place for a while, the light of the new dawn will get missed.

I do not subscribe to all the religious snobbishness about folk religion. Nonetheless, there is potentially much to be gained by the cancellation of all that cheap Christmas cheer that takes place mid-December. The light appears to those living in darkness. If we can allow ourselves to stay in this dark place a while longer, without easy distractions or analgesics, we might hear a very different story to the one we think we know.

In 1919, as WB Yeats’ wife lay sick with the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that took the lives of somewhere between 17 and 50 million people around the world, he wrote those famous words: “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Over a century later, that poem, The Second Coming, speaks spookily into the nightmare of our condition. As does that enigmatic ending: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”

No, Christmas is not cancelled. In fact, this could be the best Christmas ever.

The question is not why the UK government originally adopted the 2 metre rule. Very little was known about Covid-19 when the pandemic first reached the UK, and 2 metres was the standard recommended distance for infectious diseases that seemed to spread through the air in droplets or a fine aerosol of fluids, inhaled or otherwise absorbed by the next victim. In a lockdown, and in the absence of any other evidence, why not adopt the standard?

The question is why, as new evidence emerged, Britain was so slow to follow France, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and indeed the WHO in dropping the minimum recommended distance to just one metre? Emerging research suggested that Covid tends to travel by heavier, larger droplets. Physics, not biology, shows they fall to the ground rapidly, so the risk reduction of one metre separation is significant, but adding another metre has less impact. Some other countries decided to stay on the safe side with 1.5 metres, but the UK held out till this week at 6ft 6in.

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Of course, the virus doesn’t follow rules. If somebody is infectious, there is no hard limit beyond which you are safe. And, since people can be infectious before showing any symptoms, anyone represents at least a theoretical risk of infection. We are looking at degrees of risk, and what measures we’re willing to take to reduce them. Outdoors is safer than indoors. Wearing a mask is safer than not. Facing the same way and talking like spies meeting on a park bench is safer than face to face. And all this is provisional, as we’re not putting patients in labs and letting them breathe on volunteers to find out.

It could just be that the British Government wanted to wait until the disease was less prevalent before letting us get a little closer. Or it could be the latest in a long history of telling us, not what the science says, but what the public health officials think we need to be told.

Take “5 a Day”, the guideline that tells us all to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day (potatoes don’t count, despite being so rich in Vitamin C that their introduction to Britain ended endemic scurvy). That has a number in, so surely it must be based on scientific research? Indeed, the NHS “Why  5 A Day?” page says the campaign is based on WHO advice to eat 400g of fruit and vegetables to lower the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.

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There is research linking more fruit and vegetables to lower risks of some diseases, but that’s not the origin of the campaign. In 1980s California, the state’s Department of Health Services found a happy harmony between the desire to improve public health through diet, and the economic benefit to the region’s farmers from increased sales. In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Department’s then Director, Ken Kizer, summarised its success:

“The 5 a Day-for Better Health! Campaign had several distinctive features, including its simple, positive, behavior-specific message to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables every day as part of a low-fat, high fiber diet; its use of mass media; its partnership between the state health department and the produce and supermarket industries; and its extensive use of point-of-purchase messages.”

Professor Tim Lang was advising the UK government in the late 1990s when he was told of the US campaign and felt “we needed something”. Tony Blair’s Labour government was looking for specific policy targets, and five was “a nice round number”. The scientific precision of 400g was retrofitted later to give the “simple, positive, behaviour-specific message” more scientific authority.

Or take government guidelines for how much alcohol we should drink, revised in 2016 to “You are safest not to drink regularly more than 14 units per week.” This was cut down from the old guidelines, which were 14 units for women and 21 for men, recognising the differences in average physiology. They in turn were revised downwards in 1984 from 56 units per week, almost a bottle of wine per day. Our parents were made of sterner stuff.

But the new guidelines are based on better science, right?

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Well, it depends what you mean by science. Like most public health questions, it would be unethical to apply randomised controlled trial methods to habits that you suspect are unhealthy. Nobody assigned human adults randomly to drink nearly a bottle of wine a day or no alcohol at all, and recorded their time and cause of death. Health advice is based on a mixture of ‘ecological’ observation (real humans drinking in the wild and then reporting their intake) and mathematical modelling.

The new guidelines took an extreme position on the protective effects of small amounts of alcohol (around a unit a day) against cardiovascular diseases, for which there is robust evidence. Light drinkers are around 20% less likely to die of anything in a given period than teetotallers, even excluding people who have stopped drinking because they’re ill.

Arguing that deaths from cardiovascular disease have fallen significantly, the Chief Medical Officers argued that this made the protective effect less important, and that it was only significant in women over 55. They may have based this on a paper published in the BMJ claiming that such benefits were limited to women over 65, a claim that the statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter described as misleading, commenting that “a more appropriate headline would have been ‘Study supports a moderate protective effect of alcohol’ … This is a poor use of statistics, and I am surprised it got past the referees and into the journal.”

The new, lower drinking guidelines are not a change in public message that reflects a change in scientific research. The research has been selected, or even commissioned, to justify new, lower guidelines. A more honest public health message would be: “Depending on who you are, a drink a day is probably good for you, and every subsequent drink increases your risk of illness and death”. But that would muddy the “simple, positive, behavior-specific message”.

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Public health campaigns are, by nature, broad brush and aimed at mass populations. Most of us want rules of thumb, not scientific papers, when we’re weighing up what to eat, drink or smoke, whether to go for a run, how close to stand in the supermarket queue. We understand that advice is to be taken in context, not as a protective spell that will guard us from all harm.

In a pandemic, as new understanding emerges by the day, clarity is even more important. As early as February, scientific advice to the government about how to handle the Covid-19 pandemic included the importance of being clear and definitive, coherent and consistent, not only to improve compliance with helpful actions, but to discourage pointless or counterproductive ones.

But this is no excuse for dishonesty about the basis for official advice or rules. Where the scientific basis for policies was uncertain, it would have been far better to say that the science was uncertain, but the government had made a decision for these reasons: erring on the side of caution until more was known, or recognising that human life is about more than medical health.

When the WHO switched its advice to one metre, what was the rationale for sticking with two? Fear of looking indecisive? Lack of faith in British people to know what a metre looks like? In mid-March, the UK’s scientific advisory group, SAGE, was invoking behavioural science to argue that the public is mostly rational and altruistic in a crisis:

“The behavioural science points to openly explaining to the public where the greatest risks lie and what individuals can do to reduce their own risk … Greater transparency will help people understand personal risk and enable personal agency, send useful signals about risk in general and build public trust. Citizens should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk.”

Of all the expert advice given to the government, it’s a pity this paragraph has been so often ignored.

This public health lesson is one that the Victorians knew all too well but one facing us again nearly two centuries later as businesses start up again post-lockdown. Let us not underestimate how difficult this will be, not because of stifling government regulation (one metre or two?) nor consumer fear but because our very economic model is based on high density.

The Tesco founder and First World War veteran, Jack Cohen, who used his de-mob money to set up a market stall in East London, had one abiding business principle: “Pile it high, sell it cheap”. His approach became the chief characteristic of 20^th-century consumption, in every sector from groceries to restaurants, from beauty to air travel.

Once the epitome of luxury and exclusivity, by the 1990s air travel had opened up to the masses. The new model was all about low costs and high volumes. That marvel of engineering and design, Concorde, was grounded just as upstart low-cost airlines such as Ryanair built their brand by stripping back add-ons and offering absurdly cheap seat sales. Middle-market companies such as British Airways had no choice but to follow suit and lower their prices. The ‘no frills’ competition reached the grocery sector too, with Lidl, Iceland and Aldi chipping away at market share. Their success lay in winning over middle-class consumers for whom ‘bargain bragging’ about a £10 flight to Florence or grocery savings became du rigueur at dinner parties.

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Whereas the consumer boom in goods relied on an increasingly globalised and cheap supply chain, the consumer boom in experiences — be it travel, eating out or a hair-cut — centred on tight margins and low prices funded by boosting capacity. If density is its founding principle, then social distancing puts that entire model in jeopardy as consumers begin to prioritise space and safety above cost, and businesses recognise they can only survive by raising prices to counter lower footfall.

Restaurant owners, who all work on an extremely fragile business model, are especially vulnerable. In a survey by Square Meal, three-quarters of bar and restaurant owners said they did not think their establishment would survive social distancing. What of those restaurants with long benches designed like a school canteen where you are so close to fellow diners you end up eavesdropping on their conversation? And will a bar that is only running on 60% capacity have the same ambience? For every punter happy to get a seat, there will be others who miss the buzz of a busy bar.

Jo Eames, director of Peach Pubs, stated that “margins are so tight and costs so high in hospitality that no business can operate for long with much less than 90% full turnover”. Social distancing reduces capacity and will result in job losses and higher prices. Those restaurants in the City or West End, with high rents dependent on international tourists and business lunches, may end up faring much worse than small local establishments who are able to diversify their service with home delivery, cooked to order meals and an add-on specialist grocery store.

Hair salons are another case in point. Hairdressing is modelled on the Ford Assembly line with stylists, colourists and apprentices allotted designated roles and slots. Under this system, one stylist has the capacity to work on three clients over three hours. This becomes impossible under the new rules; stylists may have to stay with one client for the duration, massively impacting on the numbers that will be able to come through the salon door and inevitably pushing up prices. But the salon experience too will be diminished with the removal of the waiting area, refreshments, magazines and the installation of inhospitable Perspex shields between chairs.

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The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

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The high-density model made everything more accessible and also fed a culture in which consumers prioritised the buying of experiences over the buying of things. This was especially true for the millennial generation priced out of the housing market. What became cheap as they came of age — technology, eating out and travel — were all things, unsurprisingly, that millennials loved spending their money on. More millennials have passports than driving licenses, which is testimony to the fact that the open sky rather than the open road has long been the symbol of millennial consumer identity (compared to their gas-guzzling Baby boomer parents).

For millennials, “keeping up with Joneses” was not about your car, home or stuff owned; we could rent, share or borrow that stuff anyway. No, our status derived from something different: our experiences — the places we went, the people we met, the things we saw — and crucially the documenting of these experiences on social media. It is not the selfie that defined us, but the representation of the self-captured in the moment at a concert, in a restaurant, on a beach.

But now the crowd has been dispersed and the experiences have been put on ice. In a post-Covid world, it’s the home that represents a safe haven while everything that millennials enjoy spending their money on has been curbed. Evidence for this lies in how much money this particular demographic has saved over the past three months. According to Barclays, 18-29 year olds’ savings balances have increased by 9.9%, with an average saving amount of £604, which is 11% more than the national average and the highest of any age group. According to Ipsos Mori, while shopping habits did not really alter for those aged between 55-75 under lockdown, they changed the most for millennials, who bought different products and in different quantities than they did before.

But as lockdown is eased, will millennials (in particular) resume their normal ways? Will we see an era of ‘revenge spending’, (a term first coined in China, which saw an initial uptake in designer items being purchased after lockdown eased)? Consumer analysts and the Government hope that “pent-up demand” will result in a spending splurge — and the long queues outside Primark yesterday certainly point to that. The Barclays consumer survey however reveals that for millennials, the immediate priorities are restaurant meals and getting a haircut. It also revealed that 37% of millennials would like to be more attentive and responsible with their finances.

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But good intentions often wane. What may be more significant is that millennials could be forced into different spending habits due to changing prices. It has been estimated that package holidays could rise by £1,000 per head (not accounting for rising insurance costs). In the short term, there may be lower fares to entice customers back, but with airline bankruptcies and reduced competition, an inevitable decline in business travel and consumer fear likely to be a lingering factor, airlines will need to make even more money from their economy-class consumers. As one travel agent put it to me: “The days of flying so far, so often and so cheaply are over” — a fact that will chime with millennial and Gen Z’s environmental concerns.

As if pre-empting this shift, Airbnb has already sacked 25% of its workforce. It may be that, paradoxically, millennials end up benefiting. If over-tourism becomes a thing of the past and all those empty commercial office properties are turned into flats, the urban housing and rental market may finally become more affordable.

