The return of Actual Badness

In the spring of 2020, I advanced an abnormally hopeful proposition: that one blessing that might arise from a pandemic with otherwise few redeeming features was a cultural sobering-up. Maybe we’d regain a sense of perspective about the trivial non-problems of identity politics once finally faced with a proper problem.

Boy, was I wrong. Instead, what proved a relatively mild disease, in the big, smallpoxian picture, fostered an even greater frenzy of ineffectual pettiness – park benches wrapped with police tape, government edicts about Scotch eggs, fisticuffs in supermarkets over thin, gap-prone facial napkins. Rather than reveal the content of the culture wars as meeting the textbook definition of neurosis – being beset by problems of your own invention – the pandemic allowed the same rival teams to reconstitute around a new false dichotomy: who has or hasn’t partaken of a certain medical prophylaxis, when the nostrum made the experimental population no safer company than the control group. Worst of all, virtually the entire western world jettisoned every civil liberty its peoples had ever imagined their birthright, going into throes of unrestrained authoritarianism, police overreach and state micromanagement of everyday life. Last month’s scenes in Ottawa of police arresting truckers at gunpoint for protesting vaccine mandates were ominously of a piece with this week’s scenes in Moscow of Russian police roughly arresting protestors against the war in Ukraine.

Still. Another opportunity to restore a sense of proportion presents itself. Many of us, myself included, may have a hard time quite getting our heads round Vladimir Putin’s full-tilt military invasion of a vast democratic country with a population two-thirds the size of the UK’s because it’s an event on a scale we’d forgotten was possible.