Why are most Humanities academics pro-lockdown? (V)
In this post I discuss two rather obvious reasons; because they are obvious — and one of them is not exclusive to A&H academics — , they are not so interesting to me, but they are worth discussing anyway for completeness.
- Introversion
It won’t be a great revelation to say that academia tends to attract introverts, and probably the Arts and Humanities more so than other disciplines. Take the PhD, the traditional gate to an academic career: this consists four years of living mostly with yourself and your thoughts — yes, there will likely be some teaching, some research talks and conferences, but still you may go for several days without seeing another human being (whereas in STEM you tend to have your lab colleagues and in some social sciences you might have human research subjects). There will be exceptions but overall it is fair to say that your average A&H academic skews introverted compared to the rest of the population. As such, the isolation of lockdowns might be less of an a problem for them. I, for example, started descending into depression about one month into the original lockdown back in spring 2020. Over time, however, I realized that it was not the isolation in itself that was doing that to me (there are plenty of solitary pursuits I can dedicate myself to), but rather seeing the hysteria into which the world and, more specifically, my world had fallen into.
Of course, we hear a lot about how studying the Arts and Humanities can create more empathetic human beings, because you study closely and try to understand people who lived hundreds of years ago, in completely different systems of thought. It would be great if pro-lockdown A&H academics extended the courtesy of empathy to those who are truly suffering at seeing their social lives decimated, but it’s just one more of the shortcomings we’ve seen in the field for the last year and it’s not even the worst, so I’m not going to make much of a fuss about it.
2. Fear
Yes, many A&H academics are terrified of catching Covid and d y i n g. I often wonder, in fact, if I should be more worried myself: back in March 2020 I checked the estimated IFR for my age and co-morbidities (i.e. zero) and concluded it made no sense for me to unduly worry about it. Yes, I c o u l d i n f e c t v u l n e r a b l e p e o p l e; yes, I could be one of the extremely unlucky, one-in-a-million youngish, healthy people who die of Covid; yes, I could get long Covid, but: a) I don’t spend time indoors with vulnerable people these days because there’s a lockdown that you clamoured for, remember?; b) I could also die of some rare cancer, and it’s a good idea to take the basic precautions (eating healthily, exercising, not drinking in excess, going for screening if it’s available), but I fail to see what me obsessing all day about something that has a really really really tiny likelihood of happening would achieve; c) don’t make me laugh please.
(In fact, there was some sort of weird pivoting around late March: I remember even as the first lockdowns started in Europe we were told: most people will have it, some won’t even notice, for many it will be like a nasty flu; it can be very harmful to those who are already vulnerable. Then the party line changed and all of a sudden Covid was this indiscriminate killer).
But yes — a lot of A&H academics are terrified of Covid, and it seems that the younger you are, the more terrified. Although this is not, as I said above, a terribly original explanation, it might be the crucial one, the one which holds all others together: yes, you might be crazy about virtue-signalling, and in fact most academics are, but even then you might draw the line at a lifetime of lockdown, just for the purposes of appearing “caring” or “modern”; deep down, what happens is that you are terrified of d y i n g.
In a way it might be as simple as youngish people, with a penchant for drama, confronting their own mortality for the first time, in a climate which doesn’t exactly encourage them to reconcile themselves with it. Yes it’s hard. I confronted my own mortality at 16 — and not due to any traumatic event, just my own penchant for drama at the time and, as my mother would put it, reading too many books — and it was one of the hardest moments of my life. In a way, though, I am very grateful that I left this behind at such an early age; otherwise I would likely be embarrassing myself on Twitter. I will say one thing, though: my mother, after all, was right, and what prompted me to think about my own mortality was mostly certain readings I had come across at school— Greek tragedy, Baroque poetry. My discovery of mortality was intrinsically connected to the birth of my love for the Humanities: those guys had written about death and dying hundreds or thousands of years ago, in languages different to my own, yet I was able to read them and they were able to speak to me, despite all the differences, in the same way as they had spoken to thousands other people throughout history. This, which I consider to be central to the Humanities, is nothing short of a small miracle. You would imagine that any A&H academic, who will likely engage with the lives or works of people who have died, who are part of the past, who maybe even wrote or otherwise reflected about dying one day, will be no stranger to death and mortality. Alas, it seems this was not the case.