Airbnb is already refocusing its attention away from rental business to what they call ‘Air Experiences’; recalibrating the experience economy for the digital realm (clumsily known as phygital). Pitched as “unique activities we can do together led by a world of hosts”, you can take your pick from an art tour of Lisbon, a water blessing meditation ritual with a Bali-based Monk or a virtual trip through Chernobyl with its abandoned dogs — all within the comfort of your home.

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For people in their thirties who were already feeling an acute sense of burnout, with a family or soon to start one and desiring greater flexibility at work, lockdown only reinforced what they already knew. A tiny pod apartment or flat-share in the centre of town, especially surrounded by closed shops and lifeless bars, has its limitations. So even if we do snap back into old routines in 12 months’ time, things will be different in the long term, in part because business models will have had to change to survive but also because new habits and values will have been formed. As long as the economic incentives are there, a significant number of them will be encouraged (and possibly forced) to make the same choice as their parents, shifting from buyers of experiences to buyers of stuff and assets.

It will mean the birth of the ‘homebody economy’, where millennials invest in their house as a home beyond a crash pad. Lockdown saw one quarter of millennials increase their purchase of home, garden and DIY products. A move triggered by lockdown will be sustained because of new priorities — not least the inevitable and hugely significant shift in flexible working.

Might we see the rise of a new demographic — the suburban or semi-rural millennial — in their detached houses with their detached phygital dinner parties? Can we envisage a 21^st-century millennial mash up of Mike Leigh’s 1970s satirical play Abigail’s Party where couples share a simultaneous delivery from their favourite restaurant, give virtual tours of their renovated home office, bark orders at their Alexa and share Spotify dinner party playlists while wistfully reminiscing about the good old days of music festivals and cheap adventure travel?

Now that really would be a status update.

When the coronavirus hit higher education, it encountered an institution with serious pre-existing conditions. Many universities were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. A lingering dispute over pensions had corroded morale. The over-emphasis on research, imposed largely by the government, had warped priorities, leading to a decline in teaching quality everywhere. Mounting student debt led many young people to question whether the ‘ivory tower experience’ is worth the investment.

The virus is ruthless: it exposes and punishes those weaknesses. Over the long term, some institutions might be forced to close, while others will have to radically transform the product they offer.

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In the short term, universities responded impressively to the lockdown. Fortunately, the crisis struck around the term break, giving lecturers time to adjust to teaching online. I heard the usual grumbling among former colleagues but they improvised remarkably well.

The challenges were immense. Take my son, who’s currently in his third year of a drama course at the University of the Highlands and Islands. At first, it seemed impossible to do acting online from home. He, however, dutifully showed up to Zoom classes, performing movement and voice in front of his Apple Mac. An assignment in a directing module was completed with his mother in the starring role.

Higher education has changed more in four weeks than it did during the four decades I taught. When I asked friends how they’ve coped, they described nuisances familiar to almost anyone who has been working at home. One friend told about trying to conduct an online seminar while a neighbour next door was noisily building a shed. Cats walked over keyboards, dogs barked and kids made demands. Most common of all were the challenges of dealing with new technology and dodgy wifi. “One of the biggest learning curves I’ve found”, a colleague wrote, “is embracing change as a set of new perspectives rather than a series of threats.”

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The problems staff have encountered are mere nuisances; those students have had to endure are more serious, and will become more so, if the crisis continues into a new academic year. The virus, far from being a great leveller, brutally exposed inequalities among students. Some have to share laptops with family members; others don’t have a reliable internet connection, or even a simple desk. One student worked from an ironing board. They nevertheless adjusted quickly and with resilience. Courses were completed without too much loss of content.

But let’s not get complacent. One reason online teaching worked better than expected is because it happened in the middle of the semester, when classes had already met face-to-face and formed personal bonds. A bunker spirit arose, fortified by an assumption that the crisis would be temporary. Creating a group dynamic with students who have never met one another and who have endured months of lockdown and uncertainty is a much greater challenge. And that’s what lies ahead.

Universities are flying blind. Among my friends, anxiety is high; there’s a repeated refrain of “the worst is yet to come”. Colleagues are frantically planning for scenarios they can’t predict. When will the lockdown be lifted? When will social distancing no longer apply? Will travel restrictions prevent the arrival of international students who contribute massively to income? Universities have responded by anticipating every contingency. They are offering teaching both in person and online, with students allowed to choose which is best for them.

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This seems a sensible solution, but uncertainties proliferate. It’s not clear whether in-person and online classes can take place simultaneously. If not, the workload for lecturers will immediately double. Students opting for the online version will inevitably suffer a qualitative difference in provision that might be reflected in performance. As for those who opt for in-person teaching, will it be safe by September to pack 300 students into a lecture hall or squeeze eight of them into a small office for a tutorial? Yesterday, Cambridge announced that there will be no face-to-face lectures in the coming academic year and in person small group teaching will be conducted only where social distancing allows. Other universities will certainly follow. And what of all the other aspects of campus life – dances, sports, societies, carousing and casual sex?  There’s great risk of universities becoming hotspots in the second wave of the virus.

Now look at that scenario from the student’s perspective. Some will inevitably decide that it’s not worth spending £9,000 in fees for an experience diminished both educationally and socially. Many prospective first years will opt instead to defer their place. Some students in mid-course will decide to take a year off; some may never return. My son is seriously considering whether doing drama in the age of self-isolation is really worth the effort. He’s not sure he’ll go back. Universities have promised to be flexible when it comes to those choosing to defer, but this will inevitably lead to a massive logjam at the clearing stage in the summer of 2021.

I’m certain that universities will respond well to these uncertainties, just as they have so far done.  My former colleagues, for the most part, take pride in what they do; they don’t want the quality of higher education to suffer. Most of them will therefore spend the summer improving the online versions of their classes, by looking creatively at how best to exploit the existing technology. One thing is certain: online classes will be much better come September than they were back in April.

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That, however, raises another problem, one which brings to mind turkeys voting for an early Christmas. The preferred method of teaching at universities hasn’t changed much since Plato gathered acolytes together under the Grecian sun. Seminars and tutorials teach students more than English or Philosophy or History: they foster the development of life skills like reasoning, listening, discourse and argument that are applicable to any subsequent profession.

The individual develops and matures in the hothouse of the seminar room in ways that go beyond the mere imparting of knowledge. For this reason, academics have long argued that the computer can never replace the classroom. Successful examples of distance learning, like the Open University, are still seen as second-best alternatives.

If my former colleagues work hard to make the coming academic year a success, the effect might be to undermine that cherished assumption that in-person contact is essential to learning. In other words, there’s great danger in doing the job well. Universities have always sold a life-changing experience — the degree represents a level of expertise but also a rich journey in attaining it. In the post-Covid environment of austerity, that experience might look even more like a middle-class indulgence than it already does.

The ancient universities will undoubtedly continue to do what they’ve always done and will find students willing to pay for the full ivory tower experience.  They will, however, suffer in the short term.  The University of Edinburgh announced last week that its annual income will drop by £150 million due to the Coronavirus, in particular because students from outside Europe, who pay high fees, are likely to stay away.  That will be a common problem among the elite institutions.

It is, however, the less-prestigious institutions that face a really bleak future. They can’t rely on idyllic surroundings or a distinguished reputation to attract undergraduates. These institutions depend upon their ability to pack students in to large lecture courses, taught by low paid, often adjunct, lecturers.  The competition for applicants among them was already fierce and some were in dire financial trouble.  In the post-Covid future, some might decide that survival lies in developing cheap distance-learning degrees.  Cash-strapped students might opt pragmatically for that alternative — a degree without the frills delivered online and without the expense of living on campus.

Higher education has always been sold as a great leveller — a ladder of social mobility. Intelligent youths from underprivileged backgrounds, it was thought, would develop their full potential through the experience of going away to university. That ideal was already undermined by the introduction of fees in 1998 and their crippling increase in 2010. It would be weakened further if online courses proliferate.

Higher education would be divided into two unequal sectors which would reflect the characteristics of the cohort they attract. The ancient universities would continue to offer the in-person tutorial experience, with the important personal and social development that goes with it. The other sector would offer online degrees without frills — an option attractive to those whose low income necessitates a utilitarian approach to education. The latter would learn a subject, but would miss out on the personal growth. Out would go that ideal of levelling; instead of erasing class differences, universities would magnify them.

To some extent, anyway: history provides numerous examples of people living in isolation. From lighthouse keepers maintaining a watchful eye over stormy seas to anchorites in the desert, not only did these people cope, but many saw the experience as contributing to their spiritual betterment.

Meanwhile there has been a utopian strain in the writing about the Covid-19 crisis, with some commentators expressing the hope that we shall emerge on the other side transformed, convinced of the value of communitarianism/socialism/universal basic income/insert pet solution to world’s ills here. Could this period of lockdown lead us to the promised land? Or will we all just end up hating each other?

Here in the United States, the vast landscape practically invites you to disappear, self-isolate and start afresh — and many have done just that. Famously, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is an account of the two years and two months the author spent living in a hut in the woods, getting back to nature, seeking self-betterment, etc. He got a book out of it that high school kids are still made to read today — a pretty good result, all in all.

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Well, perhaps not. Thoreau isn’t actually a good example of life under lockdown. He complained of having more visitors than when he lived in town; the record was “twenty–five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof.” In Covid-19 conditions, he’d be a super spreader. A more recent American hermit, Ted Kaczynski, was more committed to avoiding people, and also got a book out of it. But he did wind up sending letter bombs to scientists and was sent to prison for a very long time for murder. So maybe not a good example, then.

No man is an island, as they say. Perhaps isolation brings better results if you do it with a select group of like-minded people? Certainly, many have tried to find perfection this way, forming self-contained communities dedicated to this or that vision of utopia throughout the nation’s history.

Take, for instance, the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Oregon, subject of Netflix’s fascinating documentary Wild, Wild Country. Rajneeshpuram was founded in 1981 by an Indian guru who went by the name of Rajneesh, after his foundation got into a spot of bother with the Indian authorities over millions of dollars in unpaid tax. Moving to the US, he hoped to be able to lead his followers to enlightenment unhampered by such petty, worldly concerns.

Alas, it didn’t turn out so well. One minute it was all peace vibes, maroon clothing and hippies rutting in public “like baboons”; the next it was all stockpiling guns, poisoning 751 people in the neighboring town, attempting to murder a US Attorney, prison sentences and deportation for the guru.

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OK, so maybe that’s also not a good example. The good news is, there are lots of other American utopian communities to learn from. In fact, more than 100 were established in the century prior to the Civil War alone. Surely one or two of them worked out, right?

Well, some certainly managed to exist for a while. One group was founded in the early nineteenth century by a certain George Rapp, who was convinced that the return of Christ was imminent and that it was necessary to prepare for the moment. To that end, he established three communities: Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1804; followed by Harmony, Indiana in 1815; and then Economy, Pennsylvania in 1824.

Celibacy was part of the deal, until a cove styling himself as the “Count de Leon” arrived from Germany in 1831 and persuaded about 200 people to seek the pleasures of the flesh and demand their share of the community’s funds. Rapp wound up embroiled in lawsuits but lived on until 1847; the remaining celibate Rappites dwindled during the second half of the century, before finally disbanding in 1906.

The Shakers were another famous utopian community, founded by Ann Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Manchester blacksmith who had emigrated to the American colonies in 1774. “Mother” Ann declared that she was the ‘divine female principle’ completing Christ’s male principle, ushering in the millennium. Like Rapp, she imposed celibacy on her followers. In the 18 Shaker villages that popped up, the sexes were housed in separate barracks; it was forbidden to touch at communal dances; and men and women were seated at separate tables during meals. To compensate, they leaped up and down and writhed in ecstasy during services.

The Shakers, nonetheless, made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. To compensate, they performed ecstatic dances during their services, and the collective trembling which ensued led to their name. The Shakers made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. Today their lemon pie lives on at Martha Stewart.com.

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Bad news for unbelievers staring down lockdown: secular utopian communities were markedly less successful.

I dimly recall learning, back in my Scottish schooldays, about the model village of New Lanark, where the Welsh manufacturer and reformer Robert Owen conducted experiments in education, communal living and the amelioration of poverty. What my teachers didn’t tell me was that Owen then travelled to the US where he went full utopian socialist.

To get a head start, he purchased the already extant utopia of Harmony, Pennsylvania from the Rappites in 1825, renamed it “New Harmony”, and then burned80% of his fortune over the next two years as disagreements erupted over details as small as the correct form of government and the role of religion (Owen didn’t have any). A flurry of Owenite communities — 12 in all — suffered a series of similarly rapid rises and falls, starting with great hope before voting to abolish themselves.

A swift demise awaited many other utopias, whether they were established on the principle of free love (like the hopefully named community of Free Lovers at Davis House, Ohio, 1854-1858), vegetarianism (like Octagon City, Kansas, 1854-1858) Fourierism (like Brook Farm in Massachusetts, 1841-1847) or anarchy (like Fruit Hills, Ohio, 1845 – 1852).

The Icarians were more successful, perhaps because their founder — Etienne Cabet, a friend of Robert Owen — had written a novel, Voyage en Icarie, which at least illustrated what his followers should aim for (a primitive economy without private property or selfishness). The Icarians got off to a shaky start in Texas in 1848 but eventually its members founded settlements in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and California where they enjoyed four decades’ worth of splits, schisms and factionalism before eventually admitting defeat in 1898.

Perhaps the most ambitious utopians, however, lived at the Oneida Community, established by John Humphrey Noyes in New York state in 1848. Noyes, a relative of the US president Rutherford Hayes, extolled the virtues of “complex marriage”, by which he meant that everybody in the community was married to everybody else. This led to a complicated system of regulated polyamory.

The Oneida Community also dabbled in eugenics and held vigorous mutual self-criticism sessions. In 1879, however, Noyes fled to Canada to escape charges of statutory rape; there God blessed him with the revelation that conventional marriage was complex enough. The community disbanded the following year, only to promptly reinvent itself as a silverware manufacturer. By the 1980s Oneida, Ltd. made half the cutlery in the United States.

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So, will we all emerge from this period of confinement — be it with our loved ones or locked in the airless virtual communities of the like-minded on social media — improved and enlightened? Almost certainly not: there is a reason why monks take a vow of silence, and why prisoners don’t hang out in the yard all day. Even so, the American utopian experience contains a couple of lessons that might help you deal with this lockdown, should it drag on.

Firstly, you stand a better chance of overcoming squabbles, factionalism and dissent — and generally holding out for a long time — if you hold Millenarian beliefs. The Shaker’s Mother Ann, for instance, persuaded her followers that she was the feminine incarnation of the Godhead, in regular communication with the angels and all that. So if you can channel a little of that sweet End Times action and convince yourself that the Coronavirus is actually a prelude to Christ’s imminent return and that now is the time to prepare — have at it. You might even find the whole lockdown experience strangely fulfilling.

On the other hand, the whole Millenarian thing can go down the pan very quickly if the wrong type of charismatic leader turns up. Take Rajneesh, for instance. So if anyone in your house (or on your Twitter feed / a Facebook group chat) is talking excitedly about the new world that will emerge post-Covid while growing a very long beard — watch out.

Finally, utopia does not await us on the other end of this, but you might still come up with some good ideas or develop some helpful new skills. The Owenites, for instance, opened a free library in New Harmony; the Shakers invented the clothespin. You can still buy Oneida cutlery; I use it to eat every day.

Maybe, that’s the solution. Forget utopia — if you want to get something valuable out of this lockdown experience, do something good for others or learn a craft. In particular, knowing how to make things with your hands might come in handy in the, er, “changed economic conditions” that await us once this is over.

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges
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This short story tells of the discovery of an encyclopaedia describing an imaginary world that has been invented by a secret society. In Tlon there is only one intellectual discipline: psychology. Physical objects are ideas in the mind; only the floating world of impressions and notions exists. Yet these insubstantial ideas have the power to invade the realm of matter.

In a postscript, Borges records how, after the discovery of this encyclopaedia, people began to find small and extremely heavy cones, “made from a metal that is not of this world”. The “primitive language” of Tlon found its way into schools, where a make-believe history was taught and only a concocted past remained. The imagined universe of Tlon disintegrated the human world.

Nearly everyone in lockdown has been struck by a sense of unreality. It is not only the empty cities that seem phantasmagorical. So, too, do the lives we led before the pandemic. If we long to return to the way we used to live, we also suspect that this previous life was a fantasy.

In pre-lockdown reality, other species were becoming extinct at a rate unprecedented for tens of millions of years. The climate was becoming violently unstable. Yet these realities did not disturb the world dreamt up in the human mind. It came to be believed that humans lived in a new era — the Anthropocene — in which they had mastered the natural world.

Like Tlon, the Anthropocene was a figment of the imagination. Springing from living relics of wilderness sold off to be eaten, the virus has disrupted that dream. While it was dreaming, humankind was desolating the planet. Now the dream has dissipated, we find ourselves in a world that seems too strange to be real. But it is in this world in which we must learn to live, with the virus.

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The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono
Recommended by Polly Mackenzie

One of the great lessons of this crisis will be that we need to make more decisions for the long term. We have to prepare not for what we need now, but for what we will need in the future. To help us absorb this lesson, there is one parable I think we should all read, and especially everyone working in politics: The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono.

It tells the story of a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier, who Giono meets in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence in 1910. He watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. Giono returns after surviving the first world war to find the valley is starting to bloom into health, with saplings everywhere. The world has torn itself to pieces but one man’s gesture of hope has created new life where there was none. And Elzéard continues to plant, even after the forest is mature and the valley prosperous.

This modern edition has an introduction by Michael Morpurgo

Elzeard teaches us that life and hope can come from the most desolate circumstances. He teaches us that one man or woman’s choices can make an endless difference. He teaches us that small gestures can be transformative, if you give them time, and don’t give up.

The story is short but it covers decades of history. You have to, if you’re writing about trees. It’s just one of those things about them, as I had to explain to my son when he planted a pear seed in the middle of the lawn last week. They take a long time to grow. There will not be pears for dinner. You do not plant trees for today, or for yourself.

So look at the trees in your park or street as you go for your daily constitutional. Wonder who planted them. Give thanks. And then wonder what gift you can give to someone who comes twenty, or fifty, or a hundred years from now.

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A Covid death is not a good death

By Polly Mackenzie

The Expert System’s Brother, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Recommended by Chris Deerin

There’s something about the lockdown — the unshakeable murmur of anxiety, the throb of genuine distress, the sudden unknowability of the future — that has left me temporarily unable to cope with, and less tolerant of, much literary fiction. I need escape, and plot, and preferably humour. Stories in which things happen. That don’t overstay their welcome. That get me out the door.

I’m largely finding my solace in science fiction: world-building and otherness provides a place to liberate oneself, to get lost, to be dazzled.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is among modern sci-fi’s biggest plasma guns. I came to him relatively late, when his wondrous, anthropomorphic tale of space-spider evolution, Children of Time, deservedly won the 2016 Arthur C Clarke award.

I’ve just finished one of his slighter works, a 170-page novella called The Expert System’s Brother, published in 2018 but highly germane to the current madness. Humanity endures a reduced, agrarian lifestyle, living in small villages run by wise elders. The twist, though: these elders seem to be cyborgs.

Don’t underestimate the power of a good sci-fi novel

As the story unfolds it becomes clear that a lost history — of forgotten science and technology and space travel — is being excavated, both figuratively and literally. In his search for meaning, 16-year-old Handry, the central character, is therefore confronted with two possible futures for his kind.

How much power and autonomy should technology be given? What is the role and purpose of human agency? How can difference and prejudice be overcome? Can tradition be beaten? Along the way, our protagonist encounters a figure who offers messianic certainty — and Handry struggles to hold on to scepticism and doubt, those most essential human qualities.

As we emerge from the Coronavirus plague and recalibrate our society, these questions — as old as the hills but utterly of the moment — will similarly confront us. The Expert System’s Brother is a useful primer, a philosophical stimulant, and a cracking read.

The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith
Recommended by Tom Holland

On Easter Sunday, I rose very early with my wife, and walked through an empty London. To see the banks of the Thames, the City and the West End all still and silent was as eerie an experience as any we have ever had. Looking towards Primrose Hill, wherein H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds the Martians set up their base and then die of flu, it was hard not to feel that we had strayed into the world of the novel. “Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.”

Which is why, as my lockdown read, I would recommend a novella published five years before The War of the Worlds, and which, although likewise set in late Victorian London, could not be more utterly, more joyously different.

“Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see — because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ — why my diary should not be interesting.” So begins The Diary of a Nobody, the chronicle of the spectacularly unspectacular life of Mr. Charles Pooter, a City clerk.

Illustrations by Weedon Grossmith

He paints a bath; he despairs of his raffish son; he attends a ball at the Mansion House. Nothing much more than that happens. There are certainly no murderous tripods. Yet it is the easiest, most enjoyable read. “The funniest book in the world,” Evelyn Waugh called it — and he did not exaggerate. As a distraction from the strange and unsettling times in which we live, I cannot think of a better recommendation than this great celebration of the normal and the utterly conventional.

Oh, and the illustrations are wonderful as well…

The Burrow, by Franz Kafka
Recommended by Jenny McCartney

The experience of ‘lockdown’ has — for many of us — shrunk the world to the confines of our homes, save for the occasional government-approved excursion. With sufficient vigilance, we are encouraged to think it may be possible to keep the viral foe at bay. Meanwhile we contemplate our domestic grocery stores with fluctuating concern or satisfaction.

Which is why, while stuck indoors, you should read Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Burrow’. Do not, however, approach this story if your sanity already feels precarious.

‘The Burrow’ is narrated in the voice of a large burrowing animal — a carnivorous, mole-like creature, we intuit, although the exact species is never declared. This creature is obsessively concerned with the security of its home and larder, into which it has poured a vast amount of labour and strategy over the years. Like any stockpiler, it gloats over its supplies, which it hoards in a section called the Castle Keep: “Consequently I can divide up my stores, walk about among them, play with them, enjoy their plenty and their various smells, and reckon up exactly how much they represent.”

The animal has acute hearing and smell, which enable it to detect the approach of enemies — or false alarms — at a great distance. Such perceived threats trigger enormous worry, and a degree of precautionary plotting that verges on madness. The story is a unique portrait of a paranoid mind, and yet — without any objective means by which to assess the external threat — the reader cannot judge whether or not the paranoia is partly justified.

Kafka, a German-speaking Jew in Prague, was keenly aware of both the lurking external menace of anti-Semitism, and the invasive horror of a germ: the tuberculosis that killed him. Yet only his peculiar genius could have nosed out such a means to let anxiety speak.

All good writers try to shrug on other skins, to inhabit other characters. But Kafka dares to cross into other species, to shrug on skins that are not human, and somehow triumphs. Although this creature talks, it is not human: its tunnelled world reeks of earth and instinct and the atavistic consumption of lesser animals, or ‘small fry’. And yet we recognise its voice.

I have read ‘The Burrow’ many times, and it still astounds me. To come to it now, however, is to experience the height of its bizarre spell. For we are communally closer to its claustrophobic, uneasy mindset, in this strange period of history, than most of us have ever been before — and, hopefully, will ever be again.

More from this author

The Kafkaesque nightmare of British justice

By Jenny McCartney

The Clothes They Stood Up In, by Alan Bennett
Recommended by Simon Evans

To the Billy Liar in all of us, a sudden lurching change in reality such as that effected by Lockdown triggers a slew of rough parallels drawn from fiction, myth and movies. Everything from Planet of the Apes to 28 Days Later to The Truman Show have suggested themselves as templates for our new situation. Or in Hove, Planet of the Gulls.

But the short fiction that has helped me to understand the potential of this moment is that of the shift in perspective often associated with the mid-life crisis. Such events are often regarded as fundamentally comic, even trivial, in nature. Yet what is Dante’s Divine Comedy if not such a crisis, writ mythopoetic?

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost…” — we’ve all been there, lately.

One good example, and of very readable length, is Alan Bennett’s The Clothes They Stood Up In. A late middle-aged couple return home from Cosi Fan Tuti one evening to find that their house has been burgled — but of everything. Beds, carpets, light fittings, the lot. Hence the title.

On an unexpected change of domestic circumstances…

I won’t spoil the story — it’s on Kindle, and less than £2 — but it takes several unexpected turns before the final curtain. It’s tackled as light, bittersweet comedy, of course, and deftly done. It has many of Bennett’s familiar tropes, and mild failings. It’s full of slightly twee vernacular and his sympathies fall a little predictably — though he acknowledges this at one point with an unexpectedly graceful meta-injunction on his characterisation of the husband.

But it is the effect the burglary has on the wife that has stayed with me. In particular, her tangible disappointment when their former life is restored, after all, and things return to “normal”.

This, as much as anything, is something we need to brace for, I suspect, when Lockdown lifts. And this gentle, very English book is a hint at some worthwhile preparatory meditations, tempered by some affectionate reflections on the likelihood of their making a damned bit of difference when it comes.

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Why mock Jordan Peterson's suffering?

By Simon Evans

A Temporary Matter, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended by Freya Sanders

If you could spend a year in solitude, where would you choose? “A house full of books” would have once been my answer. But now the hypothetical has happened, I’m quite unenthusiastic about reading. It only makes me feel more distant from social life.

If you feel compelled to read, though, read Jhumpa Lahiri. She’s an expert on the ways in which we can feel distant from one another.

In one of her short stories, A Temporary Matter — available in The New Yorker archives — a young-ish married couple receives a letter informing them that “for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at 8 P.M”. The inconvenience jolts the household out of its routine. For months, the husband has eaten dinner in his study, pretending to work; the wife has eaten hers in front of the TV. “With no lights, they would have to eat together.”

You sense that until now the lives of these two characters have crossed only in conversations about the washing up, complaints about coats not hung up properly. But now, thrown together for an hour, the couple start to talk. The wife suggests they each share one thing about themselves that the other doesn’t know. They do this, each night. Until, eventually, they address the elephant in the room.

The irony of social distancing is that a lot of people are suddenly spending a lot of time with loved ones who have been, for whatever reason, distant. Lockdown may, as some suggest, end in a cascade of divorces — but will be the confinement be the cause, or the catalyst? People, it seems, are perfectly able to trudge along together miserable peace, until something like the virus — or a persistent power-cut — makes such an existence impossible. But then what…

‘A Temporary Matter’ is the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories that is called, aptly, Interpreter of Maladies. Each narrative addresses one of life, and lockdown’s, big puzzles: how to communicate with those we’re stuck with, in sickness or in health.

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Recommended by John Lewis-Stempel

In which wearied writer Gustave von Aschenbach, after encountering a tramp one revelatory Munich afternoon, suffers a ‘contagion’ of desire to travel to the Venetian lagoon, where he falls lovesick for the boy Tadzio, wearer of sailor suit and bearer of golden curls.

Cosmetically de-ageing (he believes, tragically) with hair-dye and rouge, von Aschenbach then falls physically sick with Asiatic cholera. “And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.”

This is the novella for this time of pestilence, but also the novella for all modern time. Because our entire lives are diseased. Famed for its languid evocation of The Floating City (note that Tadzio is a homophone of adagio), Death in Venice is more truly the existentialist fiction that prefigures Sartre.

There are no escapes, even in forbidden love, even in aesthetics. Mooning after Tadzio causes Aschenbach’s death since he fails to flee Venice in time. As for the ‘improbable’ beauty of  the city, Mann turns over every exalted stone of Ruskin’s to show  Venice’s decay: the mephitic canals, the petty thieves, the “hateful sultriness in the narrow streets.” Et in La Serenissima ego.

Significantly, Aschenbach, solitary and solipsistic, chooses not to go to his house in rural Germany for recuperation. The German countryside was filling with the Lederhosen hearties of the Vandervogel movement who pre-figured Nazism. (There really are no ways out from the dilemma of being.) Some authors have their fingers on the pulse. Mann had a lancet, carved the human body gob to groin, and placed his hand on its soul.

You’ve got to laugh. Truly. A novel interpretation of Mann’s novella would suggest endemic subdermal black humour. He is wickedly funny about the self-pities and the pretensions of The Writer in maturity. Aschenbach “banished from his style every common word.” He could not indite “smelly”, he had to scribe “mephitic”. It was von Aschenbach’s first malady, his lucubration.

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Will rural France recover from Covid?

By John Lewis-Stempel

What’s Expected of Us, by Ted Chiang
Recommended by Sam Leith

I’m here to recommend a very short story indeed: the science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s ‘What’s Expected of Us‘. It’ll take you maybe three minutes to read, if that. But like a sip of a good wine, the taste lingers. Chiang’s story is a tiny squib on perhaps the biggest subject of all: free will. It’s a subject that seems particularly relevant at this time of global unfreedom, while we contemplate what we don’t know and what we’d rather not know.

The McGuffin for this story is a device called a Predictor: “Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.” The reader, the narrator says, has probably seen one — millions have been sold by the time you’re reading this. On the face of it they’re like a gimmicky executive toy. They work by sending a signal a second back in time. Everyone tries to find ways to “fool” them — but they can’t be fooled.

The story concerns the effect that these things have on people. Basically, they prove that free will is an illusion. As that knowledge sinks in, a global pandemic of why-bother sets in. People just… give up. They stop talking, stop doing anything. The narrator, it becomes clear, is issuing a dire warning — but why, and how, and from where? Aha: even for a short short story, no spoilers.

You can find this story online for free here. With a bit of luck, that taster will lead you to buy Chiang’s collection Exhalation — in which every story, though they aren’t all as short as this one, develops some giant idea. They do, to my mind, just what the best speculative fiction ought to. The best of them open up entirely other worlds and imagine what it would be like to live in them — or posit huge ideas in logic or ethics and work out just what it would mean to live with their consequences.

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Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

This is Pleasure, by Mary Gaitskill
Recommended by Rowan Pelling

The single aspect of normal working life I miss most is gossip. Without humans interacting in the same physical spaces over extended periods of time, there’s no flirting, no power games, no rebellions and no febrile soap opera. Or, at least, not the sort you can witness, or have retold to you in exquisite detail by a gimlet-eyed observer.

The crimes and recriminations of #MeToo suddenly seem to belong to another era. But Mary Gaitskill’s brilliant (and I do mean pitch-perfect on every level) novella This Is Pleasure plunges you right back in.

Quin is a foppish, married publisher who conducts numerous tendresses (why do the French have words we so painfully lack?), but not love affairs, with young women who he tells himself he wants to pique and spur on to greater things. His intimacies involve many, small provocations and a few undeniable, graver trespasses. Quin is outrageous and quite possibly dangerous, but also entertaining and compelling. He’s exactly the sort of person many of us do allow greater leeway than we should, for fear of boredom.

This new novella will make you miss office politics.

Quin’s close friend Margot also edits books and has graduated from being one of his prodigies/playthings/experiments — it’s hard to tell which — to being a family guest and confidante.  She has experienced his inappropriate behaviour first-hand, but also his unforced generosity, professional support and joie de vivre. Margot has chided him, “You delectate pain,” but never intervened — something that will haunt her after Quin is denounced, fired and becomes a social pariah.

The novella is conducted in short chapters that alternate Quin’s and Margot’s points of view. The sense of two eras, before and after #MeToo, is deftly interwoven. This is a work that’s purely concerned with the grey areas. Quin is by no means a rapist and Margot is not by nature an appeaser. Nevertheless, they have been complicit. The degree to which one or both are guilty can only be decided by the reader and everyone will put down this book with a slightly different verdict.

The strange thing is that you may also find yourself nostalgic for the office world of power-games and dodgy gallantries. If there’s one thing worse than your colleague’s “micro-aggression”, it’s being bored out of your skull.

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What did Playboy ever do for women?

By Rowan Pelling

Houston, Houston, Do You Read, by James Tiptree Jnr.
Recommended by Matthew Sweet

My friend Una McCormack is an accomplished science fiction writer. Last year she introduced me to another. James Tiptree Jnr.

Who’s he? I asked. It’s complicated, she said.

She was right. In the 1970s Tiptree was celebrated as the Ernest Hemingway of sci-fi. However, neither readers nor peers nor publishers ever clapped eyes on him — which meant they had no idea he was really Alice Bradley Sheldon, a former CIA officer who chose her nom-de-plume while reading the labels in the jam section of her local supermarket.

Tiptree’s stories are about change — how to manage it when it happens, what to do about it when it doesn’t. They are about women — sometimes as individuals, sometimes as a collective — negotiating a solution to the problems of male power.

The short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever gathers a set of bright hard gems that might reflect some light on our own historical moment. The Women Men Don’t See (1973) maroons its narrator in a mangrove swamp with a mother and daughter who, much to his bafflement, decline to behave like damsels in distress. The Screwfly Solution (1977) is set in a world overcome by a pandemic of male sexual violence: men have literally declared war on women, in an act of organised revenge upon Eve.

Don’t judge an author by her cover.

But perhaps Houston, Houston, Do You Read (1976) is her masterpiece. It’s about three male American astronauts who encounter unexpected company on a circumsolar mission — another spaceship, staffed by women who speak in Australian slang. At first the men hypothesise that the new ship has tumbled from the future through a black hole. However, it soon becomes clear that the traffic has moved in the opposite direction. The Earth to which they are returning is one in which plague has wiped out the male population, leaving women to figure out new ways of maintaining human life.

What should the new world look like, Tiptree asks. Whose skills will be most valued? And who will find themselves irrelevant? Questions we might ask as we shelter at home, while nurses and cleaners and shelf-stackers take up their positions on the front line.

It’s not a normal springtime, of course. The volume of cars on the road through the village is noticeably diminished, and the normally bustling pub closed its doors nearly a month ago. Much to my daughter’s dismay, the swings and slides in the park are out of bounds, by order of the parish council. Unless you count the odd short walk up into the hills, I haven’t left the village at all for more than four weeks, since I nipped up to the magnificent Shrine of St Augustine at Ramsgate for a last Mass before the churches were locked up for the duration.

Life has taken on a slightly hobbitish air, albeit without the consolations enjoyed by the Shirefolk at The Green Dragon. The garden centre up the road has branched out into selling produce from local farms. There are more people out and about on foot, and everyone seems a bit more willing to pass the time of day, at an appropriate distance. Without much fuss or fanfare, arrangements have been made to help those who might need it.

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Will rural France recover from Covid?

By John Lewis-Stempel

Some people have seized on these unusual conditions to suggest that the politics and economics of a post-coronavirus world may look very different to the status quo ante.

Here at UnHerd, David Goodhart echoed many sceptics of liberal globalism, when he argued that the pandemic will accelerate the move away from that system. He notes that “neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold”, mentioning for example the loss of good jobs in Western economies, and the potential damage done to national security from a lack of strategic capacity in steel or power generation.

Goodhart also notes that in the United States, attention is turning to reducing its logistical dependence on China. President Trump has been rightly criticised for the federal government’s chaotic and inconsistent response to the pandemic, but he may yet benefit from increased suspicion of Red China in November’s election, especially as his opponent is Joe Biden, long associated with the trade liberalising policies that have seen so many US supply chains relocate across the Pacific. Many of the pieties of multilateralism have come under strain in the past few months: Ian Birrell made a powerful case against the WHO, bitterly criticising that organisation for its subservience to China.

Suggested reading

The return of every man for himself

By James Barr

Away from the level of national governments and high politics, here in the UK there are signs of a resurgence of localism and community feeling, and a more human-scaled life. Hundreds of thousands of people have volunteered to help the NHS and to pick fruit and to deliver food and medicine to isolated neighbours. I hear reports from north London of children playing in the streets unimpeded by motor traffic (all sorts of statistics from 2020 are going to make fascinating reading, but I’m looking forward to seeing those on pollution and car deaths).

How much of this is permanent? Here my heart and head are in conflict. I am broadly sympathetic to the strain of thinking sometimes called “post-liberalism”, that seeks a renewed focus on localism, community, human solidarity and national sovereignty, which opposes the often destructive logic of ever-increasing choice and freedom, and seeks to transcend and tame the harsh imperatives of the market.

I would like to see more people spending more time in their communities and with their families. I think it would be good for all of us to make do with less, for our food consumption to be more closely tied to the rhythms of the year and the nature of our land. It is heartening to see so much energy devoted to protecting the health of vulnerable people.

But on the other hand, I need to keep in mind the old dictum cited by John Locke, “quod volumus, facile credimus”; what we wish to be true, we easily believe. We are undoubtedly living through an Event, but who knows what the consequences might be?

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The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

There is enormous momentum behind the economic and social liberalism that has dominated Britain for much of the past half-century. Is the general mass of people really looking on these changed conditions as a glorious experiment, as a demonstration that another life is possible, rather than as a grim time of insecurity, confinement and frustration to be endured only for as long as necessary?

It seems quite possible that an extended lockdown may in fact increase the attractions of the liberal economy. I would not be surprised if people were very keen to get back to the old way of life — back on Tinder and JustEat, back to the pubs and the clubs, back to their autonomous urban lifestyles, to the low prices and huge range of options enabled by modern technology, global supply chains, and hyper-efficient business practices.

It’s worth remembering, too, that huge economic damage is being done by the lockdown. Post-liberals may argue, with some justice, that the economy should be structured differently, such that we are more resistant and resilient to shocks like the coronavirus but that is easier said than done.

To a considerable extent the renewed communitarianism that we are seeing, the quiet streets and the lack of travel, is making the best of a bad situation, rather than a straightforward sign of a new order. While they can be viewed as experiments in living that may provide inspiration for future change, we need to be wary of glorying in them too much, because there is going to be a serious and grim recession over the next couple of years.

Reductions in consumption, and a reliance on more local and restrained economic activity, will have many losers, unless we see permanent and foundational changes to economic and social policy, perhaps along the lines envisaged by thinkers like EF Schumacher, known for his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful. In that work Schumacher lays out his manifesto for a humane and human-scale economic system, premised on careful stewardship of the environment, the dignity of labour, and the undesirability of excessive consumerism and materialism. It is a splendid vision in many ways, but we are a long way from achieving it. Similarly, without a revolution in moral and social attitudes, people will not be willing to accept the ethical conservatism without which post-liberalism is unintelligible.

Suggested reading

Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

I am confident that there will be certain permanent after-effects. Short-haul flying will struggle to recover to pre-crisis levels: national governments will have an unmatched opportunity to increase the operating costs of short-haul routes, as part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions, providing a shot in the arm for operators of long-distance European rail routes.

Increased middle-class movement out of large cities seems likely too, as does a greater tolerance for a larger government role both in the economy and in shaping public behaviour (for good or ill). Rishi Sunak’s economic aid package, involving enormous public spending, was broadly welcomed across the political spectrum. It is hard also to see how the pandemic doesn’t strengthen the hands of China hawks in Western capitals.

Nevertheless, my instinct is that what we are seeing is a holiday from the modern world rather than a thoroughgoing repudiation. Despite the disruption and upset, there are very few voices in politics offering a sustained and coherent challenge to the assumptions about the good life and human nature that dictate the structures of modern society.

These assumptions are well-described by the US writer Rod Dreher, in his book The Benedict Option. He talks about “liquid modernity”, by which he means the situation of constant moral and cultural flux in which we find ourselves. The range of acceptable values and attitudes changes with baffling speed and frequency. Within liquid modernity, consumption is king, and the amount of choice across all areas of our lives is vast, often paralysing or even damaging for individuals. For businesses to survive in the liberalised, globalised economy demands constant adaptation and a ruthless attitude.

The system is extremely resilient, not least because it is not consciously a system. But without the political clout to strike some severe blows against it, the green shoots of a better way of life that we have glimpsed in this otherwise difficult time will remain uncultivated.

Paranoia regarding la peste is palpable. Life here becomes a little less normal each and every day. Yesterday — or was it the day before? I have lost track of time — M. Jacques, who runs the tabac in the local town, installed a one-way system, improvised from the tables no-one is allowed to sit at anymore. His grey-faced coughing, though, I believe is the consequence of Camels not Covid-19.

I don’t smoke, or at least I didn’t, but I’ve taken to puffing at cigars in desperation at the ennui of house arrest since Macron addressed the nation to announce, “Nous somme en guerre!” Channelling Napoleon (complete with widow’s-peak hair), he then shut down the entire country with four hours notice to the strains of La Marseillaise. Was that the 17th March? I have lost track of time.

Anyway, until Napoleon Macron’s declaration we in France profonde had been blissfully blasé about coronavirus. After his orotundity on TV there was panic buying at our local Inter. The French plundered the demi-sel butter. The bit of shelf reserved for ‘Nos Amis, Les Anglais’ was stripped of Heinz baked beans.

Suggested reading

The glorious resurrection of Notre-Dame

By Agnes Poirier

Going shopping, for the essentials of food, newspapers, tobacco — for one hour only — is one of the few reasons you are allowed out of the house under Macron’s confinement measures, and then you have to carry an ‘Attestation‘ document on your person, signed and timed. Infringement is punishable by a rising scale of fines. After that, clink. Mais, quelle difference? We are imprisoned anyway.

In the local town, Le Neuf bistro is closed; also the new bar, the post office, Credit Mutuel bank — everything. Even the hairdressers. French women spend a lot of time at the coiffeuse. One index of our deteriorating standard of life is the abundance of self-dyed hair. You start to notice the little things. There is not much else to do.

The day before President Macron impersonated Le Petit Caporal, we had a meeting of our village’s ‘Foyer Rurale’, a national association to promote social and cultural life in the French sticks.  My wife and I are on the committee. We laughed at the notion of doing ‘le bump’ elbow greeting, we enjoyed our usual wine and cake, and agreed a whole calendar of events for the village: Le Printemp des Poètes (performance of our own poems, this year on the theme of ‘Courage’), the Easter egg-hunt pour les enfants, the charabanc trip to the zoo, the communal meal. My wife was to speak to Father Bernard about a blessing for animals. All now cancelled. All.

And we worry: when the Covid lockdown is over, will we have the heart to restart? In shutting down France, is Macron killing our spirit? Will we still shake hands, kiss both cheeks? And always, with politesse, say ‘bonjour’ to strangers, whether it’s in the GP’s waiting room, the boulangerie, the pharmacy. Anywhere.

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The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

What I do know, is this: it is going to be a long war. We are already on #ConfinementJour32 (I am almost certain it is day 32).  On Monday Macron addressed the nation again. Starey-eyed, he informed us that the lockdown will begin to be lifted on May 11th. Bonne nouvelle! Then he wielded the baguette: only if we remain in our houses in the interim. Still, chapeau to Manu, he knows his power-base: among the first enterprises to be freed from restrictions will be hairdressers.

There is no escape. Almost all public transport has ceased. Should you have the audacity to venture out in your car — a literal guilt trip — the gendarmes, with their guns and Thunderbird hats, patrol the roundabouts, market squares, and motorway tolls to catch the non-observers of Code Macron. So far les flics have made over 4 million checks. Last weekend, our department, the Charente, deployed an extra 630 gendarmes to ensure obeisance. Thinking of sneaking out via the Charente river? No go. It is now patrolled. So too the sky.

But it is the absence of conversation that is killing countryside France, where on meeting your neighbours you automatically, sincerely ask ‘Ca va?’ With our friends in the village it is ‘Bisou! Bisou!‘ If it is Jean-Rene then a parsing of Stade Rochelais‘s latest performance ensues (rugby in SW France is a fundamentalist religion), if it is Martine then matters epicurean. I haven’t seen them for days. The little village of La Roche is silent and shuttered-up.

The one rebel in La Roche is old Madame Oradou, who stumps around the village crab-backed with her stick. She called last week to ask if our horses would enjoy eating the long grass in her potager. (This was a typical village act of kindness.) She was venomous about the President. “Macron,” she spat. “What does he know about the war! He was too young, heh? I was alive then.” She waved her stick airily towards Paris. “This is just flu!”

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What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinos

In truth, I agree with her. However, I would never utter this dissenting opinion in public, even if I could find someone to say it to. Covid-19 regulations, as well as being enforced by the gendarmes, the Police Nationale, the Police Municipale, the CRS (France has a plethora of police forces) are rigorously enforced by the ‘public spirited’. Recently in Intermarché one of the cashiers screamed at a customer, “Respectez la distance de sécurité, monsieur!” A man had, by no more than a centimetre, overstepped the black line on the floor which keeps us one metre apart.

I am uneasy about this self-isolation of my own views. Does this make me an accomplice in Macron’s draconian scheme? A collaborator? (A very French dilemma, non?) Does confinement corrode the soul, as well as society?

Theoretically, my house arrest should make zero difference to my work. I work from home. I am an agriculteur, who splits the job between the UK and France. I am here in La Roche to plant lavender and thyme, which is what grows best on the Charente chalk escarpment.

Except the nursery cannot deliver the lavender. Neither the thyme.

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The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

Once, it was in another age, I wrote a book about British PoWs in the Great War. In a cosmic joke I now find myself combatting boredom by the same means as the incarcerated Tommies of 1914-18: smoking, obsessive gardening, endless reading, usually of a morbid sort — a taste, it seems, shared by many across France. La Journal du Dimanche’s reading list for these strange days is headed by Camus’ The Plague.

In my really dark moments I ponder whether Covid-19 is a mass enactment by French citizenry of J-P Sartre’s Existentialist drama Huis Clos, No Exit. You know, his play with the line, “Hell is other people.”

This morning — or was it this afternoon? I have lost track of time — our Border Terrier shape-shifted through a gap in the courtyard gate to bark at somebody on the lane. I rushed out to find our friends Claudette and Donni going past, on their way to the forest for a walk — exercise, as with all prison regimes, being an allowed daily activity. For an hour. But no more than a kilometre from chez vous.

“Desolé!” I apologised on behalf of the yapper. “Pas grave, John” they said, smiling. But they did not stop to talk.

Neither did I.

John Lewis-Stempel’s books include The War Behind the Wire: The Life, Death and Glory of British Prisoners of War, 1914-18

But will it — Covid-19 — pass? Since the “-19” refers to the form of the illness first induced by the SARS-COV2 virus in 2019, then yes, Covid-19 will pass. But Covid-20, Covid-21? I suspect that those people who hope that the virus (and the deformation of ‘normal life’ with which we’re currently wrestling) will fade away are going to be disappointed. We won’t live in social isolation for ever, but neither will we be returning to ‘normal’ anytime soon.

In any case, historically speaking, it was the relatively un-pandemicked century between Spanish flu and Covid-19 that was the statistical oddity, not living with the risks presented by a fatal infectious disease. Human beings are great hosts for fragments of RNA that just want to live, baby! We need a new-normal, not a return to the prelapsarian days of February, 2020. How long ago February seems.

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We don't deserve our wretched media class

By Graeme Archer

So much of pre-Covid-19 world was oriented for the gregarious and extrovert, and was tolerated by the rest of us (people who need solitude to maintain equilibrium) because the dominance of the herd seemed impossible to overcome. Take the world with which I’m most familiar: the office. Here, the following norms were unquestioningly accepted:

• Open-plan hot-desking (every morning, hoik a box containing your laptop cables to any flat table in the office, and set yourself up for the day) leads naturally to synergistic interactions (“Hey! Let me, like, totally interrupt what you’re doing and tell you all about my ideas right now!”) These add value to the business.
• Global teams are better, because they increase diversity, and diversity always adds value to the business.
• Anyone leading a global team needs to travel incessantly, because physical presence among team-mates increases team cohesion (which is as important as diversity), and adds value to the business.
• Serious decisions must be made face-to-face, even if half the face-to-face meeting is in one video-conference suite in Philadelphia, with the other half in another room in London.

What have five weeks (I started early) of social isolation taught me? First, that hot-desking is dead, thank God. The idea that you should be forced to spend today at the desk where yesterday Eunice from Chemistry was hacking up her lungs (“Some sort of 24 hour thing”) will be illegal by the end of next year. Everyone who was part of the “abolish private office space” movement should be forced to march through the streets — at two metres separation — with a placard round their necks saying “Sorry for our unwarranted attack on human dignity”.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

Do we need offices, at all? I’ve found it easier, not harder, to keep leading my own global team. From 1-on-1 catch-ups, to management team meetings, to seminars and town halls and performance reviews: every aspect of managing a group of globally-distributed workers has been easier to conduct from the study at home than from a hastily-booked “meeting space” cubicle at the fringes of the open-plan hell. In my (pharmaceutical) industry, the only people who actually need to be on site are the lab scientists. The rest of us can work remotely. The company works fine.

It works better than fine, in fact; better than the old-normal. Once the curve has been flattened, and isolation officially terminated, the question will loom: why leave the house at 6am to travel to Stevenage on the train every day, when the same work can be done, more comfortably, from home? Why rush back to the old-normal, the Benthamite Panopticon hell, at all?

How will HR react, I wonder, post-Covid-19, if I tell them “I’m not flying to Philadelphia for work, anymore. It’s not necessary — this we proved, in Spring and Summer 2020 — and it therefore unnecessarily raises both my susceptibility risk for infection, and that of the people with whom such travel brings me into contact?” We’ll see.

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What will you do when lockdown is lifted?

By Various contributors

That’s fine for you, Archer, middle-class manager in your Barnet semi with its nice wee garden and the impossibly patient Mr Keith as companion. What about people who live in inner city flats. With children.

I’m not proposing that social isolation should be enforced forever, merely that we stop insisting on social mixing for the sake of it. More people are like me than you suspect, if you’ve read my enjoyment of isolation with horror. Many more. And if you give us freedom to be just that little bit more physically distant from now on, well, that just leaves more space for everyone else. (Robbie Gibb tweeted a survey that shows around a fifth to a quarter of us plan to reduce social mixing in the future.)

But what about those millions on whom you depend: the health-care workers and delivery drivers and postmen and policemen and soldiers and … the backbone of the country. People who can’t work from home. What changes for them in the new-normal?

As the cheering from our doorsteps every Thursday demonstrates, the value of labour and the dignity of the labourer has — at last — been re-valorised. If we care less about what the university-educated think about Brexit or immigration or anything in the next few years, then good. Having a degree in something useless from somewhere rubbish never made your opinion more important than that of the bin man; in cost-benefit terms, each bin man is worth more than a thousand psychology graduates from North London Tech.

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The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

I’m married to an electrician. It’s Keith’s experience of globalisation that has ever shaped my politics: transcontinental supply chains (so he can’t choose to buy parts from people he knows and trusts, because his company finds cheaper alternatives from strangers he’ll never meet in countries he’ll never visit); open-doors immigration (so anyone’s qualification from any EU country had instantly the same jobs market value as his own); the downward pressure on wages — in our household, hatred of Blairite globalisation was never theoretical.

If you’re a middle- or senior-manager in a MegaCorp, you’ll know the pressure to offshore and outsource, in putatively British companies, is real. I hope that the new-normal resets this a bit. It’s too much to hope that the Labour Party (a sack of anti-Semitic rats fighting enablers of anti-Semitic rats, both of them dependent on the votes of those psychology graduates) will change. But the Conservative Party has noticed: we are kept alive by the labour of those whose opinions are despised by Labour.

Meanwhile, there has been a collapse in trust between citizen and journalist — and no wonder. The political lobby, in particular, has behaved lamentably, clinging to their dreary, invented gotchas, and indulging in preening displays of scientific ignorance, even as the old-normal paradigm shifted from under their feet. They remind me of backbench MPs at the time of the expenses scandal: in complete denial that anything needs to change. “But this is how things are done, you see,” they puff, as the sandcastle of self-belief they’ve carefully patted into proud existence is washed away by reality’s tidal wave.

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We don't need 'gotcha' journalism now

By Douglas Murray

Not only the media’s deficiencies have been on daily display. The official from WHO pretending not to hear the question about Taiwan will haunt that intergovernmental quango. I signed a petition from the sort of organisation I’d normally avoid, demanding action against “wet markets”. I don’t think animal welfare will be left to student activists anymore, not when the link between global pandemics that kill millions and the torture of sentient beings for unnecessary meat is so startingly, unavoidably visible. SARS-COV2 wasn’t the first zoonotic jump; we all know who’s responsible. I don’t think we’ll tolerate either health quangos or corporations looking the other way any longer.

Not only geopolitical outfits and MegaCorps will change in the new-normal. More parochially, perhaps we’ll weigh up the costs of devolved assemblies. An email last week from Sainsbury’s CEO told me the company is ready to match up its customer lists with the database of English citizens felt by the government to be most vulnerable and in need of food deliveries, but: “We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.”

In the name of God, why are there four lists to do one thing across One Nation? “To give Sturgeon material for a press conference” isn’t a good enough answer — not with national GDP likely to drop by around 35%. Like asking a gynaecologist to take time out from visiting her multiple homes to give you advice on immunology, devolution is an expense whose cost cannot easily be justified.

My 74-year old mother is in Scotland and has the sort of lung condition that would make her death from Covid-19 a near certainty should she become infected with SARS-COV2. That she could have had food delivered safely, last week, from Sainsbury’s, if only we hadn’t spent decades indulging the psychological inadequacies of Salmond and Sturgeon, feels pretty fucking unacceptable.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

Wishing viruses out of existence has been one of the hallmarks of my life, since HIV first reared its hideous head, but ‘wishing’ didn’t defeat HIV, any more than shouting GOTCHA! at a government press conference. Don’t die of ignorance warned Sir Norman Fowler, and while too many did, most of us didn’t, and not accidentally. Decades of pharmaceutical research and changes in (sub)cultural norms created a new-normal era that ran from the late 1990s until roughly four weeks ago.

You probably didn’t notice those changes, that coming-into-being of the new-normal, unless you’re roughly my middle-age, and gay. But the same focus on pharmaceutical research — on science, darling! — and effecting changes in cultural norms: that’s the way we’ll defeat SARS-COV2.

There’s nothing special about the virus; it just wants to live.  The universe co-inhabited by the viral and human genome couldn’t care less about the outcome, so shaking your fist in anger and insisting on the supremacy of the way we lived until February 2020 won’t, to put it mildly, be efficacious.

Instead, let’s start the conversation about what needs to change, to maximise the probability of human success. The fight for the (new) good life starts here. Don’t die of nostalgia for the old one.

As soon as it safe I will be boarding a train to North East England where I will rush to my mum and dad and wrap my arms around them both. We would have been going on holiday next month and spending precious days together.

I moved away from home when I was just 16 years old, looking for jobs and opportunities to get involved in feminism. It meant sacrificing time with my beautiful mother and missing out on so much that we could have done together as I approached adulthood. But Maureen, my mum, encouraged me to live life to the full, partly because so many opportunities, as a working-class woman, had been denied to her.

Over the years I haven’t seen my family as much as I have wanted. We are all very close, and everybody but me and my niece still live in the North East. Not only did my mum encourage me, despite the sacrifice to her, to fly the nest, she also started to bring my niece Jo to London to visit every year from the age of seven. Maureen knew it would mean eventually saying goodbye to Jo, but she wanted her to have better opportunities than the North East can offer.

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The Yorkshire Ripper fired up my feminism

By Julie Bindel

The last two years we have spent Christmas together in London, but my dad is disabled and travel is difficult for him. I have long been wanting to spend more time with them, but something always got in the way. Whether it’s a long-haul trip to investigate violence against women, or another book that takes up my time and energy, that time was often on hold. It won’t ever be again.

I don’t mean this to be sentimental, but if I have any regrets it is not spending as much time with my mum in particular. We have had some wonderful times though: I took her to Paris for lunch for her 79th birthday. It was her first ever trip to the city. For another birthday I treated her to a trolley dash around TK Maxx and afterwards a tapas lunch where we examined her swag.

I already knew how much I love my family well before the pandemic, but it has made me realise how precious time is. In the future, my work trips and book deadlines will come second to my family.

Go to a restaurant
Sam Leith

“When this lousy plague is over,” to adapt the First World War song of complaint, “No more lockdown food for me./ When the restaurants re-open, oh, how happy I shall be!/ For bland, thrice weekly pesto pasta, coronavirus thanks a bunch./ As soon as real life makes a comeback, friends, I’m going out to lunch.”

Already, only three weeks into lockdown, the diet is grinding me down. We’re eating hearty whole-family stews of panic-bought pulses and bland, thrifty, carb-heavy meals made of easily available ingredients and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, aka my culinary fusspot of a six-year-old.

The house is a miasma of sloth and fart gas, table manners are chimp-style and the conversation — mostly centering around the weekly appearance of the Beano — makes up in volume for what it lacks in interest. And the cooking, the wiping, the clingfilming, the drying, the hoovering…

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The joyful anachronism of kid lit

By Sam Leith

I shall never again take for granted the utter pleasure of choosing your own meal, in an environment where someone else does all the work: a meal where deep frying is expertly done and won’t burn down your house, interesting spices and unusual flavour combinations abound, and where you can linger past three o’clock, if you’re on the skive, in good company and with a glass of something in your hand.

Imagine a sushi splurge at Nobu! A plate of mince on dripping toast from the Quality Chop House, garnished with peppery watercress! A battery of crispy duck or salty chilli rice in a Chinese joint! A bellyful of K-Pop burger and Sichuan aubergine at Chick n’ Sours! Hell, at this stage I’d gratefully settle for a ginger chicken udon from Wagamama or an American Hot from Pizza Express.

With the likely and probably irrecoverable collapse of much of the restaurant industry, I realise with a pang that many of those places simply won’t be there when we emerge. To extend the analogy, it’ll be like coming home from war to find that your wife has run off with the postman while you were at the front, and that your mistress got bombed to bits in the Blitz. How I regret, now, every Pret sandwich drearily munched al desko: a never-to-return opportunity missed.

But as a matter of morale maintenance and selfless service to the recovery of the economy, I intend to lunch like mad. Friends — sorry, important business contacts…. — who’s up for it?

Return to Venice
Tanya Gold

When it is over, I want to go to Venice, to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, near San Toma vaporetto stop. I would like to go the whole way by water, from Penzance to Venice. I have been going to Venice since I was 17, at least once every two years, and I am enthralled by it, probably because it is preposterous, as people are preposterous. It’s a stupid place to build a city, especially a city filled with great art, and I find that touching. We make wars and genocides and plagues, but we also make this. We are strange.

Venice is a mistake: the people who became the Venetians ran away from the tribes pouring into Italy when the Empire collapsed, hid on sandbanks and, due to luck and situation, grew rich.

And, in this city of wonder — this paradigm, this error — the Scuola is the loveliest thing I have found. It is an early sixteenth century building of two stories in the classical style. It was a meeting place for wealthy Venetians, built in gratitude for surviving plague, and dedicated to Saint Roch, who offered protection from plague.  It is small for a Venetian public building and quite remote. Most tourists, stuck on the track from St Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge, do not find it.

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Woody Allen's brilliant betrayal

By Tanya Gold

They should: it is filled with paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto. If you have not heard of him — for me, the painter of the Italian Renaissance — it is because his masterpiece is a room in an idle corner of Venice and cannot be moved to Paris or New York for exhibition. Most people call Titian the master — Charles V once knelt to pick up his paintbrush — and Tintoretto was apprenticed to him for a few days, then left to teach himself. Titian’s Assumption is in the Basilica dei Frari next door, and it is perfect. It is too perfect. Tintoretto is more grandiose and thrilling. His nickname was The Furious.

You walk up the stairs, and they are here, on every wall and ceiling. The room is shuttered and dim; the floor is polished. They seem to glow and throb, as if the bright paint is still wet: Jacob’s Ladder; God Appears to Moses; The Pillar of Fire.

There cannot be a more astounding room anywhere. If art is consolation — and this is consolation specifically from plague — there cannot be more of it than this.

Stay at home
Justin Webb

Well I’m not going near the Maldives, I can tell you that for free. The world — When This Thing Is Over — is going to be doing, with knobs on, all the things we currently read are gone forever. My kids are already fretting about the purchase of new phone cases from Wuhan so all that piffle about No More World Trade will probably amount to not much, and of course for all the talk of hearth and home travel to exotic places will spike.

Not for me. I may go to Bath for the day and watch a rugby match under the floodlights at the Recreation Ground, with the Abbey for backdrop and the smell of wood-smoke and beery breath on the air. But otherwise actually I quite like this life.

Not, of course, the sadness, the fear about relatives and the knowledge that so many are suffering so much. But as a (lapsed) Quaker I am completely at home with silence and the simple life in which online groceries provide the only clue that we progressed beyond the Neolithic. Well, that and Netflix I suppose.

Anyway: travel is what I do not miss and do not want to do. I shall go nowhere when it is over, and thoroughly enjoy it.

Introduce my children to Old England
Niall Gooch

I can’t wait to get back to dragging my children round old stones in fields.

One chilly afternoon in January, in those far-off days when a disease outbreak in provincial China was the third-listed story in the foreign news section, I was sitting amid the ruins of St Augustine’s Priory in Canterbury with my two small children, trying to explain the Dissolution of the Monasteries. My account must have made some impact: on the train home my three-year-old daughter announced that on Monday she would tell her nursery teacher that Henry VIII was bad because he wouldn’t let people go to Mass.

I don’t know how much they took in at St Augustine’s. They liked the clever animation showing its centuries-long development from simple Romanesque chapel c.600 to vast medieval monastic complex with huge Gothic priory church and one of the finest scriptoriums in Europe. However, they did not seem to share my excitement about the graves of the early archbishops of Canterbury. Perhaps that will come.

Before coronavirus, I had intended the Priory to be the first instalment of a busy year of historical visiting. Having fulfilled the middle-class stereotype and left London for rural Kent in my mid-30s, last autumn I leaned into early middle age and bought an English Heritage membership.

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It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

We are now within striking range of several important sites, including a Roman fort, and my children are of an age where they can begin to understand Our Island Story. One of the gifts I‘ve always wanted to give them is to know that they are, so to speak, from Somewhere.

I’d like to help them to understand that this is an old country; to know that to be born in England is to be born into a magnificent, sprawling, globally important saga, and a rich heritage of art, architecture, language and landscape. I want them to be able to look at Dover Castle or HMS Victory or a Jacobean manor house and to know that it is in some sense theirs, a part of who they are.

When I tweeted pictures of the children at St Augustine’s, a Twitter friend commented “What a privilege to grow up and play in the midst of such deep history”. That captures my feelings exactly, and I’m looking forward to showing them Old England up close when the current unpleasantness has passed.

Play cricket
Tom Holland

To love cricket is to be as alert to the rhythms of the season as any ancient pagan. The year is divided into two halves: the months of darkness, of grey rain, when leaves lie thick on the outfield, and satellite television, with its sun-baked images of Australia or India, serves the cricket lover as a bonfire once did the celebrants of the winter solstice.

Then, of course, there is summer: six months when the patterning provided by a good fixture list can make life itself seem rich, and vivid, and dappled. To anticipate a match that has been played at the same ground, against the same opposition, on the same date, over many years, is to embrace the joys both of familiarity and the unknown: the reassurance that an English summer will always be an English summer; the promise that this year, rather than getting out for a duck or being hit humiliatingly out of the attack, everything will come together, and all shall be well.

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Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

Except that this year, of course, things are not going to be well. This year, everything that normally serves to herald the coming season — the warmth of spring sunshine, the song of returning birds, the back pages of a newspaper — serves as a kind of mockery. Authors CC, the team I play for, will not be heading to Wiltshire to play what for years now has been our season’s curtain raiser. Fixtures lovingly inscribed in diaries back in January will slip by unplayed. Our cricket bags will lie untouched in attics. Bats will remain unsheathed, whites unworn, scorebooks unfilled.

Of course, there are palliatives. Authors CC are currently in the midst of a virtual tournament, the Rathbones Cup, organised by the distinguished sportswriter David Owen, which has seen our various teams pitted against each other on WhatsApp.

The matches — which are determined by complex rules that nobody aside from David quite understands, but seem to feature a Gallimard edition of Proust, and can generally be done and dusted in 20 minutes — have us all properly gripped.

Yesterday, I am proud to report, my team of Anglo-Saxons triumphed over a 1990s Hollywood XI. Hengist took five wickets, and Alfred the Great, after catching Winona Ryder in the deep, then sealed victory with a quickfire 87.

It is not cricket — but it gives us a flavour of cricket. This, as clear blue skies look down on empty pitches, is the best we can hope for. A reminder of what has been — and a promise of what, when this hellish time is over, will be all the more precious for having been so very desperately missed.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Louise Perry 

When lockdown finally ends, we will presumably be returned to normal life in dribs and drabs, with the most essential activities prioritised over the least. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) classes will, quite rightly, be at the very bottom of the list. This is a form of martial arts that demands intimate physical contact with your opponent — more than once, I’ve had another person’s sweat drip directly into my eyes or mouth — and right now it’s hard to imagine even shaking a stranger’s hand. Nevertheless I’m desperate to get back to a sport that is entirely incompatible with social distancing.

Full disclosure: I am terrible at BJJ. Six months in, I’ve learnt the hard way that strength and fitness will only get you so far. This is less a sport and more a mechanical engineering problem. The task is to work out how to use your strong muscles against your opponent’s weak muscles, and to do so both quickly and surreptitiously, with the goal of making them submit via a chokehold or a joint lock. Every session I get slightly better, but every session I’m humbled by how inept I am.

While I’ve been able to cobble together home gym sessions by taking HIIT classes on Zoom and squatting my grudging 36kg German Shepherd, there really is no way of replicating a BJJ class at home. Other people on my BJJ WhatsApp group (yes, there is such a thing) are desperate enough that they’ve been making ‘grappling dummies’ by stuffing an old gi with rolled up towels and jumpers. But thrashing around with a mannequin is a poor substitute for the real thing, in all its exhausting, joyful, disgusting glory.

Have some time to myself
Polly MacKenzie

I want to be alone. It seems churlish of me, when I know millions of people are struggling with loneliness right now. But loneliness is the one thing I know I’m safe from. There are six people in my household, three of whom are children and therefore have no concept of personal boundaries. The closest I get to isolation is the two metre separation in the queue at the supermarket.

So when this is over I want to go away for a whole weekend and climb in the hills, all by myself. Nothing challenging; I’ll be content wandering through the Malvern Hills I roamed as a child. Even the Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point, stretches to only 425m above sea level. But it’s not the climb that I crave. It’s the silence. The bracken and the trees and the gentle slopes.

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A Covid death is not a good death

By Polly Mackenzie

I will be staying away from popular places and well-trodden paths. I shall get up early to avoid even the hint of a crowd. I shall climb, and rest, and climb and rest, never fearful for a moment that a police officer will complain that I am not exercising hard enough and should stop relaxing. I shall roam the iron age earthworks at British Camp and feel the eternal presence of history. Totally alone and therefore able to hear the echo of thousands of years of humanity and our neverending battle to protect ourselves and survive.

I shall run down the steep slope of Happy Valley into the wooded pathways below, hurtling as I did thirty years ago at a pace just a tiny bit too fast to be confident of stopping safely. I shall remember the way my father used to catch us, arms open, at the bottom. And I shall remember that other people are not, really, a pain to be tolerated, but a blessing. One that I shall be ready to return to, after just one more night of solitary peace.

Go to my local second-hand book shop
Daniel Kalder

Here in Texas there is a large chain of second-hand bookshops called Half Price Books, and I am fortunate enough to live within a short drive of not one, not two, but three of these stores. I visit them all regularly, too regularly in fact, and often swing by one of the stores in the evenings after work. But the typical half-price discount is not enough for me; I like to trawl their book clearance shelves, $1 CD racks, junk vinyl and “quarter bin” comic boxes.

Many are the strange and wonderful books I have found going for a song, such as James Ballou’s Arming for the Apocalypse, Sukarno’s autobiography, a super-rare album of photographs by a Stalin-era Uzbek photographer, and George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. The $1 CD racks contain lots of pop/rock dross — U2, Coldplay, Sting, Garth Brooks etc. — but I can usually find some exceptional recordings of classical music on prestigious labels; I discovered Mahler, Bartok and a great deal of other amazing music through HPB’s clearance shelves.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

As for comics, I once found a complete run of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! for 25 cents a pop in the quarter bins, not to mention a 3-D Steve Ditko comic, and some rare Richard Corben undergrounds that were worth a lot more than what I paid for them. Those are probably not names that mean a lot to many UnHerd readers, but if they do, you will understand the excitement I felt.

HPB tried to stay open when the shutdowns were getting into gear, but eventually had to close the doors of its physical stores. Currently they bombard me with discount vouchers for their online shop, but it’s not the same.

Successful browsing in a second-hand bookstore first requires the bookstore to be physical, and in addition is a skill that takes time to acquire and which must be practised often. It requires time, and patience, and knowledge of which types of things turn up in different neighborhoods. And I would like to get back to it, please.

Have a pint
Ed West

I had a dream I was in the pub the other night. It was like an old gin palace and crowded with people, drinking, laughing and way within the government-approved distance of 2metres away from each other. It was so beautiful, when I woke up I wanted to cry. It was like that episode of Black Mirror where people suffering from dementia are allowed to head into a virtual reality world where they’re young and healthy again.

I imagine when I first head back into a pub I’ll feel the need to get down on my knees and kiss the ground, tears in my eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week wondering about where I’d like to go when this is all over, assuming anywhere is open and we haven’t resorted to barter or descended into a Mad Max-like dystopia. I fear I’m not very well-adapted to the 21st century digital economy but I imagine I’d be even less useful in a 5th century skull-based economy.

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Coronavirus coverage is making me feel ill

By Ed West

In a parallel universe somewhere, one in which mother nature didn’t strike us down with this disease, I was supposed to be in west Cork this week, close to the heavenly Gougane Barra national park.

It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever set eyes on, and the most spiritual; it’s associated with early Christian holy men and women. I’ve also promised myself I’ll take the kids to Italy again, but strangely the lockdown has also given me a real desire to explore England more.

I was tempted to join a friend in an insane-sounding bike ride from the Cumbria coast over to Whitby this month, and although I might not do the cycle, there is so much of my own country I haven’t seen. The thought of a walk around some Pennine villages followed by a pint, without having to steer into the road to avoid people or obsessively wipe down every surface like I’m Howard Hughes, sounds like heaven right now.

Then some of the most famous studies from social psychology’s 1970s heyday fell apart on closer scrutiny. The Stanford Prison Experiment, where people were assigned roles as “prisoners” and “guards”, and the guards ended up treating the prisoners abominably? Probably misreported. The study where “pseudopatients” admitted themselves to psychiatric hospitals, acted entirely sane, and were locked up and medicated regardless? Possibly fraudulent.

Now, psychologists are disgracing themselves anew over the coronavirus.

It started with articles relying on psychological “insights” to downplay the severity of the problem. In early February, social psychologist David DeSteno wrote a piece in the New York Times arguing that people get so caught up with their fear of the virus, they fail to understand that they’re unlikely to get it. Referencing some of his own lab experiments, DeSteno wrote that “…quarantine or monitoring policies can make great sense when the threat is real and the policies are based on accurate data. But the facts on the ground, as opposed to the fear in the air, don’t warrant such actions.”

Two days later, the New York Times’s Interpreter column quoted psychologist Paul Slovic, who noted that “[o]ur feelings don’t do arithmetic very well”, and that focusing on the coronavirus fatalities, and not the “98% or so of people who are recovering from it and may have mild cases” is skewing our judgement. The article argued that our fears, triggered by disturbing reports of “city-scale lockdowns and overcrowded hospitals”, overload our critical faculties, making us overreact to the threat the virus poses. The thought that those city-scale lockdowns and overcrowded hospitals might be a mere month away from the United States didn’t seem to occur.

Further psychological insights were provided by Cass Sunstein, co-author of the best-selling book Nudge, which used lessons from behavioural economics (essentially psychology by another name) that could inform attempts to change people’s behaviour. In an article for Bloomberg Opinion on 28 February (by which point there were over 83,000 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide), Sunstein wrote that anxiety regarding the coronavirus pandemic was mainly due to something called “probability neglect”.

Because the disease is both novel and potentially fatal, Sunstein reasoned, we suffer from “excessive fear” and neglect the fact that our probability of getting it is low. “Unless the disease is contained in the near future,” he continued, “it will induce much more fear, and much more in the way of economic and social dislocation, than is warranted by the actual risk”.

On 12 March, the day after Italy had announced its 827^th death from the virus, the eminent psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer published a piece in Project Syndicate entitled “Why What Does Not Kill Us Makes Us Panic”. It was, to say the least, confused: it opened with an acknowledgement that we don’t know how bad this epidemic could be, but immediately went on to make the case that we’d likely overreact, and failed to consider any opposing arguments.

Gigerenzer’s article discussed the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which affected hundreds of millions but killed relatively few, particularly in Europe, where the fear was nonetheless high. It also likened the coronavirus pandemic to terrorist attacks, which similarly kill small numbers in a relative sense, but — according to Gigerenzer — garner disproportionate attention. If only we could improve our “risk literacy”, Gigerenzer maintained, then we could “approach situations such as the COVID-19 epidemic with a cooler head”.

At the time of writing, Italy’s death toll is now above 10,000, with over 900 fatalties being reported in a single day. The epidemic in the UK has reached 1,000 deaths; in France, 2,000; in Spain, nearly 6,000. New York City is setting up makeshift morgues for the first time since 9/11. The suspiciously uniform daily death figures from Iran might belie a truly devastating epidemic in that country. The world’s economy has largely closed down, as we all anticipate the pandemic getting far worse before it gets better. How could all those psychologists have gotten it so disastrously wrong?

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Would you take a coronavirus risk?

By Tom Chivers

To back up his points about “probability neglect”, Sunstein had referred to a 2001 paper in the journal Psychological Science. It reported three experiments; Sunstein focused on the third one, which included 156 participants, all of whom were undergraduate students reasoning about how much they’d pay to avoid an imaginary electric shock. It’s not a criticism of the scientists to say that this experiment is only tenuously relevant to a global pandemic.

Indeed, alongside talk of the “replication crisis” there’s been discussion of a “generalisability crisis”, with renewed realisation that results from lab experiments don’t necessary generalise to other contexts. A global pandemic of a completely novel virus is, by its very definition, a context never encountered before. So how can we be sure that the results of behavioural science experiments — even those that are based on bigger or more representative samples than 156 undergrads — are relevant to our current situation?

The answer is that we can’t. Exploring the human capacity for bias and irrationality can make for quirky, thought-provoking articles and books that make readers feel smarter (and can build towards a tentative scientific understanding of how the mind works). But when a truly dangerous disease comes along, relying on small-scale lab experiments and behavioural-economic studies results in dreadful misfires like the articles we encountered above.

Although there are many behavioural phenomena that certainly seem relevant to today’s news — bias, sunk costs, the tragedy of the commons — it’s not at all clear how these concepts would be practically applied to do what needs to be done right now: slowing the spread of the disease.

We can even play the psychologists at their own game: there are also biases in the opposite direction to those discussed above. For instance, “exponential growth bias” might mean that our standard ways of reasoning break down in a situation where a threat accelerates like this virus. As observed in an insightful article on Italy’s ongoing horrific experience, there’s also “confirmation bias”, where we seek out evidence that confirms our previous beliefs or desires.

In this case, many were understandably desperate to believe that the virus wouldn’t be too much of a problem, and it seems to have led them to underreact very badly indeed. None of the psychological writers above seemed to consider these opposing biases — and ironically, it might have been because they were biased against thinking about them.

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I'm frightened I'll die of Covid-19

By Stephen Pollard

That latter idea is just speculation on my part — which is the whole point. As the psychologist Stefan Schubert has noted, “[i]t’s too easy to make up a just-so-story” about us being biased in one direction or another. “The ‘psychology of X’ (e.g. risk, disease) can only tell us so much about X. We should mostly look at X itself”.

Quite so: the critical task for now is not to try and get inside people’s heads, but to learn from the experience of other countries (like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore) that have been more successful in containing covid-19; and to build realistic mathematical models of the epidemic, and to pour resources into medical advances — like tests, vaccines, and antivirals — that might help us to track and inhibit the transmission of the virus and prevent its symptoms.

Sunstein himself appears to have undergone something of a Damascene corona-conversion. On 26 March, he wrote another column for Bloomberg Opinion, entitled “This Time the Numbers Show We Can’t Be Too Careful”. In an argument that was directly opposed to his own reasoning of a month earlier, Sunstein suggested that the potentially ruinous effects of the pandemic mean that “the benefits of aggressive social distancing greatly exceed the cost”. Remarkably, he made no reference whatsoever to his previous article on this specific crisis — an article which, as the writer Ari Schulman has pointed out, had said that if you held the view Sunstein now holds, you were the sad victim of a cognitive malfunction.

It’s impossible to know how many people changed the way they thought about the virus after reading one of the misconceived articles above. But a consistent set of articles by credentialed scientists telling people they shouldn’t worry so much about the pandemic was the precise opposite of what was required in a situation where governments would eventually, and rightly, be imploring their citizens to stay at home at all costs. At best, the advice from psychology was unhelpful. At worst, it constituted dangerous misinformation.

And what of those governments? Could the “don’t overreact” advice from behavioural science have led politicians to drag their feet in dealing with the crisis, as some clearly have? Again, it’s hard to say — but it’s very possible that the broad message got through to the decision-makers.

Thankfully, the advice given to the UK government by behavioural scientists, which was published just over a week ago, didn’t contain any minimisation of the risks. In fact, it was — in my view at least — mostly banal and common-sensical, noting for instance that using the word “isolation” might have “negative overtones for older adults”, and that there might be unintended consequences if we closed schools.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

Other government behavioural advisors, though, were less circumspect. The Behavioural Insights Team, a consulting company nicknamed the “Nudge Unit”, has been brought in to assist the UK’s response. At first it seemed their focus was on how to encourage handwashing, but there appears to have been mission creep.

For example, the team’s head, David Halpern, was interviewed as a “government coronavirus science advisor” about broad policies of “cocooning” older people. He was also quoted in support of the idea — which might yet seem grievously misguided in hindsight — that social-distancing measures should only be brought in gradually, to avoid people becoming fatigued. After he was reportedly “bollocked” by No.10 a fortnight ago for introducing the unfortunate phrase “herd immunity” into the national conversation, Halpern hasn’t (to my knowledge) been heard from again in public.

And perhaps that’s for the best. As intriguing as many psychological studies are, the vast majority of the insights we’ve gained from our research are simply not ready for primetime — especially in the case of a worldwide emergency where millions of lives are at stake. Much of the useful advice behavioural scientists can give isn’t really based on “science” to any important degree, and is intuitive and obvious.

Where they try to be counter-intuitive — for instance, arguing that people are wrong to find a global pandemic frightening — they simply end up embarrassing themselves, or worse, endangering people by having them make fewer pandemic preparations. This isn’t to say that psychology isn’t useful when it stays in its own lane: it’ll be important to ensure that as many people as possible have access to psychotherapy for the mental-health effects of the pandemic, for instance. But that’s a secondary effect of the virus: my argument here is that psychology can give little reliable counsel about our immediate reaction to the pandemic.

Psychologists should know their limits, and avoid over-stretching results from their small-scale studies to new, dissimilar situations. Decision-makers should, before using psychology research as the basis for policy, know just how weak and contentious so much of it is. And everyone else should stay at home, wash their hands — and beware psychologists bearing advice.

When and if the coronavirus crisis is contained, there will be many reckonings and re-evaluations, not least about the relationship between the state, individuals and markets. In this, Boris Johnson’s decision to order pubs, clubs and restaurants to close — and the seemingly inevitable follow-up, lockdown — will be significant.

It is well-known that the Prime Minister is inclined to want to keep the state out of mundane personal business. He also likes to court people who like to go out for a drink, hence his regular schtick about free-born Britons’ ancient right to a pint of beer. His reluctance to see the state telling people what to do was abundantly clear in his Mother’s Day press conference, when he spoke breezily about the joys of being out and about on a fine sunny day.

But Johnson’s worldview is a topic for someone else. What interests me is other people. What does it say about human nature that despite repeated urging and warning, despite a bombardment of information, people continued to congregate and mix in ways that put them and others at non-trivial risk of a potentially fatal disease?

And what, in turn, will the necessity to ban such congregations mean for our future understanding of the way the state should view and treat people as they go about their economic lives?

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

I am not a libertarian, but I think libertarianism deserves some acknowledgement for its optimism about human nature. In short, this suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things.

Here’s David Boaz of the Cato Institute in The Libertarian Mind:

“The great insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.”

Free marketeers, explicitly or otherwise, tend to rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors. In markets, as in life, people left to make their own decisions will, in aggregate, make spending choices that benefit themselves, thus allowing markets to price and allocate resources in the most efficient way.

This is the ‘rational agent’ theory of economic behaviour and it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of our age. It’s the basis for most economics teaching and the foundation of most ideas of market operation, regulation and consumer law (even if there are quite a few people who argue, quite persuasively, that it’s wrong).

Now let’s go back to the people, in London and elsewhere, who last week continued to crowd into pubs and gyms.

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Covid-19 won't change this narcissistic generation

By Meghan Murphy

Why did they do it? Why was it necessary for Boris Johnson, instinctively liberal, to order the pubs to close? You only need to take such measures if people are either not nice or not rational. Neither explanation bodes well for libertarianism or free markets.

How rational were the choices made by those pub-goers or the folk crowded into parks and markets? Were they coolly assessing the pleasure they would derive from a few drinks or a stroll with friends, and assigning it a value that outweighed the risk they and others would face resulting from their choice?

If so, I think that raises a significant problem for libertarian views of human nature as benign. People who think their enjoyment of a pint of lager justifies risking the lives of others do not measure up to that nice idea that, left to our own devices, we generally do the right thing.

Or here’s another explanation for pub-going in a time of coronavirus. Maybe the people who continued to mingle were being neither good nor bad but merely inaccurately estimating the consequences and costs of their actions. Here we get to those other economists, the behavioural ones, who argue that we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.

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Why are the elderly dicing with death?

By Mary Dejevsky

The decision to keep going to the pub during a pandemic looks a lot like an illustration of what Daniel Kahneman called the availability heuristic, the tendency of people to over-state the probability of familiar things they can easily imagine, and underestimate the chance of hard-to-concieve things happening.

How many of us can easily conjure up a simple mental picture of an invisible virus spreading exponentially through a population of tens of millions, and be clear in our minds about who we might be harming by popping down the local for one last pint or a walk in the park? I don’t think the Londoners who continued to go out drinking or strolling were callous. I think they just couldn’t easily conceive the potential consequences or the probability of those consequences.

The choice to go on going out was, in other words, hard to describe as rational, even in the narrow terms of rational choice theory. And if people aren’t rational about a situation that risks tens of thousands of lives and deep damage to our society and economy, how much weight should we put on the idea of rational actors in future?

Arguably, this shouldn’t even be a debatable point. There’s a good case to be made that the 2007/8 financial crisis should have put more of a dent in the idea of rational economic actors.

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Why the Government changed tack on Covid-19

By Saloni Dattani

When no less a figure than Alan Greenspan admitted that markets did not work the way he had believed they did and that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” then policymakers the world over should have shown more scepticism about ‘rationality’.

Maybe this time really will be different. Maybe this time, when the dust settles on the graves of the last Covid-19 victims, we can start a serious conversation about how and why human beings really do what we do. And about the role of the state in markets that are made up of frail, human people who we cannot expect — or require — to be either nice or rational.

I am no fan of narrow, classical, rational agent economics, but I do admire the optimistic view of humanity that underpins the libertarianism that is its intellectual cousin. I like to think that with a bit of help, most people will mostly make the right choices. But the refusal of many people to do the sensible and altruistic thing over coronavirus leaves me gloomily wondering about that.

If people cannot be trusted to make decisions that can make the difference between life and death, if they and others must be protected from the exercise of their free will in something so fundamental, where else should restraint be imposed by the state, for the good of the individual and society? Put it another way: once you’ve closed pubs and banned people from going outside, imposing, say, a tax to deter people from consuming sugary drinks is going to seem like a very small thing indeed.

This, not the size of the state or the tax burden, will be the real change the virus brings to countries founded on liberal ideas of human nature.